You had unrestricted access to the internet as a child, didn't you?

Dizzar@iusearchlinux.fyi to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 966 points –
89

Yeah, that is what parents really should have been worried about rather than violent video games. The first time I saw someone die online was way more traumatizing than watching a videogame character get dismembered.

Yeah, seen a guy get his brain poked out with an umbrella trough his eyes while he was still alive. Got the image tattooed into my brain. Definitely more traumatizing then any kind of video game including postal.

My burnt memory (and what made me lose interest in all gore type videos) was seeing someone play catch with a dog using a live grenade

I couldn't even finish the video, I felt sick

Damn I did not need to picture that today. Sorry you had to see it.

4chan gonna 4chan, I learnt my lesson the hard way but I did learnt it lol

i hate gore sooo much i dont get the appeal to movies bumping up the blood.

when did movies stop being good and became gorey money grabs for brain dead adults that fetishize violence from their couches

That's so far from reality these days imo, maybe when Saw was first coming out and Final Destination was all the craze

Rotten.com days. I don't know if it was bad to satisfy that curiosity but I got over it pretty quick. And nowadays I can safely avoid any of these crazy videos, knowing I've seen it all. I guess that's why they call it morbid curiosity.

My dad didn’t let me download The Offspring because it would’ve been a bad influence, but I was allowed on the early internet without any supervision.

My mom threw out my brother's tape of Green Day's Dookie because Billy Joe said Shit in Basket Case.

We sang green day at fifth grade "graduation", but they didnt allow us to say "dead skin". I never would have even noticed the phrase if they didn't bring attention to it by banning it, but its so fucking silly.

Similar story, my friends dad told my friend off because he saw the song "Get Fucked, Stud" by Biffy Clyro on his iPod when we were on holiday. My friend promptly renamed it to "Stud"😂

The problem was never the blood, it was the screaming, crying, and visceral gargling

The moment of death when everything is over. All the horrible shit is done but you just have to sit with the fact this person's conciseness is gone. That's what fucked me up back in the day.

the lack of expected noises in a lot was pretty confronting too. it's not always like the movies with people screaming their guts out, those were the ones that stuck with me

10-year-old me trying to see boobs on the Playboy Channel.

Those were the days. You would listen to the audio and try to find the nipples in the wavy mess of video.

Personally I feel like it's less about exposure to extreme gore and porn and stuff like that. It's more about the constant barrage of awful shit happening all over the world. Some stupid thing some politician said, police brutality, an asshole on a plane, etc. Our brains just weren't designed to handle so much stimulus overload. I'm not a psychologist or whatever but that's my opinion.

Social media, like reddit, is just a constant rage bait machine. I spend less time on lemmy since getting away from reddit and it's so much better for mental health.

The constant barrage of awful shit, which btw does not represent real life! Most of us will never encounter 99% of the bullshit we see, was just awful.

It makes us all angry, bitter and shitter people online.

I find lemmy better so far becuase, even though there are always shit heads there's less assholes here.

Partly because there is less content, but also because there simply are less shitty assholes leaning left.

Left usually means you're more compassionate so I feel like conversations can go on longer before devolving into shittery.

Been on the Internet maybe 23 years or so and I've seen some wild shit back in the day that didn't phase me. Got shown some stuff on kaotic recently and it upset me a hell of a lot more than it would have 13 year old me.

I think this was one of the biggest failings of parents in the 90s and 2000s - the internet was so new that they were scared of all the wrong things and didn’t know how to properly protect their kids online.

I’m eternally grateful I never saw some pretty horrific shit online. The worst I saw was porn and some of those jumps are videos and clips from horror movies.

Edit: I should clarify that to some extent I don’t even necessarily blame the parents. How were they supposed to know? Most of them just used the thing for work or to file taxes or look up the news. They weren’t looking in those dark corners or really even aware they existed until they saw their kids looking at it.

I dodged goatse and lemonparty. Got hit with tubgirl once though.

I printed out copies of goatse and hid them all over my friend's room 😅

I was 18 when 4chan started, the unrestricted internet was a wild time as a teenager

LemonParty isn’t one I’ve ever seen but goddamn is it funny as a concept. I’ve actually never heard of “tubgirl”. I’m picturing “2 Girls 1 Cup” in a bathtub and I am NOT here for it lol

I don't think it's that bad really. I feel like I was more traumatized as a kid by having a lot of pets with short natural lifespans, and just generally all the animal death and gore you are naturally exposed to by living in the country. With videos online it's disturbing, depressing, and forces you to think about human suffering/mortality and the existence of evil people, but it's ultimately just a video that isn't connected to your life, that you can turn off, and probably most people learn to avoid pretty quickly.

