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everyday I'm thankful I never let curiosity get to the better of me as a kid on the internet

Back before governments realized they could spread propaganda and disinformation everywhere through the internet, and companies could make boatloads of money manipulating people algorithmically through social media.

Honestly yeah, the internet was better before all that. And now we have AI generated news and websites showing up everywhere and it's being shoved down our throats, and we are on the precipitous of global "age verification" (cough more privacy violations)

But, other than that, the modern internet is fine. Everything's fine.

Oof, I'm sorry, that's rough. Flash games?

Goatse

Tubgirl

Lemon party

Yeah, those were simpler times.

If I could go back, I’d pass on the beheading. Damn morbid curiosity.

I somehow managed to avoid the really heinous stuff like beheadings, but I do remember a lot of the classic shock websites.

Apparently the cock from MeatSpin belonged to a trans woman porn star. So that's fun, I hope she's doing well, whoever she is.

Analogue youth, digital teens, here.

Simpler times... when we'd watch Jimmy Savile on TV, and were told he was a beloved children's entertainer. O_O

Lots of people talking about beheadings, but the video that I can never unwatch was of a woman in a blank walled room facing the camera and getting unceremoniously shot in the head with a revolver. I've no idea if it was real or not, but the lack of, for want of a better word, "spectacle" makes me think it was.

I don't want to look it up again to find out but if anyone knows for sure...

RIP Flash

Gotta make a move to a town that's right for me Town to keep me movin', keep me groovin' with some energy

I dont know how i did it as a kid. Teenagers are psychopaths I guess.

Ah yes I remember "three guys one hammer" which was a video of three Ukrainian serial killers stabbing a guy in the eye and repeatedly in the stomach with a screwdriver and then beating him to death with a hammer.

Apparently one of the killers got out of prison in 2019. I imagine he's probably dead by now, given that he was most likely conscripted.

For all your flash nostalgia needs: https://flashpointarchive.org/

itch.io has so many really cool free games that can be played in your browser. Neocities exists. So many cool communities exist on the internet

just because most of the most popular websites are terrible doesnt mean cool sites dont exist

I saw war crimes and decided war was bad. Guess who decided that we shouldn't be able to see war crimes?

Saw some lemons making party, some girls with a cup definitely not doing the cup song and a few leaks live, but otherwise it was a great time.

There was a brief moment in the internet during this time, not the wild west age of unmoderated forums and ascaii memes but the budding frontier town of rage comics and early social media. There was an exact point, just before the year Facebook became the defacto social network, where the internet could have taken a different path and lead to something great. You still see the chipped paint of that mural in places like Reddit before the premium and Lemmy before the shill accounts. The hangers on from the old world that catch the scraps the mega corps drop. Gaiaonline is still propped up by a dedicated community. Small forums grow like weeds in the cracked pavement.

If we could find those places, sure up their crumbling palisades against the endless effort to advertise, breathe life into them in our own quite ways. Create the internet we wanted instead of sulking in the one we were given.

I was moderator on an online video platform at the time. I arrived to work early, get my coffee and went to my desk for my morning empty-the-queue-list routine... spitted my coffee, maybe puked a little... and moved on with my tasks!

When I was a kid I saw a video of guy being high on drugs and cutting his own dick off. Was the best demonstration of that drugs are bad 😅

I'm fairly sure I saw the same beheading video in 2003. I was convinced it was real. My one friend was convinced it was fake. Our other friend couldn't decide.

Now, with hindsight, I'm STILL convinced it was real, but I'm wondering if what I saw was an early version of what would later become ISIS.

ISIS didn't exist formally yet in 2003, but it's not like they just came from nowhere. I'm fairly confident that I saw an early version of it with that beheading video.

I'm still traumatized from some of those MySpace pages.