5 ms·

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

by Kovah 5mo ago

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.
        pegasus 5mo ago
        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.
        only-one1701 5mo ago
        Just because it can’t be easily measured doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
        rockskon 5mo ago
        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.
        noduerme 5mo ago
        Here's an anomaly: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-ptsd-intl https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
        ChoGGi 5mo ago
        I recall an article back in 2016 or '18 about workers in the Philippines experiencing the same. May not have been Facebook, Google maybe?
      - kivle 5mo ago
        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.
        noduerme 5mo ago
        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.
  - virgildotcodes 5mo ago
    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.
    - lostmsu 5mo ago
      Evidence?
      - virgildotcodes 5mo ago
        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?
        lostmsu 5mo ago
        The latter. And not just "correlates".
        5mo ago
- noduerme 5mo ago
  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.
  - like_any_other 5mo ago
    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"??
    - noduerme 5mo ago
      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.
- seltzerboys 5mo ago
  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.
- ruszki 5mo ago
  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.
- shevy-java 5mo ago
  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.
- gambiting 5mo ago
  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.
  - only-one1701 5mo ago
    One of the rare sane comments on this thread.
- anal_reactor 5mo ago
  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.
  - actionfromafar 5mo ago
    OTOH inflicting death and misery was also pretty normal.
- Xmd5a 5mo ago
  I know someone who developed schizophrenia in contact with rotten.com
  - solumunus 5mo ago
    Surely correlation and not causation.
  - fittingopposite 5mo ago
    How do you know those two are/were related?
    - Yossarrian22 5mo ago
      My mate Paul went there once and spent the rest of the week staring at the sun which was hard at night time
  - iamnothere 5mo ago
    I know someone who won the lottery after watching the film National Lampoon’s Vacation
- porkpiepants 5mo ago
  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.
- homeonthemtn 5mo ago
  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.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
everyone 5mo ago
Surgeons, coroners, forensic pathologists, morticians, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, etc. are hopefully sane.. Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.
- virgildotcodes 5mo ago
  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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10009492/ - slaughterhouse workers https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ - healthcare workers
  - GCUMstlyHarmls 5mo ago
    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.
    - virgildotcodes 5mo ago
      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.
sig-11 5mo ago
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?
- ETlol 5mo ago
  Would you put reading horror novels like IT or movies like The Thing in the same category?
GuB-42 5mo ago
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.
47282847 5mo ago
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.
camillomiller 5mo ago
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

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

by Kovah 5mo ago

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.

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.
      - pegasus 5mo ago
        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.
      - only-one1701 5mo ago
        Just because it can’t be easily measured doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
        rockskon 5mo ago
        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.
      - noduerme 5mo ago
        Here's an anomaly: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-ptsd-intl https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
        ChoGGi 5mo ago
        I recall an article back in 2016 or '18 about workers in the Philippines experiencing the same. May not have been Facebook, Google maybe?
    - kivle 5mo ago
      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.
      - noduerme 5mo ago
        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.
- virgildotcodes 5mo ago
  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.
  - lostmsu 5mo ago
    Evidence?
    - virgildotcodes 5mo ago
      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?
      - lostmsu 5mo ago
        The latter. And not just "correlates".
        5mo ago
noduerme 5mo ago
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.
- like_any_other 5mo ago
  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"??
  - noduerme 5mo ago
    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.
seltzerboys 5mo ago
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.
ruszki 5mo ago
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.
shevy-java 5mo ago
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.
gambiting 5mo ago
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.
- only-one1701 5mo ago
  One of the rare sane comments on this thread.
anal_reactor 5mo ago
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.
- actionfromafar 5mo ago
  OTOH inflicting death and misery was also pretty normal.
Xmd5a 5mo ago
I know someone who developed schizophrenia in contact with rotten.com
- solumunus 5mo ago
  Surely correlation and not causation.
- fittingopposite 5mo ago
  How do you know those two are/were related?
  - Yossarrian22 5mo ago
    My mate Paul went there once and spent the rest of the week staring at the sun which was hard at night time
- iamnothere 5mo ago
  I know someone who won the lottery after watching the film National Lampoon’s Vacation
porkpiepants 5mo ago
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.
homeonthemtn 5mo ago
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.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

everyone 5mo ago

Surgeons, coroners, forensic pathologists, morticians, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, etc. are hopefully sane.. Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.

virgildotcodes 5mo ago
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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10009492/ - slaughterhouse workers https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ - healthcare workers
- GCUMstlyHarmls 5mo ago
  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.
  - virgildotcodes 5mo ago
    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.

sig-11 5mo ago

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?

ETlol 5mo ago
Would you put reading horror novels like IT or movies like The Thing in the same category?

GuB-42 5mo ago

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.

47282847 5mo ago

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.

camillomiller 5mo ago

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