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Rotten Dot Com
- herodoturtle 5mo agoThis is so beautifully written. The internet needs more of this.
- solomonb 5mo agoDena is a great writer and was part of the trend spotting group K-Hole that put "normcore" on the map.
- tapper 5mo agoSuch 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.
- TripleFFF 5mo agoI always thought it sucked that ratemypoo got taken down but rotten didn't
- stavros 5mo agoWhite background with blue links? Why do I remember Rotten as red on black?
- INTPenis 5mo agoI 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.
- stavros 5mo agoWhat the hell is am arm breaking contest!
- nkmnz 5mo ago> that's where I spent most of my time before 4chan I rest my case.
- Brajeshwar 5mo agoSomething 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.
- stavros 5mo agoThat was a rough episode to watch. Poor Roy.
- csande17 5mo ago> 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-reply-links https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hidden... says you can work around this by clicking on the comment's timestamp.
- autoexec 5mo ago> 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.
- brador 5mo agoThe whole article is poetry. Amazing. “Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.”
- beng-nl 5mo agoWell put. The kind of doors I don’t want to lock.
- rpi_rpi 5mo agoThe 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.
- kakacik 5mo agoWell, 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.
- suddenlybananas 5mo agoBoth are absolutely horrific and evil but I don't see why that one would be worse than the one the comment above you mentioned.
- Joeboy 5mo agoNot 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_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsala_of_Wala_in_the_Nsongo_Di...
- callanhan 5mo ago[flagged]
- Lukas_Skywalker 5mo agoPeople who want to see it can search for it, but posting without a disclaimer is unnecessary.
- behaviors 5mo agoWay to roll the nostalgia. AIM and rotten, seeing grotesque human sacrifice and torture at "13" was a unique time to be alive.
- recursivedoubts 5mo agoif you stared too long into rotten.com did not rotten.com also stare into you?
- karmakurtisaani 5mo agoNo no, websites staring back at you is a more modern phenomenon.
- zafronix 5mo agoRotten.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.
- jfengel 5mo agoUsenet 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.
- COAGULOPATH 5mo agoPlease do not post AI generated comments.
- NoboruWataya 5mo agoI 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!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- phplovesong 5mo agoI 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo agoI’m pretty sure the same chap ran ratemypoo.com and ratemyvomit.com. Maybe also hotornot.com. Ahh … bastions of refined taste …
- Chazprime 5mo agoWasn’t that Mark Zuckerberg? /s
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo agoSeriously, I think hotornot was inspiration for Facebook.
- alecco 5mo agoIt'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.
- jszymborski 5mo agoAs a prank in the high school computer lab, we would set the victim's browser homepage to ratemypoo.com
- leovander 5mo agoSimilarly, pain olympics.
- seltzerboys 5mo agoreading 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.
- kakacik 5mo agoDont 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.
- netdur 5mo agoMistakenly, 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
- aykutseker 5mo ago[dead]
- Joeboy 5mo agoMy 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.
- karmakurtisaani 5mo agoSeems like a silly argument, and that the exact opposite would be true. But sometimes people want to do stuff, and rationalize it afterwards.
- Angostura 5mo agoAh, Bonsaikitten. Happier times
- shevy-java 5mo agorotten 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).
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoI 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.
- subpixel 5mo agoI 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.
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- siriaan 5mo agoI 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.com/library/whatsnew/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170902074735/http://www.rotten...
- strathmeyer 5mo ago[dead]
- alecco 5mo agoSome 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.
- crtasm 5mo agoWish 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?
- cryzinger 5mo agoI assume because Dell = computer manufacturer?
- stranded22 5mo agoI 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.
- neon_diogenes 5mo agoPerhaps 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.
- brokenmachine 5mo agoIt 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.
- Jubijub 5mo agoI 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
- ropable 5mo agoOh 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.