did you have unrestricted internet access as a child?

[brainwormz]

Oh 12 yo me on 4chan. Wonder if I'd be more functional if I wasn't a 4chan kid

 

[psp3000]

Does watching Betamax tapes count?

probably if you were watching Faces of Death or Banned Television

although most of Faces of Death was fake or re-enacted

Oh 12 yo me on 4chan. Wonder if I'd be more functional if I wasn't a 4chan kid

I can't imagine using 4chan at 12 or even 20 years old

4chan seems like a scary place

 

[nofunclub]

I had unrestricted access — I think my parents didn't really understand the internet, or what kind of stuff was out there. They certainly wouldn't have known how to check browser history or setup parental controls (if those even existed in the early 2000s).

I spent most of my time on Neopets, Harry Potter forums and AIM though until I was an older teenager. But I do remember looking at gore sites occasionally with friends when I was younger, out of curiosity and for the shock value. I don't know if it had a positive or negative effect on me lol. I can watch anything in horror movies/medical shows because I know it's fake, but I've got no idea if that's related.

 

[psp3000]

I can watch anything in horror movies/medical shows because I know it's fake, but I've got no idea if that's related.

I can too at first I thought it was just me (very desensitized to both real and fictional gore)
maybe it is somewhat related

 

[Ambivalent1]

Yes. Porn ruined me during puberty. I avoided sex for years because regular women weren't good enough. Yahoo chat was fun. But getting booted off the internet when someone called the house was unfun

 

[psp3000]

Porn ruined me during puberty.

I can relate to this + stuff with religion and how taboo that subject is and the ones relating to it

But getting booted off the internet when someone called the house was unfun

oh wow what year was that ? that sounds like a nightmare

 

[Ambivalent1]

I can relate to this + stuff with religion and how taboo that subject is and the ones relating to it



oh wow what year was that ? that sounds like a nightmare

2016

2016

1990s

 

[brainwormz]

probably if you were watching Faces of Death or Banned Television

although most of Faces of Death was fake or re-enacted

I can't imagine using 4chan at 12 or even 20 years old

4chan seems like a scary place

I mean 4chan is not as bad as some of the places I and my zoomer friends spent time online. We've all seen extensive horrors that would make normies faint. I remember after my childhood crush(best friend atr a gun at 14 looking at a lot of stuff involving suicides. Really awful stuff no kid should be seeing. And don't get me started on msn groomers that prey on loney queer kids like me.

 

[DestinyRot707]

i had mostly unrestricted access. my mom had some sites blacklisted, the more notorious nsfw ones, but she didnt really monitor my search history to my knowledge, and she never looked into any of the people i was talkin to online. i got exposed to an unfortunate amnt of porn as a kid but i dont really think it impacted me too negatively other than setting unrealistic expectations for sex. i think the most harm came from the adults i engaged with online, but i dont really blame my mom. i was a really slippery kid when it came to the internet and keeping my online activity secret

 

[psp3000]

Nope. Anti virus parental controls were absurd, parents hooked computer up to TV so they could see anything and everything. Always in extreme trouble if deviated slightly from school work. Only have access now cause got older brother's older phone when turned eighteen because everyone was sick of having to deal with required two factor verification with duel enrollment login.

that sounds terrible and like something my parents would've done if they were tech savvy

hopefully this didn't give you issues when it comes to having privacy because I definitely struggle with that now even though I did not go through the same things as you but something a bit similar

 

[Elidibus]

Voted "no" but that meant having no internet at all, we got internet at home very late. Whenever I was able to get online, there was no supervision or such.

 

[Pluto]

We first got internet when I was about 16, and the www had only been invented a handful of years earlier. The early years were characterised by a nasty battle ground with my sisters for access to the phone line. I was mainly interested in automotive and tech content.

Porn was a bit hard to access and it would take minutes to load one picture. It was definitely not a good thing, though, as I had gone to an all-boys school and missed out on interacting with real girls. Having a means to escape the need for self-improvement was quite harmful.

I can say that I would have been an extreme internet addict. I find it quite saddening to see toddlers these days constantly on iPads and phones. Their parents can't be bothered interacting with them or teaching them to cope with the reality that life isn't constantly entertaining. To me, it's abuse. Inappropriate content is not the only issue with the internet. There's the effect of addiction: short attention spans, instant gratification and the superficiality of chasing followers rather than real human contact. We lose a lot of our humanness.

Without the internet, my childhood was a mixture of boredom and innocence/magic. A feeling of wonderment that I've been searching for ever since. There was lots of time riding my bike outside, making little DIY science projects, climbing trees, reading story books and things like that. Aside from health issues and the constant theme of family abuse and school bullying (which admittedly is not a small thing at all) it was almost a perfect childhood. I think young people today are treated horribly, being preyed upon by addictive and toxic social media.

