The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it. Until you see the actual violence and gore, it doesn't mean anything, it's just empty words. I didn't care at all about wars in the middle east until I saw the reality on Liveleak. Seeing dead children and people with their legs blown off made all the commentary on CNN and Fox seem so understated.
A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real. Frankly, I owe a lot of my political beliefs (especially on foreign policy) to horrible realities I saw on Liveleak.
War and terrorism was definitely made “more real” on LiveLeak than what you’d experience via the media or YouTube.
I also found a real appreciation for other things: driving safely, worker protections, fire safety. These “boring” things take on more importance when you can see what happens when you ignore them.
I don't think people should dwell on these morbid things. But seeing just one or two videos of, for example, a bad car crash, can really give you a healthy fear of these dangers.
Liveleak doesn't portray the reality of war because it shows you some beheading. Voyeurism and gore are not the same as genuine insight into what scary and violent places are actually like. It's worth reading Baudrillard's 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place' on how media representation, and stylized, selective footage is used to distort. You didn't get to know the 'reality' of war, but the hyper-reality of it.
If you were to actually go see the reality of war what you'd see most of the time is actually soldiers doing nothing, not interating with any enemy. People trying to scrape by, someone fixing a pipe, that kind of thing. LiveLeak was even worse and a better source for propaganda than sensational news.
It's powerful, important content, but collecting and promoting it as shock entertainment, entirely out of context, doesn't strike me as the right way to do it. Our media's lack of willingness to portray the human cost of our overseas exploits is clearly a huge problem, but I don't think this really addressed it. It's all impact without usable information.
While incredibly violent things do happen in the world regularly— and we should not be ignoring them— the world is safer than it has ever been, and that should also be front-and-center in people's minds when considering this. People predominantly concerned with the scariness and violence in the world will be more likely to promote overly violent responses to relatively innocuous situations through war, policy, policing, etc.
I wish there was a publicly accessible, nonprofit archive a la Wikileaks that focused on similar content including oversight for things like privacy issues. It would be nice to see citizen pundits paying attention to it for issues that matter to them and putting things in context as they're shared instead just blasting streams of violence at people.
But wish in one hand and successfully monetize in the other and see which one fills up first...
> The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it.
Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it. Our cognition is heavily biased towards saliencing and preserving the scary bits, and being exposed to a planet scale showcase of those bits does not necessarily make us wiser (e.g. better decision makers). At least for me personally it took a decade before I regretted having watered those flowers of morbid curiosity.
The redeeming quality of LiveLeak might be, however shocking the content was, it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media. The former is ultimately bound by rules of reality but the latter is only bound by what people are willing to believe in.
LiveLeak is like those old drivers ed videos, it can make you better by showing how bad things can get.
I remember pre-internet it was Faces of Death [1] (lots faked but still intense), then Ogrish then the makers of Ogrish going to LiveLeak. There is some value in seeing the worst humans have to offer as it gives you a wider picture, but also too much of that is depressing. People should seek out the full spectrum to be based in reality, but also push better quality of life.
As a kid, horror movies were our superhero movies really with late 80s/90s slasher flicks. Fangoria was a big magazine. Then you see things like what actually goes on, seeing the true horrors of the world. Sometimes seeing those things can make you appreciate calm, quality of life focused ways, be nicer to people and try to make the world a better place as it can be raw.
LiveLeak was one of those places you could go to see the video that everyone else was blocking or censoring. ItemFix looks similar just not as intense, more on the WhatCouldGoWrong or IdiotsInCars type level. Always good to have another video site for seeing the broad spectrum of the human condition. Just balance time more towards quality of life, but always know how bad it could be, makes you respect today and appreciate things. Everything in moderation.
I had a similar experience. I've lived a relatively privileged life, I've never been in a warzone. Being exposed to the brutality that exists outside of my comfort zone really opened my eyes to the fact that other people live very very differently. You can "know" that, but it's much harder to feel it without some experience - and while a picture is nothing like experiencing that sort of life, it's a hell of a lot more than just reading that it happens.
There's a visceral reaction when you see something so brutal and horrific, and an empathy as well with the victim, that I think is extremely hard to obtain via text, especially short text.
