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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Just wondering, how old are you?

I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too.

The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except now it's your entire life, not just your literal neighbor. Way more damaging long term, since you actually know these people and can relate to them. Yeah the beheading was shocking, but I'm not hanging out with cartels regularly. Just a completely different thing.

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This. Im 29 and share the same experience.

And we can even go further back; have people checked, old black & white cartoon? Some of them are so blatantly propaganda/politica/visual horrific that they wouldn't even be aired for 15 y.o today. If you take a closer look, even Tom & Jerry is quite violent, and most Japanese animation that air on kids TV-channel back then also, very sexual.

And these things were airing on TV, broadcasting at a specific time and all you had to do as a kid was to push a couple of buttons to access it.

Well, in Spain I could see Bulma's breasts on manga an Shizuka one's as a dark joke in Doraemon. No one gave a shit, we have far worse real life problems in the 90's.

Of course there was always violence and sexual content on TV and elsewhere, but comparing Japanese anime and Tom and Jerry to stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadorVegetable/ (NSFL) or the hardcore porn you can find basically everywhere online is disingenuous. I don't think I'm very squeamish but there's stuff online that still profoundly disturbs me in my mid thirties. Meanwhile, and at the risk of bragging a little, I can watch any Tom and Jerry easily even late at night and still sleep soundly. Hardcore, I know.

You couldn't see the surveillance footage a guy being dismembered by a lathe or weird Japanese rape porn in 1080p by "pushing a couple of buttons" before the internet. Well, at least not where I grew up...

No one is comparing it, the other poster suggested completely restricting access to the internet because this content exists.

Another big difference is constant availability. A decade ago, the moment you walked away from your computer the shock sites were memories. Twenty years ago, the moment you walked away from your phone most of the social drama were memories. The most that most of us do now is stuff it into our pockets.

Aside from the psychological differences with teens, we also have to consider that they aren't being exposed to this environment "in moderation". They don't really have the opportunity to think about their responses to it.

This, I believe, is the largest difference between today and twenty years ago.

That, and the pervasiveness of social media. Myspace, for example, was huge. But unlike today’s social media, maybe 25% of your AFK circles would hang out there, not 95% like today.

This is true. We didn't even have wifi in school until my last year there (2007-2008). If you wanted to use a computer you had to go to the library or be in a classroom that had a few in the back.

A random thought: What if the filter back then (I’m 34) helped? Most of the people spending significant time online back then were some degree of nerd (I hope that classification doesn’t offend anyone). Nowadays, it’s everyone.

During the early years of the German equivalent of high school, most of my classmates would spend days without being online once.

There's a difference between something being available somewhere on the Internet (when Internet access was 56K from a desktop computer featuring prominently in your family room) and having it shared with you specifically to your smartphone.

I never get anything gore shared to me, but I think it's also because I wouldn't stay friends with anyone who sends me that. I think it's weird that, as a society, we're more OK with violence than sex.

Consider how many people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter storming the capitol or the killing of George Floyd. I can't imagine that level of exposure in 2005 or earlier. And this is just gore; we're not talking about sex (also, we don't have to choose between the two, so I don't understand the dichotomous argument).

You think more people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter or George Floyd than saw images from Desert Storm, 9-11, or school shootings? They are all horrible, but I have seen a lot worse stuff pre-2005 than after.

No, I'm not arguing that more people saw footage of those two incidents versus the universe of gore preceding 2005; rather, I'm arguing that gore is far more prevalent and accessible after 2005 than before. The images that we saw before were generally censored of gore--we saw night-vision imagery of bombs raining down on Baghdad, but we didn't see the actual death. Similarly, we saw the towers fall, but most of the actual death was censored (the worst I can recall were people falling from the towers from such a great distance that they appeared to be specs).

I swear that beheading video is a form of generational anchor in the same way that the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack is something a certain group (early millenial/late genx) is.

>Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack

Ouch. Right in the nostalgia :)

Yeah its funny I feel like the "meme" internet for teenagers was way worse if shocking content is worse when I was young. There were so many NSFL websites too like stileproject, rotten, ogrish, etc. that everyone knew about and so much weird stuff on the pirating websites and gif sites back then that you don't really see anymore outside of the dark web.

I'm pretty convinced that just a "dumb" web 1.0 site of shocking content is way better for your mental health than a handful of giant corporations honing in on your psyche and exploiting the weaknesses of the human mind.

I have distinct memories of a website Defvac or Defecation Vacation. Morgue photos and other terrible content. This was between 1995 and 1998 I think?

I'm only a couple of years older than you are. Some of my friends had internet at home well before me during high school, but I only got it when I moved after High School (my parents weren't so much anti-tech are completely outside of it).

So while I very well remember goatse, tubgirl and rotten.com, I only discovered those as an adult.

Also note that I wasn't singling out social media here. It's the web as a whole that seems very unsuited for a teenager without supervision, IMO.

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