LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online • Hacker News Board

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#451

Post by chefandy » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:22 AM UTC

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…

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...

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#452

Post by saagarjha » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

cardy31 wrote: post #196

saagarjha wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t really work on desktop.

I’ll get crucified for saying this here, but you could run it on an M1 Mac

The experience is quite poor, especially considering that the app does not work well on anything larger than a phone.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#453

Post by nkrisc » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

ntauthority wrote: post #325

skrebbel wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Car accidents are caused by people, by a system kept in place on purpose, and most the population is made dependent on them in many countries, in that there is no choice but to make oneself at risk of a car "accident".

But the deadly acts in war are meant to be deadly, meant to kill people. Most people aren’t trying to kill others even if they’re essentially forced to drive in a car-centric society. The killing is almost always accidental and unintended.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#454

Post by natmaka » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:24 AM UTC

webreac wrote: post #326

argc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone killed on a lathe on liveleak and ever since that video I've taken tool safety EXTREMELY seriously. Like, I bought safety goggles and wear them for drilling random screws. I never even thought about it before that.

Sometimes, just a story is enough. I read about a father who drove over his child while backing up. He thought his child was under his wife's supervision. Since then, all my cars have the rear view camera.

In China popular video channels available on popular apps (Wechat...) quite frequently stream accidents (nearly always catched by surveillance video surveillance), mainly traffic accident, sometimes work-related and even domestic violence.

The "didactic" tone is quite patent: don't jaywalk, drive and use machinery with care, use adequate protective gear...

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#455

Post by nirui » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:25 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #27

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…

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…

> These “boring” things take on more importance when you can see what happens when you ignore them.

Couldn't agree more.

When I was a 7 years old, a road near my home was undergo an expansion. The work involves a lots of heavy and big machines, including heavy trucks etc. During that time, me and almost all other kid was warned to not go near those machines, "Don't play near those things, it's dangerous". But none of us knows why, so none of us listened, at least not carefully.

Many years later, after I've grow up and start to understand the value of lives, one day I stumble upon a video showing a middle school aged student ridding a bike down a road, and got crashed by a turning lorry. And the lorry driver didn't even notice the student until a terrified security guard yelled him to stop. That kid was crashed at the left abdomen, then the wheel rolled over his chest and head, all with in 3 seconds of time.

That moment is when I suddenly remembered the warning that I got almost 20 years ago: Don't play near those things, it's dangerous. Everything is so real now, because it is, it's just that I didn't receive it at it's full meaning back then, and that video, completed it.

Video like those really works, because now you saw it with your own eyes. You feel the brutality without a layer of filter, and without even a slight distortion, and then you know it for real.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#456

Post by specialist » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:25 AM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #268

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 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 t…

I am dumbfounded by how snuff films went from taboo to infotainment.

~30 years ago, the Rodney King beating and the movie Natural Born Killers were shocking.

Today, it's just another day.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#457

Post by brailsafe » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #372

dmos62 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course "cesspool" is bad, "alt-right cesspool" is the same amount of badness. The reason you don't see a lot of "alt-left cesspool"s is because usually those people don't need to hide on alternative social media, as the mainstream ones are fine with alt-left people. Alt-right are the ones who are currently being fired if their opinion are being shared publicly. Now I'm neither of those, and have no fists in the fi…

I think alt-left people just bail on the whole scene, and what remains is Left cesspools; namely Twitter and Reddit.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#458

Post by TheAdamAndChe » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:36 AM UTC

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #81

raunak wrote: post #4

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.

I’m still surprised that Tor hidden services never filled that gap. As more and more stuff disappears from the clear web, I assumed more people would realize that .onion sites don’t have to be a wasteland of largely spooky scams. But if anything the quality of hidden services seems to have declined in recent years. I’m guessing it’s a mix of darknet FUD combined with less and less people knowing how to host a website…

I'm absolutely convinced that Tor was compromised around late 2012 or early 2013. It used to be the wild west on steroids. You could find deviant material everywhere and had to do no digging. Then the dominoes started falling around the time of the Silk Road shutdown. Hosting companies, hidden wiki's linking to twisted stuff, video sites, bomb-making sites, drug sites all shut down in swift succession.

My experience convinced me that any network that advertises itself as anonymous and is actually anonymous will swiftly be filled with deviant material. That will be my litmus test for anonymous networks going forward.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#459

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:41 AM UTC

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…

A LiveLeak showing how people sitting in offices design these narratives and sell them to the public would be genuinely revolutionary - especially if it also showed uncensored video of the gore and horror of the results.

IMO Baudrillard and the rest of Critical Theory are absolutely useless at this.

The language is obscure, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, and exclusive. Instead of revealing the reality of how these thing work it has the opposite effect of making them even more obscure, arcane, and distant - except for a tiny, tiny minority of self-styled insiders who feel like they have privileged secret insight which flatters their moral and intellectual vanity.

The insight is useless and illusory unless it changes mass awareness and mass behaviour. Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the rest have made a terrible contribution to making that less, not more, likely.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#460

Post by pnt12 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 11:45 AM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #389

causality0 wrote: post #69

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. Does this mean that only the alt-right have access to uncensored information?

If you read some alt right content (like 4chan /pol/), you might agree that some opinions deserve to be censored.

Hate and stupidity breed more hate and stupidity. If we approach this situation from a generic perspective we can defend free speech and argue against censorship; but if we talk about speech such as antisemitism, homophobia or black people hate, we cannot defend it anymore.