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 the greater sites, but that's where I spent most of my time before 4chan.
When I was in high school, before rotten.com, one of my best friends worked in a "fringe" video store. They had a series called "Faces of Death". Eventually, my friend discovered an even more horrifying series called "Traces of Death". We'd get stoned and watch people exploding as they were hit at high speed.
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.
I'm grateful that my friends and I all grew up to be functional adults considering we would spend hours after school looking at ogrish and ebaumsworld.
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 something horrible.
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.
This kind of lukewarm attitude is why every Western country is speedrunning to become China. There are powerful interests turning your country into a panopticon cage, and the best you can do is "well as long as they give a good excuse, I guess it's okay"??
I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, democratic society, choosing to enforce social norms at times through contested law and legal wrangling in courts is remotely the same thing as a totalitarian state issuing a dictat. And I also don't think that the primary way to distinguish our system of governance from a dictatorahip would be to legalize everything imaginable.
This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.
Your proposal was red-flag laws for visiting the wrong website, or just censoring them entirely [0]. That's not "as close to maximum freedom without being anarchy". That's the opposite.
[0] "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."
But it can cause trauma, and harm. What this shows is that it’s not inevitable. It maybe even shows that it causes trauma and harm rarely.
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.
I think it's just different scale, like anything else. When I was growing up we also knew about rotten.com(in rural Poland!) but the only way to see it was to pay for some access at an internet caffee, we(like a group of kids) would huddle around a pc, look around for 5 minutes and then the dude running the place would kick us out. If you had internet access at home it was very limited and loading any kind of images took forever - way too risky.
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.
The uncomfortable truth is that monkey see monkey do is a real phenomenon. The majority of people who play violent video games and watch violent movies and watch real snuff vids online won't commit these acts.
That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our genetics.
Do they make you more likely to feel detachment at the thought of horrors being inflicted upon others, does that influence your career path or political leanings?
The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.
To be clear, I'm against any censorship of violent video games, movies, art, etc.
You can of course argue that school shooters and Stephen Miller would do what they do without all the media (social or not) they've consumed.
That said, what are we, after all, other than some sort of combination of our genetics and environment?
It's hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link between the mention of taco bell and me immediately doordashing it, which makes it hard to reconcile the two positions.
I don’t think that is true. Advertising relies on manufactured needs, portraying the hawked goods and services as things one needs to live a comfortable, easy, pleasurable or socially worthy life.
None of that resonates with shock content.
As an extreme example, you supposedly can’t sell guns by showing pictures of gun suicide victims. This is also why some governments require tobacco products to feature gruesome images of smoker lungs, cancer, etc. Ironically, kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images cut out from tobacco packages.
I think there's a lot at work psychologically in advertising, but "kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images" kind of undercuts your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted.
From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in.
You can see how popular suicide drone footage out of Ukraine is, there is a large contingent of people eating that stuff up, cheering it on, despite watching a man desperately beg for his life as a drone circles him, toying with him, before going for his head and the feed blacking out being about as grim as it gets.
People are creating games now to replicate the experience. People want to drive drones into other people's heads, all along a spectrum from watching it on youtube, playing a video game, to joining the ukrainian effort and actually performing the act in real life.
My experience is you can find a customer for just about any content, including shock content. Some messages have broader appeal for sure, but even the worst thing you can imagine will have someone with whom it resonates.
It's clear that people are influenced by their environment, and things that were once considered grotesque and unacceptable can be watered down over time with exposure to where, for example, rapists and pedophiles can openly win presidential elections and be placed on the Supreme Court. To where large portions of nations rationalize and support genocide, or any horrible thing you can imagine, even when presented with images of the suffering inflicted.
Humans are malleable and you don't have to have a perfectly crafted advertising campaign to have some people decide they like what they're seeing and want to replicate it, no matter what it is.
> your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted.
My point was that it doesn’t resonate with the principles of advertising. Certainly shock content can resonate with an audience, as well as create demand and desire to emulate: just look at the success of the Jackass franchise.
The kids aren’t buying tobacco because of the images, though — very few if any adults are either. I would assume they’re cutting out their collections from discarded packaging, and that they would not want to emulate lung cancer even if they saw pictures of it.
