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The 90s. We saw the goatse guy on our school computers.

Even as a young teenager, I was building my own computers. If my parents wanted to use the computer, they had to use mine. They had the gall to install a cybernanny program on it to keep me from 'the bad stuff'. I quickly figured out a backdoor through it and made it obsolete. The worst thing is I knew my dad was watching porn on it cause he clearly wasn't browsing in private or clearing the browser history when he was done. Goddammit and I was supposedly the immature one.

The internet gave me a mommy fetish and I no longer look at some pokemon and tails the same

It didn't really mess me up, I just don't feel any empathy for other people any more... 🤷

Early 2000s for me, I still bring up one of the videos in therapy. (For those who know, it was leaked video with the machete.) That description might not really narrow it down, but it should give you an idea of the climate at the time.

Back in the old days between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, we had to get our irreversible psychological damage locally, usually from abusive and handsy grown-ups who we were promised were trustworthy.

The internet (and ubiquity of smart phones) has actually been a factor in uncovering that yeah daddy wasn't the only one kids had to hide from when he came home drunk. And the neighborhood police officers routinely beat the crap out of nonwhite teens minding their own business, sometimes shooting one while unarmed and not resisting.

That said, I'm pretty sure irreversible psychological damage is intergenerational. Greatests and Silents had gone mad from industry and isolation and passed their abuse to boomers further broken from overwork. Gen X was broken from expectations and neglect, and millinnials and zoomers are dealing with a failing society, a failing economy and a failing ecology.

My grandkid's adult life is going to be shaped by multiple apocalyptic events, but probably slow ones like famine and forced climate migration.

child in the 2010s

Welp, I’m old. Late 90s/early 00s were my formative trauma years 😩

A saw an Asian lady step on a kittens (live) skull in high heels... that shit is still with me

I'm psychologically okay but God damn did the internet leave some scars

It was my only form of education as my school at the time barely had a curriculum so it's hard to say.

Hello there. Furaffinity.

mid to late 2000s for me. though i have always been extremely careful and only started interacting with strangers on the internet in the 2010s after i was an adult.

...maybe i am smart

Finding a lot of 2000s punk was cool though

Those cartel victims

Footage from the Chechen war

Horrifically injured animals

Later, ISIS executions

I didn't really go out looking for it. You'd just stumble across it pretty much everywhere.

I don't think it really desensitized me. Possibly the opposite. If I drive past an accident, I make a conscious effort to keep the scene out of my field of view.

I turned out fine

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Grasping fingers pulling open the anus of Goatse... I watched shit streams glitter in the dark near the TubGirl’s butthole. All those moments will be lost in time, like jizz in the shower... Time for eyebleach.

It wasn't better in the 90s or 00s I'm afraid.

who is a child in the early 2010s?

I think what the version of this post will be for the iPad generation is ElsaGate

Anyway, for me it was seeing some goatse-lite but tbh I learned my lesson and only watch things I know I can stomach

When I was a kid everyone talked to me about online stranger danger. The real threat was my best friend's sixteen-year-old cousin who thought it would be super funny and edgy to show us rotten.com.

I still think about the meat grinder picture. ☹️

Narrator: It did

Is that the Art Fight UI I see?

My friend sent me a peaceful nature video he took yesterday and I turned my volume WAY down in fear of a screamer