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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 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.

That exact video changed my life in exactly the same way.

Thank you for putting it so well.

RIP LiveLeak. Its loss is a tragedy that is hard to quantify. Perhaps a catastrophe, that nobody will ever understand the full invisible scale of.

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.

Be careful with that stuff. There are only so many scars you can accumulate before it really affects you. Life will give you scars all by itself eventually, no need to seek them out.

This generation has experienced an unprecedented amount of isolation from danger and I think we are far closer to a state where we need to be more exposed to the lessons those dangers teach than we are to being over-exposed

Or, you can embrace the abyss and find out what's on the other side.

Which, keep in mind, could very well be horrific emotional damage, PTSD, nightmares, regret, etc.

Yeah I paused right before the brick hit the window and realized what I was about to see, I'm kind of glad I stopped.

After seeing countless videos of car/trucks/lorries with unstable load, my dad has been very annoyed with me whenever I need to help him drive a trailer around with stuff. He just throw shit onto it, an leave it. I lock that shut down, hard. I'm not gonna be that one person who accidently killed someone one the road, because I had something come loose.

Same here. I believe watching that video (with follow up discussion about what happened) should be mandatory for getting your driving license.

I know that video and I think it’s his mother.

If I recall, you hear a baby’s cry at the end, so presumably it was the driver’s wife and mother of the baby.

I was behind a truck, driving by myself at age 16, along an on-ramp with my window down. An object fell off the truck, came through my window, ping-ponged around the cabin of the car instantaneously and landed on on the passenger side floor. I looked down and saw that it was a sharpened screw driver about 8" long.

This along with many other incidents just like it have me completely paranoid of the highway. If it isn't projectiles entering a vehicle at highway speeds it's pedestrians and cyclists getting run over at 20mph. Between safety concerns and health concerns (burning gasoline) I have about had it with automobiles.

>Don't take the metro it's inconvenient

This is why I don't like driving.

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.

Some months back I saw footage of a lathe accident in a Russian factor (it was on Reddit but possibly the footage was linked from LiveLeak). Similar to you I have developed a much stronger respect for heavy machinery.

It's even made me more careful when I use obviously much smaller power tools at home. Tools like circular saws, mitre saws, and even angle grinders have the ability to irreversibly change your life (or worse) in the blink of an eye if not handled with care and respect.

Just thinking about that video again has made me feel slightly queasy, but there's no doubt seeing it has done me a huge favour.

Circular saws, mitre saws are sold with protective elements where I live. To respect, but it won't jump out and hurt you.

Angle grinders are next level, fundamental "respect or you'll be maimed" stuff.

Angular momentum is not as fundamentally easy to judge and is easily underestimated.

> Circular saws, mitre saws are sold with protective elements where I live. To respect, but it won't jump out and hurt you.

That's true but they're not sufficient to protect against all injuries if you don't take proper precautions. And, as far as circular saws go, you're flat out wrong about them not jumping and hurting you: if they bind up in the wood that's exactly what can happen in the worst case. It's called kickback.

SmarterEveryDay prototyped an anti-kickback mechanism for circular saws[1] that I hoped would inspire some mfgs; it's crazy that we haven't seen more safety innovation in handheld power tools 10+ years after SawStop became widely viable.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdW7vhYYSdM

Table saws will remove fingers instantly. And will also throw things at you if you drop them on the blade.

Thank you for sharing that article on child soldiers. The parts I did read were both enlightening and disturbing.

I’m tempted to search for industrial lathe accidents next but I think that will have to wait till tomorrow.

Good for you! I can't stand the dismissive attitude toward unprotected rotating shafts.

For me, it was a Kurdish soldier on the ground getting shot in the head with a AK from point blank. There were no bits and fragments flying around, his skull just broke apart and his head flattened uncannily like a squished rubber toy and his eyes popped out.

In another video, a ISIS (?) soldier gets shot in the head, and falls to the ground. We see him struggling to get up while a viscous red liquid pours out the side of his head. Just pours out. No pink mist or giblets. He didn't die instantly.

This broke the preconceptions I had from movies and videogames. I consider it an important milestone.

> I consider it an important milestone.

Milestone in what?

Maturing and learning of the dangers around us. We can't wait for natural selection to teach us, it's good to have a rough idea of how non-telegraphed and rapid emergency situations are.

Those types of videos gave me a new fear. I've never been one to fear death, but now I fear being in severe agony where I question why I'm not dead and wish I was.

The worst I saw was one where they gouged a guy's eyes out, skinned his face, and cut off his hands and feet, and he was still alive and seemed conscious and aware.

Then there's the infamous 2-guys-1-hammer video.

I think they do it for lower age ratings. In video games, people just drop and stop moving, and often there's even no blood. No visible pain or struggle. I think it desensitizes people to violence.

In reality, after a large scale battle the field is littered with people writhing in agony. It commonly takes several hours for a wounded person to die. Several hours of pain, as you slowly realize no one is going to help you and you're not going to make it.

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?

Appreciate 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.

For me it was the crackhead who climbed the telephone pole, got electrocuted by touching the wires, which caused him to fall off the pole, and then he then just stood up and walked off while on fire.

It made me both want to avoid crack and want to do crack.

That kind of invulnerability would be incredible.

There's a site called theync.com(I suggest not going there), which was always more gruesome than LiveLeak.

I never understood how they operate. Always thought search engines should ban the site or something.

clicked a few light links (no gore, no blood) and the more shocking part was the comments... they can't be real people, it has got to be a bot and/or honeypot of some kind.