 

[sammiechzxv]

Probably why I'm here now lol

 

[ANONYMOUSM]

Yes I remember my first fandom being my little pony fandom and see the Smile Video on Youtube I didn't understand it at the time so I wasn't really traumatized just confused

 

[plasticbomb]

Yes, I remember being on 4chan back in like 2008 when I was 9. Before that though I remember going on ogrish.com and ytmnd.com. I mostly stuck to like newgrounds and shit like that as a kid though. Once I was in like 5th grade or so I found theync.com and that place is pretty brutal for a kiddo. When I was in like 7th grade or 8th grade kids were showing me gore in class to "shock" each other. Later in high school I use to watch gore with the girls that had eating disorders. I'm very numb to all of that now.

 

[aGoodDayToDie]

I was 15 when I got a PC that had Internet access that I shared with my brother. There weren't restrictions on it. Before that I had to use my mums computer. Before about age 13-14 we didn't have Internet. We were actually a fairly progressive family, early adopters. We first got Internet around 1995.

 

[imonadeadline]

I think kids who were born before 2008 were given unrestricted internet access because the adults didn't fully expect the content t be that bad. Everyone was still kind of unaware and the online world was just vastly expanding. I was given this unrestricted access and I would say that I was lucky enough to barely skate pass the truly weird stuff on the internet. Sure, I've had my fair share of online pedo's on Omegle but other than that, it was relatively normal. However, watching this one ISIS beheading video on my YouTube timeline because I had a really aggressive sense of morbid curiosity shifted my search tastes. I was actively on the gore websites (rip bestgore) but I don't think that it traumatized me at all. I think it just helped me cope with death and how brutal it can be.

 

[sick.faery]

when i was very little no, i had parental controls when i was like 6-10. it wasnt super restrictive after 8, so could see pretty much anything just porn and stuff like that was blocked. i know cos when i had a friend over we tried looking stuff up.. i only had total access when i was 11 when i got an ipod touch so at least on there could look up anything. didnt fuck me up but i did a lot of questionnable stuff that a kid should definitely not be doing online lol
like when i was 12 i ran a porn insta acc (not of me) for some reason, and i also catfished people as a 19 yo pornstar on ifunny.. also binged watched isis beheading vids for ex too lol

 

[lavendermeadows]

I did. I'm sure my sexual abuse played a part but at 10 I was watching lesbian porn like it was a Disney movie… also in chat rooms with people God knows how old

 

[CTBookOfLife]

Yup.

Addicted to porn before 10, groomed on Discord around 13, and much more.

 

[Daft-Bear]

I think my parents tried to restrict the internet, but i remember using proxies to get around the restrictions. They were also pretty unaware of how i could access the internet, like through a PSP3000 :p

 

[Maravillosa]

I had no internet access when I was a child because the internet was not available to the public in the 1970s. (I was born in 1966 and turn 57 next month.) It must have been 1995 or 1996 when I first went online.

 

[HerculePoirot]

When I was a kid, there was no internet. No cellphone. No fax. No color TV. No personal computer. No speed limit. No Putin. Good Old Times.

 

[leloyon]

Pretty much. My mother eventually added child blocks to the wifi so that adult sites would be blocked but I used the Tor browser to get around this as a teenager.

 

[mouseteacup]

Yeah. Way too early, too. My parents had no idea what I was up to.

 

[Touhou]

Absolutely. Eventually, I went on TOR and got addicted to that as well.

 

[Zirp]

I grew up in the time of dial up modems. So my restrictions were more about access to a computer and limited time on the internet. Later when I had my own PC and dial up was no more I had pretty unrestricted access. My parents didn't know much about IT, but I was too much of a "good kid" to visit or even know about some sites. I miss the internet of those days. I remember it a lot less censored and controlled by corporations. It seemed more of a place for freethinker, artist and geeks to me than internet of today. But of course it also had its bad sides.

 

[FeyB]

wish I had been restricted to be honest. exposed to stuff that messed me up, which I used to laugh at but realizing it literally did irreversible damage to my development kinda hurts me still

Idk, outside of my sense of humor being totally fucked up I think shock video didn't made irreversible damage to my development seems kinda overexxagerated, at what age was that? to me was around 10 so I would personally classify it as a child altough maybe not for someonelse

 

[Aloneisbestforme]

I had unrestricted internet access and now my life involves around it now

And in fact one of the first things I can remember in my life is me browsing youtube watching kirby videos and weird vore videos where characters in video games/movies/cartoons would eat eachother whole and stay inside of them. and at the time I found it comfy but looking back at it wtf.

idk if anyone else remember these set of videos but they were there idk if they were everywhere back in the day but they were there and many kids watched them and it's now part of their early childhood from what I've saw

 

[Izolita]

yeah. I grew up in the early 2000s and smart phones came out my freshman year of high school. I am 31 right now.

I was terminally online as i was somewhat a loner. I watched adult stuff when I was 12 and onward. Was always online and it matured me a little and shifted my culture away from kids of my age group

In my teens I lied about my age and flirted with older people on virtual chat rooms which I shouldn't of. And around that time I do remember coming across shock sites too.