[HN Gopher] Omegle 2009-2023
___________________________________________________________________
Omegle 2009-2023
Author : liamcottle
Score : 2307 points
Date : 2023-11-09 00:40 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.omegle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.omegle.com)
| Laaas wrote:
| What "attacks" is he referring to?
| veeti wrote:
| "Omegle: Suing the website that matched me with my abuser"
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| willk wrote:
| What happened to her is tragic. However, I don't think
| warnings or age verification would change anything. Kids are
| going to do things regardless if there is a warning or age
| verification system.
|
| I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to
| them, and to start talking to them early.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You can do both. Not everyone will talk to their kids (lots
| of both useless and under resourced parents out there), and
| guardrails _are_ possible, so best to not throw up our
| hands and say "welp, the world is just a terrible place."
|
| "There is a cost" or "I don't want to" are not reasonable
| excuses, depending on use case and regulatory regime you're
| operating under. It sucks, but there are many terrible
| people out there. Hopefully the EFF and ACLU can work to
| balance out regulation from government in this space.
|
| (what sites access is gated by age is a distinct
| conversation)
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23721306/online-age-verification-
| pr...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23494175/facebook-
| dating-...
|
| https://www.yoti.com/wp-content/uploads/Yoti-Age-
| Estimation-...
| mindslight wrote:
| It's not "the world is just a terrible place", but rather
| "the world inevitably has things that kids cannot
| handle". If you want digital entertainment for your kids,
| then seek out products which explicitly offer this. The
| unfettered Internet is a less appropriate babysitter than
| a red light district.
|
| And talking about "age verification" as if it's some
| straightforward addition is an utterly dishonest framing.
| The core idea of the distributed Internet is the barest
| of communication which further complexity/policy can be
| layered on top of. "Age verification" actually implies
| the much more draconian and chilling _meatspace identity
| verification_.
|
| Nobody has a problem with a DigitalKidsPlayLand which
| performs identity verification, strictly
| curates/moderates content, and escrows all activity for
| later review. It's this push to legally require such
| things for everyone, based on some idea that everything
| needs to be made kid-safe, that is horribly authoritarian
| and needs to be soundly rejected.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Your own link talks about the many downsides, not least
| of which entrenching the idea that website owners
| regularly demand government id from their users. No
| possible downsides to that...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There are always tradeoffs. There is no law that says
| website owners cannot demand ID already. We might have
| different belief systems and perspectives on the topic of
| safety and privacy as it relates to non adults and
| Internet accessibility, in which case we won't find
| middle ground. It happens. Democracy is messy. I
| encourage engagement regardless of your position on the
| topic. That is how we find (or at least attempt to) the
| least worst policy.
| x0x0 wrote:
| That's a facile handwaving of some pretty large ones.
| veeti wrote:
| There is no law that says they have to, thankfully.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > There is no law that says they have to, thankfully.
|
| Eight states as of this comment have legislation that has
| passed requiring age verification. Ten other states have
| introduced legislation that has not yet passed. (US
| centric)
|
| > In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring the use of
| age verification on websites that contain a "substantial
| portion" (33.33%) of adult content. Websites must utilize
| commercial age verification systems that check a user's
| government identification or "public or private
| transactional data" to confirm that a user is at least 18
| years old. Louisiana's law has sparked a flurry of
| copycat legislation to be introduced in state houses
| around the country.
|
| https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-
| bill...
| allan_s wrote:
| There is at least GDPR, if you have users of European
| citizenship, that requires a legal basis to do so if it
| is mandatory in your registration process
| rvcdbn wrote:
| Basic age verification is pretty easy, no? I'm not sure
| about the details but this seems like a pretty low bar for
| a site like this. Not that I'm advocating it be required
| but just that if it were me I would not make something like
| this without at least making the best possible attempt at
| age verification.
| x0x0 wrote:
| How is age verification easy?
| tyingq wrote:
| _" I'm not sure about the details"_
| adamomada wrote:
| Why isn't having an "over 18?" checkbox enough to have
| lawsuits brought by children (at the time or later)
| thrown out unceremoniously?
| fl0id wrote:
| Because that's not really verification, probably.
| lazide wrote:
| Because kids can check checkboxes no problem? And it's
| not even a real attempt at verification?
|
| Is this a real question?
|
| If someone showed up at a bar, would a bouncer accept
| that?
| adamomada wrote:
| It's because the cops can show up and demand ID from
| everyone inside, they have to make sure everyone has one.
|
| In this case, they have no obligation to ensure everyone
| has ID on their person.
|
| Can you sue a bar you used fake ID to get into?
|
| My real question wasn't if there are kids on the system
| or not, but why are they allowed to sue when they
| themselves and nobody else have lied about the age
| verification question?
| lazide wrote:
| Yes, kids can and have sued because they got served
| alcohol while underage - even if they asked for it. The
| whole premise is as minor they couldn't understand the
| consequences, and weren't fully responsible for their
| actions.
|
| And establishments get shut down all the time for it.
|
| [https://ftxidentity.com/blog/abc-laws-if-minor-is-
| served/]
|
| Next question?
| adamomada wrote:
| Your link from an ID verification company says "it
| depends" wrt fake id liability. I suppose there are sane
| places and crazy places in the world, for a limited time
| at least
| lazide wrote:
| Sure, here's a lawyers take -
| https://www.robertnkatz.com/amp/liability-for-selling-
| alcoho...
| adamomada wrote:
| Even he mentions that the shop is not liable if they ask
| for ID.
|
| Anyway, it's really twisted my original point your
| leaning into alcohol laws that do not apply.
|
| If I make a service that says nobody named Bob can use
| it, have a checkbox Not Bob? - how can I get sued by
| someone named Bob?
| lazide wrote:
| Only if they ask for ID, check it, and it looks so good
| no one could tell it was fake. That's about as far from
| checkbox in a random website pop up as we can get though,
| right?
|
| In your new example:
|
| - is there a regulatory reason that it is illegal for
| them to serve someone named Bob? Or is there a real
| risk/harm that people named Bob would suffer that they
| know about and is predictable?
|
| - did they do any of the checks they are legally required
| to do to prevent someone named Bob from accessing the
| service and therefore suffering that injury? Or make a
| good faith effort to not just injure any Bob's, at a
| minimum?
|
| If they didn't, then yet a Bob could sue if he managed to
| get through and get injured.
|
| Pretty weird example though.
| noirbot wrote:
| What is the "best possible attempt"? There's was a
| checkbox added (possibly after this suit was filed) that
| was a "I'm over 18 and understand I'm meeting random
| people". That's something every teen already clicks past
| constantly to see increasingly large swathes of the
| internet. Any actual "verification" seems quite difficult
| beyond just relying on self-attestation.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What is the "best possible attempt"? There's was a
| checkbox added (possibly after this suit was filed)
|
| It was after the suit was filed (prior to the suit, AIUI,
| Omegle had an over-18 warning (with no confirmation) on
| the Unmoderated chat option, and a stated policy that
| users had to be 18+ or 13+ with parents permission.
|
| Also, it may not have been _because_ of this suit, there
| is at least one other suit that was found not to be
| barred by Section 230 (this one avoided S230 immunity
| because it is a product liability suit, not one
| contingent on their role as a publisher; the other one I
| 've seen, IIRC, was found to raise a triable question of
| fact regarding whether Omegle's behavior was within the
| category of knowing involvement in trafficking that
| brought it out of S230 protection.)
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Age verification in a way that is both robust and privacy
| respecting is an impossibility.
|
| Pick one.
| tzs wrote:
| Why wouldn't something based on unlinkable blind
| signatures work? Basically site issues a token to user,
| user gets token unlinkably blindly signed by some
| recognized age verification entity (government agency,
| bank) that already has their personal information, user
| returns signed token to site, site verifies it was signed
| by the recognized age verification entity.
| echelon wrote:
| > As a young girl, Alice (not her real name) logged on to the
| popular live video chat website, Omegle, and was randomly
| paired with a paedophile, who coerced her into becoming a
| digital sex slave. Nearly 10 years later the young American
| is suing Omegle in a landmark case that could pave the way
| for a wave of lawsuits against other social platforms.
|
| This is fucked. We shouldn't have to put safety padding on
| everything as a stand-in for something parents are supposed
| to do, ie. being responsible for their brood.
|
| Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars
| and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?
|
| Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?
|
| Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we
| stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a
| neck and/or head?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| We do implement many things that protect people, sometimes
| children in particular. They aren't perfect, but they can
| prevent a lot of damage.
|
| The question, as usual, isn't all or nothing. It's what can
| we do that will meet all the criteria as best possible: not
| infringe on freedoms, reduce harm, be affordable, etc.
| bogota wrote:
| 100% agree i think the bigger issue is at least in the US
| and many other countries we have lost all faith that the
| people making those choices will do so in a responsible
| or ethical manner.
|
| Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don't think
| it will ever come back. So where do we go from here?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don't
| think it will ever come back. So where do we go from
| here?
|
| A bit extreme? It will come back if you choose it, if you
| do it. The despair, as I posted, is trendy but it's
| absurd - the most ridiculous, counterproductive
| philosophical trend I can imagine. Stop philosophizing
| and just start doing!
| bogota wrote:
| I don't think im being extreme. That is the way I see it.
| That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And
| that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
|
| What should I do? I have no one I want to vote for and
| honestly I don't care enough to do it myself. At this
| point it's just figuring out how you can profit off this
| and get your own piece of land to check out on.
|
| I don't find this to be depressing it's just what I see
| as facts.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I don't find this to be depressing
|
| We'd have to redefine depressing to exclude that post.
| Look at all the ways it advocates quitting; it's
| impressive in a way.
|
| > That is the way the various media outlets portray it.
| And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
|
| Do you think that makes it true? That seems to support my
| claim that it's trendy, and people repeating these things
| because others say it are by definition following a
| trend.
|
| I've seen many trends come and go, but this one - despair
| as a trend - is the dumbest.
|
| Also, who is going to get anything done? We aren't
| children; our parents won't fix things if we don't do it.
| We'd better get to work, like prior generations who
| sacrificed and built so much. What will you tell your
| grandkids - 'well, I just quit; it was the fashionable
| thing to do.'
|
| Have you considered this trend is encouraged by people
| who don't want you getting in their way? You are handing
| all your power to them.
| afavour wrote:
| > Should we put inflatable balloons around people because
| cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide
| with?
|
| You're talking in hyperbole but... yeah, we do a ton of
| work to make roads safer than they might otherwise be. What
| purpose do you think pedestrian crossings serve?
| lazide wrote:
| To make the bodies easier to collect? (/s kinda)
| CrimsonChapulin wrote:
| In the US, they serve to shift blame from distracted
| drivers for running someone over sadly (crappy j-walking
| laws) in addition to the normal use.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| It's horrible that this happened and obviously I'm glad the
| pedophile is in jail, but how exactly was she "coerced"?
| And how is any of this Omegle's fault?
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Yeah it's unfortunate, but I don't think Omegle is
| exactly at fault here. Perhaps we should consider the
| abuser to be the one at fault?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| We can and do, and on the other side of a legal process,
| it may be found that Omegle is not at all liable for the
| actions of its users.
|
| ... and if the owner of Omegle doesn't want to take the
| years it'd take (and tens of thousands in legal fees) to
| find out whether or not they're liable for a silly
| project they put together for fun, I can't fault 'em.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| > how exactly was she "coerced"?
|
| Yeah no this is a terrible take. She was coerced by being
| an 11 year old talking to a grown adult. How do you think
| she was coerced?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Usually being coerced would involve some amount of
| coercion.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Well that's the question I'm asking, and you didn't
| answer the question
|
| > coerce - persuade (an unwilling person) to do something
| by using force or threats.
|
| What was the threat? Why did she oblige? Why didn't she
| just block him?
| Crespyl wrote:
| Children, being children, are often gullible and easily
| manipulated, especially by someone practiced in the
| matter.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Yes but coercion implies a threat.
|
| If the guy was in another country, it's hard for me to
| imagine how she became a "digital sex slave" (how the
| article refers it) instead of just blocking the guy.
| Naturally I'd imagine there was some kind of blackmail
| for her to comply, but the article doesn't mention
| anything like that.
| buffington wrote:
| It's hard for you to imagine, and I'm going out on a bit
| of a limb here, because you're not a ten year old girl.
|
| I've been the parent of a ten year old girl, and can say
| with confidence that it's within the realm of possibility
| that an adult could manipulate a child in ways that
| ultimately would make that child afraid, if not utterly
| terrified, to be disobedient.
|
| You scraping and digging through the comments here
| imploring to know about how she was coerced suggests to
| me that what you're really looking for is a justification
| to blame the ten year old girl. "coercion implies a
| threat" implies that with no evidence of a threat, the
| girl must have played along. She must have liked it.
| That's the vibe you give as you dig in and keep demanding
| people prove there was a threat. I sincerely hope I'm
| wrong about that vibe.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| Your implied accusation is totally baseless.
|
| I am just logging a protest, I have absolutely no
| interest in discussing it.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| The blackmail was threatening her into thinking she'd be
| in legal trouble too. That's not true, but a terrified
| child isn't exactly running an optimal risk calculus.
| Even without that the content _itself_ is blackmail
| material.
|
| How was she coerced? Who knows. I'll take a guess and say
| she was probably tricked at first into thinking he was
| someone else. Threatened after that.
|
| _(EDIT: and for chrissakes get identifiable information
| out of your user profile if you 're going to argue this
| hard about something like this! Internet 101, man!)_
| stalinford wrote:
| This was the threat: "Once he had coerced Alice into
| sending intimate images, Fordyce convinced her that she
| was complicit in making and sharing child sexual abuse
| material. Fearing arrest, she kept everything secret from
| her family and friends."
|
| And it is a pretty credible threat:
| https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/maryland-sk-court-
| case-... https://www.wnyc.org/story/9114-sexting-teens-
| legal-straits-...
|
| Curiously enough, no one even thinks of holding the
| government/legal system responsible.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Punishing minors for "distributing child pornography"
| over content of themselves sent in private is completely
| outrageous. Had you not linked those sources there's no
| way I'd believe our justice system would be so absurdly
| inept.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| It's easier to blame Omegle than society or her parents
| failing to educate her about the dangers of the internet.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep.
|
| If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart
| too?
|
| Weird people, pedos, criminals are everywhere.... parents
| somehow teach about "stranger-danger" offline but not
| online, and then blame platforms their kids use, even
| though they are too young to use them in the first place.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| >If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue
| walmart too?
|
| Well, yes! A different example: with few exceptions (gun
| manufacturers), when people die everybody even remotely
| involved gets sued. Examples: Station Nightclub fire,
| Surfside condominium collapse..
|
| In the case of a pedo at Walmart I could imagine: "Didn't
| the staff notice the guy dragging the girl out of the
| store? Why didn't they get involved?" Walmart has much
| more money than the pedo.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Didn't the staff notice
|
| If you want a proper Walmart analogy then you should
| stick the child in a remote part of a vast parking lot,
| so that there's no reason to expect the staff to notice.
|
| And at that point the case seems too weak to try.
| nrb wrote:
| A more accurate analogy would be if they ushered the
| child into a backroom where a stranger was seated across
| from them with a glass divider between them and then they
| left the room. This is the whole point of Omeagle, to
| facilitate these interactions. Would it unsettle anyone
| if Walmart were doing that, and would they be legally
| responsible for whatever happens in there?
| troupe wrote:
| Probably should sue whoever manufactured the device, the
| ISP, and definitely whoever provided her with the device
| and paid for her internet access.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue
| Walmart too?
|
| Yes, meatspace public venues used by traffickers are
| frequently sued for enabling the trafficking [0], its not
| something unique to cyberspace venues.
|
| [0] e.g., https://guestban.com/2023/07/12/the-unseen-
| side-of-luxury-ho...
| buffington wrote:
| Walmart doesn't invite people of all ages to hang out in
| a private room together, with no supervision, no rules,
| no limits.
|
| Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated,
| somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The
| thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right,
| because how could it not be? It's used by so many people,
| and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to
| exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be
| held to _some_ standard, and, right or wrong, put trust
| in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.
|
| The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the
| private room scenario I described above. I left out the
| part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But
| persuasive people can persuade other people, especially
| children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only
| happened to some of the 74 million people using the site,
| it happened to people. And for those it happened to,
| those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without
| Omegle's help.
|
| If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting
| here about how unique and special Omegle was for people
| who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot
| of those comments.
|
| But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle
| was operating. With 74 million people using it, the
| smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more
| than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.
