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LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

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Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#131

Post by diss »

buryat wrote: post #106

good. Human suffering should not be monetized. Perpetrators must not get any audience at all and must have no outlet for showcasing their acts. If you must watch gore to see the "real world" then you're part of the problem. Empathy doesn't require seeing someone getting dismembered.

I don't believe that any of the videos described were made for views or with the intention of having an audience. Many things go beyond your capacity for empathy if you're oblivious to them and their magnitude – they're shocking for a reason. I don't see wilful ignorance or filtered media as being a solution to any problem, but a big problem in itself. You seem to care about preventing people who "enjoy" this stuff from seeing it more than allowing anyone to see the world for what it is, if they choose.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#132

Post by Aeolun »

moralestapia wrote: post #80
acituan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dec…

>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment. And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.

> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.

Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#133

Post by deelowe »

Scoundreller wrote: post #10
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #3

I 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.

There is plenty of content they can't host and I'm sure tons of people were anxious to find examples they could use to take the site down with. Powerful governments aren't exactly too keen on the populous getting a real perspective of what war is like.

Also, bandwidth and power isn't cheap. They have to pay for it somehow.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#134

Post by dceddia »

LightMachine wrote: post #114
stu2b50 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the 1-2 punch of Reddit and Discord have all but decimated the old vBulletin forum days. If you have a niche interest, Reddit and Discord are pretty much the only place to find a community for it. It's very dominant in that space now. I'm pretty much forced to use Reddit or else disconnect from communities I'm interested in.

How do you find Discord servers for a specific interest?

I stumbled upon Disboard recently, a site that aggregates/categorizes Discord servers and lets you search them. https://disboard.org/

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#135

Post by Aeolun »

Barrin92 wrote: post #42
nickysielicki wrote: post #17

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…

> what you'd see most of the time is actually soldiers doing nothing

True, but that part of the reality of war is hardly relevant. I don’t need to emphasize with the bored soldiers. That’s part of life for me too.

I emphathize with the bored soldiers that suddenly had a massive bomb land in their midst.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#136

Post by PostOnce »

spoonjim wrote: post #55

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 exe…

Your first point, sad as it is, reminded me of this article I read, which gives clarity on how child soldiers are made in a way that I haven't read elsewhere, despite reading books on exactly that subject

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Not related, but I'll just close by saying I didn't have the same respect that I now have for rotating shafts at industrial facilities until I saw some industrial accidents on the internet. Lo and behold years later, as a programmer, I'm working at a factory automating some things and there it is, an un-shrouded rotating shaft connected to a fairly large motor, right there at ankle level. Stink was raised, shroud was installed.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#137

Post by ddingus »

Too bad. Being able to pick up a little harsh reality was a good, sometimes sobering thing.

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#139

Post by philosopher1234 »

buryat wrote: post #124
wyattpeak wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the very fact that reading those descriptions is confronting, if it is to you as it is to me, is evidence that you do need exposure to understand that horrible things happen in the world. I understand it academically, but every time I see or read something like this I realise that I don't really understand it.

it's just sick entertainment covered by explanation "I need to see how horrible the world is", and being the audience you create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives. There're better ways to educate yourself and make the world a better place.

This seems too reductionist. It can both be sick entertainment and educational and socially valuable at the same time.
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