Purely guessing here, but it doesn’t seem likely that content on rotten.com would have led anyone, let alone masses of people, to become human butchers: in the OP article, the desire to emulate was limited to building narratives around the content.
Crime scene investigator or trauma surgeon, maybe those are more likely outcomes.
>The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.
Goatse has been online for thirty years and I’ve never seen anybody say “I would definitely have never tried that if nobody showed me that website”
I'm in a cafe but I'm putting it in my notes to search for a goatse.cx replication album when I get somewhere more private. I will send you my therapist's bill.
You want evidence that rises to the level of establishing "causality" in consideration of a natural experiment that is being run across all of humanity simultaneously?
What populations are protected from violent media?
How would you even disentangle all the countless confounding factors?
The arguments here are well-worn by the industries that peddle in these types of media, with obvious incentives, and obvious incentives on our side as consumers to not be restricted from consuming whatever we enjoy.
This is why I spent so much time referencing all the other ways in which humanity tends to emulate the behavior of other humans or be influenced by advertising/media, as it seems unlikely that these tendencies would suddenly cease around the sole category of "violent media".
Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. That's not a small phenomena that seems to have been ignored by policymakers and those who inform them.
> Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma.
How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.
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.
Knowing what she's seen at that age, I'm pretty sure I'd have flashbacks as well. This wasn't the old internet, and it's not like the new internet is free of such content. I really don't think that we have a way to quantify this, but, as one sibling comment said, expecting no influence seems unrealistic – as is expecting that influence to be easily detectable. I'm sure my ex is not the only one bringing up such experiences in therapy and I bet if you ask experienced therapists they will have similar stories.
Even if it were reported at scale to each and every therapist, they rarely share even anonymized stories with others. Anecdata: I’ve talked to a bunch, and processed some of that shit, but nobody else hears.
No, but there's rough heuristic that are generally reliable. Psychologists talk. If a problem is recurring - they talk a lot amongst each other regarding the prevalence of the problem.
I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.
But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?
Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.
And in the olden times, people got nightmares from reading books, or by hearing a horror story around a campfire. Banning everything that is scary or can cause nightmares or trauma would be a very difficult effort, and deciding a boundary of what is too traumatic and what is not would be very arbitrary.
Can we agree that there's a difference between banning things and making things difficult to access?
I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be.
We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS.
There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible.
There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.
I think that gore is an easy scapegoat because this allows us to shy away from the difficult discussions. "We should ban porn" occupies the bandwidth of social discourse, and therefore we cannot discuss topics like "ok but really, what do we do about the demographic collapse". I honestly think that the kids growing up now are going to be much more traumatized by the fact that they'll find themselves in a world of insane wealth inequality while needing to support an army of retirees, rather than seeing a pic of a dead body.
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.
the idea that information can't cause harm is obviously absurd. third parties should not restrict free speech, but that's an extremely simplistic/optimistic view. everything is about trade offs, there is no perfect solution. the truth is probably closer to: exposing young children to disturbing imagery at a young age is not optimal for healthy development, but free speech is important to a functioning democracy.
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.
It sounds to me like you've already decided, sans facts, that your opinion is correct. Which is provably incorrect by decades of medical research. Or perhaps you are one of those "because it didn't bother you and your friends, the idea is a joke." It's impossible for me to present you an argument that would teach you to understand compassion, let alone trauma, because you probably think I'm some woke soyboy rando on the internet and you've got your bros to go chest-bump about how badass y'all are. But the reality is, prolonged exposure to graphic images can cause trauma, from social media moderators, to EMTs, to even everyday police that have to sort through graphic evidence as part of a report. I hope some day you learn compassion, for your sake as well as everyone else you harm.
It is. Something happened later in my life that opened the floodgates to all kinds of unprocessed shit I’ve watched as kid and early teen. I don’t wish that on anybody. It’s not so much the watching itself, it is often more the lack of talking about it with any adult at the time. (Which I didn’t experience as problematic back then, to the contrary, I felt very strong and adult-like).
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.
I think that seeking disturbing content is a normal part of being a teenager, especially for boys. rotten.com is just one of these things. If it drove people insane, I guess that evolution would have selected against this behavior.