|
| The parents blame the platforms because the platforms
| enabled the harm.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?
|
| How about spoons? https://nypost.com/2019/05/16/police-
| station-mocked-for-phot...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Should we ban kitchen knives because they 're sharp?_"
|
| We do in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives
| "It's illegal to: use any knife or weapon in a threatening
| way, carry most knives or any weapons in public without a
| 'good reason', sell most knives or any weapons to anyone
| under the age of 18." - And yes that includes kitchen
| knives because there's a callout - "In Scotland, you're
| allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen
| knives."
|
| > " _Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide.
| Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that
| fits around a neck and /or head?_"
|
| We regulate them or have standards around them[3]: "The Toy
| Safety Directive, BS EN 71-1, raises attention to plastic
| bags and plastic sheets. It specifies bags larger than
| 380mm opening circumference and having a drawstring closure
| must be made of a material which is permeable to air.
| Except where application requires airtight sealing, all
| bags are to be perforated with holes of 4mm diameter
| minimum, spaced on 30mm grid. Bags for child appealing
| products and toys must have a minimum of four holes; other
| bags to have a minimum of two holes".
|
| Your stance "we shouldn't have to do things about dangers"
| is silly, we do a lot of things to reduce risks in a lot of
| areas. Learning from other people's tragedies and trying to
| safeguard others from having to go through them is one of
| the long-running threads of civilised society.
|
| Should we restrict electric wiring options in houses
| because electrocution and fires are a thing? Yes. Should we
| restrict food production options because salmonella is a
| thing? Yes. Should we have building codes because shoddy
| buildings fall down and kill people? Yes. Should we have
| laws about lead and carcinogens and things in products?
| Yes. Should cars have to meet crash test safety conditions?
| Yes. etc. etc.
|
| > " _Should we put inflatable balloons around people
| because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can
| collide with?_ "
|
| We do; drivers are surrounded by inflatable airbags. [rant]
| Look at the social messaging around bike helmets. You never
| see people telling runners to wear a helmet in case they
| suddenly come upon a head injury. But take say YouTuber Tom
| Stanton who makes unusual engineering projects, including a
| flywheel bike[1] which he rode at walking pace down an
| empty country lane, and in his next bike video, a homemade
| supercapacitor bike[2] he's wearing a a helmet because of
| all the flack he got in the comments on the earlier one.
|
| The point is not whether helmets prevent against brain
| damage in certain situations, the point is what situations
| are casual everyday recreational cyclists getting into
| where they risk brain damage? And the answer is cars. And
| the social messaging for helmet wearing is to shift blame
| from car drivers hitting cyclists to cyclists "not taking
| safety precautions".
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gahKxbwUcYw
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_f8Q2_Q_J0
|
| [3] https://qualityinspired.co.uk/2020/03/suffocation-
| warning-re...
| silenced_trope wrote:
| Let the legal process play out.
|
| I'm not a fan of this journalist "ambushing" the founder at
| his property and staying outside of it until he gets some
| answers. "He has all the blinds closed" - right.
|
| Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and
| needs to provide answers.
|
| Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a
| fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners
| performing public shaming rituals.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| How would that work? The public wouldn't know anything
| about anything unless a judge convicted someone.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Under German law, anyone involved in a criminal case has
| the right to privacy. The press are free to report on the
| case, but they cannot identify the suspect or victim. If
| you watch or read German news, you'll see everything you
| expect to see in a report about a crime, except for names
| and faces.
|
| Personally, I think this is an entirely reasonable
| balance between competing rights. Publicly identifying
| suspects can cause immense harm to innocent people and
| prejudice the right to a fair trial based on the
| presumption of innocence. I cannot see any public
| interest argument for the general right to publicly
| identify criminal suspects, beyond mere prurient
| interest. If there would be substantial investigative
| benefits to publicly naming a suspect, for example to
| encourage witnesses or other victims to come forward,
| that should be a decision for the courts (or at least the
| police) and that decision should be made based on the
| individual circumstances of the case.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Under German law, anyone involved in a criminal case
| has the right to privacy.
|
| Until convicted, I presume?
|
| Are the identites of those arrested (and possibly
| prosecuted but acquitted) protected forever?
| echelon wrote:
| > Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally
| not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and
| executioners performing public shaming rituals.
|
| I'm starting to feel _this_ is the thing we should have
| laws against.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| How exactly do you imagine those laws would be
| structured?
| wpasc wrote:
| Harassment law would probably suffice with case law and
| precedent starting to cover the specific type of
| harassment
| mplewis wrote:
| How would you separate legitimate journalism from
| harassment?
| Gabf74phcJ2bJpr wrote:
| The same way you do today: by examining the circumstances
| and the actions.
| safety1st wrote:
| This is a really important question for sure and I want
| to protect the rights of journalists, but in this
| instance the reporter from the BBC sat in front of Leif's
| house for 7 hours, fully aware that Leif was there and
| didn't want to speak to him, and then when he briefly
| emerged, accused him of not protecting children. It feels
| more like entrapment and harassment than reporting. It
| also feels like the type of theater the BBC knows they
| can get away with because the topic is child abuse and we
| seem to lose all restraint as a society when this topic
| comes up.
| yawpitch wrote:
| So you're a fan of judges doing their jobs, but not a fan
| of journalists doing theirs?
|
| Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have
| accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the
| story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of
| literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for
| actual centuries now.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Investigative reporters should act professionally. They
| should setup a formal appointment with the accused and
| remain neutral. In the bbc report they showed up
| uninvited and asked "We want to know why you're not
| protecting children, Mr. Brooks" which is a loaded
| question [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
| yawpitch wrote:
| That's not actually a loaded question... they had a
| source with clear and convincing proof of the criminal
| victimization of numerous children by one of Mr. Brooks's
| users who had weaponized the service he provided, as well
| as both law enforcement and child protection
| organizations indicating that Omegle's service was being
| actively weaponized against children; as a matter of both
| rhetoric and law it was a foregone conclusion that Mr.
| Brooks was not protecting children, and there's obvious
| public interest in his answer to that question. Arguably
| it's something you could criticize as gotcha journalism,
| but that's often a weak critique because you saying
| they've got an agenda is predicated on you having your
| own. Also there is a LONG history of very credible
| journalists tracking down and confronting those who don't
| want light shone on their activities and therefore aren't
| exactly inclined to schedule formal appointments... sure,
| it can be seen as showboating, especially for a
| television journalist, but it's still just one of the
| tools of investigative journalism and you'd call it legit
| if it was exposing some form of public corruption or
| criminal activity that was beyond your personal pale.
| strken wrote:
| I wouldn't ever call it legit for a journalist to chase
| someone around yelling questions at them and then use the
| footage, because it's the kind of thing that makes the
| "guest" look guilty regardless of actual guilt.
|
| Showing up and getting actual answers, sure, but if you
| chased me around yelling questions about why I'm not
| protecting the children I would 100% run away rather than
| give you an in-depth interview. It looks bad until you
| think about it for five seconds and realise how
| confronting the situation is to even an innocent man,
| just like the Reid technique etc.
| RakutenSatori wrote:
| If they were journalists they would know something about
| journalism ethics.
|
| Asking loaded questions and trying to aggressively ambush
| you is definitely not "getting the other side of the
| story".
| yawpitch wrote:
| It certainly is when you attempt to avoid making public
| comment over some matter to which the public has an
| overriding interest.
|
| In terms of ethics, I'll side with the journalist's here
| over the guy running a service that randomly matches
| adults with children for video chat when he didn't
| immediately shut down the service for a top-to-bottom
| rethink the moment he found out it'd been used by a
| serial pedophile.
| RakutenSatori wrote:
| There is no journalist here to side with unfortunately.
| Ethics are infringed upon whether the other party is
| responsible for worse violations or not. It's not an
| either-or situation.
|
| You can't shut down everything once a bad actor does
| heinous things. There would be nothing left around. No
| more streets, no more cafes, no more trash bins, no more
| cars. Nothing.
|
| As it has been pointed out, omegle did arguably provide
| more protection against bad actors that lots of other
| services around today. If you're in a situation you don't
| like, just press next and it's over. Nobody can contact
| you or recognise you in any way.
|
| The crimes happen when you're not anonymous anymore,
| after exchanging snapchat or instagram accounts for
| example. They don't happen in a months long omegle
| conversation.
|
| The root of the problem is being careless and providing
| identifying information. Obviously kids are too young to
| understand all the dangers, that's what parents are for.
| You wouldn't let your kids alone in the middle of the
| city and then sue it when a pedophile gets access to
| them. You can't let your kids use the Internet without
| keeping an eye on what is going on and warning them of
| the perils.
| silenced_trope wrote:
| When judges do their job, you the accused have due
| process and legal representation.
|
| I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would
| need legal and competent representation if I were accused
| of something.
|
| We know from people that have _actually consented_ to be
| in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that
| even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a
| pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some
| cases.
|
| Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no
| "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay
| with.
|
| If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an
| investigation, carried out by the designated
| representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are
| paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the
| wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > We know from people that have actually consented to be
| in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that
| even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a
| pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some
| cases.
|
| Your actions as the officer of a company are generally
| considered to be "public".
|
| You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you
| certainly don't have to answer questions from a
| journalist either, but they're not generally invading
| your privacy by merely asking them).
| yawpitch wrote:
| He wasn't being accused of a criminal act, ergo he didn't
| need legal representation on hand. He was being asked by
| a professional journalist for a world-renowned publishing
| source why he wasn't doing more as the responsible
| officer to keep his company's product from putting
| children into harms way in exactly the way his product
| was designed to perform... he had neither any right to
| avoid being questioned nor any real interest in avoiding
| providing comment. He might not like being approached,
| and if he has some condition that makes such in-person
| discussion difficult I'm certainly sympathetic but he
| could just as certainly have communicated by email as he
| had been asked to do, but chose not to.
|
| As for the reputational risk you're pointing to, nothing
| here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc... the
| journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him
| into changing his business's product to prevent the very
| real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to
| perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he
| wasn't doing more to prevent his platform's weaponization
| when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for
| exactly that use case.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Answer me honestly, have you stopped beating your spouse
| yet? Yes or no answers only accepted.
| TheDong wrote:
| The legal process has played out. The Omegle founder has
| been faced with having to spend possibly hundreds of
| thousands in legal fees, and as such has decided to turn
| off the site without going to court.
|
| The legal process playing out rarely ever means that a
| judge or jury makes a decision, rather it usually plays out
| as an economic problem, one of "does everyone involved have
| 10s of thousands of dollars to burn".
|
| Usually the answer is "no", so usually it settles out of
| court.
| nomel wrote:
| Is it this one instance, or is it the fact that it can
| connect children to adults? Or general moderation problems
| that include that? Or maybe attacks as in lawyers?
| Prezident_Zappa wrote:
| Absolutely ridiculous in every way.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Waiting outside someone's house for 7 hours, running after
| them, and spouting accusations through the door doesn't sound
| like my idea of "trying to have a civilized conversation".
| The BBC should be deeply embarrassed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Thank you. Such a huge wall of text posted, yet the only thing
| that remotely explains "why" is a vague reference to "attacks."
| What attacks??
| m4jor wrote:
| The A.M. vs Omgele case if I had to guess.
| woleium wrote:
| Back to Chatroulette then? Having not used either platform,
| what's the difference?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Back to whatsapp and other encrypted services whereby the
| corporate overlord can plead ignorance of how thier systems are
| used. Omegle didnt evolve to meet the new standard: dont
| connect people. Let them do that themselves. Then you cannot be
| blamed when the wrong two people meet via your system.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Can you meet people randomly on any of those services? That
| would be an interesting feature.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| No, but you can join massive "private" groups and find
| rando people yourself.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is it anonymous?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Is HN? What degree of anonymity qualifies?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| We were talking about substitutes for Omegle, so that
| degree of anonymity.
| sepoes wrote:
| ome tv, and monkey app both require sign up
| poglet wrote:
| WeChat has a shake feature, also a people near me feature.
| I think telegram also has a location based feature.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| At least in the country where I live the "people near me"
| features have been removed/blocked from
| WeChat/Zalo/Telegram because they are overwhelmingly
| (like 99% of the time) used for prostitution.
| zo1 wrote:
| Prostitution happens over WA, SMS, plain old phone calls
| and everything under the sun.
|
| They don't seem to go after the communication channels,
| they go after the discovery mechanisms.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| "People near me" is sort of the opposite of Omegle.
| Izkata wrote:
| What I got from a quick search, the order was:
|
| * Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats
|
| * Chatroulette launched ~half a year later
|
| * Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after that
|
| I've not used either one so I don't know if there was more to
| it. Does explain how I knew about Chatroulette but not this
| one, even though people up above were talking about how it was
| an original idea.
| unlog wrote:
| We built a website over a year ago https://ehmeh.com/ In there
| you can video chat with multiple people, similar to Omegle. The
| difference may be that the video chat is in ASCII and the
| connection is done in WebRTC, fun alternative.
| RagnarD wrote:
| It's unfortunate that I only now found about this site, now that
| it's shut down.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I'd never heard of it either. And the comments make it sound
| like there was a big difference between what it started as and
| what it turned into.
| xwdv wrote:
| To the founder of Omegle, I would say: do not lose heart. The
| moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
| In the end, we will prevail over those who destroy the good works
| of others under the guise of false victimhood and social justice,
| and build a very special place in hell for them, where we will
| condemn them for all eternity.
| jachee wrote:
| Alas, the universe can stay unjust longer than we can stay
| conscious.
| xwdv wrote:
| Still, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose
| shade they will never sit in.
| t-3 wrote:
| Platitudes might help maintain optimism, but how do you get
| old clear-cutters and strip-miners to start planting trees?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| A stitch in time is worth two in the bush
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| I don't really see what aspect of this situation involves a
| false sense of victimhood, unless you are referring to the
| multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age
| verification to their website.
| gruez wrote:
| >unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who
| is unwilling to add age verification to their website.
|
| Mandated ID checks are fine as long as we're using it to
| bludgeon the privileged in the process?
| tyg13 wrote:
| How is age verification supposed to work? I don't suppose
| users of the site are going to provide legal documents just
| to use it. It's tantamount to shutting it down.
|
| I ask because there was a similar moral outrage around age
| verification for access to porn sites that I recall being a
| big issue a while ago. I don't recall exactly how it played
| out in court, but it appeared to amount to nothing, which I
| can't help but to feel was due to the fact that mechanisms to
| verify someone's age online are either trivial to circumvent
| or present such a high barrier to entry that no reasonable
| user would surmount it.
| intrasight wrote:
| It's supposed to work perfectly. That was easy. Next?
|
| But in all seriousness, age verification will soon be a
| legal reality. It's only "hard" because it's optional. When
| the government makes it required, they'll also have to make
| it possible - or those laws won't stand up in court. It'll
| probably require government issued digital IDs and MFA
| hardware.
| devman0 wrote:
| How do you verify someone's age anonymously? More
| practically, how do you do this in a framework that works
| globally?
| intrasight wrote:
| > How do you verify someone's age anonymously
|
| No anonymity on social media sites. Not saying that's
| desirable - but it's the logical conclusion. You can run
| your own site anonymously.
|
| > how do you do this in a framework that works globally
|
| Lots of things work globally but are subject to local
| laws.
| sepoes wrote:
| age verification wouldve killed it. most legitimate users
| use the site because they can just open the site and start
| talking without sign up
| deciduously wrote:
| > bends toward justice
|
| [citation needed]
| wins32767 wrote:
| https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/21/arc-
| mor....
| injeolmi_love wrote:
| What makes you think the universe bends towards justice? For
| the last 10 years, every metric of personal and economic
| freedom has declined. Most countries peaked in 2007. Its
| starting to look like personal freedom was an anomaly and we're
| now retiring to the historic norm.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Turns out Thrasymachus was right after all.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I truly admire your optimism.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while
| similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because
| Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with
| an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without
| batting an eye. Apparently Omegle doesn't have an army of
| lawyers.
| echelon wrote:
| This used to be exactly what the EFF and ACLU were for.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Regardless of any arguments about legitimacy, the optics of
| the EFF and ACLU defending Omegle against a child sex abuse
| victim are horrible. They need to raise funds from donors and
| having to explain that they fought against an individual
| abuse victim seems like the kind of position they would want
| to avoid. What I imagine they would do is fight against any
| overzealous legislation some politician tries to throw
| together in some ham-fisted response to this kind of
| situation.