I'm not saying LiveLeak was perfect or good, I think that it likely also fetishized tragedy - but I will say that there is absolutely something missing in existing news organizations with regards to showing the brutal, hard to watch truth.
It's fascinating to see how the sausage is made. It gives the most important datapoint before you can preach your higher ideals.
It's different if you seen a war(even if it's a liveleak video), it keeps your feet on the ground when you have to decide to cast a pro/anti war vote or argue about it's merits.
That's what worries me about our sterilised internet: Things happen, but we are not allowed to peak under the cover to see what actually happen. Unless it’s something nice, it must be limited to the commentary of people who themselves may never seen how it is made or even worse, having their own agenda.
Sure, gore can brutalise people but if it's happening everyone deserves to see it.
Much more people used to claim that the Covid-19 is just the flu, until the footage of hospital corridors emerged.
I saw a couple/few videos on LL and it shocked me to the core. I never wanted to see that kind of thing again. But I also wish that everyone could witness it without becoming psychotic about it, to have a visual imprint of 'as bad as it gets', and hopefully do something about it or at least avoid perpetuating those actions.
But that would never happen. A whole lot of people will go to very desperate measures to avoid hard truth, to avoid even thinking about this kind of situation.
For me it was seeing close ups of the Chechnyan war. I couldn’t believe what people were doing to each other. It has made the anarchy of war something to be avoided at all costs. Clearly showing that there are no winners on the ground. Soldiers shooting 3 generations of a family unarmed, soldiers having their heads clumsily chopped off with an axe.
I’ve avoided all of the not safe for life type stuff since, but agree that these are important things to see. With all the wars since and the easy images found on western news at least I know what is happening outside of what they are willing to show.
As a kid, I always wanted to be a pilot in the British airforce. I'd grown up on games like F19 Stealth Fighter, and I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to fly planes like that and drop bombs on the bad guys.
I think it was during the gulf war in 1991, when I a TV news piece, shot by a war journalist. He was filming from inside a helicopter, and there was a US gunner using a fixed gun (50-cal?), gunning down enemy forces, shooting them in the back as they ran away.
I was horrified - this was not what I thought war was. My silly ideals of valour and honour, were not real.
As I grew older I saw and came to learn of yet more horrors - US and British bombs dropped on schools and residential blocks. Children blown to pieces. The US and UK selling arms to anyone with the money. And going back further, the indiscriminate use of cluster bombs during the Vietnam war.
One of the worst aspects, was how the military often seemed to try to bury their mistakes. When they didn't, all we got was platitudes until they did it again. Perhaps the worst of all, was seeing how everyone else seemed to maintain the "them and us" stance - we were the good guys, and all those brown people were the bad guys. Very few cared one iota if a bomb was dropped on a school in the Middle East or Pakistan. I was disgusted by the apathy around me.
And so, my dream became a nightmare, and I, thankfully, took a different path. I largely have journalism and truth seekers to thank for that.
I remember the precursor to Liveleak, Ogrish, which was much more graphic than whatever Liveleak became in Liveleak's last final years.
It was back in 2004 or so when I had to reconstruct a somewhat censored link on their forum, which took me an FTP server directory with videos, that I waited to download, which showed me Al Queda celebratory videos of killing US soldiers.
That was a first for me, I'd never seen footage of US not winning, let alone a side that considered it a good thing. Really just broadened my horizon.
Was uncomfortable at first because I felt there might have been a reason with personal legal liability that the footage wasn't available in other places, but much more curious.
Anyway, such footage is much easier to come across now, with beheadings and such just occurring. Any Facebook feed assumes you want to see an extrajudicial killing involving a US police officer.
But at the time I was amazed such content exists. Not appalled. I can't really relate to people that say they can't watch that kind of stuff and will just take someone's word for it. I get appalled by things out of someone's control, such as a gas leak blowing off the side of an apartment building. But there's never anything real I have any feelings from watching.
> The world is a scary and violent place. ... A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real.
I can understand this idea. I tend to agree that confronting the harshness of reality (death, suffering) is an important act, particularly in your formative years, so that those confrontations don't paralyze you as an adult. Traditionally this is also done, differently, but getting your kid a pet and ceremoniously allowing them to process the grief of that pet's inevitable death (however it may come).
