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.

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.

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

Rotten.com was like a rite of passage.

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

I remember when I was a young tween I saw trans porn on a shock-site that my "friend" directed me to. It was apparently supposed to disgust me, but I actually liked it and that is when I started to realize that I am trans, but I repressed it until I was 16 because I lived in a conservative area and all I heard for years was negative stuff and it really did a number on my mental health.

I did also see other stuff like eel soup (I think that is what it was called) and I looked up a video of someone commiting suicide after my mental health went down the drain. I also saw uncensored decapitation on the front page of reddit a few months back, so far I am glad I haven't seen stuff like that on lemmy yet.

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.

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 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.

nah too old, from the "the simpsons are corrupting the youth!" generation

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

Horny 16 year old me: Yes

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...

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.

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 :)

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

> 10 year old me watching Neon Genesis Evangelion

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.

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

Horrible memories of The Stile Project and Rotten.com

First got online using CompuServe in 1991 and pretty much had near unrestricted access (time limits because phone bill was pretty much it) since.

I was born in 1985.

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.

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

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.

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.