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
I'd say getting PTSD and depression working in a slaughterhouse, or dealing with death as a healthcare worker only proves the point? It's a correct sane reaction.
I'd agree there. I personally interepreted the "some people aren't squeamish" comment to imply that the people in these professions are immune from negative psychological consequences of being those professions.
> Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist.
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.
StileProject was one I found more interesting, it had a better community and wasn’t completely deranged 100% of the time, but still pushed the boundaries of that type of content.
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.
As someone else that went on rotten in my formative years, the feeling of disgust was so immense to know I want to stay away from any sort of real-life gore. Yet your experience is so common (fascination, wonder) I wonder what the hell is wrong with people to willingly watch corpses and dead people.
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.
Something parallel, there is a Black Mirror episode 7.1 (Common People) where he pulls out his own teeth, tongue in a mousetrap, torture/harm his body, etc. to earn money on the Internet.
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 explained part of the storyline and is now asking me to seek help. Early Internet would now, definitely, be totally banned.
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.
I thought he maybe meant arm wrestling contest. I also cannot watch those without cringing. I'm always expecting a wrist to break or forearm to snap in the fashion of an open fracture. Then again, I cannot watch those contest also because it's f'ing boring seeing two people trying to outlever each other. We used to make fun of football as 22 men running and jumping after a ball. But football is downright intellectual compared to arm wrestling. Barton Fink should have considered himself happy having had to write a screenplay for an actual wrestling picture.
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
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.
Some day I should write about a very similar experience at ~7yo with my slightly older cool cousins showing me things as shocking (or more) out of their (MD) father's huge library (hush-hush). Things like high resolution pictures of extreme cases of venereal diseases, malformed babies, you name it. It messed me up for a bit that the first pictures of adult genitalia were so disturbing.
So when years later my internet-savy friends got into gore I couldn't get that much into it.
reading this makes me want to describe the world in a more recklessly imaginative way. what a joy.
"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.
Oh my word. This site, orsm, ebaumsworld, etc. I'm glad to say that none of these were formative for me, but that were always morbidly entertaining to a young man still firming up his prefrontal cortex. They were like reliable garbage fires that you couldn't help but go look at sometimes.
I recall back in the late 90s when someone showed me this site, back when no one had own computers. This one pic of some cars crash (i think) where some unlucky dudes face was basically caved in, while he was still alive. That image was burned to my mind, and it still haunts me to this day.
It's even in the movie. Zuckerberg was inspired by Hot or Not and used his friend's chess ranking algo for Facemash (comparing college girls). And that inspired him in part for making the Facebook.
Perhaps adolescents were attracted to this content as a reaction to the sanitized upbringing in western culture. In my experience, these sites were compelling because they showed what was "beyond the veil". Teenage me was invincible, my own death unthinkable, so exposing myself to this content was almost a rebellious reactionary activity.
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 most haunting image I remember from that website was a photograph of a young boy who'd had his lower jaw cut off to punish his mother. It has stuck in my mind for nearly three decades. How could someone do that to a child? Horrifying.
Well, I guess you havent seen the picture from belgian Congo, when they chopped the hands of small daughter of a farm worker and brought them to him to motivate him to work harder.
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.
I am aware it's more famous. I've already seen it, but I'm not sure it's more disturbing as a photo (admittedly I am not going to look at the one described above to compare).
Horrible. More recent (i wont post any links) are the reddit community (i wont name it here) where some girl did self harm by cutting to her thigh. It was not the "usual" skin deep cuts, but this girl cut all the way to the bone. Some things you wish you can unsee. The most horrible thing i have seen on the net.
I remember one of these sites had an image of a man who was a victim of a failed suicide attempt by "suck-starting a shotgun". The entire lower half of his face had been blown off. He was still alive.
rotten dot was weird. I did visit it a few times but
the general perception was that the website was - as I
would call it nowadays - trolling people. There was
virtually no "historic lesson" or anything here. It's
like Rick Rolling with a darker undertone.
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).
My recollection from this era is there was a common argument that provocation and boundary pushing were the way to ensure an uncensored internet. To me, it seems like that argument has been defeated by reality, but I've never seen much discussion of it. Maybe it's a last-year's-war now anyway.
