Live data from Hacker News

LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

techstartups.com

361–370 of 717 posts

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#361
This is a big loss and it comes at a time where it will soon be more needed than ever.

The last years has been brutal to "free information". Ever since Trump became president it seems a lot of people has begged the tech giants to filter and censor. And now they do.

I remember early 2020 when rumors about a new virus in China came out. There were very little news about it. But on YouTube and Twitter you could find scary videos of Chinese police/military in hazmat suits welding shut doors to big apartment complexes. You could find pictures and videos of roads with huge piles of dirt on it to block any traveling. There were secretly filmed videos where people just collapsed on the streets and in the waiting rooms at the hospitals.

Contrast that with the glorious 2021 online experience.

Go to YouTube and search for "India covid crisis" and you'll be met with pages and pages of news reports from the big news corporations.

I don't know about you, but this is not the result I expect. In fact, it feels dystopian and scary and that YouTube has lost its purpose.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic w…

No, there is no circular argument. If someone thinks the world is an OK place, either they're speaking from a position of privilege or they are lying. Assuming privilege is in this case the kindest interpretation of their words.

This is exactly the No True Scotsman. "No true unprivileged person would think this".

By your logic, if a slave who is tortured every day thinks the world is generally an OK place but his situation specifically sucks, they're speaking from a position of privilege.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s life. I have 2 friends that died in a car accident. They were in their mid-20s. A split second accident. If they didn’t drive that night, they probably would never get as close to death as they did that night. But it happened and all their efforts were erased in a second. It’s not just war that causes that.

The difference is not only the scale of things but especially that a war is caused by people, on purpose, too often with the consent of their population. Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.

You could argue that anything is an accident. Can you stop a war after it starts? Hardly. Can you stop a war before it starts? Hardly. Same as for car accidents. You could be smart and attentive, foster an environment unsupportive of accidents, but in the end we're not conscious enough to exert such control.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#367
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LiveLeak definitely had the ability to change you. There was a video from a dashcam where a couple is driving down a road, and a brick or rock falls off a truck driving the opposite way. It bounces on the road before slamming through the windshield and instantly killing the wife sitting in the passenger seat. Whenever I feel like a member of my family has gotten on my last nerve, pushed me to my limit, I think of the…

The video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iazTQVi1CEE Skip to 1:45. Warning, it’s disturbing. Perhaps in a good way.

Holy shit I've never seen the full video before. It's so much more chilling then the 20s clip.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#368

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…

The ISIS slaughter house video is stuck in my mind. Lots of orange dressed and back-tied prisoners hanging on hooks. One is on the floor and they slowly cut/grind off his head with gurgling bloody noises. I read that everyone in that room is high of drugs. Prisoners and executioner.

But then, and this makes me want to shut the borders around EU and North America and a few Asian countries, you watch some gore videos from South America and you realize that ISIS has nothing on these drug cartels.

The drug cartels are truly completely fucked in the heads. And they slowly ruin country after country. It's just a question of time before we see strong presence of US/UN military and drug deregulation(whether you want it or not) to prevent a complete collapse of those societies and the whole of South America. Or maybe I've seen too many horrible gore videos?

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#369

I do hope you also understand our reasons 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 interne…

> 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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#370
post #300
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals suffer in many ways, so the "OK" part is all relative. Living in environment where you can get a paycheck is still OK compared to the extreme violence and destruction depicted on Liveleak. In other words, looking through the lens of a platform that curates extreme content is hardly representative of what goes on in most people's day-to-day lives around the world.

1000s of children die everyday due to diarrhoea caused by unclean water. About a 1 000 000 die every year from malaria mostly children. Just to name a few things. The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.

Keep in mind, this is out of a population of 7.6 billion. Yes, lot of people die from terrible things. But the chance of someone suffering in the worst possible way (as depicted in those videos) is unlikely for most humans. That said, we could certainly do better.
Post reply on HN