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LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
- spamalot159 5y agoLiveLeak was the only video site that still felt like the wild west. If I was ever linked to a LiveLink url I knew something crazy was about to happen. I'm sure serving this kind of content had its hurdles legally. And running a video site cannot be cheap in the first place. LiveLeak will be missed.
- reedjosh 5y agoBitChute maybe the replacement?
- bmiller2 5y agoHaving never heard of bitchute, I just checked it out. It’s basically just right wing nut job stuff. I think LiveLeak at least was a little more “balanced”, in that it was about entertaining content, regardless of the political ideology.
- navait 5y agoI watched liveleak to see people get beheaded, not for conspiracies.
- xdennis 5y agoAren't they both weird?
- Bancakes 5y agoYeah it's sadly the same with odysee and other alternative sites.
- uKGgZfqqNZtf7Za 5y ago> same with odysee and other alternative sites. I just loaded the front page of Odysee. Here is a summary of the top videos it shows me: explanation of a helicopter accident, SpaceX SN15, corgis, green house design, guinea pigs, GPU review, Democratic Socialist, and a Godzilla vs Kong comic. That doesn't track with your opinion of the site.
- Bancakes 5y agoOkay? And when I loaded it just now, I see "Should I get married", Steven Crowler shenanigans, some self-defense videos, etc. I haven't been there just once.
- uKGgZfqqNZtf7Za 5y agoSounds like there is all kind of videos on there. Just like YouTube.
- brigandish 5y agoIf they're not stopping you from uploading and they don't hide videos from you (à la Youtube) then the content mainly being "right wing nut job stuff" is surely just a failure of non-right wing nut jobs to take advantage of such nowadys uncommon largesse.
- throwaway3699 5y agoI just looked at the home page. What a shame it's just covered in shit, because there's a lot of good YouTube refugees on there too.
- karmicthreat 5y agoJust looking at the front page of BitChute it seems more conspiracy crazy than just recordings of crazy things happening.
- userbinator 5y agoThat would change if people start using it more as a LiveLeak replacement. (The name is somewhat amusing for someone with knowledge of Australian slang.)
- weedfroglozenge 5y agoBitch ute?
- nickthemagicman 5y agoWhats a ute in Aussie lang?
- robinwa 5y agoPickup truck!
- nickthemagicman 5y agoThanks! Still learning Aussie!
- scoopertrooper 5y agoIt's not quite a pickup truck. It's more an elongated car with the rear passenger area traded for a tray to carry things around in. Though having said that, the terms are often confused.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
- RachelF 5y agoor https://leakedreality.com/ https://leakedreality.com/
- SN76477 5y agoIt did feel like a 1999 internet.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoI don't imagine it was easy to monetize most of the content they were hosting.
- AliceWong 5y agoLife insurance ads perhaps.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 5y agoProbably super easy to monetize. The world isn't just Google Ad{Word/Sense} and Facebook Ads
- timClicks 5y agoBut that's the very large majority...
- irjustin 5y agoAbsolutely not. So much of their content goes against the TOS of the major advertisers that no one wants to work with them.
- pentae 5y agoTheres literally a million sketchy ad companies out there that would be happy to buy that traffic
- MattGaiser 5y agoWho would want to serve ads on Liveleak beyond the sketchy penis enlargement people?
- ummonk 5y agoSafety device manufacturers (whether for OSHA type safety or crime safety) would actually have been a good industry for this.
- raunak 5y agoSimilar 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whymauri 5y agoWow, 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.
- breckenedge 5y agoYou consider Reddit usable? I stopped using Reddit a few years ago, recently came back and tried both the website and (dark-pattern driven) mobile app. It's distinctly worse. Everything seems to have been re-engineered to drive "engagement" and/or mindless consumption.
- MattGaiser 5y agoOld.reddit.com does not work for you?
- andai 5y agoThe userbase is also becoming worse, because they're attracting the kind of idiots that respond to design like that.
- FpUser 5y agoI wonder what will happen to content. Moving it somewhere like archive.org would be nice.
- jacklewis 5y agoI was hoping to find that out here in the comments but no luck. You would think they would offer up an archive or something at least temporarily.
- donkarma 5y agoIt's one of those sites you never expected to go, that's crazy.
- throwawaysea 5y agoThat’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.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoFree 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.