They are real commenters but they’re in a game to say the most provocative stuff they can in a pseudonymous forum.

I stopped visiting the site after viewing a video of cartel torture that was worse than anything I'd ever seen. I still see it in my head all the time. Although LL certainly helped meet the morbid curiosity a lot of us have, I am ultimately glad it's now harder to find this kind of content.

Did seeing that clip make you a worse person?

Funky town?

Yeah.

For me it was

1) gruesome abortions conducted in some western country

2) Denmark a man (immigrant?) was immolated outside his home by a crowd. They are shouting

3) man is hacked by a machete in the UK by some edl member

4) America a guy was run over by a truck and gets stuck on the wheels, still alive. crowd just blankly watches. truck begins to move

The guy who got cut in half on a train platform.

lathes, printing presses, other industrial incidents.

I suppose we’ll just have to download our favourite facets-of-the-world gore, to show to our children as they come of age.

read your depicts and

> I think the world has lost a valuable resource.

nothing of the value has been lost. You don't need to see this to understand that horrible things happen in the world.

With respect, a lot of people disagree with you... even a lot of people posting personal testimonials on this page. Seeing something can have a much more profound impact than simply being told about it.

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.

On the contrary, I don't find it entertaining at all. In fact I generally can't bring myself to watch LiveLeak videos, those text descriptions are my limit. But I do think my understanding of such situations is poorer for not doing so.

After the photojournalist James Foley was beheaded by Isis, I read a thoughtful editorial arguing that we shouldn't watch it, in part because people were ultimately doing it not to become more informed, but to test their ability or willingness to stomach it. It also argued, that ultimately this was a form of entertainment.

To address the argument that we should "see how horrible the world is", I think it's worth asking why that's necessary? What will it change, beyond making it harder to sleep? Further, there's always something worse you can see, so should we go on trying to fund ever more horrible videos to watch? What is gained by watching something live that isn't gained simply by reading about it or reflecting on injustices without becoming voyeurs to people's horrors?

I think what's gained is a visceral appreciation for such events which prompts further action.

There's a reason why, when spruiking for donations, organisations like UNICEF like to show pictures of suffering children, and read first-hand accounts. These are the things that motivate people to act. We're not perfectly rational beings. We're all well aware that there are poor and starving people in the world, and mostly we do nothing about it. It's that emotional reaction that prompts us to act.

Reflecting on it instead might be sufficient, but if so then it's demonstrably not what people do, or else those pitches wouldn't be as successful as they are.

That action, to me, is the point, and it comes in many forms. Some active, like for instance donating to a cause. Some passive, like changing opinions on an ongoing war that your country is party to.

Sure, some people are watching it for entertainment value. Is that a big problem, if it changes opinions nevertheless? And from reading the other comments on this thread, I think it's apparent that it changes opinions.

I don’t think it’s entertainment any more than reading the news is entertainment. I know that LiveLeak for example changed my view on capital punishment. You can sit in a coffee shop and debate things but once you see a guy cut out another guy’s beating heart in front of his son (before doing the same to the son) you think, “they really ought to execute that guy.”

It reminds us that in fact Evil does exist. And that despite it's flaws our society does an aweful lot to keep it from intruding into our lives.

Seeing some of those things helped me understand why people in the past did such radical things to avoid capture.

I completely disagree with you, I've gotten absolutely zero enjoyment from the few that I've watched. They make me feel completely sick and scared for myself and my family. I am much more careful with my daughter and prone to take precautions though, after having watch them. I think they provide value, I absolutely do not get the same effect from reading or learning about bad things that can happen to me, my brain just never really considered it a real option until I saw it happen.

> you create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives

The way you phrase this makes it sound like you think people intentionally create these videos where people die just to post it to LiveLeak for people to be entertained by.

A lot of it was stuff that was going to happen anyway that happened to be caught on film.

The things happening on LiveLeak would happen anyway but the videotaping wouldn’t happen without an audience.

> the videotaping wouldn’t happen without an audience.

Utter bullshit and you know it. It didn't have an audience until it was uploaded. By that point it was already recorded. People have always recorded events throughout history for as long as they were able to be recorded.

Was the Hindenburg disaster recorded in the hopes that something awful would happen so it could 'have an audience'?

LOL, this is some kind of Poe’s Law thing. Anyhoo the reason that these cartel tortures are filmed is to send to the family and associates of the victim and others who would think of working against the cartel. The purpose is to scare the fuck out of anyone trying to disrupt or compete with the cartel. The audience is the only reason it is filmed. Before phones they would just leave the flayed head in the town square or similar.

>being the audience you create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives.

What? Will we start more wars to provide it? Make workplaces, roads,etc less safe?

Chances are this type of content has saved more lives than anything by making people more sensitised to what can happen and aware of things like workplace safety.

There's something to be said about people seeing war and intervention as boring policy moves, not being able to stomach the thought of seeing where the meat they eat comes from for some reason and thinking about boring warning videos when thinking about workplace safety or a court case when thinking about drunk driving.

>create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives

Unfortunately those humans are going to die and be maimed anyway. If those videos are out there, there's a chance of educating people on the danger of not paying attention crossing the road, or using a lathe, or throwing a firework into a sewer, or any of the million other mundane things that people do that don't seem super dangerous on first thought but actually are?

I strongly disagree. Out of sight out of mind.