Back in the early 90's there was this website called "Rotten", there was a lot of fucked up pictures of suicide and and dismemberment.

I visited the site once, I was around 14 at the time...

Back in the early 90s there was no internet in the form we know it. It was in later half of the 90s.

Porn site: Please confirm that you are at least 18 years old

Horny 16 year old me: Yes

Honestly, I was clicking "Yes" since I was about 10 years old.

My father was very tech oriented and worked for a community college as a technician, which enabled him to get used and outdated computers for cheap if not free, as well as his hobby of scouring the area for any computer equipment for sale or being disposed of to find anything of value.

So, by age 5 I had a computer in my bedroom. Not a powerful one mind you, the thing could barely run Doom which came out that year (1993) and it some kind of DOS that didn't even use a mouse. Later that same year we got the internet which my father hooked into the home network he setup. While he tried to put some safeguards and restrictions on its use, it didn't taken my sisters an myself long at all to figure out how to bypass and defeat those restrictions. Nor that long for me to figure out how to view another computer on the network and see what they had been up to, finding my dads search history and also finding his poorly executed attempt at restricting search terms which just made me look all those things up after disabling the file that was supposed to block them.

At that age I was playing Flash games on FRIV, a10.com and my country's agame.com variant (gioco.it). It was literally all I did online, and all I did on computers.

How the hell do you manage to find those.

one of my classmates sent hardcore porn in the school group chat 💀

so i guess thats one way to find out about those

I did the same, but also perused rotten.com

Curiosity, chance and searching skills I guess

Nope, I didn't even unfettered access to South Park. After season one was translated to French and played in Quebec at kid hours, a bunch of parents decided their kids shouldn't watch it because they were all cussing like old truckers.

It was good times :)

they were all cussing like old truckers.

Well, at least it was localized accurately.

Yeah I had pretty unrestricted access but never found anything that bad and if I did I was probably too young to understand it was bad and forgot about it if I did see anything

I had friends who visited those shock sites but not me, can't handle them. To this day there's a handful of videos that I know of but never watched.

That's me as well. A bunch of my friends could handle watching the murder and dismemberment of other people. I've never been able to. Not unless I know for sure it's fake (like in a horror movie, that kind of gore is fine). I've never had a desire to see any sort of "snuff film". Hell, I did see the hanging of Saddam video, and I still looked away.

That being said, I have seen 2 Girls One Cup, and the One Man One Jar video. But I'd advise against both. Neither of those are sad, just revolting.

I was lucky enough to not be the kind of edgelord who thinks traumatizing themselves with horrific stuff theyll never unsee is cool and hardcore as a kid. The moment I even caught a frame of gore its an instant close. I have a hard enough time sleeping at night while knowing exactly how much suffering and pain can be inflicted in the world, I don't need to see it or hear about it.

My sister was a super vegan moralist in her teens and thought it appropriate to show 6 year old me food.inc, I will never forget that imagery and hope no other child ever has to see that shit.

I never searched for stuff like this cuz I'm kinda sensitive on this, but I have a friend who would sometimes show me and other friends really disgusting things since we were like 10 years old.

I did and I always watched creepypastas on YT

I've been watching gore since like 12. Some dude sent me the old livegore website and I peeked a look at it. First, I was a bit scaredy then got used to it. Honestly, I rarely even peek there these days, it's so boring tbh. I am pretty sure it messed me in the brain somewhere, watching gore at that early age.

Hah! Joke's on you! I'm such an old fart we didn't even have the internet to fuck with our heads.

Yeah, it's like, "Nope, there was no internet for me to have access to! Guess I was just born like this."

I did, but I used it to play Webkinz and listen to T.N.T. by AC/DC on early Youtube and I guess I didn't care to look deeper than that.

Nope. Didn't even have Internet till I was old enough to have a job and pay for it.

Same here. We did have dialup but it was slow and uninteresting at the time.

Got a paper route and upgraded the household to 1 Mbit. It was great!

I was paying for the dial up for 2 years before cable Internet came around.

Sometimes, I was on rotten.com with friends. Good and bad times. Good times to have friends around, bad times watching some of the videos or pics...

dismembered

Ah, you saw the Pain Olympics as a kid too, huh?

Sort of me, except I would immediately leave if I realized it was gore someone was tricking me into. Never liked it then, still don't.

I had a gameboy and an iPod touch as a kid. Safari was disabled on the later.

As I say, it builds character. I pity kids these days living in such a sanitised internet.