|
| EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these
| groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences
| here.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Framing this as "what about the children" is an easy way to
| attack just about anything that's not strictly top-down
| from some large corporate vendor.
|
| On the other hand, I do wonder if "talk to strangers" is
| indeed a reasonable model. Our brains form largely on the
| basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers.
| Clearly that model works there. But then again the neurons
| are simple (relatively) cells with much more cohesive goals
| and behavior, while humans are complex entities with
| behavior ranging from the cooperative to the ghastly
| predatorial.
|
| Ultimately it seems any such service can't be anonymous.
| Talk to strangers... fine. But you need to register first,
| with your name, face, age, and meet consequences for what
| you're doing on the service, if your intent is less than
| noble. Alas this takes people and money which Omegle
| apparently didn't have.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking
| and connecting to strangers.
|
| This is nonsense. Our neurons don't talk to strangers.
| They talk with other neurons from the same individual.
| There is more in common between any two connected neurons
| than between two family members.
|
| And besides there is no reason to think that what happens
| between cells is a good model to base human behaviour on
| whatsoever.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| you're taking a metaphor overly serious.
|
| Socialization is important (we have decades of
| documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain
| in mere weeks of solitary confinement), and we can't nor
| shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same
| relatives for your entire life. If only because we
| biologically have urges to reproduce and are aware enough
| of biology to know that family reproduction is a horrible
| idea.
| krisoft wrote:
| > you're taking a metaphor overly serious.
|
| I just point it out that it is a bad one.
|
| > Socialization is important.
|
| Yes.
|
| > we have decades of documentation on how you can
| permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary
| confinement
|
| Yes.
|
| > and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that
| socialization with the same relatives for your entire
| life
|
| Yes.
|
| see how easy it was to write it without asserting
| falsehoods about neurons, and without drawing unsupported
| conclusions from said falsehood?
|
| A metaphor can be faulty even if the conclusion it
| purports to end up with is true. And if we can do away
| without the obscuring metaphor (as you did in this very
| comment I'm responding to) then we should.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| What an odd response. I'm not even sure how to react.
| Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.
| krisoft wrote:
| > What an odd response.
|
| Thank you.
|
| > Your claim is we must only communicate with our
| families.
|
| No. Please read my comment again. I claim no such thing.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > optics
|
| Didn't they used to specifically and notably not care about
| this? See ACLU defense of neo nazi march.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sure, but then what happened.
|
| I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature
| of freedoms. Or the public that funds it has and it
| realized that it can't do any good if donors pull support
| because it keeps supporting Nazis. Maybe distinction
| without a difference.
| ethanbond wrote:
| > I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the
| nature of freedoms.
|
| Of all the targets of ire for "woke culture" etc., I'm
| really surprised that ACLU, SPLC and similar aren't
| getting more heat. They're _actually_ highly
| consequential in people 's daily lives and can clearly be
| ideologically captured by a rather small group of people,
| given that the orgs themselves are so small.
|
| Much better targets of critique than random Twitter mobs.
| lazide wrote:
| It's mostly because they're frankly irrelevant anymore
| (near as I can tell).
| fastball wrote:
| Money corrupts all.
| Obergruppen wrote:
| The ACLU is not the same organization that it used to be.
| That neo nazi march they defended was almost 50 years
| ago. It is doubtful they would take a similar stance
| today.
| bitcurious wrote:
| The ACLU of Virginia did defend the rights of white
| supremacists to organize in Charlottesville in 2017. I
| believe the resulting violence triggered some aclu soul
| searching and I'm not sure where the organization landed
| on defending the free speech of nazis and the like.
| Speaking for myself, I hope they keep to their
| principles.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I hope they keep to their principles.
|
| Not anymore. The Charlottesville incident was the straw
| that broke the camel's back [0][1][2].
|
| There was a revolt from donors and plenty of lawyers
| against their stance during Charlottesville.
|
| [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-
| speech.html
|
| [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-
| first-amendm...
|
| [2] -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-
| speec...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| damn, that's rough. It's a shame because yes, the first
| amendment does include "the right of the people peaceably
| to assemble"
|
| But that's the rub, PEACEABLY. Clearly what happened in
| Charlottesville violated that and is no longer protected
| under the constitution. But we can't ever truly predict
| the actions of an individual in a large group.
|
| I'm very torn. I feel like we veer into Minority Report
| if we start having to predict what assemblies are prone
| to violation or not.
| sdfhioandion wrote:
| They sure did, but they've changed. They helped obtain
| permits for the "Unite the Right" rally in
| Charlottesville, which devolved into a MAGA riot that
| ended with a white supremacist murdering one protestor
| and injuring 35 others. Since then the ACLU has become
| far more squeamish about their clients and has been
| willing to compromise on their historical principles.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-
| johnn...
|
| I think the ACLU is still a good organization, but it's
| no longer the ACLU. It should be monomaniacal and
| universally despised.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > I think the ACLU is still a good organization
|
| > It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
|
| Never thought I'd get whiplash just from reading a
| comment on Hacker News.
| COGlory wrote:
| no, that's what they are for. The entire point is that they
| don't care about optics. I let my membership go when it
| came obvious they were starting to care.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Didn't the ALCU defend Nazis in the past?
| echelon wrote:
| And satanists. And homophobic churches. They used to know
| no point on the political compass and would defend all
| liberties.
| lazide wrote:
| Except anything second amendment (and a few others).
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The nazis, or free speech and freedom of assmbly?
| bobsmooth wrote:
| A Nazi's right to free speech and assembly, yes.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Nazis are people, and being a nazi is not a crime. Until
| they commit some sort of crime they should be afforded
| all the same basic human rights and freedoms as everyone
| else. That's just basic common sense.
| zo1 wrote:
| Everyone here keeps using that word, and I'm sitting here
| confused.
|
| Can we sit down and define it, or are we to forever just
| throw it around as a convenient "bad people"?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| In the case I expect the OP meant[1], it was the National
| Socialist Party of America, an explicitly neo-Nazi
| organization.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Part
| y_of_Am...
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| You're acting like the ACLU hasn't _specifically_ stood up
| for child molesters in cases about sexual offense
| notification. It's not about that. They just care more
| about cases that will give them free publicity than
| defending a floundering website.
| specialp wrote:
| They have changed their direction considerably since
| 2016. The cases they take on now tend not to align with
| an absolutist stance on freedom of speech and due
| process.
|
| When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd
| they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think
| the days that they would defend the speech of deeply
| unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
|
| This is their plea for donations: "Abortion care, trans
| people's right to live freely, people's right to vote -
| our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate
| today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and
| nationwide."
|
| Now I am not saying these are bad causes but it seems
| their priorities have shifted. They don't seem to be
| defending deeply unpopular people anymore
| lazide wrote:
| And frankly, they always had a very selective list of
| things they bothered to get involved in. There are a ton
| of civil liberties they always avoided doing anything
| about.
|
| But they're mostly irrelevant anymore - the causes
| they've started going after have a thousand other non-
| profits doing as much for, or better now.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > But they're mostly irrelevant anymore
|
| The ACLU war chest has been over $400M the last few
| years, with many thousands of people in pretty much every
| state working with the organization in some capacity.
|
| There's absolutely no evidence to support your claims
| that either the ACLU is irrelevant, nor that it has
| somehow shifted its momentum considerably since 2016 in
| what class of cases it handles (especially given the age
| of the organization and number of shifts vs. overall
| societal/cultural changes).
|
| On the contrary, I can find many recent examples of legal
| actions spread headed by the ACLU across dozens of issues
| all over the country. If you can't find any it's because
| you're not looking, though you can start with their
| Annual Reports.
| lazide wrote:
| Oh my, their annual reports!
|
| I got my impression from following the actual court cases
| and related news. Weird eh?
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Your multiple statements of the ACLU's irrelevance tells
| me you don't have reliable sources. I would wager you've
| spent more time on these comments, than actually reading
| up on the ACLU and its activities. You're welcome to hold
| any opinion you want about the organization, though
| without supporting evidence I doubt anyone else is going
| to share it with you.
| lazide wrote:
| I was a card carrying member for over a decade, and still
| read their reports.
|
| But go ahead and project all you want.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| > When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd
| they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think
| the days that they would defend the speech of deeply
| unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
|
| Hard to square this assessment with the last news item I
| caught about the ACLU: fighting a gag order against
| Donald Trump on free speech grounds.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| This is the pretty standard issue of, as the US drifts
| further and further to the right, anyone who stays
| relatively stable is now accused of being liberal or
| leftist.
| specialp wrote:
| That is noble they did that and shows that they still
| have that element in them. I do not support Trump, and it
| shows objectivity to defend someone like him when his
| rights are infringed as they seem to be in that case.
|
| The NY Times has covered the internal friction in the
| ACLU to take on more progressive causes as well. I was
| wrong to say they have completely strayed from defending
| speech absolutely but they do seem to have moved focus
| away. [1]
|
| 1.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-
| speech.html
| mquander wrote:
| For people who agree with the libertarian stance, the
| optics aren't horrible, of course, they are good. The
| question is whether there are enough of those people to
| sustain an organization like the EFF.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| I donate a large sum yearly to the EFF and so should all
| of you. Great org overall.
| fragmede wrote:
| The ACLU speaks up for the rights of murderers and rapists
| that we don't like, because we don't want the system to be
| able to abrogate the rights of politically inconvenient
| people that the powers that be don't like. Like Edward
| Snowden or Chelsea Manning. The ACLU and the EFF aren't
| about optics, but the underlying rule of law. We are better
| than a mob with pitchforks, even when we _really_ don 't
| like the perpetrator.
| userinanother wrote:
| That's the aclu of pre trump America. The new aclu is no
| longer willing to fight for that
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| fuck the optics.
|
| Really, I'd like to flip the script here and dare anyone
| _against_ EFF protecting Omegle to post their real life
| resume /linkedin/etc.
|
| I'll do my part to make sure you're unhirable, because the
| "optics" of destroying something as simple and innocent as
| this are terrible, and what's actually happening is pseudo-
| anonymous pressure.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The article mentions supporting the EFF if you are opposed to
| this kind of thing. It's possible they offered to help but
| the owner was sick of it all. That's the impression I got
| from reading the piece.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while
| similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because
| Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms
| with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off
| without batting an eye.
|
| Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight
| Omegle's basic behavior, to start with.
| wavemode wrote:
| What "basic behavior" is that? Anonymously video chatting
| strangers on the internet? Can't you already do that in many
| Discord servers? Or on dozens of other apps and websites
| (e.g. Chatroulette)? There clearly isn't anything
| fundamentally illegal about the practice, or these would all
| be shut down.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| You'll notice that all of those sites have registrations
| where you have to create an account and affirm that you're
| over the age of 13 rather than just putting "Don't use this
| if you're under 13" in tiny print at the bottom of a page.
| Even Chatroulette has a big popup where you have to affirm
| you're over 18 and that you agree to their terms and
| conditions before using the site..
| notimetorelax wrote:
| What does this accomplish?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| A minimal level of protection against lawsuits like the
| one that just killed Omegle.
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes, obviously, but what does it prevent in terms of the
| outcome we care about, i.e child abuse?
|
| We shouldn't just take zealous well-paid lawyers as a
| fact of nature. If those "defense against
| lawsuits"-actions actually don't make a difference in
| terms of reducing child abuse, then we should not let
| them make a difference in the legal system either.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Another case of not making perfect the enemy of good.
| Some percentage of children who see a disclaimer saying,
| "Do not use if you're under 18, click here to confirm
| you're 18+" and decide not to lie and login -- so as a
| base level, sites that are dangerous for kids should do
| that.. the should also do a bunch of other stuff, and it
| certainly should be mitigating to Omegle's liability that
| they were doing a bunch of other stuff, but they
| apparently didn't do a few easy things which may cost
| them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| it's the difference between an open and closed (unlocked)
| door. Very small actions can be a surprising deterrent
| for many people.
| taurath wrote:
| When has that ever effectively stopped anything? Is it
| that it seems more careful?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's like having a "no trespassing" sign and a fence
| around your pool. You still might be in legal trouble if
| a kid hops your fence and drowns, but you're vastly
| better off from a legal perspective than the alternative
| of not having any barrier whatsoever.
| sgift wrote:
| That comparison hinges on having to click "yes, I'm over
| 13" being more of a fence+sign than a "tiny" text saying
| you should only use the website if you are 13 or older.
| I'm sure some lawyer will argue that's the case - since
| I'm not one: Sounds rather flimsy.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's certainly the case, especially legally.
|
| Here's Chatroulette's login screen:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/PV3sT0r
|
| And from Archive.org, here's how Omegle's looked when the
| girl who is now suing them joined the site. "Tiny text"
| isn't an exaggeration. The call to action to start a text
| chat is a 200x50 button -- the 'don't use if you're under
| 13' text is 0.75em font:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/QpFBJ15
|
| It should be obvious to everyone, not just 'some lawyer'
| that the former is more of a barrier than the latter.
| There's also the concept of overt acts in many statutes -
| lying to a website by clicking a button that says "I'm
| over 18" when you're not demonstrates that you read the
| disclaimer and disregarded it, where you can plausibly
| claim you never saw the copy when it's just legalese on
| the bottom of the page.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| I expect at least some kids to be scared off by this.
|
| The BBC article above states that Omegle is being
| mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If
| 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13",
| that would be 10 cases fewer.
| newswasboring wrote:
| How does any of this assist in safety? These just sound
| like things they do to cover there asses.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| Discord is not anonymous and chatroulette is next on the
| choppingblock
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g.
| Chatroulette)?
|
| Chatroulette, the one most similar to Omegle, like Omegle,
| was started by a teenager alone (at about the same time),
| with the additional advantage (from the point of
| vulnerability to civil liability) of being in Russia.
|
| But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of
| criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and
| adults-only very early on, had an easier way to report
| inappropriate content, automatic temporary bans for too
| many reports too close together, and adopted other
| mitigations beyond what Omegle has.
| noirbot wrote:
| What do you think Facebook Groups are if not a poorly age-
| verified way to talk to strangers on the internet?
| 3np wrote:
| OP doesn't mention anything about a lawsuit - got more
| information on that?
|
| EDIT: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I find it hard to be polite to people who try to blame the
| world around them for their poor luck and poor parenting.
| 4star3star wrote:
| What happened to the plaintiff was really messed up, but I
| don't see how it's the site's problem. Suppose you answer a
| newspaper personal ad, meet up with the person and get all
| your limbs chopped off. Yeah, that fucking sucks, but we're
| not about to shut down the newspaper.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Maybe... But if this is a real problem with Omegle (the
| article mentions that it is a common grooming platform)
| then it's not like there's _nothing_ they could do. Did
| it even have age verification?
|
| On balance I still think Omegle should win the case, but
| I don't think it's entirely without merit.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Age verification would probably require some form of ID,
| killing the site.
| randunel wrote:
| Did the internet provider have age verification? The DNS
| Resolution service? The SSL certificate authority? What
| about the electricity company? Or any other service or
| non-service provider which contributes in one way or
| another to online streaming, such as Logitech for
| providing a webcam, Dell for the computer, Nvidia for the
| graphics card.
|
| After all, no grooming happened on omegle, that's just
| where they shared contact details. Grooming apparently
| happened on other platforms, and the common denominator
| seems to be the internet and everything that makes it
| work, not omegle.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| my thoughts exactly. I don't understand why people are so
| hasty to blame any and all tangentially related to
| societal issues. But it happens all the time for websites
| who exist and let people post content.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The BBC went to his _house_ , he clearly didn't want to talk,
| so they stayed there for hours, waiting for him to come out?
|
| That's is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below
| the BBC.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| The reporter seems insufferable.
|
| > Yells at the man's house "Why aren't you protecting
| children?"
|
| > Turns to camera "I just wanted to have a civil
| conversation. He doesn't want to talk... ever"
|
| Sure man, civil conversation.
| nektro wrote:
| article is from february
| SamPatt wrote:
| I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It
| echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the
| magic of the early internet we witnessed during our coming of age
| feels threatened.
|
| I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects
| which aren't as stressful.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I find it interesting that the "magical period" seems to be
| determined by your age.
|
| For me, the internet has already lost its magic by the time the
| mid 2000s came around, well before Omegle came out in 2009.
|
| For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was
| growing up.
|
| In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current
| internet as the time when the magic was there?
|
| It seems more about the magic of childhood itself than anything
| to do with the technology.