- rsj_hn 5y ago> just don't expect giant public corporations to broadcast and amplify conspiracy theories. Unfortunately that is exactly what the giant public corporations are doing. They are running disinfo ops against the public, and it's bizarre how they justify this to themselves (in the name of the antiracism, or the greater good, or achieveing some utopia). What is odd is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of variety in the types of disinfo ops it is OK to run. The "peaceful protests" chyrons emblazoned behind a burning hellscapes is OK. The "we have always been at war with East Asia" kind is OK - and you have to go to rough and tumble corners of the internet to see other conspiracy theories that don't fit the narrative of our nihilistic PMC elite.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoVery few deny Covid exists. Many More are skeptical of the vaccine. Because of things like this happened before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal The idea of informed consent, is you get to know the benefits and risks of any medicine. Skepticism is valuable too. If anything, human history is littered with dead bodies of those that blindly went along and listened to those in authority.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mandatum 5y agoThe fact they were HQ'd in London always confused me. Yes the EU gives you some protections, but taking a pseudonymous TPB-style approach is probably easier for everyone (support, operations, management, marketing) than the legal grey area LiveLeak operated in. Also the end of the note from Hayden sticks with me, I know the type of videos or users he's referring to and I don't think the majority of readers will realise just how fucked up this platform was. Yes, there were videos from the likes of Lasse Gjertsen who made people question a lot of the content they saw, but there were some real ones in there too. > Lastly, to those no longer with us. I still remember you. I'm not sad it's gone. But there should probably be a place for all of this type of content, I'm just not sure where. The public internet probably isn't it. Reading the ToS for the new site.. It seems all the content that made LiveLeak so popular (murder, shock videos, terrorism, suicide, sexual violence) is the exact content they won't allow. Seems a little bit like management are wanting to settle down, they know the main brand isn't going to be profitable long-term - but they can at least monetize some of it by building a video hosting site from its userbase.
- judge2020 5y ago> The public internet probably isn't it. If it's not available to the public internet, what's the point? If you just make a "upload your video and we'll archive it" site, it probably won't gain any traction as people can't link to it and thus your site doesn't gain the mindshare that LiveLeak had. And I don't think people are going to start sending SD cards to a random PO box.
- Mandatum 5y agoI would honestly hope it could be hosted and paid by an academia organisation, as the motives to drive profit behind this type of platform are so insidious - I fear we'll likely see darknet style actors step in (that is, if we haven't already - I try not to read too much about that side of the internet, having listened to some podcasts that explain just how bad it can get).
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoMaybe someone someday WASMizes TOR/I2P/Freenet etc., you get a link to something like a "hidden service"...
- lettergram 5y agoLiveLeak team moved to develop ItemFix - https://www.itemfix.com/ https://www.itemfix.com/ kinda interesting, almost like they are trying to create meme videos. Currently, I don't think it's very good, but generally could become a thing I supposed.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoItemfix is such a bad name. It sounds like it was generated by AI or a domain generator
- userbinator 5y agoIt's definitely not suitable for the content it currently hosts, but would be a perfect name for a site containing service manuals and such. Even the logo is suggestive of that. My first thought upon seeing that domain was whether it could be related to https://www.ifixit.com/ https://www.ifixit.com/
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoYeah but even for that it's not a great name. "Item" is just so generic I wouldn't want it to be the main focus of my brand name
- q_andrew 5y agoWas any person or institution archiving liveleak videos? Even just for the sake of law enforcement or journalistic documentation, I hope there is a way of accessing this content. I'm sure there's a lot of unprocessed history in those shut down servers.
- abhishekjha 5y agoI am sure there would be a torrent up soon enough.
- lovelearning 5y agoThere are community efforts : https://tracker.archiveteam.org/liveleak/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/liveleak/ Note : They are NOT the archive.org team. They are an independent decentralized archiving collective. IMO, that's the better approach.
- nickysielicki 5y agoThe 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 a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real. Frankly, I owe a lot of my political beliefs (especially on foreign policy) to horrible realities I saw on Liveleak.
- throwawaysea 5y agoAgree. I was never that cognizant of what ISIS/ISIL/Daesh were capable of until I saw videos on LiveLeak that made it all very real. You won’t find those anywhere else, but I dare say that the emotions those stir in the viewer create political clarities that are razor sharp, in a way you can’t get through overly academic and stoic news articles.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y agoGetting your head cut off and die within few seconds isn't more cruel than getting half your face ripped off and a leg due to an airstrike and then bleeding to death over the course of several minutes. Isis was just more honest with their inhumanity.
- secondcoming 5y agoThere are videos of beheadings where it literally takes minutes for the head to be cut off. It's not a swift blow to the neck with a sword. I remember one where the executioner had to borrow a knife from someone in the crowd because his wasn't sharp enough.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y agoutterly disgusting ... period. I almost want to vomit reading that. I hope you didn't watch that yourself. my point holds nonetheless.