I loved rotten dot com when I was a teenager (97ish time). Simpler times, where I was looking for gore and (a year or so later) Joes Cartoons (I’m super fly).
I do think the site, along with watching horror such as puppet master and reading Stephen King at 14, affected my psyche though.
I remember as a kid I went to a local internet café with a few friends to spend the evening playing Halo for one of their birthdays. I was sat at my computer waiting for one of the others to be set up so we could get going. To fill the time I absent-mindedly started browsing rotten.com, not realising (or perhaps just not caring) that the woman in charge of the café could monitor our browsing. After a few minutes I looked over to see her staring at me with a mix of confusion and disgust. I just sheepishly closed the window (no tabs back then). I'm lucky I wasn't kicked out much less put on some list!
Such a blast from the past. my cousin would often print out pictures from this site, and then stick them up in random places. we would hang around for adults to spot them and then laugh ourselves silly at their reactions.
I wish I'd had more weird friends like these growing up. A girl I had an enormous crush on introduced me to rotten when I was 14, then disappeared from my life, and all my friends since that I shared anything along these lines with thought "wtf is this weird gross shit". Led to me developing for the rest of my life a circle of friends who never really shared my curiosity about "weird" or "nerdy" subjects.
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.
I feel differently. Like the author of this article, I attended an expensive, quasi-prestigious prep school in the American South _and_ went to Columbia. Kids in both milieus were competing with each other to be the weird ones.
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.
Yeah, I guess it makes sense that being weird for the sake of being weird becomes its own unhealthy driving impulse.
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.
Mistakenly, i thought it was about Rotten Tomatoes, and i started thinking about how a movie like Michael ranked badly, the critics missed the whole point of watching a movie, to be entertained, sadly, here on HN, sometimes we miss the point too, if that involves some names
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 completely.
Today’s internet is arguably more manipulative, even if it’s less graphic.
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 the greater sites, but that's where I spent most of my time before 4chan.
When I was in high school, before rotten.com, one of my best friends worked in a "fringe" video store. They had a series called "Faces of Death". Eventually, my friend discovered an even more horrifying series called "Traces of Death". We'd get stoned and watch people exploding as they were hit at high speed.
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.
I'm grateful that my friends and I all grew up to be functional adults considering we would spend hours after school looking at ogrish and ebaumsworld.
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.
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 something horrible.
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.
This kind of lukewarm attitude is why every Western country is speedrunning to become China. There are powerful interests turning your country into a panopticon cage, and the best you can do is "well as long as they give a good excuse, I guess it's okay"??
I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, democratic society, choosing to enforce social norms at times through contested law and legal wrangling in courts is remotely the same thing as a totalitarian state issuing a dictat. And I also don't think that the primary way to distinguish our system of governance from a dictatorahip would be to legalize everything imaginable.
This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.
Your proposal was red-flag laws for visiting the wrong website, or just censoring them entirely [0]. That's not "as close to maximum freedom without being anarchy". That's the opposite.
[0] "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."
But it can cause trauma, and harm. What this shows is that it’s not inevitable. It maybe even shows that it causes trauma and harm rarely.
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.
I think it's just different scale, like anything else. When I was growing up we also knew about rotten.com(in rural Poland!) but the only way to see it was to pay for some access at an internet caffee, we(like a group of kids) would huddle around a pc, look around for 5 minutes and then the dude running the place would kick us out. If you had internet access at home it was very limited and loading any kind of images took forever - way too risky.
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.
One of the rare sane comments on this thread.
It shows that exposure doesn't always cause trauma (which I don't think anyone claimed), not that it can't.
The uncomfortable truth is that monkey see monkey do is a real phenomenon. The majority of people who play violent video games and watch violent movies and watch real snuff vids online won't commit these acts.
That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our genetics.
Do they make you more likely to feel detachment at the thought of horrors being inflicted upon others, does that influence your career path or political leanings?
The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.
To be clear, I'm against any censorship of violent video games, movies, art, etc.
You can of course argue that school shooters and Stephen Miller would do what they do without all the media (social or not) they've consumed.
That said, what are we, after all, other than some sort of combination of our genetics and environment?
It's hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link between the mention of taco bell and me immediately doordashing it, which makes it hard to reconcile the two positions.
