Das waren noch Zeiten, als Leute «neu» im Netz waren und man denen gesagt hat: «Geh doch mal auf rotten.com» und wenn sie dann noch nicht gekotzt haben, gab es noch gleich Meatspin hinterher. Nun scheint einer der dunkelsten Flecken des Internets zu sterben: Rotten.com ist schon seit Wochen nicht mehr zu erreichen, laut Dell aufgrund eines «hardware issue», keiner weiss näheres, die Website hatte zuletzt vor 5 Jahren neue «Faces of Death» veröffentlicht. R.I.P. Rotten.com:
A relic of Web 1.0, Rotten and sites like it — Stileproject, Ogrish.com and so on — exist to horrify you. The site traded primarily in images of death: the aftermaths of car crashes, suicides, terrorist attacks, depictions of unusual diseases and deformities, deranged pornography. The domain name was registered in 1996 by Thomas E. Dell, a former software engineer at Apple and Netscape who went by the alias Soylent. According to Salon, the site drew 200,000 visitors a day in 2001. But like many Web 1.0 holdouts, Rotten.com hasn’t done well on the post-Facebook web. Today, if it’s lucky, it draws that many in a month, according to the web analytics tracker SimilarWeb. The site hadn’t published any new content since 2012. […]
But Dell, contacted over Google Hangouts, says Rotten is not gone forever. According to Dell, the site is only temporarily down because of a hardware issue. What that issue is, Dell wouldn’t say. “It’s too old,” he said. Dell declined to say when he expects the site to be back up. For now, at least, one of the most horrifying relics of the early web is gone.