But... I don't know. Are any of us better people for watching a US soldier get executed on our computer screens when we were 14? Does that content, in fact, give people a sense of hopelessness and dread? When a confrontation with death or violence becomes a common (everyday?) occurrence, what does THAT do to the psyche of a child? Certainly if you watch enough, the hyperreality of exuberant violence serves to disassociate the viewer from conscious engagement and does become a morbid form of entertainment and I personally believe (despite the "free speech" angle) it is dangerous to condition your mind to be entertained by suffering.
This is why reddit's /r/watchpeopledie ban was such a loss. I didn't go to the subreddit often, but when I did, it was an intense reality check at how good I and others have it, and how much of the world still needs help. Also helped me to really appreciate OSHA at my workplace...
Yes. After the Vietnam war, real footage of violence left the public zeitgeist. Liveleak hosted videos that showed what life was really like when you listened to the guy who was trying to recruit you into the U.S. Army.
I agree in many cases, but remember that this is a double-edged sword. Being exposed to horrible things can also make people support unreasonable policies and seed hatred. This principle is why the family of victims aren't put on the jury.
While I think visibility of these horrific things is important, watching too many or dwelling on them just isn't healthy. It reminds me of this opinion article on watching police videos:
I remember American TV regularly showing things like Palestinian children blown to bits back in nineties, or atrocities of wars in Africa, and then it somehow just disappeared.
- The horror of the Mexican Drug War. The unbelievable violence and cruelty, which is almost the exclusive responsibility of the United States' catastrophic War on Drugs.
- Car accidents. I'm always much more alert, as a driver and as a pedestrian.
Actually, add fires into that list. Terrifying stuff.
This also changed my perspective on Isis cutting heads off and filming it. The act of filiming it is just of medial relevance. Of actual relevance is the suffering caused to the victim. Having said that - our media tries to sell the idea of a clean war. Air strike -> Bad people dead. First of all if a bomb goes off more often than not also innocent civilians are hurt and killed. Further more - and that is my main point - if a rocket goes off somewhere not everybody is dead immediately. Instead people will get random parts of their body ripped off and will bleed miserably to death. It's arguably more painful to die that way compared to getting one's head cut off within twenty-three seconds.
We used to watch the stuff on Ogrish back in the day,when we were teenagers. I couldn't say it desensitized me but made me realise I can't do shit about it. When one side of the planet is launching rockets to space and the other throwing stones on people because they looked at someone, there's no fixing of this only slow, agonising passing of time,with the hopes that it will eventually improve as people will be less and less willing to do certain things.
It also made me realised,how we, people in the Western world,are insulated from many horrors of this world both directly and indirectly by the lack of coverage on them.
I mean, I'd like to try, except he didn't actually give us any of those reasons.
Rest in peace, LiveLeak. You were a beacon of reality that shone through the propaganda, the bullshit, and the sugar-coating. Your demise means that people who want to see something like a shooting that's been removed from mainstream platforms will be forced to visit darker corners of the internet. Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
> Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
Does this mean that only the alt-right have access to uncensored information?
> Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
You complain about some sites being alt-right cesspools, as if being a cesspool is not bad on its own.
But actually liveleak did become an alt-right cesspool.
Back before they made comments hidden to non-members, it was WALL-TO_WALL <insert-your-favorite-right-wing-kook-faction> a-holes mixed in with classic misogynists, anti-semites, racists, conspiracy theorists, and unclassifiable awful nihilistic basement-dwellers.
While I would have liked to think that the operators simply listened to their conscious, I am sure making the comments non-public was done strictly because they feared having a nut perform a mass-killing as a "liveleak exclusive".
LiveLeak was the only video site that still felt like the wild west. If I was ever linked to a LiveLink url I knew something crazy was about to happen.
I'm sure serving this kind of content had its hurdles legally. And running a video site cannot be cheap in the first place. LiveLeak will be missed.
Why is there so much fetishization of violent content in the comments? Sure maybe liveleak provided some footage you couldn't get on youtube and that is indeed a loss, but to think that the violence you see represents the truth is just as bad as denying that any bad happens in the world.
