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 the greater sites, but that's where I spent most of my time before 4chan.
Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.
But lots of people seeing lots of horrible things, if it doesn't traumatize them, can desensitize them. There are plenty of freedoms that also cause harm. That doesn't mean the freedoms should be taken away, but it means that the "third party" is often correct. Society in a free country calls its own balls and strikes.
Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information. And I say this as a person who would absolutely revolt against any system that based that decision on fiat, religion, or unfounded hysteria. We all personally have a right to do anything we want that doesn't hurt anyone else. But if the "third party" you're talking about are your neighbors, and if they have decided that you are a threat to them, then talk with them.
Who should be protected from it, and by who is a different thing. I strongly against blanket restrictions, but one for sure they are easier. And they definitely protect people who wouldn’t get this protection in other scenarios, because for example their parents are shit. Another viewpoint is that probably this is the least important thing for people who wouldn’t get this protection otherwise, so maybe it doesn’t matter at that point. One for sure, there should be a better argument to restrict access than the currently provided ones.
BTW seeing death, disease, and misery was completely normal through entire human history. We live in abnormally safe times. Maybe there is some mechanism akin to allergies, where immune system cannot believe that everything is chill so it overreacts to tiniest threats.
Compare to now where kids literally have all the world's internet in their pockets, they can watch as much of it as they like with very little risk. Like if you speak with primary school teachers they say kids share naked pictures of their classmates, because there's lots of online services that just generate nudes from a few pictures.
Like, yeah, information should be free for everyone. But I think our experience from the 90s isn't really relevant to the world in 2026.
I have no real interest in any shock video or shock image; but I reject any form of censorship even more so, such as is currently tried via age sniffing on everyone and killing off VPNs. The world wide web is currently privatized.
Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.
Can't speak to the others.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10009492/ - slaughterhouse workers
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ - healthcare workers
My friend was too into this stuff. He was also a "goth" and a Marilyn Manson fan. Anyway, this culminated in his senior year art project in which he built a full-sized glass coffin with a realistic rotting corpse inside it.
My friend turned out to be one of the most successful commercial artists of our generation, has a wonderful family, great kids, and absolutely is not a psychopath. We had some bloody steaks and martinis recently, his father had passed away and I brought up the fact that he was always obsessed with death. He said something really funny. He said, "I always got that reaction from people, but now I realize it's not that they didn't get what I was saying, about us all dying and being made of guts and meat. They totally got it. They just thought it was obnoxious and didn't want to be reminded of it." To which I said, congratulations, you joined the human race.
Edit/Add: I asked Claude to find that episode as I explained part of the storyline and is now asking me to seek help. Early Internet would now, definitely, be totally banned.
Edit2: Is this new, or am I stumbling on something new? I cannot reply to my replier below. I’m sure @stavros hasn’t blocked me. But, yes, we will always call him Roy. That is the only way we remember him.
If you did seek help, either online or even by making a phone call to a suicide prevention number that action will be logged and then sold to countless third parties ending up in several dossiers about you specifically which will follow you for the rest of your life and could impact your life and future employment in any number of ways for as long as you live and even impact the lives of your children as you'd now have a family history of needing mental health services. Claude has probably already modified the psych profile they've been building on you and who knows where that'll end up.
The real threat of the internet isn't the random messed up videos we watch in our younger edgelord years, or the sci-fi warning us about them, but the endless surveillance and abuse of information by everyone looking to leverage it for their own advantage.
The internet was a lot safer when you could look at gross stuff in peace and nobody noticed.
Hacker News hides the reply link on deeply nested replies for a little while to try and prevent flamewars. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hidden... says you can work around this by clicking on the comment's timestamp.
I rest my case.
Well. Innocent ...
I agree with regards to the law, but unless I misremember ... were there only images? No videos? Because some videos were ... mega-suspicious. Perhaps these were on other websites, I don't remember the late 1990s/early 2000s era that well. Several images were just for the shock factor and I also suspect that some of those were partially fake, to "intensify" the shock factor.
