I want to know how and when you realized the internet was full of crazy people: whether this is extremists, racists, sexists, conspiracy theorists, trolls, idiots, hackers, whatever. What happened that finally put the internet into perspective.

When I was in seventh grade we had to give a debate about something that had happened in history. This was a very broad concept, but my prompt was "did King Arthur actually exist?" I took the pro - yes he did, and my partner took the con. As the internet was new and fascinating our teacher encouraged us to look things up online. Keep in mind this was before wikipedia; and the encyclopedia britannica had just come out on CD for home use. Also, dialup. Anyways so I went looking on the internet for my prompt, which was mostly simple html pages slightly improved sometimes by it being linked to geocities or angelfire - when I came across a page titled something like: "King Arthur is the Antichrist!" I thought this was way too interesting to pass up, so I clicked on it...I honestly expected to be a band.

Nope. It was a poorly made html page claiming that King Arthur was Lucifer himself, and the knights of he round table were his demons. It quoted versus that backed up this theory...mostly from revelations or obscure parts of the Bible that I never really read. To top it all off, the website went on to describe King Arthur as still living in a cave in Wales, biding his time until he can once again rise up and lead the people into darkness and hell etc. etc.

So that was the moment that I realized the internet was full of people that were batshit insane. What happened to you?


As a side note, I looked up this webpage today and it still exists. The owner changed the name to THE ANTICHRIST IS HERE, and it looks like King Arthur is no longer hiding in the hills, he is none other than Prince William, and he will strike soon. There is enough information in my topic that if you want to track down the page be my guest, but that page is to fricken weird for me to post the link here.

When I signed up here, so some time in 2006. I don't quite remember the exact date or month.

XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

I learned the internet was crazy when I learned salior moon and goku were having sex on this really shitty hentai site.

Funny, this wasnt me looking this shit up either.

I remember the first time I accidentally stumbled across awkward porn in our browser history as my family shared the computer. Don't know who it belonged to, don't want to know.

AOL.

pictures of corpses

Stumbled onto some kind of freaky sex roleplay on battle.net in some random channel. May have been channel Sex in fact.

I have yet to experience that revelation to be honest. At least not as a single, sudden event.
I'm using the Internet for more than 15 years and I swear to god the amount of trolls and kidiots has been way lower back then.
So I was introduced to the Internet as a friendly place to get all sorts of useful stuff from (*). It was later when it got more and more widespread and the social aspect got more important that I noticed a considerable portion of people becoming hostile or immature.

For quite a while I honestly thought it was only the gamers (especially bnet) that are "crazy" and attributed that to lack of age.
So maybe, in spirit of the question, you could say I realized it around 2000 when I first played with strangers on bnet and got nazi paroles yelled at me when they realized I was German.

(*) Of course I realized that there's illegal stuff, porn, hackers etc. but those things exist in rl, they're just more easily accessible on the Internet. Then again, I never understood why people would create viruses. Put work into something that does no good at all except destroy other people's work / cost their time. But I've had to deal with viruses before I was ever online, so I wouldn't attribute that towards the Internet.

February 26, 2013 8:55 pm

But why.

And how did it take so long. O.o

The first thing I was introduced to on the Internet was Newgrounds.

*COCK JOKE*

That was during 2003. Since then, I have seen a lot of content that has morally dehumanized me over the last ten years.

Getting scammed on RuneScape was my introduction to the ways of the internet.

I can't think of any single event or even string of events ... It's just sort of a slow realization as you hang out more and more on the internet.

Well, except for one. When I learned that people were ridiculing my totally logical and thought out website about King Arthur. Wtf, Kame.

That's when this thread was posted in his time zone

No, he just thinks that's when it was posted because he entered the wrong GMT settings for his account, resulting in all forum times appearing to be an hour later than they actually are. I'm not sure how he hasn't noticed, considering all current shoutbox and forum activity would be dated an hour into the future, especially since I've pointed it out before.

The crazies on the internet are only representative of the crazies in every day life, and there's a lot of neurotic, distorted, insecure behavior patterns in society these days.

I figured, I just didn't find it funny.

I AM THE INTERNET.

In 2003, I was playing a UMS called "DON'T F***ING MOVE" and a guy was explaining to me, in detail, how to rape a woman.

The idea that the internet would be any less crazy than the real world never occurred to me as an expectation to be shattered in the first place.
And the real world has plenty of examples, historical and otherwise, of craziness to the utmost.

Alternative answer:
My first experience using the internet significantly was logging onto Battle.net and finding out that most people don't type out full, proper sentences. That was entirely unexpected.