- notatoad 5y agoi always understood that liveleak and dailymotion were the same site, and liveleak was just the branding for their less-respectable content. but this article doesn't make any mention of that, and i can't find any other discussion online of a relationship between the two brands. is this something i just invented in my head?
- advance512 5y agoThese two websites are not related.
- 1123581321 5y agoNo connection. Dailymotion is French YouTube/Vimeo owned by a respectable large media company (Vivendi.)
- duxup 5y agoWhy couldn't they make enough money to stay in business?
- Kranar 5y agoI don't feel like posting the alternative, but there is a much more extreme alternative to LiveLeak that makes LiveLeak look like eye bleach and I suspect much of LiveLeak's users moved over to it. LiveLeak was in a weird position because it allowed full on gore but it also kind of tried to pretend to be a serious site reporting actual events. I suspect most people going to LiveLeak were not interested in seeing a legit gore site pretending to be news and just wanted the most hardcore gore they could find, and well the alternative to LiveLeak is exactly that.
- duxup 5y agoFound an audience but only with the content...they really didn't want to be about. Understandable that they might choose not to go that far.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- malwarebytess 5y agoLiveleak stopped hosting gore, including controversial videos, many years before this shut down.
- dk775 5y agoI understand you said you don’t want to tell us, but the way you wrote that comment you have to imagine it would generate interest. Can you share it or provide a clue (though since this is HN, I would appreciate it if you shared the knowledge with us). Knowing about these sites is more than the gore. People with kids, journalists, public safety people and more source stuff from these places, and often to do good or inform.
- U8dcN7vx 5y agoThe shutdown note reads like they got bored, but money certainly might have been an issue.
- irjustin 5y agoMixed feelings from me. I remember the Hussein video. I never believed in the vision, but they hosted important events I simply could not see from other sites. Reddit users rely on it and I knew what I was getting into if I clicked on a LiveLeak link. Separately, being a content moderator for LL must be absolute hell. While you must filter for illegal things, you're actually expected to watch through the death and gore. That can not be healthy.
- abhishekjha 5y agoIs there any study or papers on people who actively go through such content? What changes about them after?
- mttjj 5y agoNot exactly what you’re looking for but I remember reading this when it was published and it was disturbing to say the least : https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
- scrollaway 5y agoThere's a lot of first hand accounts of people explaining the logic behind seeking and watching such content. The WatchPeopleDie subreddit had a lot of that and you had many people detailing their experience, but iirc it turned into a neo-nazi hangout before it got banned.
- shard 5y agoI'm not aware of any studies, but there are several articles on the content moderators. Some effects mentioned were: - people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave - conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views - Fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues - they coped with the stress of the job with sex, drugs, and offensive jokes, all in the workplace - self-harm were also common - turned people intensely paranoid https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
- mrpigeonpants 5y agoShocking news. Not as shocking as watching a video on LiveLeak, but still surprising.
- hellothere1337 5y agoSeeing a child trying to gather the pieces of his mother after getting shredded by an Apache gunship undermines government propaganda. If something makes you realize you're probably not always the good guy bringing democracy then that something is quite dangerous and it should be removed.
- donatj 5y ago> that something is quite dangerous and it should be removed You really took a left turn at the end there and I’m not sure if you were serious. Poe’s law in full effect, I’d argue the opposite. If something true challenges your narrative the only intellectually honest thing to do is embrace it.
- hellothere1337 5y agoI'm merely explaining how it got to the current situation from my own point of view. There is no money in showing the real consequences of people's actions. People pay to be coddled and have their biases confirmed. Without any money you cannot maintain a considerable online presence (especially content hosting).
- georgiecasey 5y agoI notice Ogrish.com redirects to this new vanilla site as well. What a relic from the turn of the century Internet.
- joshmanders 5y agoOgrish was replaced by LiveLeak. It's interesting how people talk about LiveLeak like it was original and not just a spin off and replacement for Ogrish which was much darker.
- ryandrake 5y agoI happen to think a lot of the pandemic denial and downplaying had to do with the media's refusal (for valid privacy reasons) to show what was actually going on in ICUs everywhere. The lack of graphic coverage kept the pandemic's worst effects out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, allowing them to focus on and rage against the less important side-issues like how awful masks are and how upset it made them to not be able to drink at bars for a while. Just like honest, graphic war reporting helped to end Vietnam, honest, graphic COVID reporting could have helped shock people into doing their part to end the pandemic.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoWe did get an absurd amount of Tik Tok videos with seemingly empty hospitals and nurses with apparently enough time to choreograph dances though
- XorNot 5y agoPandemics are non-linear. Pandemic response and fear emptied hospitals almost immediately and reduced normal cases (as well as people delaying treatment in too many cases). People don't understand exponential phenomenon: a half-full hospital when there's a spreading contagion (with a replication factor ~2) is actually already over capacity. At 33%, with a replication factor of 2, the next influx of patients overwhelms you.