The world is far larger than any one mind can handle. I wouldn't judge it from a few videos taken out of context. The world can be a great place and so can the internet, buts it's easy to get PTSD from it. Browse responsibly.
"What exactly is Itemfix?
Itemfix is a website that lets users post and edit ("fix") video - , image - and audio files ("items").
Any registered user can turn existing items into "fixes"."
"What is a fix?
A fix can be a video, image or audio file generated out of one or more items that exist in the ItemFix system. An example of a "fix" would be a video with added captions, a gif image generated out of a video item, or a meme created through one of our "fix templates".
Sounds like a mix between YouTube and TikTok/Instagram, as in, video hosting with democratized editing. Wouldn't be surprised if they went for an app after a while.
My opinion is that the reality-check video host we need, is getting replaced by the meme video host we want. More holes to dig our societal heads into and abstract ourselves from harsher realities.
Hosting LiveLeak must've been really tough, can't blame them for moving on to something easier and more financially attainable, but I hope someone will pick up a similar torch.
Four LiveLeak videos will always stay in my head. WARNING: even in text this stuff is horrifying. Stop reading if you don’t want to have nightmares.
1) an ISIS video where a 7 year old kid or so goes through a building where a bunch of hostages are tied up. He shoots them dead in succession. He looks like he’s about to cry throughout the whole video — but he doesn’t.
2) a completely covered up woman(?) in Iran is executed in public. They tie the rope around her neck and then lift her up . Her legs flail and kick a little, then a lot, then stop. The crowd is shouting.
3) a teenage girl in Guatemala is beaten by a crowd. When she’s lying on the floor someone pours a liquid over her and lights her on fire. She struggles a bit and it seems like the fire has gone out. The guy comes and pours more on her and sets her on fire again. She struggles a bit more slowly and it seems like the fire is out. Then she yells the most chilling thing I have ever heard. She screams “Echenme mas gasolina, culeros!” (Throw more gasoline on me, assholes!) I will never unhear a 16 year old girl begging for a mercy killing. The crowd obliged and pours a very large amount of the accelerant on her and she flails around while burning to death.
4) a woman is walking with her two kids near a maybe 6 foot high single brick thick wall in construction. One of her kids touches the wall and it collapses on his or her head. The mother digs out the bricks to get to her child but when she sees him she has a meltdown and is grabbing her hair and screaming.
Absolutely horrifying, yes. But I don’t think there’s any other way to learn about this facet of the world. I think the world has lost a valuable resource.
Mixed feelings from me. I remember the Hussein video. I never believed in the vision, but they hosted important events I simply could not see from other sites.
Reddit users rely on it and I knew what I was getting into if I clicked on a LiveLeak link.
Separately, being a content moderator for LL must be absolute hell. While you must filter for illegal things, you're actually expected to watch through the death and gore. That can not be healthy.
The fact they were HQ'd in London always confused me. Yes the EU gives you some protections, but taking a pseudonymous TPB-style approach is probably easier for everyone (support, operations, management, marketing) than the legal grey area LiveLeak operated in.
Also the end of the note from Hayden sticks with me, I know the type of videos or users he's referring to and I don't think the majority of readers will realise just how fucked up this platform was. Yes, there were videos from the likes of Lasse Gjertsen who made people question a lot of the content they saw, but there were some real ones in there too.
> Lastly, to those no longer with us. I still remember you.
I'm not sad it's gone. But there should probably be a place for all of this type of content, I'm just not sure where. The public internet probably isn't it.
Reading the ToS for the new site.. It seems all the content that made LiveLeak so popular (murder, shock videos, terrorism, suicide, sexual violence) is the exact content they won't allow. Seems a little bit like management are wanting to settle down, they know the main brand isn't going to be profitable long-term - but they can at least monetize some of it by building a video hosting site from its userbase.
Seeing a child trying to gather the pieces of his mother after getting shredded by an Apache gunship undermines government propaganda. If something makes you realize you're probably not always the good guy bringing democracy then that something is quite dangerous and it should be removed.