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Yep, each generation thinks they're special. But I think the
| early internet was different since it had literally just went
| from 0->1
| adamomada wrote:
| IMHO the early internet was different in one important way
| - you used to have to know how to use a computer that was
| fairly complex to even get online vs mashing glass on a
| touchscreen device that is always connected that you have
| approximately 0% idea of how it works
|
| That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter
| than the average user today
| iopq wrote:
| I went online in 1999 and it was almost always online
| DSL, so the idiots were just as bad back then. Those that
| didn't have DSL had AOL which is one click to get online
| fragmede wrote:
| Yeah but even then they had to work to escape AOL's
| walled garden, which mostly served to keep them in,
| rather than the rest of us out.
| ekianjo wrote:
| 1999 is not early internet by any measure...
| iopq wrote:
| 1999 is closer to the invention of the internet than
| present day
|
| TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 and commercial ISPs
| didn't exist until 1989
| joshspankit wrote:
| Since you made your statement with quite a lot of
| condescension it's morally difficult to seem to agree
| with any part of it.
|
| But, separately, my own experience is that there is a
| particular quality to those places where people need to
| pass a barrier of entry to get in and those are still
| happening all over the place. I played against highly-
| skilled players on day 1 of the PS4 launch, had
| intelligent conversations on Clubhouse when it was
| invite-only, and regularly find people with clear minds
| inside certain pay-only doors.
|
| I think the early internet was just that effect on a
| scale that was more impactful to the public where now
| everything is so siloed and fragmented.
|
| Media conglomerates and tech oligopolies make it seem
| like people are "idiots now" but humans are humans and I
| don't think that's changed in the last few decades.
| SamPatt wrote:
| You may be right. The author mentioned being in their 30s,
| and so am I, but I'm at the tail end and they're probably at
| the start.
|
| Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.
| sroussey wrote:
| Same here. That's when we were running a forum hosting site
| and it was great--until it wasn't. Slowly then suddenly as
| they say.
| AddLightness wrote:
| I agree and I think this era absolutely will be remembered
| fondly by kids who grew up with it. The streamer/YouTuber
| culture is massive and to many young people now that makes up
| a big part of their life. Many people are already waxing
| poetic about the "golden eras" of sites like Twitch.
| sroussey wrote:
| Or JustinTV... ;)
| ethanbond wrote:
| Also would comport with the explanation that the Internet
| just gets worse and worse.
|
| Will be interesting to see if kids who grew up with TikTok et
| al. will, as adults, view it as affectionately as we view our
| childhood form of the Internet. I do think there's something
| to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less
| production.
| lazide wrote:
| Anyone who thinks the internet 'just get's worse' never had
| a full Usenet feed in the 90's. _shudder_
| ethanbond wrote:
| I don't mean "just gets worse" as in it gets worse on
| every dimension :)
| Mtinie wrote:
| / alt.binaries.* enters the chat
| lazide wrote:
| At one point I was doing support calls for a small
| regional ISP, and a customer called in about some
| alt.binaries. group with bestiality in the name.
|
| Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was
| personally offended.
|
| I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.
| Mtinie wrote:
| That was a definite trial by fire period of accessing the
| internet. I imagine there exist similar areas today but
| I'm experienced enough to know I don't need to go in
| search of them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Honestly, 1994-1996ish web was in some ways worse -- yes,
| there was horrible stuff on Usenet, but you could avoid
| the worst of the text stuff pretty easily, and to be
| assaulted by any media other than text you had to expend
| at least a little effort.
|
| In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search
| term and click away from some truly awful media.
| lazide wrote:
| We don't talk about 2 girls 1 cup anymore. Or goatse.
| Ugh, man those were a rough time.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Mudfall, bluewaffle ...
| blagie wrote:
| It's free market dynamics. There is a constant push towards
| things which are more addictive and make more ad click
| dollars.
|
| That's the opposite of better. Better is made with soul,
| and often for free.
|
| Google has come full circle. Early Google succeeded in part
| because of nonintrusive ad words, scamming over banner ads.
| Now, Youtube.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not sure a market is free in the sense people mean by
| that term when the market is dominated by network
| effects. A free market in that sense requires competition
| and the ability to upset existing players. As an example,
| you can't upset Google search, and even having a 80B
| company with an LLM integrated into a 2.5T company is
| having a hard time displacing them. If that's still a
| free market then I'm pretty sure we could claim the USSR
| was a free market and just that Stalin's Communism LLC
| dominated.
| xmprt wrote:
| > there's something to be said of an overall trend toward
| more consumption, less production
|
| I think this couldn't be further from the truth. You could
| argue that the production has been heavily centralized, but
| I think today more than ever we see kids in their early
| teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different
| from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities
| website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but
| it's still production nonetheless.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I think TikTok is a _substantial_ aberration on this
| trigger trend. It's been great (as a non-user) seeing
| legitimately funny and creative stuff coming from that
| platform. It'll be interesting to see if it stays that
| way or it does go the way (at least IMO) of YouTube and
| Instagram: quite commercialized.
|
| Note: All of this based on impressions/vibes, would be
| keen to hear any stats if people around have 'em on hand!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| TikTok is _extremely_ commercialized; even a lot of the
| "good" content is _extremely_ carefully crafted part of
| the acquisition funnel for commercial activities.
|
| I'm not knocking people liking it -- its like people
| liking SuperBowl ads; just because something is the very
| much marketing content doesn't mean its not fun and
| entertaining. But, the idea that becoming "quite
| commercialized" is a potential way it might go downhill
| in the future seems to miss that it is very much already
| there.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I've never used TikTok but definitely not surprised to
| hear this. I've certainly seen some interesting things
| escape the app, but yeah quite a shame to hear it's
| already over that hump already (or started over it)!
| fragmede wrote:
| Given the investment involved (installing and using an
| app), I'd recommend trying yourself and drawing your own
| conclusions, rather than treating one person's experience
| as gospel
| ethanbond wrote:
| No thanks :) I'm extremely defensive of my information
| diet + attention allocation, and I know upfront that I
| don't need to add a service like TikTok to the mix.
|
| I'm not treating anyone's experience as gospel in any
| case. There are no important decisions I'll be making off
| this information.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > I think today more than ever we see kids in their early
| teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's
| different from other people's childhoods where you'd make
| geocities website or customize your myspace page or write
| blogs but it's still production nonetheless.
|
| You are correct, but there is a disappointing shift in
| the nature of said content.
|
| GeoCities sites and the like were at least labors of
| love. Your site looked like shit but that's ok, nobody's
| going to see it anyway.
|
| Tumblr was performative garbage that bridged
| LiveJournal/Myspace and Instagram. Your site looked like
| shit but if you say something controversial enough,
| you'll get a lot of views.
|
| The YouTube/Instagram/TikTok crowd only optimize for
| engagement, to get as many views as possible. Everything
| is so over-the-top. You're not making anything out of
| love, you're making what gets you attention. Your content
| is professionally-polished and staged to attract eyeballs
| even if you have nothing to say. (No wonder everybody has
| an identity crisis; everyone's a child star that's been
| living for the camera since they got their first iPhone.)
| izzydata wrote:
| That's also what happens when you turn hobbies into jobs
| that then become necessities. If you want to pay the
| bills you have to do and say controversial nonsense or be
| incredibly exaggerated.
| samtho wrote:
| I think the post you are replying to was trying to say
| this, but less precisely. It used to be that a MySpace,
| account profile on DeviantArt, Flickr, an online forum,
| or even a personal website was another human trying to
| connect with (or troll) someone, and that everyone was
| putting out content because that's how you needed to
| exist.
|
| Nowadays, I'm sure that 95% of all content I see is made
| by a media company for hire, mega corporation, or, most
| recently, word soup from an LLM where, in a strange twist
| of fate, I'm just a lab mouse in a giant, AI created A/B
| test trying to determine which option gets 0.2% more
| clicks. The age of casual creator is mostly over.
| Everything you do must be to build or enhance "your
| brand" and its a full time job to keep up with huge teams
| that automate the churn of information regurgitation,
| otherwise you'll never be able to get enough of a
| following to qualify for perks that actual content
| creators make - and we've not even gotten to compensation
| yet. The gold rush of making money selling your brand
| online is over and it has been enshitified much like
| everything else novel and interesting in the world and on
| the internet.
| pxoe wrote:
| as much as this doomer drivel might be true, it might be
| blinding you to the good parts and good people. just not
| seeing what's "novel and interesting", nor seeking it
| out.
| FullstakBlogger wrote:
| I think this is essentially a false dichotomy. It's possible
| to experience the loss of both of those eras, as well as the
| current one whenever it passes. There's no inherent conflict
| in wanting them all back.
| mightybyte wrote:
| This is an interesting idea. For me the magical period of the
| internet was also the nineties to mid-naughts. But I'm not
| sure. It doesn't seem entirely age-relative to me. It seems
| like something changed. I really have no way to say for sure.
| In fact, I was recently talking to someone a couple decades
| or so younger about similar topics and he indeed seemed to
| have more of the age-relative view. I plan on talking to him
| more at some point to get a better understanding of his view.
| But I don't think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I'm
| sure many people have a magical period of wonder where their
| world is expanding. To be perfectly honest, in some ways I've
| continued to have that even in recent years. There's a really
| cool corner of YouTube that has tons of incredible content
| that IMO is revolutionizing education. But I also feel that
| as a species we humans haven't figured out how to handle the
| powers of communication that the internet has made available
| to us. In an age of unprecedented access to the world's
| information, misinformation still abounds (no matter which
| side of the political aisle you happen to be on). I don't
| know that anyone has any really compelling ideas about how to
| deal with this, but I think it's a significant issue that we
| all collectively need to work on. The question is, will we be
| able to come together and do so or have we already been
| irrevocably torn too far apart?
| flkiwi wrote:
| Non-technical, non-idealistic, non-visionary (pick two of
| three) people starting putting glossy red ribbons on
| websites with pink lettering and called it Web 2.0.
|
| A lot of monumentally good things have come from the last
| ~20 years of technological change, but the Internet
| breaking out into something mediocre people could exploit
| has done damage. And that's a range that encompasses
| everything from minimally qualified marketing consultants
| to people drifting by on MBAs to (sorry) serial
| entrepreneurs who focus more on the launch than the idea.
| paulcole wrote:
| Yeah it's like how my dad says SNL peaked when he was 18 and
| I say it peaked when I was 18.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Everyone can agree it peak a long time ago.
| paulcole wrote:
| In 2035, I guarantee they'll be talking about how nobody
| could ever match the greatness of Pete Davidson.
| mulmen wrote:
| I don't get the SNL hate. It seems fine to me? Maybe I'm
| not watching enough?
| rexpop wrote:
| This is a common sentiment echoed regarding many different
| topics across the human experience, so I want to, for the
| sake of discussion, try and articulate exactly what are the
| two sides of this scale that might be worth debating. David
| Putnam defined "intra-" and "intercohort" like this in
| _Bowling Alone_.
|
| > Because generational change will be an important theme in
| our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how
| social change and generational change are interrelated. As a
| matter of simple accounting, any social change--from the rise
| of rap music to the decline of newspapers--is always produced
| by some combination of two very different processes. The
| first is for many individuals to change their tastes and
| habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of
| social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as
| quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall
| in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the
| 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed,
| and it can be transformed in a different direction just as
| quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change
| "intracohort," because the change is detectable within each
| age cohort.
|
| > The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle,
| and harder to reverse. If different generations have
| different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth
| and death will eventually transform society, _even if no
| individual ever changes_. Much of the change in sexual mores
| over the last several decades has been of this sort.
| Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and
| most of those who did actually became more conservative. In
| the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital
| sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the
| last several decades, because a generation with stricter
| beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with
| more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change
| "intercohort," because the change is detectable only across
| different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of
| generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly
| inexorable.
|
| I almost want to say that you're arguing internet
| disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a
| predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies
| to _all_ familiar aspects of one's life and not, conversely,
| an intercohort phenomenon through which generational
| attitudes remain constant, and the world changes around us.
|
| On second thought, I don't think this is the right dichotomy
| to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody
| more learned happens by, please assist.
|
| Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort
| analysis (APC analysis)," which I know nothing about.
| iopq wrote:
| Back then you could post to Craigslist for an anonymous
| hookup and play poker online for money.
|
| Now the Match Group owns all the dating websites and
| successfully shittified them. Social media in general has
| been basically a big loss, with Reddit charging for API
| access since they don't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying
| to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
| thegrim22 wrote:
| Also back then every other post wasn't full of political
| echo chamber warfare like your jab about russian propaganda
| you just couldn't resist throwing in.
| iopq wrote:
| Twitter owners did not engage in promotion of conspiracy
| theories back then
| pauldenton wrote:
| If we look at the Durham Report all the claims that Trump
| was colluding with Russia were infact a Conspiracy
| Theory. Like Iraq having WMDs in 2003 was a Conspiracy
| Theory.
| iopq wrote:
| Conspiracy and conspiracy theory are not quite the same.
| Some things are just false claims. A conspiracy theory
| usually refers to something that has a semblance of
| consensus.
|
| The Iraq war had a decent amount of opposition before it
| happened, there were like 100K people in San Francisco
| for the protest I went to.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Funny how some conspiracy theories end up actual being
| factual conspiracies. Remember when your news sources
| told you that 100% covid did not come from a lab?
| iopq wrote:
| I don't believe it's been conclusively proven either way.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Don't forget that _everything_ wants to be a subscription
| service now, and companies will block open access to their
| platforms so that only "partners" (other companies that
| pay them) may access their platform, and they're sure going
| to show ads on top of that as well.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
|
| Propaganda goes both ways in war. In case you were not
| aware.
| hanzmanner wrote:
| You are right, people have the same sentiment in regards to
| many other things. A great example is music. The golden age
| is often the music you and your generation grew up with.
|
| Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it
| already trends in that direction, I wouldn't be surprised.
| Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored
| Apes, TikTok as their Internet's magical period.
| lettergram wrote:
| Tbf on a downward decline, 2009 might still be the highlight,
| just because someone didn't experience 1995.
|
| For what it's worth, I always point out that my parents
| fondest pre-30s memories we're drinking, smoking and blasting
| music while riding in the back of a pickup when they were
| 16-20. All of which is illegal now and will get you years in
| prison...
| amerkhalid wrote:
| > For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was
| growing up.
|
| > In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the
| current internet as the time when the magic was there?
|
| I remember seeing stats/meme that you will hear the best
| music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our
| teen years, things make big impact on us.
|
| So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar
| effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current
| internet when they are 30+ or so.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I heard something similar: that nostalgia is mostly what
| was popular when you were 12
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's the eternal September and regular nostalgia
| ekianjo wrote:
| Except that things actually changed
| ajmurmann wrote:
| That's part of the Eternal September. More and more less-
| technical users are added and things get changed to their
| benefit
| dotnet00 wrote:
| While you have a point there since certain aspects of the
| internet experienced by each generation were different, I
| think a shared part of it is just the sheer sanitization of
| the 'open' internet that has happened since the
| mid/late-2000s. That aspect is not coming back in any way for
| the generation growing up on the current internet, unless
| they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like
| certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet
| they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run
| advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on
| eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has
| complete power over you.
|
| This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of
| the 'old internet' between both me and decade older friends
| when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old
| internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of
| connection/genuineness with other people's content because
| even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar
| feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.
|
| So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old
| internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults
| it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >That aspect is not coming back in any way for the
| generation growing up on the current internet, unless they
| go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like
| certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only
| internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-
| run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on
| eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has
| complete power over you.
|
| Is this true? Maybe you just don't know the right places
| anymore. Im sure there's all kinds of crazy, basically
| unmoderated shit going down in discord or roblox or vrchat.
| tinycombinator wrote:
| There's definitely a bunch of crazy unmoderated stuff
| going down in those places, but it does seem more
| underground and out of the way unless you specifically
| look for it.
|
| Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people
| to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a
| lot of resources and guides out there, and if you _want_
| to, you can most likely find them.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Ah that's a fair point, I do hang out in a couple of
| discords where we have that old internet feel, and same
| with vrchat.
|
| But at least with the former we still have to be a bit
| reserved since discord can also be pretty heavy handed
| with moderation. It effectively suppresses less sanitized
| content in the sense that if your discord grows past a
| certain size, it's much more likely to catch their
| attention. So the old internet type content we have there
| is mostly a handful of private discords from friends with
| a handful of their friends there. At that point we just
| ended up setting up a matrix server for stuff we'd rather
| not leave to the whims of discord.