- jodrellblank 5y ago> "People don't understand exponential phenomenon" "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" - Dr Albert Bartlett, part of his talk "Exponential Growth Arithmetic, population and energy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
- Sebb767 5y agoThis is probably a "my part of the Titanic is rising!" kind of problem. Doctors have and need some time off as well and doing a dance is good for moral and teamwork. Plus, in some regions, the pandemic is pretty well under control. This doesn't change the fact that they're currently burning corpses on the streets in India. A bullet missing you by 10cm or 10m does not feel much different; Liveleak showed you the effects of the bullet that did not miss.
- advance512 5y agoWhenever 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.
- yubiox 5y agoWell for police shootings at least, PoliceActivity on youtube is the place to go for uncensored, no-commentary bodycam video.
- khawkins 5y agoIt certainly was at one point, but near the end it definitely wasn't. Whether it was soft censorship, hard censorship, or a declining user base, I struggled to find videos I could sometimes even find on Twitter or Youtube. Videos whose place was obviously LiveLeak, based on their standards from 5 years ago. As much as I lament the death of LiveLeak, it died well before today.
- smashah 5y agoDespite 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.
- spoonjim 5y agoFour 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.
- ergot_vacation 5y agoAppreciate you and others detailing some of this stuff in this thread. I mostly have to stay aware from content like this; don't really have the psychology for it. But I'm glad it's documented.
- causality0 5y agoLiveLeak 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 sounds that man made as he looked at his wife and my anger just melts away. LiveLeak may have scarred me but it taught me not to ever take the people I love for granted.
- tgtweak 5y agoProbably decided it was more profitable to use the storage to mine chia...
- ergot_vacation 5y agoAnother 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.
- enw 5y agoSad to see both LiveLeak and Best Gore gone. Not that I visited either much, but they really opened my eyes to the horrors of reality. What are alternatives to LiveLeak or Best Gore?
- rcpt 5y agoDocumenting reality is the lead site afaik
- malwarebytess 5y agoGoregrish
- 29athrowaway 5y agoThe predecessor of LiveLeak was pretty violent and full of gore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogrish.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogrish.com
- causality0 5y agoI 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 internet. 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.
- dmos62 5y ago> 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.
- capableweb 5y agoOf 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 fight at all, but I also realize what the current climate is like, even though I'm hoping no one wins and eventually we can all be friends again.
- madeofpalk 5y agoLet 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.
- syshum 5y ago
- PedroBatista 5y agoThanks to Liveleak we could have a more accurate gasp of what was going on in the latest wars. Yes, many were one-sided but even then you could have an idea of who's doing what and where. Most TV coverage was some guy/girl 200 miles away telling 10% of the story.
- dirtyid 5y agoHow much of LiveLeak is archived?
- drdrey 5y agoSerious question: how can we ensure stable and long lasting access to this kind of content, no matter how offensive, to journalists and researchers?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lovelearning 5y agoI feel decentralized storage and better tools are the key both for technical and social reasons. We should start looking at old data just like we look at old paintings, old parchment books and fossils - as things with inherent intangible value to be preserved for, and by, every generation. Centralized archives are single points of failures subject to political and business pressures. Political ideologies and their governments love to hide or rewrite inconvenient histories. I feel centralized archives (like Wayback Machine or Google's initiative) can't be trusted or relied upon for long-lasting access. Something that surprises me is that the tech community seems to feel the necessity for long-term archiving much more strongly than the history / sociology / humanities research communities. I expected university humanities departments would be at the core of such initiatives.
- rocqua 5y agoNote that it is not just archiving, but also search, indexing, and discoverability that matters.
- exciteabletom 5y agoweb.archive.org
- kzrdude 5y agoLibya 2011 and arab spring in general spawned a lot of violent videos that were important for documenting what happened. They must have been archived or stored somewhere too - I know they were on youtube at the time, quickly taken down, and some were trying to archive/stow them.