> to deny all of advertising
I don’t think that is true. Advertising relies on manufactured needs, portraying the hawked goods and services as things one needs to live a comfortable, easy, pleasurable or socially worthy life.
None of that resonates with shock content.
As an extreme example, you supposedly can’t sell guns by showing pictures of gun suicide victims. This is also why some governments require tobacco products to feature gruesome images of smoker lungs, cancer, etc. Ironically, kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images cut out from tobacco packages.
Curiosity lands squarely opposite of control.
I think there's a lot at work psychologically in advertising, but "kids in those countries have started collecting and trading those images" kind of undercuts your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted.
From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in.
You can see how popular suicide drone footage out of Ukraine is, there is a large contingent of people eating that stuff up, cheering it on, despite watching a man desperately beg for his life as a drone circles him, toying with him, before going for his head and the feed blacking out being about as grim as it gets.
People are creating games now to replicate the experience. People want to drive drones into other people's heads, all along a spectrum from watching it on youtube, playing a video game, to joining the ukrainian effort and actually performing the act in real life.
My experience is you can find a customer for just about any content, including shock content. Some messages have broader appeal for sure, but even the worst thing you can imagine will have someone with whom it resonates.
It's clear that people are influenced by their environment, and things that were once considered grotesque and unacceptable can be watered down over time with exposure to where, for example, rapists and pedophiles can openly win presidential elections and be placed on the Supreme Court. To where large portions of nations rationalize and support genocide, or any horrible thing you can imagine, even when presented with images of the suffering inflicted.
Humans are malleable and you don't have to have a perfectly crafted advertising campaign to have some people decide they like what they're seeing and want to replicate it, no matter what it is.
> your point that shock content doesn't resonate with an audience, create demand or a potential desire to emulate what's depicted.
My point was that it doesn’t resonate with the principles of advertising. Certainly shock content can resonate with an audience, as well as create demand and desire to emulate: just look at the success of the Jackass franchise.
The kids aren’t buying tobacco because of the images, though — very few if any adults are either. I would assume they’re cutting out their collections from discarded packaging, and that they would not want to emulate lung cancer even if they saw pictures of it.
Purely guessing here, but it doesn’t seem likely that content on rotten.com would have led anyone, let alone masses of people, to become human butchers: in the OP article, the desire to emulate was limited to building narratives around the content.
Crime scene investigator or trauma surgeon, maybe those are more likely outcomes.
>The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.
Goatse has been online for thirty years and I’ve never seen anybody say “I would definitely have never tried that if nobody showed me that website”
Do you think the number of people who have tried to reproduce the photo, specifically because they saw this photo, is 0?
Feels like it would be 0 or extremely close to 0.
I'm in a cafe but I'm putting it in my notes to search for a goatse.cx replication album when I get somewhere more private. I will send you my therapist's bill.
Wayback Machine goatse marathon dot com
It’s not really something anybody could just replicate on a whim. It is not like ordering taco bell
Evidence?
Evidence of the fact that I ordered doordash? Evidence of the fact that people are a product of their genetics and their environment?
Are you asking for evidence that humans tend to emulate what they see other humans do?
Are you asking the more direct classic question of if there's evidence that violent media correlates with violent acts?
The latter. And not just "correlates".
lol
You want evidence that rises to the level of establishing "causality" in consideration of a natural experiment that is being run across all of humanity simultaneously?
What populations are protected from violent media?
How would you even disentangle all the countless confounding factors?
The arguments here are well-worn by the industries that peddle in these types of media, with obvious incentives, and obvious incentives on our side as consumers to not be restricted from consuming whatever we enjoy.
This is why I spent so much time referencing all the other ways in which humanity tends to emulate the behavior of other humans or be influenced by advertising/media, as it seems unlikely that these tendencies would suddenly cease around the sole category of "violent media".
Water flows, until it's ice. I imagine it was very hard to get freezing temperatures in Singapore.
Your argument has no strong data to back it up.
Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. That's not a small phenomena that seems to have been ignored by policymakers and those who inform them.
> Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma.
How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.
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.
