Rotten Dot Com

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.

Some day I should write about a very similar experience at ~7yo with my slightly older cool cousins showing me things as shocking (or more) out of their (MD) father's huge library (hush-hush). Things like high resolution pictures of extreme cases of venereal diseases, malformed babies, you name it. It messed me up for a bit that the first pictures of adult genitalia were so disturbing.

So when years later my internet-savy friends got into gore I couldn't get that much into it.

reading this makes me want to describe the world in a more recklessly imaginative way. what a joy.

"What mattered wasn’t so much the image itself but how it moved. Its value lay in its circulation: whom you could shock, how fast the chat room would combust, how far something would travel before it came back to you like a bad penny."

also, for what it's worth: i did not have access to the early internet. strict parents & computer only available in 'the computer room' where my dad's desk was, so he was always right there. as a consequence, i can't 'handle' movies with graphic sexual assault scenes or similar. i like that about myself tho.

Oh my word. This site, orsm, ebaumsworld, etc. I'm glad to say that none of these were formative for me, but that were always morbidly entertaining to a young man still firming up his prefrontal cortex. They were like reliable garbage fires that you couldn't help but go look at sometimes.

Yeesh, the things we put on the internet.

I recall back in the late 90s when someone showed me this site, back when no one had own computers. This one pic of some cars crash (i think) where some unlucky dudes face was basically caved in, while he was still alive. That image was burned to my mind, and it still haunts me to this day.

I work in Trust&Safety, and can vouch that the passion for gore things has not left the internet.

I will say it built my resistance: if you were an internet user in the late 90’s, you ‘ve seen since really broken stuff

The whole article is poetry. Amazing.

“Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.”

Perhaps adolescents were attracted to this content as a reaction to the sanitized upbringing in western culture. In my experience, these sites were compelling because they showed what was "beyond the veil". Teenage me was invincible, my own death unthinkable, so exposing myself to this content was almost a rebellious reactionary activity.

Now the current crop of curious teens are watching drone drops and soldier suicide compilations. Trench clearing, close combat. Executing surrendering soldiers. Industrialized trench warfare in high def. Yeah its brutal. What was beyond the veil is not something nice to be discovered. It hurts us to watch it. It hurts me, but maybe its supposed to hurt. Hollywood has proven to be laughably unrealistic. Almost any movie with violence is. Maybe the silver lining to watching war in HD, and by extension rotten et all, is a natural aversion to hollywood bullshit.. Surely that's got to count for something.

I’m pretty sure the same chap ran ratemypoo.com and ratemyvomit.com. Maybe also hotornot.com.

Ahh … bastions of refined taste …

This is so beautifully written.

The internet needs more of this.

I was never interested in seeing the gore pics but the library section had some great writing in it. They even had an interview with Patton Oswalt: https://web.archive.org/web/20170902074735/http://www.rotten...

The most haunting image I remember from that website was a photograph of a young boy who'd had his lower jaw cut off to punish his mother. It has stuck in my mind for nearly three decades. How could someone do that to a child? Horrifying.

White background with blue links? Why do I remember Rotten as red on black?

rotten dot was weird. I did visit it a few times but the general perception was that the website was - as I would call it nowadays - trolling people. There was virtually no "historic lesson" or anything here. It's like Rick Rolling with a darker undertone.

I guess people like the novelty factor in general, but I quickly realised that I don't really have the slightest interest in cruelty or giving credibility to this by watching anything in this regard. Nowadays such troll videos are more commonly seen but I quickly skip to do something else than waste time watching any of these. Back in the 1990s, though, it was quite a bit hard to realise any of this, largely because of finding images and videos being harder back then. Even Rick Rolling wasn't quite a real "thing" in the 1990s; that became more of a thing in 2006, with our usual suspect, the 4chan troll army (though, Rick Rolling is very harmless compared to some content that was on rotten dot com).

Wish I could remember how I found my way there back in 96/97

>his real name, aptly, was Thomas E. Dell

Could someone explain why this is apt?

My recollection from this era is there was a common argument that provocation and boundary pushing were the way to ensure an uncensored internet. To me, it seems like that argument has been defeated by reality, but I've never seen much discussion of it. Maybe it's a last-year's-war now anyway.

I loved rotten dot com when I was a teenager (97ish time). Simpler times, where I was looking for gore and (a year or so later) Joes Cartoons (I’m super fly).

I do think the site, along with watching horror such as puppet master and reading Stephen King at 14, affected my psyche though.

I remember as a kid I went to a local internet café with a few friends to spend the evening playing Halo for one of their birthdays. I was sat at my computer waiting for one of the others to be set up so we could get going. To fill the time I absent-mindedly started browsing rotten.com, not realising (or perhaps just not caring) that the woman in charge of the café could monitor our browsing. After a few minutes I looked over to see her staring at me with a mix of confusion and disgust. I just sheepishly closed the window (no tabs back then). I'm lucky I wasn't kicked out much less put on some list!

Such a blast from the past. my cousin would often print out pictures from this site, and then stick them up in random places. we would hang around for adults to spot them and then laugh ourselves silly at their reactions.

I always thought it sucked that ratemypoo got taken down but rotten didn't

Way to roll the nostalgia. AIM and rotten, seeing grotesque human sacrifice and torture at "13" was a unique time to be alive.

if you stared too long into rotten.com did not rotten.com also stare into you?

Similarly, pain olympics.

I wish I'd had more weird friends like these growing up. A girl I had an enormous crush on introduced me to rotten when I was 14, then disappeared from my life, and all my friends since that I shared anything along these lines with thought "wtf is this weird gross shit". Led to me developing for the rest of my life a circle of friends who never really shared my curiosity about "weird" or "nerdy" subjects.

I now develop software, and have nobody to really talk to about it. I'm even kind of bored of the idea of talking about it, feels like talking about World of Warcraft or something.

Was too concerned with being "cool", oh well. It's nice to see so many people were wiser and more headstrong and confident/authentic at a young age and found their people who they could more fully connect with.

Ah, Bonsaikitten. Happier times

Mistakenly, i thought it was about Rotten Tomatoes, and i started thinking about how a movie like Michael ranked badly, the critics missed the whole point of watching a movie, to be entertained, sadly, here on HN, sometimes we miss the point too, if that involves some names

Rotten.com felt like one of the first moments where the internet stopped pretending to be curated civilization and instead exposed itself as raw human curiosity.

People often remember the gore, but what I remember more was the texture of the early web: sparse HTML, no engagement optimization, no algorithmic feed, no “creator economy.” You had to intentionally go looking for things. That changed the psychology completely.

Today’s internet is arguably more manipulative, even if it’s less graphic.