[sersi]

I would say that I remember the medieval Internet as being much more shocking (or at least, much easier to stumble on shocking content). I remember when I first got internet at 12 years old in 1996, I saw an ad for a site called "Animal sex farm" and basically saw an image of a girl with a dog... That was my first exposure to porn (not ideal as a first thing to see as a kid)...

This kind of content is most likely still available today but I do think that it's deeper under a surface and that a kid or anyone is less likely to stumble on it while browsing.

That's not to say that there weren't good things about early Internet. I have good memories of irc, usenet and the decentralization that existed back then. In a way, it felt more magical than it is now but that's maybe the kid in me talking.

[M_Grey]

This kind of content is most likely still available today but I do think that it's deeper under a surface and that a kid or anyone is less likely to stumble on it while browsing.

Oh god yes. It's also not... new. Alost everyone has seen at least one unforgettably horrible thing, and we're not stronger or better for it... just a bit sadder. When almost everyone has that under their belt, it's not really a cool or new thing to look at someone rotting off a noose, it's just pathetic and childish.

I think that, as much as anything, has changed it.

That, and it's just... at the time you could watch Magical Trevor again, or go to the dark places. You could spend the rest of your life in 2017 just looking at a slideshow of kittens.

[dkersten]

Once upon a time, I frequented 4chan. I've lost count of all the stuff I can't unsee and in hindsight would have preferred not to see. There is a LOT of fucked up shit online.

[M_Grey]

A whole generation just winces and sighs at the phrase, "Can't Unsee" or "Need eyebleach". I wonder if this is going to be a permanent feature of youth, or if generations yet to come will just see us as odd?

[yiyus]

I agree with what you say, but I think there is also a bit of the opposite. We have become desensitised.

I remember waiting for minutes to download a picture (with all my family nervous because I was using the only phone line at home) and then being totally shocked by something I had never seen before. Images of this kind could not be found in books or magazines. Nowadays, kids see one of those images and either they just sweep left or write a 'not wtf' comment.

[btilly]

No, you just hang out in places full of mature people. Go to 4chan and pop your bubble, it is still out there.

That said you have just given me a flashback to https://xkcd.com/467/. I haven't forgiven Randall yet.

[throwanem]

4chan today is nothing like 4chan a decade or more ago, and overall I think that's a good thing. What you're talking about gets saged to death very quickly these days, if it's not removed by moderators. That's been true since well before moot sold the site to Hiroshima; the sort of thing you describe here, one no longer really finds unless one goes looking for it.

The Web isn't the Wild West any more. It hasn't been for a long time now. What we have today is more like the sort of well-aged cyberpunk shithole you find in films like Blade Runner, translated from the physical to the virtual. That's an interesting world of its own, and it has its own challenges. It also has gatekeepers - many of them - and they mostly bounce old-style shock site content pretty fast.

[sersi]

Yep, I was curious and visited 4chan about 6 years ago and I've just revisited it now, it's much more tame compared to what I remember. I mean it's still rather misogynistic and not a great place to be but it's definitely not as bad as it was...

[dragonwriter]

But GP acknowledged it was still out there, just harder to accidentally stumble upon for the average internet user. And I think it's right; even with safesearch off (because I don't want to lose anything I might want to false positives, and I trust Google's relvlecance algorithms more than their filtering ones) I stumble into orders of magnitude less extreme content today then I did around the turn of the millennium.