Knowing what she's seen at that age, I'm pretty sure I'd have flashbacks as well. This wasn't the old internet, and it's not like the new internet is free of such content. I really don't think that we have a way to quantify this, but, as one sibling comment said, expecting no influence seems unrealistic – as is expecting that influence to be easily detectable. I'm sure my ex is not the only one bringing up such experiences in therapy and I bet if you ask experienced therapists they will have similar stories.
Here's an anomaly:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
I recall an article back in 2016 or '18 about workers in the Philippines experiencing the same. May not have been Facebook, Google maybe?
Even if it were reported at scale to each and every therapist, they rarely share even anonymized stories with others. Anecdata: I’ve talked to a bunch, and processed some of that shit, but nobody else hears.
Just because it can’t be easily measured doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
No, but there's rough heuristic that are generally reliable. Psychologists talk. If a problem is recurring - they talk a lot amongst each other regarding the prevalence of the problem.
I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.
But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?
Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.
And in the olden times, people got nightmares from reading books, or by hearing a horror story around a campfire. Banning everything that is scary or can cause nightmares or trauma would be a very difficult effort, and deciding a boundary of what is too traumatic and what is not would be very arbitrary.
Can we agree that there's a difference between banning things and making things difficult to access?
I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be.
We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS.
There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible.
There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.
I think that gore is an easy scapegoat because this allows us to shy away from the difficult discussions. "We should ban porn" occupies the bandwidth of social discourse, and therefore we cannot discuss topics like "ok but really, what do we do about the demographic collapse". I honestly think that the kids growing up now are going to be much more traumatized by the fact that they'll find themselves in a world of insane wealth inequality while needing to support an army of retirees, rather than seeing a pic of a dead body.
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.
OTOH inflicting death and misery was also pretty normal.
the idea that information can't cause harm is obviously absurd. third parties should not restrict free speech, but that's an extremely simplistic/optimistic view. everything is about trade offs, there is no perfect solution. the truth is probably closer to: exposing young children to disturbing imagery at a young age is not optimal for healthy development, but free speech is important to a functioning democracy.
This kind of conflates two issues though.
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.
Yeah I disagree. We've normalized a lot of bad shit because it was pressed into the strata of our lives like road kill on asphalt.
My kids do not need to see beheadings and exploding people. I could have done without that exposure. It was certainly traumatic.
I know someone who developed schizophrenia in contact with rotten.com
I know someone who won the lottery after watching the film National Lampoon’s Vacation
How do you know those two are/were related?
My mate Paul went there once and spent the rest of the week staring at the sun which was hard at night time
Surely correlation and not causation.
It sounds to me like you've already decided, sans facts, that your opinion is correct. Which is provably incorrect by decades of medical research. Or perhaps you are one of those "because it didn't bother you and your friends, the idea is a joke." It's impossible for me to present you an argument that would teach you to understand compassion, let alone trauma, because you probably think I'm some woke soyboy rando on the internet and you've got your bros to go chest-bump about how badass y'all are. But the reality is, prolonged exposure to graphic images can cause trauma, from social media moderators, to EMTs, to even everyday police that have to sort through graphic evidence as part of a report. I hope some day you learn compassion, for your sake as well as everyone else you harm.
It is. Something happened later in my life that opened the floodgates to all kinds of unprocessed shit I’ve watched as kid and early teen. I don’t wish that on anybody. It’s not so much the watching itself, it is often more the lack of talking about it with any adult at the time. (Which I didn’t experience as problematic back then, to the contrary, I felt very strong and adult-like).
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.
I think that seeking disturbing content is a normal part of being a teenager, especially for boys. rotten.com is just one of these things. If it drove people insane, I guess that evolution would have selected against this behavior.
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.
Would you put watching an arm breaking contest (something I still dont know if it's made up, and don't want to research) in the "sane" category?
Would you put reading horror novels like IT or movies like The Thing in the same category?
we had rotten but no social media.
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
Surgeons, coroners, forensic pathologists, morticians, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, etc. are hopefully sane..
Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.
Slaughterhouse workers have very high rates of PTSD and depression. Healthcare workers who deal with death are also psychologically impacted.
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
I'd say getting PTSD and depression working in a slaughterhouse, or dealing with death as a healthcare worker only proves the point? It's a correct sane reaction.
I'd agree there. I personally interepreted the "some people aren't squeamish" comment to imply that the people in these professions are immune from negative psychological consequences of being those professions.
> Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist.
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.
StileProject was one I found more interesting, it had a better community and wasn’t completely deranged 100% of the time, but still pushed the boundaries of that type of content.
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.
Thanks for reminding me!
As someone else that went on rotten in my formative years, the feeling of disgust was so immense to know I want to stay away from any sort of real-life gore. Yet your experience is so common (fascination, wonder) I wonder what the hell is wrong with people to willingly watch corpses and dead people.
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.
LiveLeak, Ogrish.com, Disinfo.com... man, and those are just the ones I can remember.
snuffx.com, sideburns.co.uk (a little more tame IIRC but it's been a while)...
Bestgore, TheYNC
What the hell is am arm breaking contest!
Something parallel, there is a Black Mirror episode 7.1 (Common People) where he pulls out his own teeth, tongue in a mousetrap, torture/harm his body, etc. to earn money on the Internet.
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 explained part of the storyline and is now asking me to seek help. Early Internet would now, definitely, be totally banned.
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.
> 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.
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.
That was a rough episode to watch. Poor Roy.
I thought he maybe meant arm wrestling contest. I also cannot watch those without cringing. I'm always expecting a wrist to break or forearm to snap in the fashion of an open fracture. Then again, I cannot watch those contest also because it's f'ing boring seeing two people trying to outlever each other. We used to make fun of football as 22 men running and jumping after a ball. But football is downright intellectual compared to arm wrestling. Barton Fink should have considered himself happy having had to write a screenplay for an actual wrestling picture.
> that's where I spent most of my time before 4chan
I rest my case.
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.
never really got into those no.
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.
Some day I should write about a very similar experience at ~7yo with my slightly older cool cousins showing me things as shocking (or more) out of their (MD) father's huge library (hush-hush). Things like high resolution pictures of extreme cases of venereal diseases, malformed babies, you name it. It messed me up for a bit that the first pictures of adult genitalia were so disturbing.
So when years later my internet-savy friends got into gore I couldn't get that much into it.
reading this makes me want to describe the world in a more recklessly imaginative way. what a joy.
"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.
Dont regret that you retained your humanity.
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.
Oh my word. This site, orsm, ebaumsworld, etc. I'm glad to say that none of these were formative for me, but that were always morbidly entertaining to a young man still firming up his prefrontal cortex. They were like reliable garbage fires that you couldn't help but go look at sometimes.
Yeesh, the things we put on the internet.
I recall back in the late 90s when someone showed me this site, back when no one had own computers. This one pic of some cars crash (i think) where some unlucky dudes face was basically caved in, while he was still alive. That image was burned to my mind, and it still haunts me to this day.
I work in Trust&Safety, and can vouch that the passion for gore things has not left 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
The whole article is poetry. Amazing.
“Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.”
Well put. The kind of doors I don’t want to lock.
I’m pretty sure the same chap ran ratemypoo.com and ratemyvomit.com. Maybe also hotornot.com.
Ahh … bastions of refined taste …
As a prank in the high school computer lab, we would set the victim's browser homepage to ratemypoo.com
Wasn’t that Mark Zuckerberg?
/s
Seriously, I think hotornot was inspiration for Facebook.
It's even in the movie. Zuckerberg was inspired by Hot or Not and used his friend's chess ranking algo for Facemash (comparing college girls). And that inspired him in part for making the Facebook.
Perhaps adolescents were attracted to this content as a reaction to the sanitized upbringing in western culture. In my experience, these sites were compelling because they showed what was "beyond the veil". Teenage me was invincible, my own death unthinkable, so exposing myself to this content was almost a rebellious reactionary activity.
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.
It seems to me like Hollywood horror films have gotten more visually gory.
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.
This is so beautifully written.
The internet needs more of this.
Dena is a great writer and was part of the trend spotting group K-Hole that put "normcore" on the map.
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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The most haunting image I remember from that website was a photograph of a young boy who'd had his lower jaw cut off to punish his mother. It has stuck in my mind for nearly three decades. How could someone do that to a child? Horrifying.
Well, I guess you havent seen the picture from belgian Congo, when they chopped the hands of small daughter of a farm worker and brought them to him to motivate him to work harder.
