Rotten.com

Last updated
Rotten.com
Rotten-screenshot.png
Screenshot from March 18, 2010
Type of site
 Shock site
Available inEnglish
CommercialNo
RegistrationNo
Launched1996
Current statusDefunct

Rotten.com was a shock site active from 1996 to 2012. The website, which had the tagline "An archive of disturbing illustration", was devoted to morbid curiosities, pictures of violent acts, deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs, depictions of perverse sex acts, disturbing or misanthropic historical curiosities and hosted explicit, real-life, photographs and videos of real events such as suicides, murders, torture, open surgeries, mutilations and accidents. Founded in 1996, it was run by a developer known as Soylent Communications. [1] Site updates slowed in 2009, with the final update in February 2012. [2] The website's front page was last archived in February 2018. [3]

Contents

History

In late 1996, Soylent wrote a program that identified unregistered Internet domain names consisting of one word with a corresponding dictionary entry. "Rotten" was one of the unclaimed words, and Soylent went on to register Rotten.com in the same year. [4] Rotten.com presented itself as a bastion of online free speech, in an era when censorship rules in some countries had begun to restrict internet access. [2]

Rotten.com had a spartan layout; no thumbnail images were present next to links, and the links had one-line descriptions couched in morbid humor, often carrying no hints at their content. Content consisted of user-submitted images, with developers rarely posting content themselves. Though submissions were marked as "real", often they were misattributed; in one instance, a file submitted as "motorcycle.jpg" was given the description of depicting a motorbike accident, but the developers admitted it was probably an attempted shotgun suicide. [4]

Rotten.com received an alleged image of medical personnel recovering Princess Diana's body from a car accident, though this was later confirmed as fake. However, due to wide interest in the crash, the image was posted anyway, resulting in a large traffic spike. [5] The website was also one of the first websites to publish images of the September 11 jumpers from the Twin Towers, under the title "Swan Dive". [6] [7] The September 11th attack's videos and photos were uploaded to the site and later uploaded to ogrish.com

The site was also notorious for hosting videos such as the Dagestan massacre, which was later uploaded to Liveleak, and Chechclear, which was a video filmed by Chechen rebels in 1996, showing a Russian soldier being beheaded by Chechen rebels during the First Chechen War.

Rotten.com was threatened with many lawsuits over the years, mostly in the form of cease and desist notices. These ranged from serious matters, such as requests to remove pictures of dead relatives from the site, to Burlington Coat Factory asking to take down 'trenchcoat.org', a domain bought by Rotten.com as a Trenchcoat Mafia reference, though it simply linked to Burlington Coat Factory's webpage. [8]

On June 24, 2005, the US federal government ordered that the "Fuck of the Month" section of the site be removed, along with content from several ancillary sites. [9] In posting the page's removal notice, the site's moderator criticized supporters of both Alberto Gonzales and the Bush Administration for the enablement of censorship. [10]

Rotten Library

In 2003, The Rotten Library was created as an encyclopedia to supplement the website. [11] The Library contained hundreds of articles under 17 different headings, including culture, art, medicine, crime, travel, and the occult. Articles contained detailed research, timelines, and occasionally included previously unseen images of various well-known events. The headings inside of entries are humorous in nature, with a description of the subject (for example, a medical condition) in an informal and often insulting tone. In the entry dedicated to eating disorders, the heading above the section for bulimia is titled "Betty Bulimia." [12]

Merchandise

Rotten.com had a store that carried t-shirts, mousemats, stickers, magnets, and bizarre DVDs. [13]

Ancillary sites

The Daily Rotten

In late 1999, The Daily Rotten was started by Thomas E. Dell, [14] which published news stories on a daily basis, focusing mostly on terrorism, murder, suicide, abuse and excrement. Daily Rotten, also known as Rotten News, is driven by user submissions, which are edited by a self-described "Rotten Staff Duder". This also features comments for each one of the articles, posted by the registered members; they usually bring similar histories and or graphic images of real gore and dead people. They refer to themselves as "rotteneers", a satirical reference to Walt Disney's Mouseketeers, and/or "rottentots".

Boners.com

Rotten.com launched Boners.com in response to viewers who wanted a daily pictures page alongside the Daily Rotten newsboard. [15] The word "boner" suggests an embarrassing mistake or a male organ in a state of arousal. The images typically consisted of amusing public signs, phallic imagery, and members of the public in embarrassing situations.

