Rotten.com
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Closed Website |
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Rotten.com was a shock site that collected pictures of dead people, diseases, deformed bodies, violent acts, perverse sex acts, and other morbid curiosities. It stopped updating in 2012, and was eventually closed in 2018.[1] It was one of the first shock sites to be created on the Internet. Pictures were largely submitted by the site's userbase, but staff would occasionally buy images or take images themselves.[2]
History
The website was first registered in 1996 by a developer named "Soylent".[3] He wrote a program that could easily identify unregistered internet domain names consisting of a single dictionary word. After some searching, he found that the word "rotten" was one of these unclaimed names, and later went on to register Rotten.com.[2] Rotten.com postured itself as an online free speech platform, in a time where internet censorship laws and regulations had begun to restrict access to material online.[1]
The site received a lot of attention and coverage following an incident in which the site posted alleged images of medical personnel recovering Princess Diana's body from her fatal car accident. This picture was eventually revealed to be fake.[4] The website was also one of the first websites to publish images of jumpers from the September 11 terrorist attacks, under the title "Swan Dive".[5]
PenisBird
PenisBird, also known as the "The Incident With The Bird" is a shock image hosted on Rotten.com and Encyclopedia Dramatica. The image displays a close-up picture of a naked man standing in the middle of a concrete parking lot with a scarlet macaw perched on the man's erect penis. Links to the image were spammed on the Slashdot messageboards. There is also an ASCII art version of PenisBird, and an edited GIF version of PenisBird which shows the macaw masturbating the man's penis with semen discharging from it.
Rotten Library
The Rotten Library was created in 2003 as an encyclopedia to supplement the website. The Library contained hundreds of articles written in a humorous fashion under 17 different headings, including culture, art, medicine, crime, travel, and the occult.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 web.archive.org/web/20191005094145/https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/10700/rotten-history-shock-site/
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 web.archive.org/web/20050516235424/http://www.rotten.com/FAQ/ (NOTE: This link contains graphic images!)
- ↑ https://www.salon.com/2001/03/05/rotten_2/
- ↑ web.archive.org/web/20050516235424/rotten.com/about/press.html
- ↑ esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/ (NOTE: This article contains graphic images!)
Links
NOTE: The following shock site contains extremely graphic content!
- web.archive.org/web/20040113023130/rotten.com
- PenisBird: web.archive.org/web/20000815234302/smoke.rotten.com/bird/
- Rotten Library: web.archive.org/web/20170824154553/rotten.com/library/
Further reading
- Rotten.com page on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com (This article contains content derived from this page, which is licensed under CC-BY-SA.)