- 5y ago
- briankelly 5y agoThe Internet just got less weird and more and more it feels like the days of it being "sketchy" to the average user are mostly over. On the other hand, social media can be insidious and in some ways it's made society weird as ever in a worse direction. Then again there's a lot less creeps, criminals, and deranged or at least their presence isn't as strong or obvious on here. I guess that is about as I feel about this, and I think it's been a couple of years since I've watched something there. I'll bet there will be an alternative for those who really seek this stuff out, though, adjacent to what remains of the pirates.
- kome 5y agoAnother independent, not US-American, bastion of the free internet is gone. Big tech is more and more monopolistic and more and more censored, as technology follows the imperialist idiosyncrasies of US American political debate.
- buryat 5y agogood. 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.
- diss 5y agoI 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.
- randomopining 5y agoHah foolish. There are many well-written posts in this thread that say the exact opposite of you. They’re right. With the money part I agree with you (most would).
- ta_ca 5y agobrutal reality is the only weapon against mass-indoctrination. can you even imagine if Iraq was a western country? would Syria happen if 1/100000 of Iraq was televised? would Iraq happen if child deaths under sanctions was televised? can empathy see through the fog of indoctrination/demonization/skin-color? go ahead, shadowban again and again.
- chovybizzass 5y agoupvotocracy allows these kinds of posts.
- syamilmj 5y agoProbably a minority here - but I could not stomach the horrible comments on LiveLeak, especially because it almost seemed like they were all written by a bunch of really young audience.
- arp242 5y agoI never read any of the comments on LiveLeak, but this sounds awfully similar to the comments on YouTube.
- c-c-c-c-c 5y agoComments were removed a few years ago iirc. Atleast made totally unusable.
- severino 5y agoI think they made it only visible for registered users, so it looked like there were no comments if you were a guest.
- thunderbong 5y agoEveryone's mentioning the many tragic and gory videos they've seen on LiveLeak. But how were they making money? Also, is it moral to make money out of people's anguish and human tragedy? I also don't see any mention of why they are shutting down. Additionally, shouldn't these things be in the realm of journalism? Or is this the new journalism? Shouldn't there be some kind of fact-checking against this? In today's world where anybody can post videos which elicit responses (and the more responses the better), shouldn't there be some ombudsman?
- irjustin 5y agoWhat? > how were they making money? That clearly was the problem - they weren't. They lived in a space where no advertiser would work with them, they don't have a 'paid content' feature. General population does not "hang out" on LiveLeak. You go there and then leave. What is all this about "journalism"? What journal going to feature actual death videos?
- ddingus 5y agoToo 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.
- randomopining 5y agoOligarchization of the internet.
- ddingus 5y agoCan't say that is inaccurate.
- malwarebytess 5y agoLiveleak died years ago when they decided to begin censoring videos. Ogrish forum, the remnant of the predecessor site shut down two years ago.
- sadmann1 5y agoLiveleak made me appreciate just how fragile our abstractions of human rights and rule of law are. When the chips are down reality can transform into a hell few can imagine.
- miguelmota 5y agoAnyone remember rotten.com? It was a treasure trove for morbid curiosity. You can probably still visit some of the pages on the wayback machine if you're curious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com
- remux 5y agoHell yeah! A good piece of history where many have gained their first experience
- unixhero 5y agoHonestly, good riddance.
- imranq 5y agoWhy is there so much fetishization of violent content in the comments? Sure maybe liveleak provided some footage you couldn't get on youtube and that is indeed a loss, but to think that the violence you see represents the truth is just as bad as denying that any bad happens in the world. The world is far larger than any one mind can handle. I wouldn't judge it from a few videos taken out of context. The world can be a great place and so can the internet, buts it's easy to get PTSD from it. Browse responsibly.
- rocqua 5y agoViolence doesn't represent truth. But it is part of it, and it is usually censored. Seeing it uncensored hence feels like seeing more of the truth.
- c-c-c-c-c 5y agoWhat are you on about. Since when can you get shell-shock from watching videos online. Its not fetishization but rather an unabridged edition of the footage you see on the news.
- slumpt_ 5y agoIndividuals can absolutely be traumatized by footage.
- Oddskar 5y agoThe many stories coming out of content moderation companies would disagree. E.g: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
- ggggtez 5y agoSure you can. You can build up a tolerance, but most people are not mentally prepared to confront graphic violence. It takes months of hard training for soldiers to be prepared for confronting death. How is a school teacher going to feel after watching a video of a school shooting? Probably not very safe all of a sudden, and that could have long lasting scars even if it wasn't something they personally experienced. Edit: And while I agree, LiveLeak was a source of truth for news stories, it also was a fetishization for some people. I think in order to truly tackle the legacy of liveleak, we can't ignore that some people watch gore for the gore and not because they want to be more informed citizens. I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we must confront that reality too.
