Yeah... But we also saw countless dicks on Chat Roulette and watched terrorists sever heads of journalists on LiveLeak and talked to plenty of perverts on AIM.
It wasnt all peaches and candy.
It wasnt all peaches and candy.
If you don't want to see dicks on Chatroulette, don't use Chatoroulette. Or use it, but leave when you see a dick.
Some creeper on AIM? Block them. If they keep making new accounts to come back, create a new account and invite your friends to that one.
With bigger social media, the social cost of not being where your peer group is is high. Things are engineered to try and limit your exposure to the crazy stuff but it's still out there and in higher volumes than ever before.
It's also much harder to avoid now if somehow an algorithm decides you should see it. And you can't just create a new account and leave a dead one behind you, or at least it's much harder.
If you wanted to watch terrorists sever a head you had to at the very least search for it (it was usually more complicated than that). Facebook wouldn’t stuff it in between videos of kittens doing cute stuff while you endlessly scroll your newsfeed.
Or just happen to stumble onto 4chan during the summer period of each year where it would be flooded with gore and other shock content*. Or be unlucky enough to be on a site which had been targeted by a raid by 4chan or other imageboard users and flood those with shock content.
* to provide historical context for the younger folk here, 4chan would receive a flood of new users every year roughly corresponding to the American summer holiday period, and there would be a noticeable decline in posting quality during that time.
To ensure that only people who fit in with board culture stuck around, the site (or at least /b/ which was where I spent most of my time back in those days) would be flooded with the most offensive content possible to scare away the bulk of the new users. This was rather effective at filtering out people of an emotionally sensitive nature and leaving only the most jaded and persistent to become regular users.
Much like the so-called "Eternal September", the board eventually had a culture change and became more welcoming of new users, and this practice declined. Although that was a long time ago and I think perhaps it may have been more that the introduction of CAPTCHA, rate-limiting, and other anti-spam measures prevented the use of automated image dumping software that was used to flood threads with shock content.