|
| VRchat has the benefit that if you aren't in public,
| you're free to do anything. But that does still sort of
| mean that you need to know the right people to get into
| those circles, since public is generally unenjoyable,
| being filled with screaming "Quest kids" (and even if
| they weren't screaming, it's obviously awkward to be
| hanging out with children as adults).
| calamari4065 wrote:
| > when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the
| old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of
| connection/genuineness with other people
|
| This is a sentiment repeated by almost everyone who finds
| their niche in the fediverse. Once you settle in, you get
| that early internet magic of simply _connecting with
| people_. The fediverse is all about talking to or showing
| things to other people.
|
| It's pretty interesting what happens when you talk to
| people instead of just posting into the void. Interactions
| become purposeful and meaningful because it's clear there's
| a real person on the other side.
|
| It really does feel like the earlier internet when we all
| posted anonymously on small forums with a few thousand
| users total. There's a sense of community.
|
| There's also a really strong selection bias right now.
| People who use the fediverse are much more likely to be
| people sick of modern social media and want to return to
| the old days. So they went out and they goddamn made their
| own social media and made it feel like the old days.
|
| I think it's a great place to hang out right now. It'll be
| interesting to see how things evolve over time. There's a
| push to bring back small websites, blogs and forums and I
| really hope that takes off.
| generationP wrote:
| How much was there to find on the internet in the 90s?
|
| I arrived ca. 2001 and found enough high-quality content
| (folk songs, math puzzles, some books already digitized) to
| feel like I had discovered a giant library. And it kept
| growing: Wikipedia arrived, various forums and magazines
| appeared (most were crap, of course, but there was no
| shortage of good ones).
|
| As far as I can tell, things started getting worse around
| 2008, with places such as geocities closing down and social
| networks rising; then the deprecation of Java and Flash
| kicked the floor out of some of the good old parts. Other
| things were still improving, though, up to 2015 or so. It's
| only recently that I see most "culture production" locked in
| perennial closed gardens with unaccountable moderation. I
| wish I could point to some places still on the rise other
| than arXiv and LibGen...
|
| What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the
| 00s?
| Swizec wrote:
| > What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into
| the 00s?
|
| IRC was a big one. Back when you hopped on a server, typed
| in #cityname, and joined a lively realtime conversation
| with folks in your area. That was cool.
|
| I'm too young for usenet, but I've been hearing about how
| cool and amazing it was for like 25 years now. Apparently
| the web never quite managed to capture that magic.
| generationP wrote:
| Ah, IRC. Yeah, I came too late to make new friends there
| (though it was still good for keeping in contact with old
| ones). Still managed to enjoy the usenet, although the
| "big" groups were already full of spam.
| bawolff wrote:
| And before that people were pointing to 1993 as the date the
| old internet died
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying
| "kids these days"
| baby wrote:
| I don't think it has been determined by your age. Internet
| freedom and its wild wild west aspect has been vanishing
| gradually since its creation. Everybody has witnessed it.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| It's also a question of what we call "magical"
|
| The 90s were special in a certain way that is very different
| from how the Internet was in 2010.
|
| I enjoyed both. I could call both of them "magical periods".
| Just different.
|
| One could look at the current AI innovation as a different
| magical period.
| taneq wrote:
| Anything before you were ~10 is "old", things between ~15 and
| ~20 are natural and right, things between ~20 and ~35 are
| modern and exciting, and anything that occurs after that is
| proportionately unnecessary and annoying. :P
|
| /shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure
| nandhinianand wrote:
| I think it comes down the exploration vs
| maximization/exploitation instincts that grows and changes as
| a human being grows. For ex: teens/early adults has more
| exploration instinct.(it's a hypothesis that's true for at
| least some sections of human society, not sure how far it
| generalizes).
|
| For me it was yahoo chat rooms that filled the need, this
| omegle founder had created to solve.(at least till it got
| filled with bots) The real question is what will a
| teenager/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use
| and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger
| to share perspectives??
|
| I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly
| exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and
| commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool
| anymore.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I'm sure that's partially the case, but not entirely here
| (IMO).
|
| I used Omegle when it first came out and I was in college. I
| thought it was amazing, and lost interest in it for awhile as
| one is wont to do.
|
| But I decided to check out the site again and I tried out
| "Spy Mode" some years ago (my late 20s or early 30s) where
| someone could choose a topic or ask a question and then two
| other random people would talk about it. It was fun and
| chaotic and had the energy that 2009 Omegle had again. I
| enjoyed it quite a bit. People would sometimes answer the
| topics and sometimes have their own openings and such. It was
| chaotic without the negative vibes of many other websites
| that used to be more fun.
|
| The random matching combined with the private one-on-one
| conversation structure had an advantage of not having a
| popularity algorithm OR the ability for one person in a bad
| mood to derail your conversation. So aside from the
| moderation attempts to stop spam on the back-end, the two
| participants could choose what they felt was acceptable in
| their conversation.
|
| Sadly, about a quarter of the topics on Spy Mode were
| spambots linking to questionable sites (likely related to the
| law enforcement quotes in the article), and when they took
| down Spy Mode and reverted everything just to plain chat, the
| spambots were almost all you could talk to with regular
| Omegle. (I've never used the video chat so I have no insight
| there)
|
| Definitely downhill in a distinct way, and now with stricter
| liability for site owners that larger sites can tank with
| lawyers, I think it was inevitable that the whole thing was
| going to collapse soon anyway.
|
| I made a few friends from there, most temporary, but one
| remains who I am very close to. We never would have met in
| real life, and honestly I don't think we would get along in
| person, but we talk almost every day and both our lives are
| better for it.
|
| But I think that this truly is a material loss for the
| internet.
| pxoe wrote:
| they might, either about pre-ai internet, or the early ai /
| early widespread ai, when it was widely available and
| accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn't
| yet destroyed entire industries
| shusaku wrote:
| This is kind of revisionist history though. The early 2010s
| were not so long ago. Nobody talked about Omegle as some
| magical safe place of real human connection. It was always
| viral because of the edginess and danger. There were genuinely
| good stories you would see about it, but the impact was strong
| precisely because everyone knew the dark side.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I had that same feeling with the AOL chatrooms of the early
| 00s and to a lesser extent forums around that time and after.
|
| So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.
| bloaf wrote:
| I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got
| popular around that time.
|
| People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.
|
| For every lovely flash animation on sites like
| albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of
| deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence,
| ___ism and nudity.
|
| My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver
| lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a
| site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want
| to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost
| certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What
| you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier
| to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low
| as possible.
|
| It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site
| like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for
| regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe
| that its beauty is ours too.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| It's possible to have multiple periods of "magic" as the
| internet improves in capability over time and people find new
| ways to use it.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| That's a good point. I remember when Facebook genuinely
| allowed people to connect with others whom they hadn't seen
| for years. MySpace before it is the source of nostalgia for a
| lot of my peers. Twitter had many genuine interactions
| between popular celebrities and their fans. Any of these
| things are likely to be magical to someone.
|
| (Not sure what it means that these examples are all
| approximately dead to a lot of their previously most active
| users. That's actually distinct from Omegle, unfortunately;
| most of their active users had remained perfectly happy with
| the platform.)
| eddiewithzato wrote:
| The magic died when majority of the population got access
| thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The magic died when majority of the population got access
| thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.
|
| ...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal
| September.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| animitronix wrote:
| So that's what Green Day was signing about
| lwhi wrote:
| It was when people learnt how to make money from the
| internet.
|
| The corporatisation of net ruined it.
|
| Not much can survive the incentive of profit.
| duxup wrote:
| Just today I was dreaming of how awesome it would be if you
| could just somehow filter "good sports" and just open a game up
| for online play without having to think about all the bad
| behavior. How amazing would that be?
|
| In my eyes during the golden age of the internet that I think
| of, you could still do that... bad actors now and then but not
| a huge % and we were all excited just to play together and
| enjoy how cool everything was.
| bendbro wrote:
| Try skiing or hiking. Basically anything with high enough
| effort bar or cost bar is a sufficient proxy for this filter.
| fragmede wrote:
| hiking is an interesting one to choose. wherever I've gone
| hiking, I've come across garbage which had to have been
| left by a fellow hiker. or a bear, I suppose. but which is
| to say, that effort level bar isn't high enough.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I remember the magic of USENET! I'd posted a question about how
| do do some basic piano repair, and got an answer from Marvin
| Minsky! Who knew he played the piano?!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Despair is trendy, which makes doing it easier; it makes it
| normalized. Perhaps previously a 'I'm not going to give up; I'm
| going to keep fighting for what I care about!' message would be
| normalized, and because of that the Omegle founder would feel
| strong and supported instead of alone.
|
| (I don't know the person or much about their situation; I'm just
| using what I read to make a general observation.)
| SamPatt wrote:
| Sounds like he's been fighting for a long time and eventually
| tired.
|
| It's a bit presumptuous to say that his actions / statement are
| due to despair being trendy. Everyone has their own "It's not
| worth it anymore" moment.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| See my second paragraph; I'm not really talking about this
| person.
| ge96 wrote:
| Damn I spent time on Omegle, haha minefield but sometimes you
| find good people.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Omegle has fewer than 30 employees, according to some sites
| online. I can't help but wonder whether having a more robust ops
| and legal team would have prevented this outcome. Founders
| shouldn't feel like they're going to have a heart attack at 30 if
| they've hired the right size of team. One (probably frivolous)
| lawsuit for a nearly 15-year-old company shouldn't be
| existential.
| RagnarD wrote:
| One is fewer than 30. Did he have any? How was he making money
| at all?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Job review sites suggest he's had many employees over the
| years. Potentially over 200.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| > But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew
| organically from there, reaching millions of daily users.
|
| The law of big numbers dictate that if there's even a tiny chance
| of a catastrophic event it has close to 100% probability of
| happening if n is just large enough (in the case of millions of
| daily users, probably multiple catastrophic events per day). This
| kind of asymmetrical risk is very hard to defend against no
| matter what you do.
| adamomada wrote:
| The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a
| good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the
| inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn't it well worth
| it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn't possibly
| function any other way
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a
| good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs
| the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn't it well
| worth it to accept the risk and continue?
|
| Assuming the 74 million are really getting lots of value from
| it, compensating the victims of the catastrophic event is
| more than worth it. Holding the host liable for the harms,
| and trusting the host to charge an appropriate amount
| warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do
| this.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an
| appropriate way to handle a free service.
|
| Imagine a store owner downtown adding a flowerbed and a
| couple benches at the front of their property. If someone
| gets hurt via rare catastrophic event, it seems bad to make
| the owner pay, and even worse to suggest they're supposed
| to be charging bench users 20 cents each to fund payouts
| like this.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an
| appropriate way to handle a free service.
|
| A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn't free
| in a way that makes that really true, and even if the
| service was free, if the benefits to the people that
| aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a
| sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I
| would argue the service is almost certainly a net social
| loss, anyway.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > if the benefits to the people that aren't being
| victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to
| cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the
| service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
|
| You didn't directly address my bench scenario, but this
| sounds like it fits the bench scenario. I don't see
| anything you've said that would make it an exception. But
| I think the logical outcome of that is _ridiculous_.
|
| Sometimes there are bad things that can happen in a
| place, and that place should not have to pay damages.
|
| And providing value, as an argument to keep existing,
| should not mean you have to monetize that value. (or
| drastically increase monetization)
| dotandgtfo wrote:
| I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle
| is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The
| numbers are pretty wild.
|
| > There is evidence that Omegle has improved its
| moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports
| to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in
| 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed
| 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC
| (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year.
| This figure is higher than the reports made by very
| popular social media applications including TikTok
| (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When
| queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle
| spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal
| responsibility but indicated that their moderation
| efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/
| doi/10.1177/26338076231194451
|
| I don't support the business model of scaling up social
| networks while skimping on moderation to make it
| profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation
| costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this.
| While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in
| moderation, maybe some business models are just
| unsustainable and not worth the externalities.
|
| IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a
| festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while
| only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a
| release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it
| seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere
| either in the future.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| it's the nazi bar story. If you are lax in moderation at
| the beginning the problems compound because word spreads
| that you are lax. If you are strict from the beginning
| word spreads that you are strict and corruption finds a
| better niche.
| concordDance wrote:
| Only if the host captures the lion's share if the
| benefits. This is hard (transaction costs are a big free
| market issue).
| otteromkram wrote:
| The owner would probably need city approval to extend
| their reach onto municipal property (the sidewalk).
|
| The store owner might also be required by the city and/or
| landlord to update their insurance policy to cover the
| extended liability.
|
| But, in general, your proposed scenario never specified
| what the catastrophic event is and why the store owner
| would be held liable.
| terryf wrote:
| The store owner wants to do something nice for people and
| in your world the best way to handle that is making them
| jump through months of bureaucracy and probably paying a
| lot of money to their insurance and for permits and shit?
|
| Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and
| building anything costs a billion dollars.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| If anyone is injured on your property, you're liable.
|
| Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
| terryf wrote:
| Right, if that is really true as a blanket statement,
| then it's an idiotic and short sighted law.
|
| I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard,
| bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the
| rose bush and the rose pokes your eye. According to the
| rule, I'm not liable for your injury?
|
| Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is
| actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort,
| goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent
| on bs court cases for things like I described? How much
| of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun
| things will never happen because of fear?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| A store attracts people with money (adults) interested in
| the products the store sells and the bench out front is
| in public. But the catastrophic events in question are
| somewhere that attracts easily amused people with time on
| their hands (often children) and predators (among others,
| but specifically predators in a way a shop bench
| doesn't), and the catastrophe is deliberate targeted harm
| and not natural disaster or innocent accident. The two
| aren't comparable.
|
| A comparable service would be something which ended up
| attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which
| parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or
| not that was the original intent, and to which most
| adults wouldn't have time or interest to go on, and with
| those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult,
| and all the interactions take place outside the public
| eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse
| reported in a year and then say "rare event it would be
| unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any
| other way". I'm not sure if anything offline could be
| comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark
| funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a
| horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
| 2devnull wrote:
| >to which most adults wouldn't have time or interest to
| go on
|
| Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very
| thread. It was popular with different age groups.
|
| So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and
| therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if
| someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes,
| they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like
| malls, and they will always attract people and therefore
| predators.
| mrighele wrote:
| In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic
| accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing,
| and only the people that actually caused the accident are
| to blame.
|
| If you think that victims of a "catastrophic event" need
| compensation, why not propose to institute a mandatory
| insurance for people using the Internet, like many
| countries do for cars ? (I am assuming here that the
| website is not actively trying to help crime, but this
| doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a
| traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is
| still a thing
|
| Its really not; user fees in the form of driver's license
| fees, vehicle license fees (both of which tend to be
| legally required for operation on public roads in most US
| jurisdictions), federal and state gasoline taxes, etc.,
| are used to pay for use of public roads, as well as
| general fund taxes which are directed to roads (making
| even the _indirect_ use of roads by ordering goods, etc.,
| not really free.)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think you are missing the point intentionally. I have
| seen you make many cogent points over the years, but this
| is just low effort failure to engage.
|
| Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the
| damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because
| they built the roads.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the
| damages of drunk drivers.
|
| Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the
| road, true.
|
| They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules
| violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a
| general legal requirement for using public roads, though
| you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance
| in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal
| liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you
| cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage.
|
| Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free
| with the idea that "well, a bunch of people will be
| damaged, but there is no need to assure that those
| damages are reasonably covered because other people will
| benefit", it has _lots_ of costs associated with use, and
| a number of them (both the licensing regime and the
| insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the
| expense of potential beneficial use _and_ assuring
| compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes,
| its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the
| supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so
| its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary
| for a service that has benefits for most users and acute
| harms for some.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that mandatory insurance for roads was already
| acknowledged by the parent poster. They invoked it
| directly by suggesting internet users should have to
| carry liability insurance if the central concern is
| victim restitution or compensation (like roads). You are
| making the same point you objected to.
|
| The fundamental question is what is the legal objective
| here, and what do we want it to be?
|
| 1) Is the goal to make sure that victims are compensated?
|
| 2) Do we think companies like omegle are negligent, and
| are we trying to hold them accountable?
|
| 3) Do we actually think neither?
|
| If the answer is 1 but not 2, then making Omegles pay is
| clearly an injustice, and we should be looking into some
| sort of mandatory user insurance.
