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.
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.
Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.
It is actually a well researched topic in psychology. See “vicarious trauma”, “secondary trauma”, etc. - also, see PTSD from content moderation. Similar for war journalists. They can do it for a decade or two, until one story gets under their skin, and then they’re confronted with decades of material, which at the time of watching didn’t phase them at all.
The argument “but then we should see more cases” is misleading, because similarly to “a little spanking didn’t hurt me” the psyche is good at avoidance - with the negative side effects of that avoidance equally well researched and documented. For example, perception of others might be influenced without grounds in reality, and this wrong perception is subsequently passed on to children.
It may even have some positive effects, like preparing for real life events in a safe environment. Not all about rotten.com is about violence, it shows diseases, injuries, surgeries, etc... things that getting desensitized about may be good. I don't know the opinion of psychologists is on the subject, but positive or negative, I believe the effects of internet "shock" content are mild at best and interest in it not unhealthy, though maybe revealing of an underlying condition if done in excess.
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
Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.
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.
Still, despite my dislikes, I would fight against censorship of these sites. Somehow I feel a kid seeing a corpse or a video of people dying is less psychologically damaging than, for example, getting into political or religious extreme communities.
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.
I rest my case.
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.
Ahh … bastions of refined taste …
/s
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.
Its format was even sparser, pure text, with pictures crammed in there by brute force.
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.
"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.
“Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.”
The internet needs more of this.
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.
I prefer old style stuff like Omen. Where the dread is more part of it than just straight goriness.
I expect war films will go the same way.
>his real name, aptly, was Thomas E. Dell
Could someone explain why this is apt?
So when years later my internet-savy friends got into gore I couldn't get that much into it.
Yeesh, the things we put on the internet.
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 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).
I do think the site, along with watching horror such as puppet master and reading Stephen King at 14, affected my psyche though.
