I don't think that's quite true, either. Parent poster said it was amazing they were still sane. Other people might not be sane, depending on what they were exposed to at an early age. And watching something on video is different than seeing it happen in front of you, which is also different from having it happen to you ...and I understand the impulse to say that we're not a victim of anything just because we saw something horrible.

But lots of people seeing lots of horrible things, if it doesn't traumatize them, can desensitize them. There are plenty of freedoms that also cause harm. That doesn't mean the freedoms should be taken away, but it means that the "third party" is often correct. Society in a free country calls its own balls and strikes.

Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information. And I say this as a person who would absolutely revolt against any system that based that decision on fiat, religion, or unfounded hysteria. We all personally have a right to do anything we want that doesn't hurt anyone else. But if the "third party" you're talking about are your neighbors, and if they have decided that you are a threat to them, then talk with them.

It shows that exposure doesn't always cause trauma (which I don't think anyone claimed), not that it can't.

But it can cause trauma, and harm. What this shows is that it’s not inevitable. It maybe even shows that it causes trauma and harm rarely.

Who should be protected from it, and by who is a different thing. I strongly against blanket restrictions, but one for sure they are easier. And they definitely protect people who wouldn’t get this protection in other scenarios, because for example their parents are shit. Another viewpoint is that probably this is the least important thing for people who wouldn’t get this protection otherwise, so maybe it doesn’t matter at that point. One for sure, there should be a better argument to restrict access than the currently provided ones.

I know someone who developed schizophrenia in contact with rotten.com

the idea that information can't cause harm is obviously absurd. third parties should not restrict free speech, but that's an extremely simplistic/optimistic view. everything is about trade offs, there is no perfect solution. the truth is probably closer to: exposing young children to disturbing imagery at a young age is not optimal for healthy development, but free speech is important to a functioning democracy.

I think that gore is an easy scapegoat because this allows us to shy away from the difficult discussions. "We should ban porn" occupies the bandwidth of social discourse, and therefore we cannot discuss topics like "ok but really, what do we do about the demographic collapse". I honestly think that the kids growing up now are going to be much more traumatized by the fact that they'll find themselves in a world of insane wealth inequality while needing to support an army of retirees, rather than seeing a pic of a dead body.

BTW seeing death, disease, and misery was completely normal through entire human history. We live in abnormally safe times. Maybe there is some mechanism akin to allergies, where immune system cannot believe that everything is chill so it overreacts to tiniest threats.

I think it's just different scale, like anything else. When I was growing up we also knew about rotten.com(in rural Poland!) but the only way to see it was to pay for some access at an internet caffee, we(like a group of kids) would huddle around a pc, look around for 5 minutes and then the dude running the place would kick us out. If you had internet access at home it was very limited and loading any kind of images took forever - way too risky.

Compare to now where kids literally have all the world's internet in their pockets, they can watch as much of it as they like with very little risk. Like if you speak with primary school teachers they say kids share naked pictures of their classmates, because there's lots of online services that just generate nudes from a few pictures.

Like, yeah, information should be free for everyone. But I think our experience from the 90s isn't really relevant to the world in 2026.

This kind of conflates two issues though.

I have no real interest in any shock video or shock image; but I reject any form of censorship even more so, such as is currently tried via age sniffing on everyone and killing off VPNs. The world wide web is currently privatized.

Slaughterhouse workers have very high rates of PTSD and depression. Healthcare workers who deal with death are also psychologically impacted.

Can't speak to the others.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10009492/ - slaughterhouse workers

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ - healthcare workers

> I explained part of the storyline and is now asking me to seek help. Early Internet would now, definitely, be totally banned.

If you did seek help, either online or even by making a phone call to a suicide prevention number that action will be logged and then sold to countless third parties ending up in several dossiers about you specifically which will follow you for the rest of your life and could impact your life and future employment in any number of ways for as long as you live and even impact the lives of your children as you'd now have a family history of needing mental health services. Claude has probably already modified the psych profile they've been building on you and who knows where that'll end up.

The real threat of the internet isn't the random messed up videos we watch in our younger edgelord years, or the sci-fi warning us about them, but the endless surveillance and abuse of information by everyone looking to leverage it for their own advantage.

The internet was a lot safer when you could look at gross stuff in peace and nobody noticed.

> Is this new, or am I stumbling on something new? I cannot reply to my replier below. I’m sure @stavros hasn’t blocked me.

Hacker News hides the reply link on deeply nested replies for a little while to try and prevent flamewars. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hidden... says you can work around this by clicking on the comment's timestamp.

That was a rough episode to watch. Poor Roy.