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LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

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Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#411

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 opened my eyes to about two things:

- The horror of the Mexican Drug War. The unbelievable violence and cruelty, which is almost the exclusive responsibility of the United States' catastrophic War on Drugs.

- Car accidents. I'm always much more alert, as a driver and as a pedestrian.

Actually, add fires into that list. Terrifying stuff.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#412

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…

> that isn't an alt-right cesspool.

But actually liveleak did become an alt-right cesspool.

Back before they made comments hidden to non-members, it was WALL-TO_WALL a-holes mixed in with classic misogynists, anti-semites, racists, conspiracy theorists, and unclassifiable awful nihilistic basement-dwellers.

While I would have liked to think that the operators simply listened to their conscious, I am sure making the comments non-public was done strictly because they feared having a nut perform a mass-killing as a "liveleak exclusive".

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#413
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.

I heard an interview once with a guy I don't remember, but he was a profuse traveller, and he said, no, the world is less dangerous than people think, and it all comes down to common sense. Whether New York City or Bogota - stay out of poorly lit places.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#415

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

they are having some information remove from other places but are also having many misleading thing circulating, example being "election steal" in year past. like with regular media, alt-right and alt-left are having some thing you cannot find outside of them so reading a little is good (not fun but still good).

Just a nitpick; there is no alt-left: leftism has deep historical roots in the French Revolution that predate liberalism (which is by definition a centrist ideology). The left is the left, the right wing just calls centrist liberals leftist.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#416
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…

> less people knowing how to host a website without using an easy to deploy service

Also less people just caring about anything that isn't the normal open web. Have to install something? Nope, no way. Unless some very dramatic and visible changes take place in our society (or big companies with too much power step in and make the choice for the average user), darknets are doomed to be a tiny tiny niche.

Right now tor stats says there are between 2M and 2.5M users.. and if you discount everyone who's just using it to hide their IP / piracy / working around geo blocks, the potential audience for content hosted as a hidden service is absolutely tiny.

I also think that if tor or any such system got really big among normies, governments would start cracking down. Right now it's probably just a convenient tool for hosting honey pots and keeping an eye on the few people that use it.

Every once in a while I think about hosting a blog or a forum on tor but then I get the vibe that I'd have about as many readers as I would if I just wrote my thoughts on toilet paper before flushing.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember they used to show bad car crashes as part of the training you could take to reduce the number of penalty points (Polish road code, accumulate 24, lose your driving license). My colleague, who was a bit of a petrolhead, took it. It made him drive safe(r) at least for a few weeks.

My American school in the 1990s showed “Signal 30” in Driver’s Education class, a gruesome documentary film from the 60s showing deceased, disfigured victims in automobile accidents. Totally messed up to show kids that.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#418
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…

Let be clear here though - usually the "alt-right" viewpoints that people are (supposedly) fired for are... violent, or call for discrimination or other things like that.

There's no huge threat of people being fired for wanting less regulation on companies.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#419
post #218
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video over Tor is surprisingly usable in my experience. Captchas are a much bigger problem.

Services that ask for captcha solving when on tor are probably hosted / delivered via cloudflare. Not an option for a hidden service.

That's definitely not true. Most hidden service use some darknet-specific captchas nowadays. Just open the next best darknet market or simply forum and you'll see what I mean.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#420

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…

As a kid, I always wanted to be a pilot in the British airforce. I'd grown up on games like F19 Stealth Fighter, and I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to fly planes like that and drop bombs on the bad guys. I think it was during the gulf war in 1991, when I a TV news piece, shot by a war journalist. He was filming from inside a helicopter, and there was a US gunner using a fixed gun (50-cal?), gunn…

I see my kids going through this same pattern. They idealize war guns and violence, and it really pains me because I know it sets them up to minimize the realities of war and violence.
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