LiveLeak

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

~ the goodbye ~

liveleak was the kind of link you got passed once in msn around 2007 or 2008. you opened it once and then you knew where it lived if you ever needed something youtube would not host. for most of its run that was the whole relationship i had with it. ogrish.com had been the previous tab you closed quickly, and liveleak was its slightly-tamer rebrand.

the site launched on october 31, 2006 out of the uk, with hayden hewitt as the public face. the early footprint was iraq war footage that the cable networks would not show. by late 2006 it had the saddam hussein execution cellphone video. that clip was on a lot of front pages worldwide. it was hosted on liveleak.

hewitt closed the site on may 5, 2021 and redirected the domain to itemfix, a safe-for-work video host run by the same team. he wrote that the world had changed and that liveleak no longer fit it. by then the gore-and-conflict video function had migrated to telegram channels and to twitter's broken moderation queue, so the cultural job liveleak did was already being done somewhere else.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

in the post-9/11 internet, liveleak was the place military footage went when there were no embedded reporters. hellfire missile cockpit clips on the war side. russian dashcam crashes on the curiosity side. some of the content was citizen journalism. most of it was rubbernecking. the site never pretended to be more than what it was, which was useful in a media environment that pretended a lot.

~ the decline ~

every content-moderation crisis the modern platforms now have, liveleak had first and louder. the christchurch shooter's livestream landed there mirrored within hours in 2019. moderators tried to keep the worst of it off the front page and lost. by the late 2010s the site was a liability for any advertiser and the team was a small exhausted crew running a brand no host wanted to point dns at.

~ what it became ~

itemfix is what hewitt pointed the dns at. it is video sharing without the gore, which means it is video sharing competing with youtube on a budget. the actual cultural object that liveleak was got distributed across telegram and reddit's quarantined corners. the brand died. the demand did not.

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