I've managed to never see goatse so far. Not because I'm new or innocent, but because I've learned my lessons. I don't think the 10,000 really applies to this situation. It's certainly not something that everybody needs to see at some point in their lives (or so I've been lead to believe).

I didn't want to see it

But it was kind of a rickroll situation... yeah it sucks

In college my friend came over for a LAN party and when he went to the bathroom I quietly set his background to Goatse… I got quite the chuckle at 3am when he went to shut down his computer after a long night of gaming. Ah to be young again.

> after a long night of gaming.

Wasn’t it more like 3 hours to setup and get the network functioning, and hour of gaming?

That was part of the fun at lan parties.

Or goto a hosted one

Anyone who was a freshmen in college circa y2k saw it about 4000 times. It was one of the first images to which I became desensitized.

Welp perhaps you'd enjoy an album of other people see goatse for the first time:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrneutron/albums/1568481/

That was great. Risky click of the day, but well worth it. I think my favorite was Ron Jeremy, of all people, being super dismayed by goatse.

This is a different twist on that xkcd - if you haven't seen goatse before, consider yourself truly lucky, and enjoy not experiencing this particular cognitohazard.

I'm opening myself up to criticism by saying this, but this is unusually cringeworthy even for XKCD

Cringeworthy? This is one of the more oft-linked XKCDs, I think because it makes a valid observation: everyone has a few things that "everyone knows" that they've randomly missed, and it's more fun to enjoy the discovery than to ridicule them for something that happens to all of us randomly.

the observation is sound, it's the presentation that irks me

Did you read the xkcd? It's not about goatse

goatse isn't cringeworthy

I mean, the subject's face probably did resemble a cringe.

You’re not the only one. It’s an XKCD comic made for LinkedIn and it annoys me every time it’s referenced.

Same but every XKCD

I guess you're one of those people who thinks that any sincere emotional expression is cringe?

I've never understood that attitude.

you guessed wrongly

That's what you're doing, though.

it's the "any" that makes it wrong. I reserve the right to pick and choose what expressions I find cringeworthy

So you only sometimes find things cringey just because they're sincere?

That's not a large improvement.

Your joke really flips the meaning of the lucky 10000. Nicely done.

This is the "Lucky Pierre" type of lucky.

If you don't know what that is, you might not want to search it.

None of these seem particularly horrifying?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Pierre

I'm guessing the poster is referring to the last item on that disambiguation page.