I will start off with a post from a wiser anon than I:
I never really participated in gore sites, I just lurked and collected. Places like liveleak and DR were like the wild west of free speech, and it was always interesting to see the perspectives of others entrapped in shithole countries where most of these sorts of videos take place. Liveleak thought itself more of a raw news network with uncensored stories, so it wasn't just pure unfiltered torture porn. Lotta verboten foreign language political stuff too, or just curious medical cases.
Anyway what drew me in to this stuff was how upset it would make me. The first exposure I had to nasty gory shit was in elementary school when we would go over to a friend's house and watch retarded spongebob edits on the original iteration of youtube. Some of those got pretty dark and one of them had clips from Saw. That really freaked me out and upset me to see. But at the same time it piqued some morbid curiosity in me and I wanted to feel that emotion again.
Well growing up I had an anxiety problem and I would constantly get intrusive thoughts of horrible painful shit like tripping while holding a pencil and gouging out my eye, losing control and stabbing myself in the face with a paring knife, jamming toothpicks under my fingernails and hitting a wall, etc. It would leave me nauseous and very afraid and almost physically feeling that pain. Eventually I got so fed up of being jerked around by my own emotions and fear, I decided I would get used to these awful situations and control my own feelings.
So I would go looking for gore and force myself to look at it and watch it and sit with the emotion until it didn't other me anymore. I was not allowed to look away and if someone was in pain I had to feel that pain with them. I started with fiction because it was easier to stomach knowing the blood was ketchup and it was a script. But once I was okay with that I moved on to IRL gore photos, and then videos, which were harder to deal with. But after years of ramping up what I can stomach I have become so jaded to pain and suffering that it's a skill I can use in my job in EMS. I see some nasty, gnarly, disgusting, horrifying shit IRL sometimes and it doesn't bother me at all, because like the black knight, "I've had worse." This strength allows me to set aside my discomfort with other people's pain and agony, and help them in a practical manner.
So gore is a tool one can use or abuse like any other, it can help inform you of the realities of the world that polite society desperately tries to ignore into nonexistence - or it can be fuel used to enhance those very destructive tendencies in yourself.
Once thing I will note, despite the trillions of videos out there taping crimes in action such as murder, physical assault, robberies, domestic violence, etc, there are practically zero where someone is filming adult on adult rape. Either the "gore community" has moral standards and some twisted form of chivalry, or there is some legal hand quietly plucking those videos away from the public eye as religiously as they do to videos of child abuse.