The internet is dying a slow death. Instead of being an open exchange of ideas and content, it's become just another vehicle for corporations to make a buck off of everyone. It's now locked down, dumbed down and buttoned down and is controlled and surveilled to make sure no one steps out of line or has their feelings hurt. It treats everyone like fools and children who can't handle reality, a new idea or an opposing thought. Don't talk about this. Don't look at that. Don't think independently. Control. Group think. Manufactured consent. The goal is to have you fall in line with the dominant paradigm that is ultimately driven by economics that make a small percentage of the world's population very rich and solidified in their position. Like all great things that had so much potential but ultimately got harnessed and driven to the lowest common denominator for control and power, it was fun while it lasted.
Similar to bestgore.com - I suppose as the Internet becomes more and more just Google-land, niche websites such as these two will continue to disappear.
The Internet just got less weird and more and more it feels like the days of it being "sketchy" to the average user are mostly over. On the other hand, social media can be insidious and in some ways it's made society weird as ever in a worse direction. Then again there's a lot less creeps, criminals, and deranged or at least their presence isn't as strong or obvious on here. I guess that is about as I feel about this, and I think it's been a couple of years since I've watched something there. I'll bet there will be an alternative for those who really seek this stuff out, though, adjacent to what remains of the pirates.
LiveLeak was the only place I know where I could find footage of warcrimes in Ukraine that will more than likely never be "a part of our national conversation".
Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is?
That we have no problem funneling weapons and money to them?
Even if they did, would they show you the video of them crucifying and setting on fire a captured enemy? Liveleak did.
I wonder if all the atrocities committed during the Syrian Civil War still sit somewhere on the open internet, relatively easy to search. I know that at some point LiveLeak was one of the few remaining websites that was still hosting that kind of content, which I personally regard as very important to preserve.
Anyone remember rotten.com? It was a treasure trove for morbid curiosity. You can probably still visit some of the pages on the wayback machine if you're curious.
Whenever something big happened in the news and I wanted to see the video or images directly, uncensored, real as they are, LiveLeak was The Place To Go.
- as a child I could be heartless towards animals. Wasn't extreme but definitely didn't care and would "punish" when they didn't behave. Having to kill a sick rabbit to prevent it from suffering was what changed me. Maybe a video could has done as well, but this was way before LL existed.
- in farming school we had to watch a video of all the stuff that happens on farms complete with images and graphic explanations, stuff like: "here the neighbor came down in the evening to find out why the tractor and the baler was standing in the middle of the field, engine running in the night. He found the caps in front of the baler. We figure he tried to get some gras unstuck by kicking it and got his foot caught in the feeding belt."
[+] [-] nickysielicki|4 years ago|reply
A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real. Frankly, I owe a lot of my political beliefs (especially on foreign policy) to horrible realities I saw on Liveleak.
[+] [-] nostromo|4 years ago|reply
I also found a real appreciation for other things: driving safely, worker protections, fire safety. These “boring” things take on more importance when you can see what happens when you ignore them.
I don't think people should dwell on these morbid things. But seeing just one or two videos of, for example, a bad car crash, can really give you a healthy fear of these dangers.
[+] [-] Barrin92|4 years ago|reply
If you were to actually go see the reality of war what you'd see most of the time is actually soldiers doing nothing, not interating with any enemy. People trying to scrape by, someone fixing a pipe, that kind of thing. LiveLeak was even worse and a better source for propaganda than sensational news.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Plac...
[+] [-] chefandy|4 years ago|reply
While incredibly violent things do happen in the world regularly— and we should not be ignoring them— the world is safer than it has ever been, and that should also be front-and-center in people's minds when considering this. People predominantly concerned with the scariness and violence in the world will be more likely to promote overly violent responses to relatively innocuous situations through war, policy, policing, etc.
I wish there was a publicly accessible, nonprofit archive a la Wikileaks that focused on similar content including oversight for things like privacy issues. It would be nice to see citizen pundits paying attention to it for issues that matter to them and putting things in context as they're shared instead just blasting streams of violence at people.
But wish in one hand and successfully monetize in the other and see which one fills up first...
[+] [-] acituan|4 years ago|reply
Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it. Our cognition is heavily biased towards saliencing and preserving the scary bits, and being exposed to a planet scale showcase of those bits does not necessarily make us wiser (e.g. better decision makers). At least for me personally it took a decade before I regretted having watered those flowers of morbid curiosity.
