The 90s were an innocent time where the idea of a guy removing a rib in order to suck himself off was the most outrageous thing we could imagine.

I have a strong feeling that if we were to re-live the 90's right now we'd quickly realise it wasn't so "innocent" after all. People just had thicker skin back then and recreational outrage wasn't really a thing due to how slow news and trends speaded at the age of early internet.

For most of the 1990s the internet wasn't much of a factor in pop culture or daily life. Email was something of a newfangled gimmick in the movie You've Got Mail.

This was a rumor created and disseminated by children. I think that context is pretty important when you're using it to gauge naivety.

Shock marketing and the release of hyper gory “banned” vhs tapes was a big marketing tactic for music in the early 90s. There’s a great NIN documentary that covers this.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out this rumor was somehow disseminated by labels.

There were multiple genocides going on too buddy

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy did they have to teach us that “never again” and “lest we forget” are but rhetorical kindnesses and also poisonous lies??!

In the 90s, I remember going to rotten.com and seeing dead bodies. Kids these days don't know about the wild west world web.

I was usually pretty good about avoiding those things, but that fucking sloth guy still haunts my nightmares.
Not to mention the granddaddy of link pranks, Goatse. This excerpt from Wikipedia gives a nice little window info how the web operated back then:

The goatse.cx image has been used by website authors to discourage other sites from hot-linking to them. By replacing the hot-linked image with an embarrassing image when hot-linking has been discovered, an unsubtle message is sent to the offending website's operators, visible to all who view the web page in question. In 2007, Wired.com hot-linked to another site in an article about the "sexiest geeks of 2007"; the site subsequently swapped the hot-linked image with one from goatse.cx.

Man, I miss the early Internet.
- 2007 was early internet???
In Tombstone, when Wyatt threatens to turn that dude's head into a canoe? I saw that exact pic on rotten.com. Looked like: U
- You're a Daisy if you do
yeah I remember that in 2000 or so. Was scarred for some time. Would not recommend
But did you go to a suicide forest as part of a YouTube video? And then have to fake cry an apology?
- I don't think that tops the content on rotten.com
- I wanna hike through the suicide forest, for nostalgia.
  
  And everyone needs a good fake cry now and then.
I remember before it was called rotten.com, it was originally called thecreepingeyemorgue.com. That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue very well though..
What is outrageous about a dead body?
- Electrocuted, cut in half, smashed... Once you see it, it can't be unseen.

What? The Rodeny King beating and subsequent riots, OJ Simpson murdering 2 people, Columbine, the first time the WTC was bombed, 1500 people died near Mecca, and like 3 civil wars in Africa

Rawanda, South African Apartheid. Those two alone...
Not to mention all the shit that wasn't being captured on any kind of recording at the time.

The rose tint feels so fuckin good tho, right?
- There's only a single decent quality video of the first plane on 9/11. Because in a city of millions of people, only 1 person in the area was recording at the time.
  
  I can't even imagine how many videos there would be if it happened today.
- yeah and for a lot of people who'd be using lemmy, the reason they weren't aware of all this shit is our parents kept us safe from it
Why does EVERYONE forget about the oklahoma city bombings???
- I was in 3rd or 4th grade at the time and happened to be sick that day. Freaked me out that people were going to think I did it.
- I did not forget about them, but I felt I gave enough examples to where I drove my point home
I mean as bad as those things were, none of those things come close to recent events. Look at your examples and compare them to "worldwide virus kills millions and the entire planet goes into quarantine for a couple years" or "president of the United States fails to get reelected so he foments a literal coup on the US government and his rioting mob breaks into the capitol building trying to stop the transfer of power. And then 4 years later that criminal gets elected to be president again".
- AIDS has killed many more than COVID-19, albeit slower. Gingrich and Justice Thomas are responsible for a lot of the degradation of our institutions that allowed for trump and his ilk. Gay and Trans rights were essentially non-existent compared to today.
  
  We are worse off in many many ways, but for me personally that last one means I am much better off at this moment (this may not last).
- And most of history is worse than any of that. Other than climate change, we are not living in unprecedented times.
Eastern Europe collapsing in the power vacuum left by the fall of the USSR, multiple civil wars, horrendous war crimes including genocide. NATO having to go in.
- Another good example
🎵We didn't start the fire 🎵
- Funny you mention that. When I saw the comment, I was listening to the Fallout Boy version
Maybe OP should have used the word ridiculous instead of outrageous. Removing ribs for such a thing is ridiculous IMO.
- I think "bizarre" would be more fitting
What's the mecca thing? I don't remember that one
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_Mecca_tunnel_tragedy
  
  However, this apparently isn't a stand-alone incident
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_during_the_Hajj

A group of friends and I had a little website we used as a precusor to modern day social media. I made a comment on a post on there where I linked to an image on SA. Little did I know that Lowtax didn’t use goatse. No he used a very high resolution close-up image of the head of a penis with a drop of pre-finishing liquid oozing out.