- tandav 5y agoDaily reminder that the future is decentralized. Also content like liveleak videos is a good mark that some platform is decentralized. If there's no content like this then it's centralized, controlled by somebody.
- tha0xa3 5y agoTruly the end of an era. LiveLeak was a trustworthy source to get the unedited, uncensored version of whatever the media was peddling you.
- anonytrary 5y agoPulse of reports; the final breath: https://downdetector.com/status/liveleak/ https://downdetector.com/status/liveleak/
- paganel 5y agoI wonder if all the atrocities committed during the Syrian Civil War still sit somewhere on the open internet, relatively easy to search. I know that at some point LiveLeak was one of the few remaining websites that was still hosting that kind of content, which I personally regard as very important to preserve.
- DarkByte8 5y agoAn alternative to liveleak for people who want to see gore, accidents, shootings, etc is theync.com
- holoduke 5y agoAnd childporn!!. The site is filled with links to very obscure porn sites containing childporn. Please don't support theync!
- edem 5y agoSo what were the reasons?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Markoff 5y agoI dunno why I always thought for some reason LiveLeak is Russian only today discovering it's British? It's shame what's happening, first they take down WatchPeopleDie (honestly Rotten and Ogrish were way long time ago), now LiveLeak, it's shame you are not allowed to see uncensored content anymore, I used to be regular visitor of WPD also for discussions, one could learn lot of useful stuff what to do in dangerous situations or how to avoid them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mansoor_ 5y agoSomething primal about LiveLeak I've not met anywhere else online.
- wpdev_63 5y agoCurious anyone would be willing to host a mirror on ipfs? I personally don't care to watch violent videos but it did fill a much needed void that the YouTube censors created.
- joelbondurant 5y agoCensored
- A_non_e-moose 5y agoItemFix FAQs are more informative on what is succeeding LiveLeaks https://www.itemfix.com/faq https://www.itemfix.com/faq "What exactly is Itemfix? Itemfix is a website that lets users post and edit ("fix") video - , image - and audio files ("items"). Any registered user can turn existing items into "fixes"." "What is a fix? A fix can be a video, image or audio file generated out of one or more items that exist in the ItemFix system. An example of a "fix" would be a video with added captions, a gif image generated out of a video item, or a meme created through one of our "fix templates". Sounds like a mix between YouTube and TikTok/Instagram, as in, video hosting with democratized editing. Wouldn't be surprised if they went for an app after a while. My opinion is that the reality-check video host we need, is getting replaced by the meme video host we want. More holes to dig our societal heads into and abstract ourselves from harsher realities. Hosting LiveLeak must've been really tough, can't blame them for moving on to something easier and more financially attainable, but I hope someone will pick up a similar torch.
- BlameKaneda 5y agoAt first I wondered why ItemFix was hosting videos---based on the name alone, it sounded like a home improvement site.
- ticviking 5y agoHonestly allowing graphic content to get mixed and have context added feels like the best(and worst) of both worlds.
- finnjohnsen2 5y agoWhen something bad happened, especially during ISIS and the Jihad John period, or just an accident getting press - I used to rush over to LiveLeak whenever (I for some reason) wanted the real footage. A curiosity or guilty pleasure of some sort perhaps. I never understood why I did it, because quite often they just made me feel bad. Regardless, in the later years they seems to not have incidents so I stopped going to LiveLeak. It felt like they stopped getting the real stuff, or they just didnt publish everything anymore and did some cencoring. So this is not a surprise to me.
- Flow 5y agoThis 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.
- intricatedetail 5y agoI have noticed that every time someone mentions China in negative light, they get downvotes. Interesting.
- Flow 5y agoYeah, I had like 3 upvotes and then boom, were back up 0 points. Weirdly, I don't feel what I wrote was even negative against China.
- dang 5y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines—more than one of them actually. Can you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The generalization you're making is far from true, and with most of the comments you're talking about it's pretty easy to see why they'd get downvoted. Also - the GP comment was about media and censorship, not China, so if downvoters were reacting to the topic of the comment or to the point it was making, it more likely had to do with that. Downvotes on comments making controversial points about divisive topics are to be expected anyhow.
- 5y ago
- yurgen228 5y agoBig F
- supergirl 5y agoso they pivot liveleak to a tiktok with UI from 1999? i guess liveleak was impossible to monetize.
- pacman2 5y agoStrange. I wanted go "recommend" bestgore.com but it is gone too.