The redeeming quality of LiveLeak might be, however shocking the content was, it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media. The former is ultimately bound by rules of reality but the latter is only bound by what people are willing to believe in.
[+] [-] drawkbox|4 years ago|reply
I remember pre-internet it was Faces of Death [1] (lots faked but still intense), then Ogrish then the makers of Ogrish going to LiveLeak. There is some value in seeing the worst humans have to offer as it gives you a wider picture, but also too much of that is depressing. People should seek out the full spectrum to be based in reality, but also push better quality of life.
As a kid, horror movies were our superhero movies really with late 80s/90s slasher flicks. Fangoria was a big magazine. Then you see things like what actually goes on, seeing the true horrors of the world. Sometimes seeing those things can make you appreciate calm, quality of life focused ways, be nicer to people and try to make the world a better place as it can be raw.
LiveLeak was one of those places you could go to see the video that everyone else was blocking or censoring. ItemFix looks similar just not as intense, more on the WhatCouldGoWrong or IdiotsInCars type level. Always good to have another video site for seeing the broad spectrum of the human condition. Just balance time more towards quality of life, but always know how bad it could be, makes you respect today and appreciate things. Everything in moderation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_of_Death
[+] [-] staticassertion|4 years ago|reply
There's a visceral reaction when you see something so brutal and horrific, and an empathy as well with the victim, that I think is extremely hard to obtain via text, especially short text.
I'm not saying LiveLeak was perfect or good, I think that it likely also fetishized tragedy - but I will say that there is absolutely something missing in existing news organizations with regards to showing the brutal, hard to watch truth.
[+] [-] mrtksn|4 years ago|reply
It's different if you seen a war(even if it's a liveleak video), it keeps your feet on the ground when you have to decide to cast a pro/anti war vote or argue about it's merits.
That's what worries me about our sterilised internet: Things happen, but we are not allowed to peak under the cover to see what actually happen. Unless it’s something nice, it must be limited to the commentary of people who themselves may never seen how it is made or even worse, having their own agenda.
Sure, gore can brutalise people but if it's happening everyone deserves to see it.
Much more people used to claim that the Covid-19 is just the flu, until the footage of hospital corridors emerged.
[+] [-] artificialLimbs|4 years ago|reply
But that would never happen. A whole lot of people will go to very desperate measures to avoid hard truth, to avoid even thinking about this kind of situation.
[+] [-] lunatuna|4 years ago|reply
I’ve avoided all of the not safe for life type stuff since, but agree that these are important things to see. With all the wars since and the easy images found on western news at least I know what is happening outside of what they are willing to show.
[+] [-] GordonS|4 years ago|reply
I think it was during the gulf war in 1991, when I a TV news piece, shot by a war journalist. He was filming from inside a helicopter, and there was a US gunner using a fixed gun (50-cal?), gunning down enemy forces, shooting them in the back as they ran away.
I was horrified - this was not what I thought war was. My silly ideals of valour and honour, were not real.
As I grew older I saw and came to learn of yet more horrors - US and British bombs dropped on schools and residential blocks. Children blown to pieces. The US and UK selling arms to anyone with the money. And going back further, the indiscriminate use of cluster bombs during the Vietnam war.
One of the worst aspects, was how the military often seemed to try to bury their mistakes. When they didn't, all we got was platitudes until they did it again. Perhaps the worst of all, was seeing how everyone else seemed to maintain the "them and us" stance - we were the good guys, and all those brown people were the bad guys. Very few cared one iota if a bomb was dropped on a school in the Middle East or Pakistan. I was disgusted by the apathy around me.
And so, my dream became a nightmare, and I, thankfully, took a different path. I largely have journalism and truth seekers to thank for that.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
I remember the precursor to Liveleak, Ogrish, which was much more graphic than whatever Liveleak became in Liveleak's last final years.
It was back in 2004 or so when I had to reconstruct a somewhat censored link on their forum, which took me an FTP server directory with videos, that I waited to download, which showed me Al Queda celebratory videos of killing US soldiers.
That was a first for me, I'd never seen footage of US not winning, let alone a side that considered it a good thing. Really just broadened my horizon.
Was uncomfortable at first because I felt there might have been a reason with personal legal liability that the footage wasn't available in other places, but much more curious.