The Gaping Maw

In 2000, The Gaping Maw – an editorial/commentary archive – was founded. Most of the articles were written by cartoonist Tristan Farnon under the alias "Spigot" (from Leisure Town ) or by other webmasters. The pages contained news, satire, and commentary on modern society. Along with the Rotten Library, this improved Rotten.com's standing in many communities since it introduced a humane and intellectual aspect to the website. On June 22, 2005, The Gaping Maw went dark to comply with new government bookkeeping requirements regarding the distribution of pornography, specifically governmental age-verification of models, under 18 U.S.C.   § 2257. All articles were taken down, and the site's title page was replaced with a statement lamenting the passage of the laws, headed by the banner, "CENSORED BY US GOVERNMENT!". [10] In January 2006, The Gaping Maw came back online with some articles heavily edited.

Rotten Dead Pool

In November 2003, the Rotten Dead Pool was launched. [16] The Dead Pool was a game in which players picked ten people they believed would die over the course of the next 12 months. A point was awarded to a player for each of their correct picks. A pick did not count as correct if the pick was executed or murdered, or died some other way, after the 12 months had passed.

NNDB

In mid-2002, Rotten.com launched NNDB, an online database. NNDB is a steadily-updated website that contained information about thousands of notable people. The news section ceased updating on January 16, 2016, [17] and the celebrity deaths section last updated on December 31, 2021. [18] The website itself is still live.

Sports Dignity

Sports Dignity was a gallery of pictures showing embarrassing or NSFW incidents in sports games and tournaments. [19]

Publications

Related Research Articles

A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or disturbing to its viewers, though it can also contain elements of humor or evoke sexual arousal. Shock-oriented websites generally contain material that is pornographic, scatological, racist, antisemitic, sexist, graphically violent, insulting, vulgar, profane, or otherwise some other provocative nature. Websites that are primarily fixated on real death and graphic violence are particularly referred to as gore sites. Some shock sites display a single picture, animation, video clip or small gallery, and are circulated via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a prank. Steven Jones distinguishes these sites from those that collect galleries where users search for shocking content, such as Rotten.com. Gallery sites can contain beheadings, execution, electrocution, suicide, murder, stoning, torching, police brutality, hangings, terrorism, cartel violence, drowning, vehicular accidents, war victims, rape, necrophilia, genital mutilation and other sexual crimes.

<i>Soylent Green</i> 1973 film by Richard Fleischer

Soylent Green is a 1973 American ecological dystopian thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer, and starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, and Edward G. Robinson in his final film role. It is loosely based on the 1966 science-fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, with a plot that combines elements of science fiction and a police procedural. The story follows a murder investigation in a dystopian future of dying oceans and year-round humidity caused by the greenhouse effect, with the resulting pollution, depleted resources, poverty, and overpopulation. In 1973, it won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Archive</span> American nonprofit digital archive

The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of February 4, 2024, the Internet Archive holds more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".

In the context of the World Wide Web, deep linking is the use of a hyperlink that links to a specific, generally searchable or indexed, piece of web content on a website, rather than the website's home page. The URL contains all the information needed to point to a particular item. Deep linking is different from mobile deep linking, which refers to directly linking to in-app content using a non-HTTP URI.

goatse.cx, often spelled without the .cx top-level domain as Goatse, was an internet domain that originally housed an Internet shock site. Its front page featured a picture entitled hello.jpg, showing a close-up of a hunched-over naked man using both hands to stretch open his anus and expose his red rectum lit by the camera flash.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Markoff</span> American journalist

John Gregory Markoff is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rotten Tomatoes</span> American review aggregator for film and television

Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the direct inspiration for the name from Duong, Lee, and Wang came from an equivalent scene in the 1992 Canadian film Léolo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flickr</span> Image and video hosting website

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a common way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.

The Notable Names Database (NNDB) is an online database of biographical details of over 40,000 people. Soylent Communications, a sole proprietorship that also hosted the now-defunct Rotten.com, describes NNDB as an "intelligence aggregator" of noteworthy persons, highlighting their interpersonal connections. The Rotten.com domain was registered in 1996 by former Apple and Netscape software engineer Thomas E. Dell, who was also known by his internet alias, "Soylent".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Million Dollar Homepage</span> Website

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Library</span> Online project for book data of the Internet Archive

Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.

IGN is an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa district and is headed by its former editor-in-chief, Peer Schneider. The IGN website was the brainchild of media entrepreneur Chris Anderson and launched on September 29, 1996. It focuses on games, films, anime, television, comics, technology, and other media. Originally a network of desktop websites, IGN is also distributed on mobile platforms, console programs on the Xbox and PlayStation, FireTV, Roku, and via YouTube, Twitch, Hulu, and Snapchat.

Flixster was an American social-networking movie website for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies, currently owned by parent company Fandango. The formerly independent site, allows users to view movie trailers as well as learn about new and upcoming movies at the box office. It was originally based in San Francisco, California and was founded by Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari on January 20, 2006. It was also the former parent company of Rotten Tomatoes from January 2010 to February 17, 2016. On February 17, 2016, Flixster, including Rotten Tomatoes, was acquired by Fandango.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lolcat</span> Image combining a photograph of a cat with text intended to contribute humour

A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.