- RamblingCTO 5y agoVery weird comment section. It feels really weird to me that you need videos of people blowing up and getting killed to get a reality check. Reading about it and being empathetic should really be enough. Are you guys so out of touch with yourselves and the world? And is it really necessary to consume this taxing content? I mean, I've seen a lot. I lurked on 4chan/krautchan in the early days. But I'm not so sure that was a good thing as I was quite young and I can imagine that it sends some people down the drain and incentivises violence. I'm really wondering what happens to a brain that is exposed to such things. Now I would be really interested in the psychological effects of such content on our brains. But imho it's just weird to consume that stuff. Also I'm really glad that it's forbidden in Germany to take or publish videos of these things due to personality rights.
- meowkit 5y agoIts not a reality check its more akin to mindfulness meditation. Momento mori, a reminder that it is so easy to die of stupid things in this world. > I can imagine that it sends some people down the drain and incentivises violence. As far as I’m aware, this is not the case for video games and violent movies, so I don’t buy it for liveleak content. Propoganda for terrorism and cartels is a whole other argument though.
- RamblingCTO 5y ago> Its not a reality check its more akin to mindfulness meditation. Momento mori, a reminder that it is so easy to die of stupid things in this world. I find it very weird that you need gore for a memento mori. > As far as I’m aware, this is not the case for video games and violent movies, so I don’t buy it for liveleak content. Well, if I think about how I felt while watching this stuff (very, very uneasy) versus how I felt while gaming or watching movies I'd say there's quite a difference. So I would argue that the brain indeed processes those things differently.
- Quarrelsome 5y agoThere's one hell of a difference between the news reporting of "sectarian murders" and seeing a group of people hitting another group of people with sticks WHILE THEY'RE ON FIRE. Also I watched the Christchurch stream and there's something about someone seeing another person pleading for help and seeing the cameraman put a bullet in their head that really communicates a horror that words fail to. For me at least, it humanises the dead (no longer statistics) and demonstrates the true horror of the capacity of human cruelty. Lest we forget. I won't forget what I've seen, I won't forget how cruel people can be when unshackled and these stories act as significant warnings to me. While the press rationalise the next round of wars I've seen what it looks like and will never want.
- varispeed 5y agoI think this is because EU terreg regulation that was introduced without a vote. Basically services that have EU users (regardless if they use VPN etc) have 1hr SLA to remove any content requested to be deleted. Have a look https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/04/the-eus-terrorist-content-regulation-and-what-it-means-for-uk-hosting-providers https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/04/the-eus-terrorist-content...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nickthemagicman 5y agoThe fascinating thing about LL was how in touch with death it put people. But before modern medicine and modern industrialism seeing death was a CONSTANT part of life for most of human history. Wars, disease, childbirth, work accidents etc. The world was a much more dangerous and deadly place. A canal was built in my city and thousands of people died while building it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Basin_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Basin_Canal Now things are so safe and we rarely see death outside of the confines of a funeral home or something. Death has become strange and foreign event to people in the west, which is good from a quality of life perspective. But also bad because we're so out of touch with the natural world that I think it warps human beings psyche a little bit.
- skinkestek 5y agoTwo observations among the tens of others: - as a child I could be heartless towards animals. Wasn't extreme but definitely didn't care and would "punish" when they didn't behave. Having to kill a sick rabbit to prevent it from suffering was what changed me. Maybe a video could has done as well, but this was way before LL existed. - in farming school we had to watch a video of all the stuff that happens on farms complete with images and graphic explanations, stuff like: "here the neighbor came down in the evening to find out why the tractor and the baler was standing in the middle of the field, engine running in the night. He found the caps in front of the baler. We figure he tried to get some gras unstuck by kicking it and got his foot caught in the feeding belt."
- frr149 5y agoWhere they sued to oblivion or something?
- heydenberk 5y agoI don't think I've even seen a link to LiveLeak scroll by in 5 or 10 years, but I still had a visceral reaction to seeing the name on the HN frontpage. Saw some really traumatic things on there in the mid/late aughts.
- neycoda 5y agoSo... they just got tired of it?
- joshsyn 5y agoWow, tbh watching this kind of gore had made me sick to the stomach, yes it haunts me the whole day, but I am also extra alert and gives me a reminder why one shouldn't fool around on the roads, with machines, etc
- samuelizdat 5y agoLiveLeak was the only place I know where I could find footage of warcrimes in Ukraine that will more than likely never be "a part of our national conversation". Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is? That we have no problem funneling weapons and money to them? Even if they did, would they show you the video of them crucifying and setting on fire a captured enemy? Liveleak did.
