NSFW people who used the Internet in the 90s specifically forums or chat rooms were things always this graphic and open everywhere ? (RAMBLING)

[psp3000]

was doing some reading / exploration / deep dive on archived posts in the alt.suicide.methods newsgroup and found this on the first page

Fem to hang? Can I watch? (In London, UK)

I am not that shocked that someone made a post like this but rather how there are multiple different newsgroups related to this person's paraphilia and how some of the replies to the post/thread used their real names

do you have any memorable stories about strange or unmoderated content back then (90s Internet stuff similar to posts like these or something like Cannibal Cafe) that you can't believe existed? if so feel free to share

maybe I am shocked since I feel like I just had to talk about/share this and I wonder where these people are now or if they caught the bus and how messed up the mentions/site references and newsgroup references are out of curiosity

but I think it's for the best not to find out / I would be scared to even in the Wayback Machine

but I do wonder

I would just leave it up to one of those internet deep dive channels or forums to talk about these someday but I doubt that will happen especially since I am not willing to do so

 

[thenamingofcats]

I remember there being porn pop ups EVERYWHERE to a degree that could be uncontrollable for your average user who at that time didn't know anything about internet safety or viruses.

There was also a trend called "cybering" which was when kids would go into a chatroom and have "cyber sex" with someone that could be another kid or a 50 year old creep.

Chatrooms were everywhere and largely unmoderated.

The entire thing was a free for all since there were wasn't much internet culture yet and very few online social mores. People still lived IRL so it was weird to be online all the time.

 

[psp3000]

I remember there being porn pop ups EVERYWHERE to a degree that could be uncontrollable for your average user who at that time didn't know anything about internet safety or viruses.

There was also a trend called "cybering" which was when kids would go into a chatroom and have "cyber sex" with someone that could be another kid or a 50 year old creep.

Chatrooms were everywhere and largely unmoderated.

The entire thing was a free for all since there were wasn't much internet culture yet and very few online social mores. People still lived IRL so it was weird to be online all the time.

I think cybering still happens today/is basically a normal thing now with the rise and improvement when it comes to artificial intelligence and virtual reality

but the whole stranger danger thing is even bigger today (stereotypical 50 year old man you would always get warned about in computer class) with the popularity of Discord + they are all over children's games now which is sad and terrifying, I recently watched a video a few months ago about this being a major problem on Roblox

I can only imagine how terrifying and irritating porn pop ups were back then especially since during the early days of the Internet when it came to shock sites and viruses and spam mail

some sites would have multiple pop ups at once that were difficult to close all at once due to how shocked and disoriented the user would be or victim rather

one video that comes to mind is this besides a shock site video iceberg made by Hannah the Horrible on YouTube I highly recommend it

 

[thenamingofcats]

I think cybering still happens today/is basically a normal thing now with the rise and improvement when it comes to artificial intelligence and virtual reality

but the whole stranger danger thing is even bigger today (stereotypical 50 year old man you would always get warned about in computer class) with the popularity of Discord + they are all over children's games now which is sad and terrifying, I recently watched a video a few months ago about this being a major problem on Roblox

I can only imagine how terrifying and irritating porn pop ups were back then especially since during the early days of the Internet when it came to shock sites and viruses and spam mail

some sites would have multiple pop ups at once that were difficult to close all at once due to how shocked and disoriented the user would be or victim rather

one video that comes to mind is this besides a shock site video iceberg made by Hannah the Horrible on YouTube I highly recommend it

LMAO the porn pop ups in that video!! That's my memory of it, just fucking impossible to contain. Also the freezing, what a great video!

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

I was born at the end of the 90s but spent loads of my childhood on the internet cause my family was one of the few in the area to have a computer at home during that time. It really was like a wild west back then, not just in the you might download boobs onto your desktop accidentally sense, but people would talk about ANYTHING.There was no heavy censorship like there was now, or curated social media.

I used forums a lot even as a young child, and can remember as early as 2006 someone live blogging the experience of their parents beating them senseless on a random forum in gruesome detail. Omegle and things like that were also a complete wasteland of deranged content. When I was about 11 or 12 years old an older person on a forum started cybering me and teaching me how to do explicit roleplay, and I would continually get groomed by older people online well into my late teens... back then it was just eerily normalized. It was not uncommon to see shock value content in random places either due to lack of moderation.

There was no way for me to make friends irl (where I am from it is so isolated and small, you go to school with the same group of people from the time you are born until you graduate from secondary education) so I was talking to absolute weirdos online all of the time due to unrestricted internet access. Sometimes the freedom and unrestrained nature of the old internet was a good thing, back in the 2000s I think being open online about suicidality or other dark topics wasn't as taboo- though if you got labeled as "emo" many people would bully and make fun of you, especially if you self-harmed. The memes back then were super brutal and edgy.

There used to be a lot more open discussion online about these topics, especially when websites like Tumblr became popular. The culture there was often pretty toxic, and I think many people would surmise that some aspects of blogging websites such as tumblr romanticised self-harm and suffering in general. It's even worse when you realize most of the people using that site (myself included) were young teenagers at the time, and there were hardly any sane adults around to offer more mature perspectives or discourage users from posting explicit "self harm aesthetic" moodboards all over the place.

One beacon of light among all the cringe though was definitely yahoo answers. People would post the most unhinged and insane questions on there, with absolutely no hesitation, and they'd never get taken down. Stuff like this simply does not exist on the modern internet anymore.