Anyway, such footage is much easier to come across now, with beheadings and such just occurring. Any Facebook feed assumes you want to see an extrajudicial killing involving a US police officer.
But at the time I was amazed such content exists. Not appalled. I can't really relate to people that say they can't watch that kind of stuff and will just take someone's word for it. I get appalled by things out of someone's control, such as a gas leak blowing off the side of an apartment building. But there's never anything real I have any feelings from watching.
[+] [-] hbosch|4 years ago|reply
I can understand this idea. I tend to agree that confronting the harshness of reality (death, suffering) is an important act, particularly in your formative years, so that those confrontations don't paralyze you as an adult. Traditionally this is also done, differently, but getting your kid a pet and ceremoniously allowing them to process the grief of that pet's inevitable death (however it may come).
But... I don't know. Are any of us better people for watching a US soldier get executed on our computer screens when we were 14? Does that content, in fact, give people a sense of hopelessness and dread? When a confrontation with death or violence becomes a common (everyday?) occurrence, what does THAT do to the psyche of a child? Certainly if you watch enough, the hyperreality of exuberant violence serves to disassociate the viewer from conscious engagement and does become a morbid form of entertainment and I personally believe (despite the "free speech" angle) it is dangerous to condition your mind to be entertained by suffering.
[+] [-] Salgat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] q_andrew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happytoexplain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfranz|4 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/why-i-can...
[+] [-] baybal2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|4 years ago|reply
- The horror of the Mexican Drug War. The unbelievable violence and cruelty, which is almost the exclusive responsibility of the United States' catastrophic War on Drugs.
- Car accidents. I'm always much more alert, as a driver and as a pedestrian.
Actually, add fires into that list. Terrifying stuff.
[+] [-] georgiecasey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 74d-fe6-2c6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmodisk|4 years ago|reply
It also made me realised,how we, people in the Western world,are insulated from many horrors of this world both directly and indirectly by the lack of coverage on them.
[+] [-] causality0|4 years ago|reply
I mean, I'd like to try, except he didn't actually give us any of those reasons.
Rest in peace, LiveLeak. You were a beacon of reality that shone through the propaganda, the bullshit, and the sugar-coating. Your demise means that people who want to see something like a shooting that's been removed from mainstream platforms will be forced to visit darker corners of the internet. Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
[+] [-] concordDance|4 years ago|reply
Does this mean that only the alt-right have access to uncensored information?
[+] [-] varispeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niutech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmos62|4 years ago|reply
You complain about some sites being alt-right cesspools, as if being a cesspool is not bad on its own.
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|4 years ago|reply
Wait, did Whirlstah! get taken down too?
[+] [-] crispyambulance|4 years ago|reply
But actually liveleak did become an alt-right cesspool.
Back before they made comments hidden to non-members, it was WALL-TO_WALL <insert-your-favorite-right-wing-kook-faction> a-holes mixed in with classic misogynists, anti-semites, racists, conspiracy theorists, and unclassifiable awful nihilistic basement-dwellers.
While I would have liked to think that the operators simply listened to their conscious, I am sure making the comments non-public was done strictly because they feared having a nut perform a mass-killing as a "liveleak exclusive".
[+] [-] fukmbas|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rasz|4 years ago|reply
WARNING WARNING DO NOT ENTER
[+] [-] spamalot159|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure serving this kind of content had its hurdles legally. And running a video site cannot be cheap in the first place. LiveLeak will be missed.
[+] [-] imranq|4 years ago|reply
The world is far larger than any one mind can handle. I wouldn't judge it from a few videos taken out of context. The world can be a great place and so can the internet, buts it's easy to get PTSD from it. Browse responsibly.
[+] [-] A_non_e-moose|4 years ago|reply
https://www.itemfix.com/faq
"What exactly is Itemfix? Itemfix is a website that lets users post and edit ("fix") video - , image - and audio files ("items"). Any registered user can turn existing items into "fixes"."
"What is a fix? A fix can be a video, image or audio file generated out of one or more items that exist in the ItemFix system. An example of a "fix" would be a video with added captions, a gif image generated out of a video item, or a meme created through one of our "fix templates".