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.
Both are absolutely horrific and evil but I don't see why that one would be worse than the one the comment above you mentioned.
Not really answering your question, but the Belgian Congo photo is probably more notable and consequential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsala_of_Wala_in_the_Nsongo_Di...
I am aware it's more famous. I've already seen it, but I'm not sure it's more disturbing as a photo (admittedly I am not going to look at the one described above to compare).
GRAPHIC WARNING ^^^^^ Even though it's on wikipedia; it's horrible.
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People who want to see it can search for it, but posting without a disclaimer is unnecessary.
Horrible. More recent (i wont post any links) are the reddit community (i wont name it here) where some girl did self harm by cutting to her thigh. It was not the "usual" skin deep cuts, but this girl cut all the way to the bone. Some things you wish you can unsee. The most horrible thing i have seen on the net.
I remember one of these sites had an image of a man who was a victim of a failed suicide attempt by "suck-starting a shotgun". The entire lower half of his face had been blown off. He was still alive.
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White background with blue links? Why do I remember Rotten as red on black?
rotten dot was weird. I did visit it a few times but the general perception was that the website was - as I would call it nowadays - trolling people. There was virtually no "historic lesson" or anything here. It's like Rick Rolling with a darker undertone.
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).
Wish I could remember how I found my way there back in 96/97
>his real name, aptly, was Thomas E. Dell
Could someone explain why this is apt?
I assume because Dell = computer manufacturer?
My recollection from this era is there was a common argument that provocation and boundary pushing were the way to ensure an uncensored internet. To me, it seems like that argument has been defeated by reality, but I've never seen much discussion of it. Maybe it's a last-year's-war now anyway.
Seems like a silly argument, and that the exact opposite would be true. But sometimes people want to do stuff, and rationalize it afterwards.
I loved rotten dot com when I was a teenager (97ish time). Simpler times, where I was looking for gore and (a year or so later) Joes Cartoons (I’m super fly).
I do think the site, along with watching horror such as puppet master and reading Stephen King at 14, affected my psyche though.
I remember as a kid I went to a local internet café with a few friends to spend the evening playing Halo for one of their birthdays. I was sat at my computer waiting for one of the others to be set up so we could get going. To fill the time I absent-mindedly started browsing rotten.com, not realising (or perhaps just not caring) that the woman in charge of the café could monitor our browsing. After a few minutes I looked over to see her staring at me with a mix of confusion and disgust. I just sheepishly closed the window (no tabs back then). I'm lucky I wasn't kicked out much less put on some list!
Such a blast from the past. my cousin would often print out pictures from this site, and then stick them up in random places. we would hang around for adults to spot them and then laugh ourselves silly at their reactions.
I always thought it sucked that ratemypoo got taken down but rotten didn't
Way to roll the nostalgia. AIM and rotten, seeing grotesque human sacrifice and torture at "13" was a unique time to be alive.
if you stared too long into rotten.com did not rotten.com also stare into you?
No no, websites staring back at you is a more modern phenomenon.
Similarly, pain olympics.
I wish I'd had more weird friends like these growing up. A girl I had an enormous crush on introduced me to rotten when I was 14, then disappeared from my life, and all my friends since that I shared anything along these lines with thought "wtf is this weird gross shit". Led to me developing for the rest of my life a circle of friends who never really shared my curiosity about "weird" or "nerdy" subjects.
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.
I feel differently. Like the author of this article, I attended an expensive, quasi-prestigious prep school in the American South _and_ went to Columbia. Kids in both milieus were competing with each other to be the weird ones.
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.
Yeah, I guess it makes sense that being weird for the sake of being weird becomes its own unhealthy driving impulse.
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.
Ah, Bonsaikitten. Happier times
Mistakenly, i thought it was about Rotten Tomatoes, and i started thinking about how a movie like Michael ranked badly, the critics missed the whole point of watching a movie, to be entertained, sadly, here on HN, sometimes we miss the point too, if that involves some names
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 completely.
Today’s internet is arguably more manipulative, even if it’s less graphic.
Usenet was full of people at their most, uh, uncivilized. It was there well before the Web.
Its format was even sparser, pure text, with pictures crammed in there by brute force.
Please do not post AI generated comments.
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