Best Gore

» see bestgore.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i did not go to shock sites. i was aware they existed in the same way anyone online in the 2000s was aware of rotten.com and ogrish. by 2008 when best gore launched i was 24 and finishing up an engineering degree in ankara, past whatever curiosity might have taken me to that part of the web at 15. best gore's audience was mostly english-speaking north americans already inside the shock-site subculture that rotten had opened up ten years earlier.

mark marek was a slovak-canadian based in edmonton. he registered bestgore.com on 30 april 2008 and ran it as a solo operation. the model was the same as rotten before it: user-submitted graphic images and video alongside war footage that would not be posted on the mainstream news sites of the day. what set best gore apart in the shock category was marek's willingness to post material even when it was under active law enforcement attention.

in june 2012 someone uploaded a video titled "1 lunatic, 1 ice pick" to the site. it was the actual footage of luka rocco magnotta murdering and dismembering jun lin, a chinese international student in montreal. marek left it up. edmonton police charged him on 16 july 2013 with corrupting morals under section 163 of the canadian criminal code, a rarely used statute with a two-year maximum sentence.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the case ~

this happened in the canadian legal system i had no visibility into. the case took two and a half years to resolve. marek was committed to stand trial in august 2014. in january 2016 he pleaded guilty and received a conditional sentence of three months house arrest plus three months community service. no jail time. the video came down but the conviction stuck.

the site itself did not close after the sentencing. marek kept publishing through 2016 and into 2017. in a 2017 interview he said the site was costing more than it was generating in ad revenue and that most mainstream ad networks had cut him off after the magnotta case became public.

~ what really happened ~

best gore went offline on 15 november 2020. marek posted a short note saying the site was down and that it would "most likely permanently" stay that way. he said he wanted to focus his attention on other interests. by that point the payment processing options had shrunk to almost nothing. cloudflare and the ad networks had both walked away. the site had been running on personal savings for a couple of years already.

~ what got buried with it ~

the shock site as a category had been dying since about 2015 anyway. the crimes that used to travel through sites like best gore now travel through telegram channels and encrypted group chats. the aggregator layer that rotten and best gore represented is not really needed when the material distributes peer-to-peer. best gore was the last of the big english-language public shock sites to close.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »