The Daily Dot remembers Rotten.com:

Rotten was the original shock site, a place where you could see images of people hit by trains, self-immolation, the gory aftermath of car crashes, failed suicide attempts, dismemberment, botched executions, orange juice enemas, and perverse pornography. These images—many of them reader-submitted, many fake or doctored—became Internet folklore. Rotten, for better or worse, is one of my first memories of the Internet.

I remember that cesspool too, never my scene, but it’s interesting to think about what it preluded.