|
| Putting my cards on the table, I am in camp 3. Just
| because bad things happen, doesnt mean can or should find
| a way to compensate the injured party.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| > In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a
| traffic accident, yet
|
| Yet EV's still have to pass insane standards because
| 1/10th, 1/100th of deaths would be too much... it's all
| about our monkey brain's perception, negativity bias
| (i.e. 100x good thing equals 1x bad thing) and emotions.
| We are tied to these things until we leave our carbon
| meat suits.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Are you confusing electric with autonomous here?
| terryf wrote:
| _individual responsibility_ is the way things need to be
| handled. Make it clear that if you do X, then there exists
| a risk of Y, and Z. If you still want to do the thing, and
| for you the risk is realized, then ... well, sucks to be
| you I guess. But you knew what you were getting into.
|
| And saying, "oh, but people are bad at analyzing risk" or
| "some people are too stupid to understand". Well, so what?
|
| Building a world where everyone is wrapped in a soft foam
| and nothing can be done because there is always some
| element of risk, is a terrible idea.
|
| "You can get killed walking your doggie" - Heat (1993)
| concordDance wrote:
| The issue here is that the host is capturing only a very
| small fraction of the value here, which may not be enough
| to cover liability.
| terryf wrote:
| Yes, 100 times yes. This is one of the big issues with the
| modern world, that no risk at all is acceptable. And that's
| bullshit. So many things that are enormous amounts of fun can
| get shut down because maybe someone gets slightly hurt some
| time or whatever.
|
| Should we make things safe? yes, of course. But the trade off
| should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no". It
| should be made clear that risk exists and it's everyone's own
| personal responsibility to take that into account when doing
| something. And if I happen to be the unlucky guy for whom the
| risk realizes, then well, guess life sucks for me. Let's move
| on. That shouldn't stop everyone else from having fun.
| concordDance wrote:
| The big issue here is that us monkeys really can't
| comprehend scale (insert classic links to studies on scope
| insensitivity here). Heuristics that work well for groups
| of up to a few thousand people stop working when there are
| hundreds of millions.
|
| There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people
| chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a
| life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years),
| and it's probably less than a million.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| This is one of the root causes of many of the issues in
| modern society. The creeping safety is taking the fun out
| of everything, especially kids. Kids nowadays rarely have
| any play time anymore, which has an immense cost to their
| later growth and well being. If you want to read a book
| about this with some related topics, I recommend "The
| Coddling of the American Mind"
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised that I'm still allowed to put myself
| on two wheels with an engine in between, and ride down the
| autobahn at an insane amount of speed.
| varispeed wrote:
| > isn't it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The
| world couldn't possibly function any other way
|
| Had a friend who started a social network website at his
| parents house. Pushing 20 million monthly users. Death
| threats, competition uploading illegal content and then
| reporting it, whistleblowers and more threats, people having
| beef and looking for arbitration, more threats for getting
| banned etc. He become extremely stressed, stopped going out,
| paranoia kicked in and then suicide attempts. His friends
| helped him close the site and he "recovered".
|
| But lesson here is - if you don't have a deep wallet, right
| mindset and access to therapist, don't start a website today
| or keep it small and off the main internet.
| lazide wrote:
| Just because someone got struck by lightning while playing
| golf, doesn't make golf dangerous to play.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Golf also requires a membership and equipment to play, as
| well as physically being there. Omegle is (was?) a free
| online service with no signup required.
| lazide wrote:
| Which requires a computer, internet connection
| (subscription based!), and actually going to the website
| and interacting with it on an ongoing basis.
|
| No one is 'accidentally' using Omeagle, anymore than they
| would 'accidentally' go golfing.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Yeah, but this is from the site operators perspective.
| How are you not bound to have abuse everyday on a
| platform with such low barrier to entry?
|
| An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a
| golf membership.
| lazide wrote:
| Is this a serious question? Not everyone with an internet
| connection ever got on Omeagle, even once.
|
| Of the people that went to Omeagle, the odds of this kind
| of thing happening are clearly astronomically low - it's
| been there for over a decade, internationally known, and
| my guess is only a handful of these types of things have
| likely happened.
|
| Old school AOL chat rooms were clearly more dangerous.
| And were consistently implicated in all sorts of
| nefarious child trafficking operations.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Based on the goodbye letter, it has happened enough that
| the admin worked with authories, and it was getting toxic
| enough frequently enough that the owner was feeling
| psychological damage from moderating it.
|
| I'm not going to say if the boons are worth the burden,
| but in Leif's case it was now. And he was calling the
| shots at the end of the day.
| michaelt wrote:
| See, when I read:
|
| _> Whatever the reason, people have become faster to
| attack, and slower to recognize each other's shared
| humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage
| of attacks on communication services, Omegle included,
| based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users._
|
| To me this sounds like the problem isn't the malicious
| users, so much as people _using_ the malicious users as
| an _argument to shut down Omegle_.
|
| You can moderate people showing their dicks, you can't
| moderate people suing you because you didn't do enough to
| stop little 16 year old Timmy seeing a dick.
| plasticchris wrote:
| No, but if you operate enough golf courses you better be
| ready for the eventuality.
| egorfine wrote:
| Playing golf, no. Providing a golf field service in the US -
| yes, absolutely.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at
| paid ice skating rinks. I'm amazed they haven't been sued into
| oblivion to where helmets are required to be worn.
|
| So it seems like we do have SOME semblance of understanding
| risk vs reward.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Don't you have to sign a waver for that type of accident.
| Maybe that's what we are missing from the internet. But that
| would likely require a real proof of age to work
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while
| at paid ice skating rinks.
|
| And they are regularly sued for injuries (even short of
| death), and sometimes lose.
|
| Picking one case out of many because it was a ice rink on a
| cruise ship:
|
| https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-
| roy...
| Nevermark wrote:
| Business insurance is what prevents isolated disasters from
| killing off businesses.
|
| Insurance takes on many useful forms.
|
| For instance, you can hire a winter season snow removal
| service from companies that indemnify you from people
| slipping and falling on your property based on their having
| an insurance umbrella that covers all their customers.
|
| May not be relevant to Omegle. It takes a healthy income to
| be able to afford serious coverage. And it wouldn't help with
| the policing work or the protests of pearl clutchers who
| don't care about precautions, effort and resources for victim
| support, and just can't handle any failure of any kind.
| wildzzz wrote:
| It's all baked into the premiums.
| heisenbit wrote:
| No, the catastrophic risks are borne by society - the are
| limits to liability insurance and there is a limit at
| which limited liability companies can pay or individuals
| behind companies can pay.
| sanroot99 wrote:
| I think lot of problems from real world get projected to social
| media in meta form, we can also say lives of people has gone
| worse since web 2.0, hence rise of such cases, but increase
| scale of platform also contribute to probability of malice
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| This is so sad.
|
| For all the conventional reasons: the victim of the abuse
| deserves sympathy, and that abuse shouldn't happen.
|
| But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on
| the service, not the abuser. And that's sad because instead of
| being able to just make interesting stuff and put them online, we
| are being forced to consider "what's the worst possible thing
| that some evil bastard could use this for?" and prevent that.
| Again, like the responsibility is on us to not make things that
| could be used for evil, rather than the responsibility being on
| the evil bastard to not do evil things.
|
| And ultimately, it means we'll go the same route as Omegle; it's
| just easier to not make stuff than fight this misallocation of
| blame. The world will be poorer without random quirky websites.
| Evil bastards will do their evil offline still, so no-one will be
| better off. But apparently that's what we want. It's so sad.
| adamomada wrote:
| The victim of this abuse had to log on to a computer each and
| every time they were "abused" which is lowering the bar further
| than I ever thought possible for there to be a victim
| charptr wrote:
| This is a remarkably bad take that indicates a severe lack of
| understanding about how abusers operate. Do better.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the
| abuse on the service, not the abuser.
|
| Blame is not exclusive or zero-sum, and while there is
| obviously blame being placed on the service, I don't see any
| evidence that blame is not being placed on the abuser (or that
| less blame is placed on them than would have been if blame
| wasn't placed on the service as well.)
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| This is true. Maybe I should have said "also placing blame on
| the service as well as the abuser"
| ryandrake wrote:
| When there's money involved, blame always gets placed on the
| deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost never an
| individual person. If I spill a soda on the floor at Walmart
| and someone slips on it, they're going to sue Walmart and
| probably not me.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > When there's money involved, blame always gets placed on
| the deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost
| never an individual person.
|
| The individual abuser was located, arrested, criminally
| convicted, and sentenced to 8.5 years of prison and 20
| years of restricted supervised release.
|
| Many would consider that a significant form of blame.
| 4star3star wrote:
| No, dude. I was abducted, and my captors tormented me by giving
| me papercuts all over my body. Naturally, I feel strongly that
| paper should be outlawed. It would be illogical to allow for
| the possibility of someone else going through what I went
| through. Down with pulp!
| op00to wrote:
| You're comparing paper cuts to sexual abuse. Don't do that.
| keithnz wrote:
| Only thing I know about Omegle is all the pranking videos and
| people playing music for others on youtube. Like
| https://www.youtube.com/@SomethingAboutChickens or
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKbLGu4xsPE
| uwagar wrote:
| its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and
| amplify the evil forces that harms other people including
| children?
|
| + the tool creator shouldnt be at the helm when it goes super
| viral. cos once everyone shows up, it will as the microbiologist
| and ecologist rene dubois observed, "[any successful social
| innovation can be] pushed to the point of absurdity".
|
| when a tool goes viral i suppose it should be "taken over" (reeks
| of totalitarianism no?) by the community but it clashes with the
| ethos of proprietary, capitalist and indivdualist culture, the
| need for the culture to spotlight one person, they want them to
| become very famous and become very rich which leads to hate
| directed at them. where is the compassion for a mark zuckerberg
| say?
|
| its not that evil shut this person and their service down, its
| more like a hammer finally whacking a nail down thats been
| sticking out too long.
|
| better to be anonymous and not so successful. nothing fails like
| success. u could meet random people on IRC too, because its not
| so sticking out, its still operating.
| krasin wrote:
| > its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and
| amplify the evil forces that harms other people including
| children?
|
| Care to elaborate on your accusation? In my world, Omegle was
| about things like these:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q
| uwagar wrote:
| sure that is very cool. thanks for sharing. shows the
| possibility of this medium. i didnt mean that the author did
| a bad thing.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| well yeah, that's why it's shut down
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| This is like suing Google because a scammer used Gmail
| johntiger1 wrote:
| While I totally understand there's the potential for abuse, I
| don't think Omegle should be penalized for stuff like this. From
| my understanding, there's no addictive, profit-maximizing
| matchmaking or anything going on - it's just a service which lets
| two strangers talk to one another. Of course you will have bad
| actors target any platform, but for a lowkey site, it seems sad
| that they would need to shut down because of something like this.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| I found this passage particularly relevant:
|
| > Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely
| aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical
| world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a
| refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good
| people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said "no" to
| someone online, they couldn't physically reach through the
| screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles
| of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other
| people as a kind of shield
|
| Omegle, as one of the last places that _didn 't_ tie your
| activity to a _real_ identity, inherently limited the possible
| harm. Obviously there were creeps on there, but not interacting
| with them was easy and the only way for anyone to seriously
| harm you was to give them information about who you were
| outside of omegle.
|
| A while back I was curious about what sorts of awful things
| could happen from omegle chats and when you look into it, every
| single case ultimately involves people continuing conversations
| via Snap or Instagram.
|
| It's sad that this free, no-harm site has to shut down while
| Snap/Insta routinely ignore legitimate criticism of their
| ability to encourage abuse and have enough lawyers to ensure
| they'll never have to face any consequences for enabling abuse.
| noirbot wrote:
| This really summed up my feelings about it. Were there creeps
| and people trying to get up to illegal stuff on the site?
| Absolutely. I ran into plenty over the years, but two hits of
| ESC later and I was on to someone else.
|
| It some ways, it was kinda like Craigslist Missed Connections
| or something like that. Just people looking for... something
| into the void of the internet. And sometimes you met
| something you didn't want at all, and sometimes you met
| someone you really connected with, either for just a moment
| or for long enough that you wanted to keep up with them.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your
| activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible
| harm.
|
| I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all
| this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and
| even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve
| this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| IP alone makes it fairly tricky for non-state actors to
| identify someone, just roughly geolocate them. Good for
| freaking out people that don't know how the web works, but
| not useful for much more.
|
| The flip side is that p2p means that nobody is snooping in
| on those video conversations. Omegle couldn't spy on it's
| users once they had entered a video chat. It was also
| fairly easy to see how they implemented the monitoring they
| did if you have a webdev background: periodically in
| between chats the omegle client requested an image from
| your cam.
|
| I believe the whole video chat component, while initially
| using flash, was ultimately implemented using WebRTC, which
| is pretty cool and as shame more places don't make use of
| this.
| culopatin wrote:
| Are you sure about that? In the text they say they did
| moderation. So how could they do that without seeing your
| feed?
| userbinator wrote:
| This brings back some amazing memories. If I remember correctly,
| the original inspiration for Omegle came from 4chan; or more
| precisely, a user thought of stretching the limits of "anonymous
| free speech" to realtime communications, and came up with the
| idea in late 2007. The PoC server for it was nothing more than
| "telnet to this IP" and it was sporadically advertised on 4chan
| for a short while.
|
| Astonishingly, Google still remembers after 16 years:
| "forced_anon chat" (with the quotes) finds the very origin, if
| you want to go down that dark and probably-too-offensive-to-the-
| current-generation rabbithole.
| kr0bat wrote:
| God, they're complaining about newposters all the way back in
| 2007. Is the problem really Eternal September or is it just
| "kids these days"?
|
| Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into
| his posts I don't know why exactly I think a
| one on one chat system would be different from an imageboard.
| When one makes a post on an image or discussion board, I think
| one does take into account that his words are going to be
| judged by the whole community. Even he isn't worried about
| preserving some identity, he still identifies with those words
| and responds to the reactions they get, and I think that
| ultimately leads to self-censorship and conformity. When
| there's only one person passing judgment, it doesn't have
| nearly the same negative impact, and what's more you can hit F5
| and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Complaining about newposters is just something you do. It
| would be weird otherwise.
| huytersd wrote:
| Calling it new _posters_ is already weird
| otteromkram wrote:
| For real. I've never heard of that term until this
| thread.
|
| Aren't they just neewbs or something? N33wbs?
|
| N00bs?