> that's where I spent most of my time before 4chan
Ah, so the dark side of the www got you early. Thankfully I never got into 4chan.
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 completely.
Today’s internet is arguably more manipulative, even if it’s less graphic.
"What mattered wasn’t so much the image itself but how it moved. Its value lay in its circulation: whom you could shock, how fast the chat room would combust, how far something would travel before it came back to you like a bad penny."
also, for what it's worth: i did not have access to the early internet. strict parents & computer only available in 'the computer room' where my dad's desk was, so he was always right there. as a consequence, i can't 'handle' movies with graphic sexual assault scenes or similar. i like that about myself tho.
Everybody is different, but exposure to such graphic content at young age leaves some scars, no way to avoid that regardless of what some claim. Its 'growing up' as much as lashing or getting beaten to pulp would make you grow up, there is transition for sure, away from childhood, but hardly in a good direction.
Been there during those times, saw a bit, there was undeniable magnetism to such stuff for young minds, but more than happy to say I didnt get addicted to it unlike author of the article, and overall saw the page only few times. One can irrepairably damage oneself quite easily, and there are no warning signs along the road.
So when years later my internet-savy friends got into gore I couldn't get that much into it.
Ahh … bastions of refined taste …
/s
Now the current crop of curious teens are watching drone drops and soldier suicide compilations. Trench clearing, close combat. Executing surrendering soldiers. Industrialized trench warfare in high def. Yeah its brutal. What was beyond the veil is not something nice to be discovered. It hurts us to watch it. It hurts me, but maybe its supposed to hurt. Hollywood has proven to be laughably unrealistic. Almost any movie with violence is. Maybe the silver lining to watching war in HD, and by extension rotten et all, is a natural aversion to hollywood bullshit.. Surely that's got to count for something.
The internet needs more of this.
I do think the site, along with watching horror such as puppet master and reading Stephen King at 14, affected my psyche though.
>his real name, aptly, was Thomas E. Dell
Could someone explain why this is apt?
People can be vicious animals rather easily, once 'the others' are dehumanized its not worse than behavior towards animals in slaughterhouse. it doesnt take much, look at various conflicts around the world, look at how drug cartels in south/central america behave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsala_of_Wala_in_the_Nsongo_Di...
“Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.”
I now develop software, and have nobody to really talk to about it. I'm even kind of bored of the idea of talking about it, feels like talking about World of Warcraft or something.
Was too concerned with being "cool", oh well. It's nice to see so many people were wiser and more headstrong and confident/authentic at a young age and found their people who they could more fully connect with.
It’s also worth noting that tbe author has spent a chunk of her career in advertising, using what she knows (first hand!) about how young brains are seduced by the verboten to sell trend forecasting to companies who want to mine that ore.
As a parent I consider it a specific challenge to help my daughter discern between behavior that looks or seems cool and behavior that is actually worth emulating.
I see these sorts of anecdotes (in the OP for ex.) through a romantic lens of people who are completely comfortable sharing their interests and who have those interests understood and reciprocated by their friends, alongside the reverse, outside of the "norm", enriching your own worldview.
I'm sure much of it is unrealistic vicarious dreaming, and projected regret for not pursuing my own interests, and friend groups aligned with those, more earnestly throughout my young life.
I guess people like the novelty factor in general, but I quickly realised that I don't really have the slightest interest in cruelty or giving credibility to this by watching anything in this regard. Nowadays such troll videos are more commonly seen but I quickly skip to do something else than waste time watching any of these. Back in the 1990s, though, it was quite a bit hard to realise any of this, largely because of finding images and videos being harder back then. Even Rick Rolling wasn't quite a real "thing" in the 1990s; that became more of a thing in 2006, with our usual suspect, the 4chan troll army (though, Rick Rolling is very harmless compared to some content that was on rotten dot com).
