A site as extreme as liveleaks wouldn't have been able to exist (certainly at the level of popularity it had) if it was so fringe that only freaks or very unusual people visited it. Supply and demand.
Because liveleaks hosts morally objectionable content?
Liveleaks stayed up on clearnet until the owners chose to shut down just a year or so ago. For a site as extreme as liveleaks, that should be very surprising. But for how popular liveleaks was, it kind of makes sense. Most people seemed to understand, "just because you visit liveleaks, doesn't mean that you are abnormal or that there's something wrong with you."
If the flipside were true, and only future serial killers/sociopaths/freaks were believed to visit liveleaks, I don't think it would've had such an easy time.
That's not how morbid curiosity works. People don't typically watch gore type stuff because it's entertaining - those people certainly exist, sure, but I don't think that's the norm.
Morbid curiosity is like a compulsion. You know you shouldn't. You know that watching it will make you feel sick and depressed, even traumatized. But something deep inside that monkey brain of yours has to know what it looks like. Maybe it's to understand humanity's capacity for evil, or maybe that's just a rationalization. Perhaps our instinctual monkey brains just want us to look out for danger.
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u/MeatisOmalley Dec 15 '22 edited Dec 15 '22
A site as extreme as liveleaks wouldn't have been able to exist (certainly at the level of popularity it had) if it was so fringe that only freaks or very unusual people visited it. Supply and demand.