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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 durin

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.

stavros 5mo ago
What 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 ago
  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.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    That 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.
- raffael_de 5mo ago
  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.
senectus1 5mo ago
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
- rockskon 5mo ago
  Hope you were never a part of Helldump or FYAD on Something Awful, then.
  - senectus1 5mo ago
    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.
Kovah 5mo ago
It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.
- vova_hn2 5mo ago
  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.
  - pegasus 5mo ago
    It shows that exposure doesn't always cause trauma (which I don't think anyone claimed), not that it can't.
    - rockskon 5mo ago
      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.
      - pegasus 5mo ago
        > 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.
        rockskon 5mo ago
        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.
noduerme 5mo ago
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.
Aboutplants 5mo ago
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.
avazhi 5mo ago
LiveLeak, Ogrish.com, Disinfo.com... man, and those are just the ones I can remember.
- abanana 5mo ago
  snuffx.com, sideburns.co.uk (a little more tame IIRC but it's been a while)...
- RGamma 5mo ago
  Bestgore, TheYNC
retired 5mo ago
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!"
- tempaccount5050 5mo ago
  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.
  - nosrepa 5mo ago
    Thanks for reminding me!
shevy-java 5mo ago
> 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.
rglover 5mo ago
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.
sph 5mo ago
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.

stavros 5mo ago

What 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 ago
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.
- stavros 5mo ago
  That 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.
raffael_de 5mo ago
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.

senectus1 5mo ago

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

rockskon 5mo ago
Hope you were never a part of Helldump or FYAD on Something Awful, then.
- senectus1 5mo ago
  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.

Kovah 5mo ago

It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.

vova_hn2 5mo ago
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.
- pegasus 5mo ago
  It shows that exposure doesn't always cause trauma (which I don't think anyone claimed), not that it can't.
  - rockskon 5mo ago
    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.
    - pegasus 5mo ago
      > 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.
      - rockskon 5mo ago
        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.

noduerme 5mo ago

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.

Aboutplants 5mo ago

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.

avazhi 5mo ago

LiveLeak, Ogrish.com, Disinfo.com... man, and those are just the ones I can remember.

abanana 5mo ago
snuffx.com, sideburns.co.uk (a little more tame IIRC but it's been a while)...
RGamma 5mo ago
Bestgore, TheYNC

retired 5mo ago

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!"

tempaccount5050 5mo ago
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.
- nosrepa 5mo ago
  Thanks for reminding me!

shevy-java 5mo ago

> 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.

rglover 5mo ago

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.

sph 5mo ago

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.