- Uberphallus 5y ago> Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is? Western media, yes? I mean, when they were relevant. Russian TV keeps mentioning them every other day, and short of how Ukraine has been the Third Reich all along. Azov is integrated in the armed forces now and subject to a level of scrutiny that they were not back in 2014. Pravy sektor has no representation in other than some local councils, which is real good if you compare it with the numbers of Vox in Spain, Front National in France, or the usual suspects. 2014 caught Ukraine off guard and they threw everything they could to the East, and unfortunately that included extreme right paramilitary groups that had no rules of engangement or official oversight of any kind. The government(s) corrected it in the best way they could, which wasn't great to be honest. Not defending it, just contextualizing it.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoBut... but Ukraine is so close to transitioning from "hybrid regime" to "flawed democracy" !
- Taylor_OD 5y agoEvery time I've looked for videos on LiveLeak that I knew would be removed from normal sources over the last few years I didn't get any hits. I actually was just looking for something the other day. Liveleak opened my eyes to what was really being done by evil people early in my life. I'm not sure I would recommend that to people but it did help me take on the comparably very not evil things I had to deal with day to day.
- T3RMINATED 5y agoDuring the time we need leaks more than ever, they shutdown what?
- rodolphoarruda 5y agoThis is one of the best discussions I've seen in HN so far. It's amazing when great minds think about worldview formation and the role of Internet has on it. I feel sad about the end of LiveLeak and what the site represented to very curious people like most of us here.
- lgessler 5y agoAm I understanding right that this shutdown happened overnight with no warning? I didn't have any investment in LiveLeak one way or another, but this gushing about how much the community meant to the team rings a little hollow when I imagine there are users angry they didn't have any time to prepare for it.
- pupdogg 5y agoI'm saddened to hear this! For me, LiveLeak was a real life Safety Training video catalog plus much more. Comments weren't the best attribute of the site but you could keep yourself informed without having to participate. I think that most users related to site it in their own personal way. Some came to view gory videos, some to express their views, while others to see what's new with world.
- Semiapies 5y agoOn what planet is a business around for over a decade a "startup"?
- Giorgi 5y agoI am going to assume it was monetization issues. It is always monetization issues.
- brickabrack 5y agoThe internet is dying a slow death. Instead of being an open exchange of ideas and content, it's become just another vehicle for corporations to make a buck off of everyone. It's now locked down, dumbed down and buttoned down and is controlled and surveilled to make sure no one steps out of line or has their feelings hurt. It treats everyone like fools and children who can't handle reality, a new idea or an opposing thought. Don't talk about this. Don't look at that. Don't think independently. Control. Group think. Manufactured consent. The goal is to have you fall in line with the dominant paradigm that is ultimately driven by economics that make a small percentage of the world's population very rich and solidified in their position. Like all great things that had so much potential but ultimately got harnessed and driven to the lowest common denominator for control and power, it was fun while it lasted.
- varispeed 5y agoFree flow of thought is dangerous to ruling parties (and fake opposition), because people get to know what's going on more easily. The current push is to leave only a few global players that will share personal data with intelligence services. For example, the new EU regulation essentially stops anyone worldwide from running any website with user generated content, unless you have money to set up a legal entity in the EU that will respond to censorship requests within 1hr SLA round the clock. Check the article: https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/04/the-eus-terrorist-content-regulation-and-what-it-means-for-uk-hosting-providers https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/04/the-eus-terrorist-content...
- RGamma 5y agoWith so many (mainstream) eyes on the public web these days this was bound to happen. The wild west of the (pre) 200x's may be coming to an end but stuff will prevail in darknet and private archives or outside western jurisdictions, and continue to spread from there. (It's easy to forget the non-English internet exists too!) Alternatively we might end up with a more or less mild variant of a "web in chains" (analogous to https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201014-totalitarian-world-in-chains-artificial-intelligence https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201014-totalitarian-wor...), that's characterized by a highly siloed and prefiltered/fabricated flow of information. Powerful (gov + big tech) forces push this way for some time now; OTOH I believe the internet remains a difficult beast to tame as long as control doesn't reach China levels. Also, archive shit, because the internet does forget.
- lefty2 5y agoI'm surprise people say it had gory videos. I've being watching Liveleak for the last year. There were hardly any videos with violence and gore. The videos could be classified into 4 categories: traffic accidents, drunk/stoned people doing stuff, police cam recordings, industrial accidents (cranes, ships crashing etc.)
- biblical_Arc 5y agoWhat happened in that torture ?
- biblical_Arc 5y agoWhat happened in that torture?
- biblical_Arc 5y agoHow are their torture different ?
- jibanes 5y agodamn