Those were the days when people were "new" to the internet and they were told: "Go to rotten.com" and if they didn't throw up, there was Meatspin afterwards. Now one of the darkest spots on the internet seems to be dying: Rotten.com hasn't been available for weeks, according to Dell due to a "hardware issue", no one knows the details, the website last published new "Faces of Death" 5 years ago . RIP 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.