Sounds like a mix between YouTube and TikTok/Instagram, as in, video hosting with democratized editing. Wouldn't be surprised if they went for an app after a while.
My opinion is that the reality-check video host we need, is getting replaced by the meme video host we want. More holes to dig our societal heads into and abstract ourselves from harsher realities.
Hosting LiveLeak must've been really tough, can't blame them for moving on to something easier and more financially attainable, but I hope someone will pick up a similar torch.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
1) an ISIS video where a 7 year old kid or so goes through a building where a bunch of hostages are tied up. He shoots them dead in succession. He looks like he’s about to cry throughout the whole video — but he doesn’t.
2) a completely covered up woman(?) in Iran is executed in public. They tie the rope around her neck and then lift her up . Her legs flail and kick a little, then a lot, then stop. The crowd is shouting.
3) a teenage girl in Guatemala is beaten by a crowd. When she’s lying on the floor someone pours a liquid over her and lights her on fire. She struggles a bit and it seems like the fire has gone out. The guy comes and pours more on her and sets her on fire again. She struggles a bit more slowly and it seems like the fire is out. Then she yells the most chilling thing I have ever heard. She screams “Echenme mas gasolina, culeros!” (Throw more gasoline on me, assholes!) I will never unhear a 16 year old girl begging for a mercy killing. The crowd obliged and pours a very large amount of the accelerant on her and she flails around while burning to death.
4) a woman is walking with her two kids near a maybe 6 foot high single brick thick wall in construction. One of her kids touches the wall and it collapses on his or her head. The mother digs out the bricks to get to her child but when she sees him she has a meltdown and is grabbing her hair and screaming.
Absolutely horrifying, yes. But I don’t think there’s any other way to learn about this facet of the world. I think the world has lost a valuable resource.
[+] [-] irjustin|4 years ago|reply
Reddit users rely on it and I knew what I was getting into if I clicked on a LiveLeak link.
Separately, being a content moderator for LL must be absolute hell. While you must filter for illegal things, you're actually expected to watch through the death and gore. That can not be healthy.
[+] [-] Mandatum|4 years ago|reply
Also the end of the note from Hayden sticks with me, I know the type of videos or users he's referring to and I don't think the majority of readers will realise just how fucked up this platform was. Yes, there were videos from the likes of Lasse Gjertsen who made people question a lot of the content they saw, but there were some real ones in there too.
> Lastly, to those no longer with us. I still remember you.
I'm not sad it's gone. But there should probably be a place for all of this type of content, I'm just not sure where. The public internet probably isn't it.
Reading the ToS for the new site.. It seems all the content that made LiveLeak so popular (murder, shock videos, terrorism, suicide, sexual violence) is the exact content they won't allow. Seems a little bit like management are wanting to settle down, they know the main brand isn't going to be profitable long-term - but they can at least monetize some of it by building a video hosting site from its userbase.
[+] [-] drdrey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellothere1337|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brickabrack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raunak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddingus|4 years ago|reply
We are trending toward a sort of digital disneyland. That depresses me.
Reality is far less pretty, and escaping that, avoiding the implications is being made easy and doing that made to pay well.
I do not see how this benefits us as people needing to know more than we do.
[+] [-] lamp_book|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samuelizdat|4 years ago|reply
Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is? That we have no problem funneling weapons and money to them? Even if they did, would they show you the video of them crucifying and setting on fire a captured enemy? Liveleak did.
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelmota|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com
[+] [-] malwarebytess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] advance512|4 years ago|reply
Outside the Big Tech bubble.
Not sure what alternatives there are, if any.
[+] [-] skinkestek|4 years ago|reply
- as a child I could be heartless towards animals. Wasn't extreme but definitely didn't care and would "punish" when they didn't behave. Having to kill a sick rabbit to prevent it from suffering was what changed me. Maybe a video could has done as well, but this was way before LL existed.
- in farming school we had to watch a video of all the stuff that happens on farms complete with images and graphic explanations, stuff like: "here the neighbor came down in the evening to find out why the tractor and the baler was standing in the middle of the field, engine running in the night. He found the caps in front of the baler. We figure he tried to get some gras unstuck by kicking it and got his foot caught in the feeding belt."