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.
Outside the Big Tech bubble.
Not sure what alternatives there are, if any.
LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
51–60 of 717 posts
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#52Despite Hayden being a contemptible goon, liveleak is an institution which now leaves a void. Interesting to see what will take it's place in the interZeitgeist.
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#53That’s really sad. They were one of the few platforms that would carry content honestly no matter how offensive it might be. With how overwhelming the scope and influence of big tech platforms like YouTube are, free speech has few homes left.
Free speech has the entire internet, just don't expect giant public corporations to broadcast and amplify conspiracy theories. No one expects youtube to host porn or gore, but when they take down covid deniers and mass shooting conspiracies people think they are entitled to youtube hosting them.
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#54I 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
If it is super easy then can you list what advertiser networks or affiliate networks they should use? Also it's not like somebody going to watch a Liveleak video has any commercial intent so the ad RPMs will be really low
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#55Four 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.
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#56Probably decided it was more profitable to use the storage to mine chia...
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#57Similar 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.
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.
I found the facebook killed forums more than Reddit, although its probably both depending on the audience.
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#58Another place where actual free exchange of information could happen, gone forever. I don't really blame the site runners; must take balls the size of a planet to host that kind of content, especially now. Sad to see it go though.
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#59I don't imagine it was easy to monetize most of the content they were hosting.
But if your content is free and you don't really moderate, what's hosting cost? Just gotta appeal to your clientele and your advertising will be successful. Maybe I should white-label purchase some beef jerky and just advertise on sites like this.
Oh, so what do you do?
I run a Beef Jerky as a Service thing but really it's just a lever against inefficient ads networks' partner's policies.
Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
#60The 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…
> 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.