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| They have a different term over on 4chan...
| lkt wrote:
| They use "newf*gs" on 4chan, I assume that word is banned
| here so the above posters are censoring it.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| newfags? if you see this comment, then it is not censored
| n6h6 wrote:
| Or the people who manually moderate HackerNews just
| haven't gotten to it yet.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| I can read it, so it's not even (yet) shadowbanned.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Newfriends.
| broodbucket wrote:
| I haven't seen newposters anywhere before, it's always
| been newfriends as the slur replacement
| karolist wrote:
| You know how brits call a cigarette? For some reason
| 4chan calls new-posters new-cigarettes.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _newposters all the way back in 2007_
|
| My recollection is that newposters was coined around 2007 for
| everyone who joined after the Habbo raids that had made /b/
| much more popular. These newposters from Habbo were "ruining"
| the site.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| protip: it was never good
| at_a_remove wrote:
| One night, visiting a friend, I overheard his kid
| complaining about the first big Habbo raid and how these
| people were everywhere. I slid into one of his schoolbook's
| a block-printed note reading POOL'S CLOSED. He never knew
| it was me.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Eternal September is an observable phenomenon whenever a new
| demographic in a community outstrips the old guard. This is
| fundamentally different than "kids these days", though you
| may find some overlap.
| morkalork wrote:
| It's either growing and suffering from eternal September,
| or shrinking and a dying echochamber.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| On an anonymous website, that's the only differentiator
| vasco wrote:
| Lurk more
| waffleiron wrote:
| > and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire
| thing, whereas a post still remains.
|
| Which was no longer a thing, with many people using Omegle to
| create content and upload it to youtube. It became far less
| anonymous in some cases than an image/discussion board.
| permo-w wrote:
| >probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole
|
| 4chan offensiveness isn't so much a generational thing as it is
| a personality thing
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I will forever respect and cherish 4chan because it's pure,
| undiluted humanity in all its goodness _and_ badness.
| praptak wrote:
| Dunno, it feels very diluted nowadays to me.
| midasz wrote:
| Teenage me loved the edginess. Adult me just finds it boring.
| More like a phase thing to me.
| zigman1 wrote:
| I find people who love edginess to feel some sort of moral
| or intellectual superiority to the commons or people they
| often communicate (example, in high school where you really
| have a random mixture of all kinds of personalities).
| Definitely a phase kind of thing
| Loughla wrote:
| 100%. Adults who still enjoy that "edgy" style of
| communication and entertainment always come off as super
| immature.
|
| There's something in there about human development and
| pushing boundaries in your youth, I'm certain.
|
| Also, it did feel great as a teen from a very backwards
| rural area, to be on the very bleeding edge of internet
| culture. Knowing the memes before anyone else was secretly
| satisfying.
| malfist wrote:
| I think there's a phrase for it: Kids are assholes.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| As a father (29) whose daughter (5) told him that she
| didn't like his gray hair because it means he is gonna
| die soon, can confirm.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Our generation grew up on offensive / edginess, things like
| late 90's shock rock, South Park, Jackass, Saw, etc. Nobody
| cares anymore, and it feels like nobody's tried to out-edge
| series like South Park. It feels like we've reached rock
| bottom so the only way is up. Which is a good thing btw.
| naremu wrote:
| With the exception of the "break glass to reboot/one more
| time the IP" moments
|
| It has felt like a natural end to the long term cultural
| battled for acceptance of such basic expressions of
| working class language and humor, in a kind of "needing
| to break it down so we can build it back up" sort of way.
|
| I'd dread to think of a cultural landscape where the
| previous puritanical average continued letting air out of
| the balloon at an excruciatingly slow rate, as opposed to
| the admittedly immature fart sound we reveled in for a
| few moments.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| Series like Paradise PD are more trash and less
| politically edgy. I think you're right.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| A community is defined by the selection process.
|
| People who aren't sensitive to the general offensiveness of
| these communities come from all backgrounds and are
| effectively tolerant of each other in ways that are
| meaningful to them.
| _shantaram wrote:
| That Google search you suggested appears (barring some UI thing
| I'm missing because I'm on Mobile) to only have two results,
| your comment and the 4chan archive. Is there a name for a
| google search with exactly two results? I know one with one
| single result is called a Googlewhack.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's cheating if you use quotes.
| userbinator wrote:
| A Twooglewhack.
| mrmanner wrote:
| Sounds like a 19th century robber baron
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://archive.tinychan.net/read/img/1196772434
|
| archive link for those who don't want to google
| sltkr wrote:
| Very prophetic:
|
| > is this meant as a new scheme to pick up underage children
| by getting them one-on-one with no one else to monitor the
| two-way conversation?
| ratg13 wrote:
| FYI, ICQ had popularized this type of random chat long before
| 4chan existed.
| Aicy wrote:
| Any time I used it in the last five years I had to wade through
| about ten obvious bots advertising some pornsite or scam before
| I got to a real person.
|
| Then when you do get to a real person, 90% of the time they
| said "M or F?" and if you said M they'd instantly leave
| reverse_no wrote:
| wow. i remember using omegle in 2010. the whole chat roulette
| craze. this guy dresses up the issue in some pretty overly
| dramatic and sentimental clothing... in reality this is the
| failure of yet another company that uses the old model. the model
| of the early internet where everything is free and everyone is
| anonymous. its just unviable and becomes less viable as the
| internet grows. captcha is broken... the old model is dead.
|
| when you have a free service and broken captcha then you will be
| a magnet for crime, spam and you will hemorrhage money. maybe
| youll get advertisers if you sanitize the platform and now youve
| defeated the point anyway. or you can sell user data. at the end
| of the day people have to pay.
| Ridj48dhsnsh wrote:
| That's a depressing viewpoint.
|
| The text chat version of Omegle could have easily been hosted
| on a single server with some kind of automated spam protection.
| Donations could have more than covered the costs to run it. The
| positive value it added to millions of lives far outweighs the
| negative.
| system2 wrote:
| Monthly users reaching 70 million. I doubt a basic server
| could handle that.
| codersfocus wrote:
| You'd be surprised what a well optimized server can do.
| Moores law hasn't stopped. 70 million is a pretty low
| number, when modern $40 servers can easily do 10-100k
| requests per second.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| the site you are currently leaving a comment on operates on the
| old model. so far it's working pretty well.
| xelia wrote:
| Ironically it is technically VC backed
| ilc wrote:
| I wonder what it'll have to do to get to an IPO ;)
| seydor wrote:
| most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It's not
| like some magical growth threshold crossed in 2010s, More and
| more of this audience was born internet-native too. It seems to
| be a cultural shift instead
| Blahah wrote:
| Gives me chills, that was so heartfelt and raw. Hurt on all
| sides, but this is a bit like losing access to a public space
| because someone committed crimes there.
|
| One of the greatest things Omegle enabled is this...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is (Harry Mack
| freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+
| episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)
| amanzi wrote:
| He just did the 100th episode the other day and announced he
| wouldn't be doing any more.
| Blahah wrote:
| The journey of those episodes is really inspiring. Practising
| in that environment he pushes the boundaries of so many areas
| of human achievement in one, and once he's better than anyone
| else in the world (maybe half way through the series) he then
| starts surpassing himself faster and faster.
| pdxandi wrote:
| I'm so glad to see Harry Mack getting love on here. It's
| wild that he just shared his last episode on Friday and now
| the site is shutting down. Glad he already took off and
| found success.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Or this:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5poLSRa3cpHBfiJ6wQdT...
|
| Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes
| song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he
| listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.
| tzs wrote:
| Also see these musicians with many "play for strangers on
| Omegle" videos:
|
| Marcus Veltri, piano, https://www.youtube.com/@MarcusVeltri
|
| Rob Landis, violin, https://www.youtube.com/@RobLandes
|
| Billy Wilkins, guitar and vocals,
| https://www.youtube.com/@BillyWilkins
|
| The Doo, guitar and piana and otamatone,
| https://www.youtube.com/@TheDooo
|
| Both Frank Tedesco and Marcus Veltri frequently did joint
| Omegle videos with Rob Landis. Tedesco and Veltri also have
| some joint videos. I seem to also recall some Wilkins,
| Landis, and Tedesco collaborations.
| smcleod wrote:
| Harry Mack
| cristoperb wrote:
| Harry Mack has done a few collaborations with Marcus Veltri
| and Rob Landis:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXKJ3uv_XIk
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Is there a word for whatever the human thing is that makes
| people want to watch reaction videos?
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| mirror neurons
| texuf wrote:
| Mirror neurons
| Simran-B wrote:
| Philanthropy? Humans are social creatures.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| Empathy?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| As others have said, empathy and/or mirror neurons; it's
| the modern day equivalent of a laugh track.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Are they much different from book or restaurant reviews?
| chasd00 wrote:
| Man, i stayed up way past bedtime watching the Frank Tedesco
| youtubes. I was completely blown away, his ability to listen
| to 20 seconds of a song on his phone and then get it mostly
| right on the piano is incredible. What an amazing individual.
| hah, the reactions were golden too, very funny and endearing.
|
| edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in
| college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around
| the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to
| cross it.
| bpicolo wrote:
| This definitely may have destroyed the career of a large number
| of widely popular youtubers... It certainly destroyed their
| format anyway.
|
| Imagine they'll hop to a different platform.
| Blahah wrote:
| Tbh the sad thing isn't any youtuber losing a platform, it's
| that Omegle was really a place people went when they were
| having a hard time and other people went there to cheer them
| up. I really hope there's another platform like it, but I
| don't know it.
| diamondsdancing wrote:
| not video based, but captures some of the spontaneous
| spirit of omegle. it lets you have live interactions with
| anyone on the same web page as you.
|
| https://www.getmoonbounce.com/
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Some of them were already on OmeTV, so I imagine that's where
| most will move.
| simlevesque wrote:
| While.we are on the subject of Omegle youtubers, I also love
| Something About Chickens
| fragmede wrote:
| https://youtu.be/-4e3hi9AWVs
| subpixel wrote:
| Looking for the explainer on this one!
| tzs wrote:
| For that one it may be a combination of two things.
|
| 1. He starts out by asking if he can show them a magic
| trick. They say yes or nod yes. He then exits stage
| right. He then returns either through the back door or
| some the side stage left. Where he enters from is too far
| away from where he left for him to have walked or even
| ran there in the time between entrance and exit.
|
| The part up to where he exists stage left could be pre-
| recorded. His wording and gestures change slightly with
| different people but he could have several different pre-
| recorded segments for this.
|
| As Teller once observed:
|
| > Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on
| something than anyone else might reasonably expect
|
| Penn has said something similar:
|
| > The only secret of magic is that I'm willing to work
| harder on it than you think it's worth
|
| It could then switch to live for his return, where he
| then actually converses with them to prove that he's
| live.
|
| 2. If he encounters someone whose responses to the pre-
| recorded segment don't fit in, he skips them. Remember,
| we don't see how many people he had to try this with to
| get enough good ones for a video, and recall Teller's
| quote from above.
|
| The one he's done that has me baffled is the one where he
| does this:
|
| 1. He asks them what city they live in.
|
| 2. He then tells them he used to live in that city and
| gives the address of where he lived. It is their address
| or an address of a close neighbor.
|
| He also does this except instead of asking the city he
| tells them he has a talent for guessing people's names,
| and then tells them their name.
|
| I can see in general how to do these, by using fake
| disconnects. He uses fake disconnects in one of his most
| common routines where he asks someone if he can show them
| a magic trick, starts a "pick a card" type routine, and
| then disconnects just has he's revealing their card. Then
| later when the person is connected to someone else either
| that someone else says "is this your card?" and holds up
| the correct card or he walks into that someone else's
| room and shows the card.
|
| The key here is that he doesn't really disconnect. He
| just shows the disconnect screen, and then switches to
| feeding them video of the other person. They think that
| they have connected to someone new on Omegle but it is
| him the whole time.
|
| With fake disconnects he could have his subjects in the
| "tell them their name" bit first talk to an accomplice
| who gets their name, fake disconnect and fake connect
| with him, and then he can do his name guess.
|
| That should be fairly easy because people often exchange
| names on Omegle. But full addresses? I'd hope that would
| be rare, rare enough that even a Penn/Teller level of
| time would not be enough to get many people.
| rnk wrote:
| Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn't ever come across
| Harry Mack. That guy is fantastic. And he gave so much
| happiness to those people he was rapping for! Just seeing all
| the delight on their faces gave me a tear in my eye. There's a
| lot of lonely people in the world, and for a moment, he
| improved their lives. We need better ways to connect; today I
| can VC with anyone in the world in a second, but we don't know
| how to connect like he does. Creators, work to make that kind
| of connection happen.
| Blahah wrote:
| So happy you've discovered it! In every single video in the
| series he lifts up a bunch of people who are struggling in a
| really personal, memorable, inspiring way. I reckon he's
| saved a few lives (at least).
| amplex1337 wrote:
| Great analogy. And.. thank you so much for posting this. HMack
| is a legend. Every time I listen to him I get stuck for hours.
| He is mindblowing constantly, pure love. It's worth the
| excursion every time, no one can amaze and impress like him
| every time. I've seen some Omegle videos with him before, but
| this one was really special. Super appreciate this.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| My first thought was, what is Harry Mack going to do now??
| ConorSheehan1 wrote:
| The Doo and Marcus Veltri too. So many world class musicians
| show up randomly on omegle
| donkeyd wrote:
| Thanks for sharing Harry Mack, never heard of him, but this
| took me down an emotional rabbit hole. Amazing what music can
| do.
| op00to wrote:
| > a bit like losing access to a public space
|
| It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random
| people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't
| giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private
| rooms to prevent sexual abuse.
| joenot443 wrote:
| And so now they'll have to choose one of the other, even
| seedier bars. The kids aren't any better off.
|
| You've made a poor analogy, though, since obviously it's very
| trivial for a bar to validate age at the door. If such a
| thing were easy for Omegle to do, I'm sure they would.
| op00to wrote:
| If it's trivial for a bar to validate, why not the same for
| a web site?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| With websites, you can have one person serving ten
| million people, and support that on a single income. With
| bars, you can only fit about a hundred people in, and
| enough of them have to be paying customers that you can
| afford to keep the bar running - but that also means you
| can physically look at everyone's identification papers.
| op00to wrote:
| If you can't validate the age of the people using Omegle,
| perhaps the service is not appropriate to exist.
| malfist wrote:
| I think my right to privacy out weighs a "think of the
| children" argument.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The anything goes / mass surveillance dichotomy is false.
| It _is_ possible to have small-scale, individually-
| moderated websites, if the software to host them is
| available and easy to run, without sacrificing privacy
| (or even accountability). Pseudonymity is usually good
| enough, especially for things like Omegle.
|
| Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when
| most people's primary computing device was capable of
| acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied
| empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard
| enough I'm sure we can get there.
| malfist wrote:
| How do you propose verifying a users age without
| sacrificing privacy?
|
| Even knowing their age at all is giving up some privacy.
|
| If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to
| data brokers and exploited at large a scale
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _How do you propose verifying a users age without
| sacrificing privacy?_
|
| It's usually obvious if you can have a short conversation
| with the person in question. Throughout my childhood
| escapades, I'm certain that most, if not all, the
| responsible adults I interacted with knew pretty much
| exactly how old I was. (I'd managed to navigate a legal
| loophole that, I believe, still exists in GDPR today, so
| they weren't required to kick me off - but while I was
| treated as an equal, I wasn't treated the same way I'm
| treated now.)
|
| > _If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to
| data brokers and exploited at large a scale_
|
| That's quite illegal, and quite easy to detect (just give
| slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks).
| Most people don't commit crimes: individuals just don't
| have the kinds of incentive to buy and sell people's
| personal data that organisations like Facebook, Taboola
| and Oracle have. (And what would they get for betraying
| these people's trust? $30? Sure... I'd _totally_ go for
| that.)
| malfist wrote:
| How do you propose to give slightly different data to
| everyone and see what leaks when you have to have a short
| conversation with the person in question?
| o_nate wrote:
| Seems like a good opening for a service that could
| validate your age for a low cost and provide a token good
| for logging on to adults-only sites.
| kevindamm wrote:
| This bar had a complex tunnel system leading up to it that
| was completely unlit. In the beginning you could run right
| through, but eventually they made you yell "I'm over 18"
| and took your word on it.
|
| This bar also had special partitions in each room that were
| practically indestructible, allowing sound and light
| through but protecting from physical harm.
|
| [EDIT: I don't mean to imply that the check is easy! The
| reality of Omegle's difficulties is understood. I'm just
| riffing on the metaphor]
| ferfumarma wrote:
| Why? Anything on Omegle could happen in a park. Or a library.
| Omegle can't keep kids off their platform: their parents need
| to.
| op00to wrote:
| A park is in public view.
|
| A library is in public view.
|
| Omegle was in private, away from public view.
|
| No one needs to keep anyone off Omegle now, it is gone.
| ouEight12 wrote:
| > A park is in public view. > A library is in public
| view.
|
| And yet heinous acts of abuse/violence/etc have occurred
| in both.
|
| By your logic, we should pave all the parks and burn down
| the libraries.
| op00to wrote:
| How many sex crimes are reported in your local park?
| Hundreds of thousands were reported to Omegle.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| Hundreds of thousands? Do you have a link?
| 2devnull wrote:
| Depends on the park. Some are known for it. Parents know
| to keep their kids away from those parks. For that
| reason, it's better to have one really cruisy park that
| everyone knows about and can easily avoid but which also
| acts to contain the pervs. Maybe Omegle closing will just
| make the predators harder to spot and keep away from?
| cultureswitch wrote:
| You've got an axe to grind don't you? Does it really not
| seem obvious to you that the damage of a single sexual
| harassment in a park outweighs any number of online
| interactions?
| hnrodey wrote:
| Harry Mack has a very active channel on TikTok where he posts
| recordings from Omegle. 12/10 highly recommend. Never seen
| anyone like him.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I'm not getting the economics here.
|
| With so many big names using it, and it is so popular.
|
| Why was it a financial drain? Why can't it keep going?
|
| Surely if was making enough money. .
| _eric wrote:
| His Omegle 100[0] video is one of the best one yet, Harry is a
| legend. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk
| DoingSomeThings wrote:
| There's an interesting progression watching him over time.
| While his technical ability has dramatically improved, so too
| has the engagement. Now you start to get more clips of people
| saying "Wait. I've seen you on Youtube/TikTok". Love his
| journey.
| _eric wrote:
| Definitely, it's been a crazy and inspiring journey. I'm
| kind of bummed it's coming to an end, it was my favorite
| series of his.
