• wombatula@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    When I went to school in the 80s, they had to remove the cloth hand towel roller thing, because kids were getting “high” choking themselves on it. Nobody needed a tiktok trend, it wasn’t on TV, some dumb kid did it and others copied them.

    When I was ran a BBS in the 90s, I was constantly having to kick people for uploading grainy photos that honestly could have been CSAM, and gore images that haunted me for years. I ended up having to disable all uploads and downloads entirely, removing the entire section, because I was scared someone was gonna get me put in jail. Later, on the early internet on more than one occasion I tried to download a movie and instead got some random pornography, and it was never normal stuff, you just learned to watch the first few frames and close/delete it quickly if it was that.

    The good old days were not that good, maybe things aren’t great now but yesterday was not perfect, and a kid in 2006 could have come across tons of horrible things on the internet, not to mention pedophiles cruising for children on the internet was even more common back then as unmoderated chat spaces were the norm, and law enforcement was still struggling to understand the internet.

    Anyone that tries to pretend the early internet was some “safe space” is delusional at best, or intentionally misrepresenting the truth.

    • funkless_eck
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      1 year ago

      I was a skinny twink closeted bisexual teen, who got the internet in my early teens in the early 90s. SO many 40+ men tried to groom me, to the point where one semi-stalked me IRL. Nearly all of them tried to get me to create underage porn for them.

      • wombatula@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah a number of girls I knew at the time had to deal with the same, it was shockingly common.

    • sleepy@reddthat.comOP
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      1 year ago

      I think they’re talking about early 2000s internet but, yeah, i personally remember a pair of radio djs in my area who used to think it was funny to tell callers asking how to find general stuff on the internet ( jobs, dates or whatever) to go to qoute “wwwdot youngasianboysdotcom” and people would apparently just do it. That’s how naive people were. That’s how easy that shit was to find. Although, i heard from somewhere that a load of those sites were honeypots. I do wonder if theres any sort of possibility that we could have algorithmless internet without that shit. I’m not talking about on a few tiny websites but, making it standard or make turning it off an option.