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LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

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Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#41

i always understood that liveleak and dailymotion were the same site, and liveleak was just the branding for their less-respectable content. but this article doesn't make any mention of that, and i can't find any other discussion online of a relationship between the two brands. is this something i just invented in my head?

These two websites are not related.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#42

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…

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Plac...

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#43
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitChute maybe the replacement?

Having never heard of bitchute, I just checked it out. It’s basically just right wing nut job stuff. I think LiveLeak at least was a little more “balanced”, in that it was about entertaining content, regardless of the political ideology.

I watched liveleak to see people get beheaded, not for conspiracies.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#44

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 go…

Is there any study or papers on people who actively go through such content? What changes about them after?

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#45

Was any person or institution archiving liveleak videos? Even just for the sake of law enforcement or journalistic documentation, I hope there is a way of accessing this content. I'm sure there's a lot of unprocessed history in those shut down servers.

I am sure there would be a torrent up soon enough.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#46

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…

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, yeah. Reddit killed the forum. Google and silo'd social media (FB, TikTom) are eating everything else. I just realized that I barely recognize the modern net vs. the one I grew up with.

You consider Reddit usable? I stopped using Reddit a few years ago, recently came back and tried both the website and (dark-pattern driven) mobile app. It's distinctly worse. Everything seems to have been re-engineered to drive "engagement" and/or mindless consumption.

Old.reddit.com does not work for you?

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#48

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…

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#49
post #36
post #20

Why couldn't they make enough money to stay in business?

I don't feel like posting the alternative, but there is a much more extreme alternative to LiveLeak that makes LiveLeak look like eye bleach and I suspect much of LiveLeak's users moved over to it. LiveLeak was in a weird position because it allowed full on gore but it also kind of tried to pretend to be a serious site reporting actual events. I suspect most people going to LiveLeak were not interested in seeing a le…

Found an audience but only with the content...they really didn't want to be about.

Understandable that they might choose not to go that far.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#50
post #3

I don't imagine it was easy to monetize most of the content they were hosting.

Probably super easy to monetize. The world isn't just Google Ad{Word/Sense} and Facebook Ads

Who would want to serve ads on Liveleak beyond the sketchy penis enlargement people?
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