FindArticles was a website which provided access to articles previously published in over 3,000 magazines, newspapers, journals, business reports and other sources. The site offered free and paid content through the HighBeam Research database. In 2007, FindArticles accessed over 11 million resource articles, going back to 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TV Tropes</span> Wiki documenting plot conventions in creative works

TV Tropes is a wiki that collects and documents descriptions and examples of plot conventions and devices, which it refers to as tropes, within many creative works. Since its establishment in 2004, the site has shifted focus from covering various tropes to those in general media, toys, writings, and their associated fandoms, as well as some non-media subjects such as history, geography, and politics. The nature of the site as a provider of commentary on pop culture and fiction has attracted attention and criticism from several web personalities and blogs. Users of the site's community are called "Tropers", which primarily consist of 18-34 year olds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wayback Machine</span> Digital archive by the Internet Archive

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">8chan</span> Imageboard website

8kun, previously called 8chan, Infinitechan or Infinitychan, is an imageboard website composed of user-created message boards. An owner moderates each board, with minimal interaction from site administration. The site has been linked to white supremacism, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, racism and antisemitism, hate crimes, and multiple mass shootings. The site has been known to host child pornography; as a result, it was filtered out from Google Search in 2015. Several of the site's boards played an active role in the Gamergate harassment campaign, encouraging Gamergate affiliates to frequent 8chan after 4chan banned the topic. 8chan is the home of the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pornhub</span> Pornographic video-sharing website owned by Aylo

Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, one of several owned by adult entertainment conglomerate Aylo. As of February 2024, Pornhub is the 13th-most-visited website in the world and the second-most-visited adult website, after XVideos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cats and the Internet</span> Popular part of Internet culture

Images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the World Wide Web. ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial mascot of the Internet".

References

  1. ↑ "The Internet's public enema No. 1". salon.com. 6 March 2001. Archived from the original on 5 April 2019. Retrieved 26 October 2019.
  2. 1 2 Audra Schroeder. "The legacy of Rotten.com". kernelmag.dailydot.com. Archived from the original on 5 October 2019. Retrieved 26 October 2019.
  3. ↑ "rotten.com". 2018-02-10. Archived from the original on 10 February 2018. Retrieved 2021-12-12.
  4. 1 2 "FAQ @ rotten dot com". Archived from the original on 16 May 2005. Retrieved 26 October 2019.
  5. ↑ "diana fallout @ rotten dot com". Archived from the original on 17 March 2015. Retrieved 26 October 2019.
  6. ↑ "The Awful Forums - the World Trade Center is on fire". truegamer.net. Archived from the original on 7 October 2019. Retrieved 26 October 2019. "Soylent from Rotten.Com has posted a series called "Swan Dive." These are people jumping from the burning World Trade Center, floor 60 and above. I have seen Stile's kitten video. I have seen videos of castrations. I have seen "Train Girl." And these three blurry, still photographs are the most horrible things I've ever witnessed. Soylent also claims that the fourth airliner, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania, was shot down by a military jet. That, so far, is unconfirmed by the BBC."
  7. ↑ Tom Junod (Sep 9, 2016). "The Falling Man". esquire.com. Archived from the original on 26 October 2019. Retrieved 26 October 2019.
  8. ↑ Rotten.com legal Archived 2006-07-05 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ↑ Jardin, Xeni (2005-06-22). "Rotten.com: our gapingmaw.com and other sites shut in anticipation of 2257". Boing Boing. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  10. 1 2 "The Gaping Maw - rotten.com Editorial". 2005-06-25. Archived from the original on 25 June 2005. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  11. ↑ "Rotten.com Library". 2003-02-26. Archived from the original on 26 February 2003. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  12. ↑ rottenlibrary.net
  13. ↑ "Rotten Store | www.rottenstore.com". 2005-07-01. Archived from the original on 2005-07-01. Retrieved 2021-12-12.
  14. ↑ "Daily Rotten legal". Archived from the original on 2006-02-10. Retrieved 2006-01-08.
  15. ↑ "Boners.com". 2005-10-01. Archived from the original on 1 October 2005. Retrieved 2021-12-16.
  16. ↑ Dead Pool Archived 2005-11-04 at the Wayback Machine
  17. ↑ "NNDB: Tracking the entire world". Archived from the original on 2019-10-14. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
  18. ↑ "Died in 2021". Archived from the original on 2022-02-13. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  19. ↑ "Sports Dignity". Archived from the original on 2005-11-04. Retrieved 2005-11-04.
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