So I post this comment from my desk and go back to work. About 30-minutes later, my roommate, who sat a few cubicles down from me says my name. Not like normal, his voice broke as he was saying it. I’m like, “what?” He says, “what did you post to the site?” I told him and he says that is not at all what he’s seeing. I go over there and holy shit all 1600x1200 pixels of his 21” CRT is filled with this engorged dickhead!

We reached out to the site admin and told him what happened. He deleted the image ref and I posted a comment explaining what happened.

Another time, at my same cubicle desktop, I updated my Linux workstation and went to lunch. When I get back, my screensaver is just a whole bunch of very explicit porn images. Apparently Jamie Zawenski(sp?), the maintainer of xscreensaver, thought it would be a good idea to introduces a new screensaver that went out and eandomly pulled images from anywhere on the web. So that was fun.

Forgot to add the SA image was cached in my browser. So when my roommate asked me about it I brought it back up and, of course it looked fine to me! No dicks to be seen.
- Sorry if I'm stupid for asking this but what are you referring to when you say SA?

Sorry bud, but I think you just used to be more innocent.

Just look at the celebrities and culture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s... Even the whole outrage culture pushed by conservative media like Fox News also goes that far back!

The fashion of the day changes but humanity itself.. not so much!

Maybe OP was simply a child then? Children arent usually exposed to / aware of the total shitstorm that is politics.
- Entirely possible, but I didn't want to assume! My dad didn't know the Village People were gay and he was a grown adult with kids when people broke the news to him...
In roman times they used to chain link slaves together by the necks and ankles. Then they'd scoop out the eyes of everyone who isn't the first in the chain.

Today, we not only don't have slaves (well, except for prison, but thats another conversation) but the idea of scooping out anothers eyes is horrific sounding, rather than just the norm.
- You should hear what cartels do to people.
Hmmm...I seem to remember the Republicans in Congress actually having a spine with Nixon. Though I do agree things weren't roses back then. The cost of living was easier, but we paid for a lot of things we don't now. $12 for one CD vs $10 a month for Spotify. But I would say the late 90s/ pre 9/11 was pretty nice for the US. Not the case for the rest of the world admittedly. But we definitely have nothing on how bad the 20s, 30s and 40s were.

It was a long time before that when (allegedly) a rib was removed from a man to create the first woman so he wouldn't have to suck it himself.

This was what I thought the OP was talking about at first. It took me a minute to remember that urban legend from the 90s.

I suspect people living in Sarajevo in the 90's resent that opinion.

Are you confusing outrage with political violence?
- Are you not outraged at genocide?

There was also the rumor of the actor who put the hamster up their bum.

It was all innocent stupidity and none of it was malicious though.

Or the woman singer who drank so much of her male SO’s cum that she had to have her stomach pumped

Viral word of mouth rumors were wild back then
- LOL, just commented it was 10G out of Rod Stewart in my childhood.
Richard Gere, and it was a gerbil.
- Armageddon!
Lemmiwinks?!
- All hail the Gerbil King!
It was Richard Gere, and it was a Gerbil, not a hamster.
70s elementary school: Rod Stewart having 10 gallons of sperm pumped out of his stomach.
- 90s middle school: same urban legend, except it was 1 gallon from Gwen Stefani.

What about Ozzy eating a bat on stage?

I remember seeing an Ozzy interview about what happened.

In short, he didn't eat it, but he did bite its head off. Why? Because he thought it'd look cool after someone had thown what Ozzy assumed was a toy bat. "Because who the fuck brings a luve bat to a concert and throws it on stage?"

Also, he wasn't hospitalized. He just went and got a tetanus shot or something like that to be safe.
- rabies shots, certainly not a fun experience lol
Omg that was one time!
- Weren't a few pigeons also, erm, bitten off?
- You fuck one sheep...
Or when Ozzy wouldn't go on stage without a brandy glass full of M&Ms?
- Was that Ozzy? Whoever it was, it was a request for a bowl of only brown M&Ms backstage and their reasoning was that, if that request wasn't fulfilled, whoever was responsible didn't do their job and they'd assume that other, necessary stuff also wasn't done properly. Kind of a canary, in a way.
- I'm sad that none of the other responses seem to have gotten the Wayne's World 2 reference.
- Not ozzy. Van Halen.
  
  That way they knew all the prep work was properly done by the crew: unsorted M&Ms = short on time, and it's possible something more important was missed.

It's quaint, right?

Not just any guy, but Marilyn Manson, who used to play Paul on The Wonder Years. I'm not sure what was more shocking, learning about this, or learning of Mark Paul Gosselaar's fatal motorcycle crash. Taken from us far too soon.

Apparently Marilyn Manson playing Paul was just one of the first internet rumours and isn't true, which in itself is a pretty facinating piece of history.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/the-true-story-behind--wonder-years--star-and-crazy-marilyn-manson-rumor--video--164331931.html
- Given that Mark Paul Gosseaar is still alive, I think Ivan was listing 2 things that weren't true

Peak fake news control... I wouldn't call this "innocent"

How old are you? That's not even close to true.

Lol goatse