111–120 of 133 posts
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Back then you had to go to Rotton to see dead bodies. Nowadays you can go to a mainstream news website. It's wild how national news websites will just have a casual warning of "O hey, the video you are about to see has dead people, just letting you know!"
A motionless dead person is a far cry from a soldier getting his head sawed off by a jagged bayonet and screaming through a gash in his neck while he chokes on his own blood.
I didn't realize why until much later into adulthood, but I was one of those teenagers fascinated with rotten.com, and all the other weird sites out there during this time. Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist. And today I can barely watch an arm breaking contest without cringing. Anyone else remember orsm, b0g? They rarely get mentioned among…
It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.
I remember the camaraderie of discovering disturbing internet content with friends, but it was a specific bonding group activity, limited to a pc in someone’s room not a mindless solitary scroll
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No, I think that it actually shows that the idea that information can cause "trauma" or another kind of "harm" unless some third party forcefully restricts your access to this information, is completely insane. Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.
I don't think that's quite true, either. Parent poster said it was amazing they were still sane. Other people might not be sane, depending on what they were exposed to at an early age. And watching something on video is different than seeing it happen in front of you, which is also different from having it happen to you ...and I understand the impulse to say that we're not a victim of anything just because we saw som…
I will say it built my resistance: if you were an internet user in the late 90’s, you ‘ve seen since really broken stuff
I was never interested in seeing the gore pics but the library section had some great writing in it. They even had an interview with Patton Oswalt: https://web.archive.org/web/20170902074735/http://www.rotten...
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Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.
Here's an anomaly: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
Rotten.com felt like one of the first moments where the internet stopped pretending to be curated civilization and instead exposed itself as raw human curiosity. People often remember the gore, but what I remember more was the texture of the early web: sparse HTML, no engagement optimization, no algorithmic feed, no “creator economy.” You had to intentionally go looking for things. That changed the psychology complet…
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It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.
No, I think that it actually shows that the idea that information can cause "trauma" or another kind of "harm" unless some third party forcefully restricts your access to this information, is completely insane. Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.
Yeesh, the things we put on the internet.
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rotten, orsm etc were core to my growing up and exploring the internet. glad i got it out of my system, glad i grew up in a time when it wasnt normalized. I never graduated to 4chan, it all seemed too nasty and pointless to me
Hope you were never a part of Helldump or FYAD on Something Awful, then.
SA is another one i remember now you mention it tho. getting a crash course in the nastiness of what was out there really helped me realize what my empathy base should be. It's probably why i never got into 4chan at all.