Yes, the prime time of rotton.com and ogrish.com, the website that cleaned up to become liveleak, the golden era of piracy and torrenting before it was mainstream where 80% of everything was copies of the anarchists cookbook, child porn or a virus usually both, dialup redirectors on dodgy porn sites and advertisements that would charge you $3.50 a minute then give you a virus and brick your computer.
We have very different memories about being a kid on the Internet in the 90’s.
When I went to school in the 80s, they had to remove the cloth hand towel roller thing, because kids were getting “high” choking themselves on it. Nobody needed a tiktok trend, it wasn’t on TV, some dumb kid did it and others copied them.
When I was ran a BBS in the 90s, I was constantly having to kick people for uploading grainy photos that honestly could have been CSAM, and gore images that haunted me for years. I ended up having to disable all uploads and downloads entirely, removing the entire section, because I was scared someone was gonna get me put in jail. Later, on the early internet on more than one occasion I tried to download a movie and instead got some random pornography, and it was never normal stuff, you just learned to watch the first few frames and close/delete it quickly if it was that.
The good old days were not that good, maybe things aren’t great now but yesterday was not perfect, and a kid in 2006 could have come across tons of horrible things on the internet, not to mention pedophiles cruising for children on the internet was even more common back then as unmoderated chat spaces were the norm, and law enforcement was still struggling to understand the internet.
Anyone that tries to pretend the early internet was some “safe space” is delusional at best, or intentionally misrepresenting the truth.
I think they’re talking about early 2000s internet but, yeah, i personally remember a pair of radio djs in my area who used to think it was funny to tell callers asking how to find general stuff on the internet ( jobs, dates or whatever) to go to qoute “wwwdot youngasianboysdotcom” and people would apparently just do it. That’s how naive people were. That’s how easy that shit was to find. Although, i heard from somewhere that a load of those sites were honeypots. I do wonder if theres any sort of possibility that we could have algorithmless internet without that shit. I’m not talking about on a few tiny websites but, making it standard or make turning it off an option.
I mentioned early 00s in that, but added some earlier stuff for even more context.
I was a skinny twink closeted bisexual teen, who got the internet in my early teens in the early 90s. SO many 40+ men tried to groom me, to the point where one semi-stalked me IRL. Nearly all of them tried to get me to create underage porn for them.
Cyber Dans a major player in the cyber scene. He goes to the message boards reposts the dank memes.
Such a vibe. It’s true.
Might sound like a weird connection to make, but honestly as I’ve played through Red Dead Redemption 2 I’ve thought more about the end of the Wild West era and I too have felt we’ve seen variations of the same “end of an era” in our own lifetimes already.