| cristoperb wrote:
| I've never used Omegle myself, but I've watched all of Harry
| Mack's Omegle Bars videos (freestyle rapping) and they are
| golden. Always fun to see him matched with some random kids and
| brighten their day:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk
| wycy wrote:
| The loss of Harry Mack's Omegle Bars was the first thing that
| came to mind for me.
| lukeholder wrote:
| He was retiring the series at 100 episodes anyway, but yeah a
| sad day.
| pwython wrote:
| Wow, he finished that just in time (ep 100 was released
| just last week).
| romanhn wrote:
| I just discovered him yesterday and ended up watching something
| like 20 videos last night. This was also the first thought that
| came to my mind when I was reading the announcement.
| LarsAlereon wrote:
| I'm really sad about this. I know that a lot of really desperate
| people used the text chat feature when they needed someone to
| listen, and there's certainly a lot of people who are alive and
| happy today because they found someone to talk to there when they
| needed it. I can't deny that there have also been cases where
| people's lives have been made worse or ruined because of
| something that happened to them, but I think on the balance the
| site made the world a better place.
| blastersyndrome wrote:
| So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because
| the owner didn't want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?
|
| Is there a list of websites that have been shut down due to this
| type of attrition? I'm aware of at least one other site[0] that
| has met the same fate. It would be interesting to see an
| exhaustive list.
|
| [0] freeimage.us
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down
| because the owner didn't want to deal with the constant spam of
| CSAM?
|
| No, not spam of CSAM (in the sense of distribution of material
| where the abuse occurred elsewhere), but actual grooming and
| abuse happening through the site.
|
| e.g.,
| https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/virginia-m...
|
| the more specific proximate cause, I believe, is one of the
| current suits that has gotten past S230 immunity, possibly the
| ongoing product liability lawsuit:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The owner is currently being sued by a woman who used the site
| as a minor and was matched with a pedophile who convinced her
| to make and send CSAM. This isn't the usual kind of "CSAM
| intermediary liablility" lawsuit; the plaintiff is actually
| making an ordinary product liability claim. i.e. Omegle has no
| safety bars to keep kids from using the service ergo they are
| liable for me being abused by an adult.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| zug_zug wrote:
| That seems nuts to me. It's just a generic venue for people
| meeting people, like a cafe that happens to be online.
|
| To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you
| met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.
| op00to wrote:
| No cafe would allow an adult to sexually groom a child
| while sitting at a table.
| gosub100 wrote:
| No parent would allow their child to communicate with a
| groomer.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Yes, 90% of cafes would, because just like Omegle, it's
| not their job or ability to monitor every single
| interaction between every single person and identify
| whether a conversation is appropriate.
|
| Crimes happen on all technologies and in all venues, and
| they likely always will.
| fer wrote:
| No grooming happened on Omegle, she just shared her
| personal info there and kept in touch off the platform.
| nullc wrote:
| By their own case the explicit activity didn't even take
| place on omegle. The perv met the kid and went elsewhere.
| Of course that wouldn't be prevented in a cafe.
| goydefense wrote:
| The decentralized cryptonet can't come fast enough!
| oynqr wrote:
| So they sue the platform that got them to meet, but not the
| one that allowed CSAM to be exchanged?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| correct, like suing the city because you met a podophile in
| the city park
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Wow fuck, I was on there sketching portraits of people just
| yesterday. This really sucks. RIP
| sugarpile wrote:
| Elsewhere in the thread this article with an embedded video was
| linked: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
|
| The video, showing a BBC "journalist" attempting to ambush Leif,
| is one of the most... existentially disgusting? videos I've seen
| in a long, long time.
|
| It's so utterly performative. Such a transparent attempt by the
| "journalist" at painting himself as a certain sort of person. Not
| a single genuine emotion, action, expression, or word. Absolutely
| soulless and desperate attempt to virtue signal in the even more
| desperate hope of furthering his career. This "man" is no better
| than someone selling themselves on onlyfans. Actually, I'd posit
| he's worse: the entire schtick requires disingenuous postering.
|
| I don't know what to do when seeing stuff like this. It's
| depressing. I hope one day there's a return to a much smaller
| internet and these people deign to just leave us alone. He's a
| sad man and the fact his doing this will may well advantage him
| is even sadder. I guess I'll go take a walk.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Even more disconcerting is the possibility they believe they're
| pursuing righteousness genuinely rather than just for the
| reward.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| The reporter, Joe Tidy, isn't virtue signaling. He is an honest
| zealot full of righteous fury. He is 100% confident he's right,
| just like those who killed heretics during crusades a couple
| thousand years ago, burned witches a few hundred years ago, or
| exterminated capitalists as part of Cambodian Khmer Rouge a few
| decades ago.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| He must be stopped at all cost.
| falsenapkin wrote:
| In that video he asserts through the closed door that Omegle
| hasn't done anything "for the children" and then in the article
| they have one measly line about how Omegle actually has been
| productive on that front. The text now on the Omegle site seems
| to support that they did what they could as well. Of course
| they're not going to get a good conversation with him when
| that's how they're going to frame it compared to reality.
| Whether Omegle was doing _enough_ or should exist to begin with
| are different arguments but the premise of "Omegle is doing
| nothing" appears very wrong and I imagine offensive to
| creator/employees.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| "He was definitely home, all the blinds were drawn" _5 minutes
| later, Leif is seen going from his car to his house_
|
| You can't make this stuff up.
|
| Every time I see a BBC clip it's something ridiculous. There's
| probably a good business opportunity doing a mystery science
| theater 3000 version of BBC news at this point.
| shmde wrote:
| The guy can file a stalking and harassment case on BBC can't
| he ?
| NietTim wrote:
| I was wondering about that. If someone is sitting at my
| doorstep for hours, no matter their intention or field of
| work, I'm calling the cops to have them removed
| la64710 wrote:
| Touching
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Redistribution of consequences strikes again.
| neilv wrote:
| > _From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it
| has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town,
| relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation
| how much more there was to discover - how many interesting people
| and ideas the world had to offer._
|
| This was a not-unusual story for people active online in the
| '80s.
|
| I wonder how the world-expanding has changed, now that everyone's
| online. I feel like I only have a partial and rough high-level
| understanding.
|
| Nowadays, for example, every gay kid in every small town knows
| they're not alone, which is a great advance for humanity.
|
| But everyone is also being bombarded, conditioned, tracked,
| manipulated, and exploited _pervasively_ online.
|
| What things can we contemporary techbros do, to keep all the
| goodness of making online accessible to everyone, but remove much
| of the current badness?
|
| (I mean, after we spend 5 minutes removing various kinds of
| third-party trackers from sites we control, what's the next thing
| we can do?)
| hu3 wrote:
| Amazing. This post is 1 hour old and Wikipedia is already
| updated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle
|
| "Omegle (/oU'meg@l/[1]) was a free online chat website that
| allowed users to socialize with others without the need to
| register. The service randomly paired users in one-on-one chat
| sessions where they would chat anonymously using the names "You"
| and "Stranger". It operated from 2009 to 2023."
|
| ...
|
| "On November 8, 2023, K-Brooks posted an announcement describing
| the challenges of running the site, and the ultimate decision to
| suspend the service. Challenges listed was online exploitation of
| children and attacks on communication services. K-Brooks
| concluded that his decision revolved around internet misuse and
| asked users to consider donating to the Electronic Frontier
| Foundation to combat misuse."
| paulpauper wrote:
| Wikipedia is so fast, soon they will predict the news
| tapland wrote:
| Didn't know Leif founded Omegle but he's struck me as one of the
| most sincere and well intensioned people I've encountered.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| This is devastating. I have so many fond memories of meeting
| fellow weirdos over text. The days where StumbleUpon always took
| you somewhere exciting, cool, beautiful, interesting, funny, or
| novel. Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and
| only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly
| feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-
| the-2010s.
|
| I even used it during pandemic times as a way to dance with
| strangers over video; putting on ridiculous outfits and playing
| disco were some of the moments from those dark times that I still
| cherish.
|
| RIP Omegle! You will be missed, by me and many others.
| eru wrote:
| > Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only
| marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels
| like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s.
|
| This is funny to me, because I am old enough to remember when
| web 2.0 was new, and people were nostalgic for 'web 1.0'. (And,
| of course, it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.)
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| I was growing up when the first people got BBS' and
| CompuServe. I don't miss the days of dial-up.
|
| I miss the days just as you learned Google could answer
| questions you asked in free-form, without the censorship and
| advertisement preferences they give today. Those were better
| days on gonewild also.
| civilitty wrote:
| I miss the good ol' days of Minitel. Imagine an internet made
| up almost exclusively of French people.
| eru wrote:
| > Imagine an internet made up almost exclusively of French
| people.
|
| I'm not sure I would want to imagine that. But then, I'm
| German.
| dotancohen wrote:
| A fox would not want to imagine an internet made up
| almost exclusively of hens? ))
| eru wrote:
| Those dastardly Frenchmen used to always try and conquer
| my ancestors.
|
| The long line of Louis didn't get all that far (but their
| interference in the 30 years wars probably made things
| worse), but Napoleon finally managed to take a big bit
| out of German lands for a while.
| malpighien wrote:
| How expensive was it to participate in message boards. My
| parents used it so sparingly and with the idea that any
| minute was addding up. I read 60 francs l'heure, so about
| 10 euros or more like 17 with inflation. Even spending an
| hour a day would be a costly hobby.
| jchw wrote:
| Even though I did miss older stuff in the web 2.0 days, I had
| a positive outlook (and good reason to have it) for the
| things that would come next.
|
| Not anymore.
| maegul wrote:
| > it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.
|
| And yet golden eras do occur, or so it would seem.
|
| I'm sure it's hard to tell when you're in or near one, which
| is an interesting topic in its own right, but it doesn't mean
| we should dismiss outright the possibility that a passing era
| might just be taking something truly valuable with it.
| eru wrote:
| Even a non-golden era can have something truly valuable.
|
| Btw, we are living in a golden age. The vast majority of
| humanity has never had it better.
| chx wrote:
| > we are living in a golden age
|
| I would've agreed pre-covid.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Less than 130 years ago 47% of all children in the USA
| died before reaching age 5. I think that we are doing
| just fine even with covid.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| A lot of folks are hungry in my state. As in : not enough
| nutrient a day.
|
| https://www.cpex.org/blog/stateofhunger
| pmarreck wrote:
| Other states (that are probably run better): Exist
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Sorry, what is your point?
|
| Mine was that a level of poverties implying calories
| deficit exist in the US.
| jannes wrote:
| Does COVID still exist meaningfully in your part of the
| world?
|
| In my country the first few waves were very strong, but
| after a successful vaccination campaign (among other
| things) COVID has completely disappeared in everybody's
| daily lives.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I think they are referring less to the actual virus and
| more to the rapid deterioration of our discourse and
| politics that accompanied it. Or at least this is what I
| might mean when using "COVID" as an epoch.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| > rapid deterioration of our discourse and politics that
| accompanied it
|
| That has been happening way before Covid.
|
| IMHO it started with the internet. Pre-internet the flow
| of information is gatekept by traditional media -
| newspapers, radio, TV, ... etc. Everyone watched,
| listened to, read more or less the same things. This
| resulted in a more uniform set of opinions and more
| common ground between people.
|
| The internet broke all that. People could choose what
| they watch/listen/read and different people picked
| different things, coming to very different conclusions.
| In the past you could ask someone if they watched X last
| night and there is a decent probability they did. Today
| it's much harder to find common ground - you could both
| be on YouTube but watching completely different things.
|
| Edit: Don't just downvote. You got a problem with this
| post, say something.
| 2devnull wrote:
| I agree it was happening before COVID. I think the
| internet could be part of the problem. But it wasn't
| freedom of choice that caused the problem, which is what
| you claim. There's much less freedom on the internet now,
| and if anything it's much worse. If we're going to blame
| internet then blame ads and big tech. Don't blame people
| for watching cat videos, that's absurd.
| berdario wrote:
| A teammate caught Covid this week, and they're now
| isolating.
|
| Another teammate's family caught Covid last week.
|
| Me and my wife caught Covid in August.
|
| We're all vaccinated afaik (myself with 5 jabs), and
| thankfully we only got mild symptoms, but the problem
| with Covid is how easy it is for it to spread.
|
| Do people in your life do a rapid test when they get
| sick? The only explanation I see for thinking that Covid
| has "disappeared", is that barely anyone still tests.
| tyiz wrote:
| Perhaps you need a solid booster shot? And if it is for
| the Pfizer smile.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > The only explanation I see for thinking that Covid has
| "disappeared", is that barely anyone still tests.
|
| That and barely anyone still dies (excess of eg the flu
| which kills a bunch of people each year)
| chx wrote:
| Dying is no longer that much of a concern indeed thanks
| for the jabs (got my 6th this week) but long covid very
| much is.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| And long COVID significantly increases your risk of death
| from other causes, including heart attack and stroke.
|
| I did read recently that a long course of acyclovir may
| be a working treatment, possibly even cure, for long
| COVID. But in order to get that out to people, we'd have
| to start taking long COVID seriously.
| all2 wrote:
| I'm on 0 jabs (apparently they don't slow transmission or
| virality, so I figured I wouldn't bother) and long covid
| is still really rough. A few things helped me get through
| long covid: surprisingly, nicotine and a _lot_ of natural
| carbs from fresh ripe fruits. And by an excess, I mean
| 200+ grams a day by macro. It took me a month or two of
| nicotine gum, about 100lbs of fruit (12.5lbs a week) and
| so much sleep, but I 'm starting to do better.
|
| It sucks, but you can make it through.
| chx wrote:
| do not listen to this guy.
|
| long covid is not something you can combat with fresh
| fruits, it can cause a life long disability, brain damage
| and more. it's quite obvious an anti-vaxxer would try to
| dismiss it as a "sucks but you can make it through". Look
| up the stories of people who still can barely get out of
| bed after _years_ of long covid.
| all2 wrote:
| I'm offering what worked for me. There's other stuff out
| there that might work, but I haven't tried. For example,
| I've heard folks talk about paxlovid working to alleviate
| symptoms, or using standard courses of antivirals, and so
| on. I'm here sharing my own experience.
|
| If I've dismissed anyone, I sincerely apologize. That was
| not my intent.
|
| When I say "it sucks, but you can make it through" my
| desire is to _offer hope_ to a group of people - that I
| 'm a part of - that often lacks hope given the severity
| of their symptoms.
|
| As for efficacy, I'd invite you to look into
| mitochondrial dysfunction and how long covid is related.
| I'll note that a carb heavy diet is one of the ways to
| reboot energy production on the body, which can be potent
| for reducing fatigue.
| chx wrote:
| > I'm offering what worked for me
|
| I choose not to believe you because you refused to
| vaccinate which makes everything you say suspect. Sorry.
| all2 wrote:
| > suspect
|
| Why?
| chx wrote:
| Actually, I looked this up for you.
|
| https://derekfranksmusings.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-
| thi...
|
| > You see, covid is NOT really a respiratory illness.
| Researchers at Oxford University call it a "Serious
| Vascular Disease with Primary Symptoms of a Respiratory
| Ailment". So, you need to stop comparing it to colds and
| flus. No cold killed 30,000+ Americans in less than two
| months in 2023. Covid did so in January and February. So,
| please stop comparing them.
| berdario wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that article, there's also another
| recent one with plenty of references about the
| clusterfuck of the current situation:
|
| https://www.normalcyfugitive.com/p/the-pandemic-isnt-over
|
| One thing that (by skimming again) both articles don't
| touch is: excess deaths.
|
| I've seen people suggest that we're "past it", because
| the excess deaths (compared to 2 years before) are now
| subsiding... While ignoring the fact that excess deaths
| compared to 2 year before are comparing against when the
| first few COVID spikes happened (and we didn't have
| vaccines, so mortality was even higher).
|
| We need to compare our society excess mortality to 2019
| (and/or average of years preceding 2020), for the
| foreseeable future :/
|
| That said, I'm not spending 100% of my day worrying about
| COVID, and I don't take as many precautions as I could...
| I wear FFP2 masks in public transport, but I usually
| don't bother in the office, for example
| slowmotiony wrote:
| Have you thought about getting a sixth shot? It ought to
| work eventually...!
| superhumanuser wrote:
| > We're all vaccinated afaik (myself with 5 jabs), and
| thankfully we only got mild symptoms
|
| You got the shot 5 times, still caught it, and you call
| it a vaccine...
|
| Serious question. How do you keep making the decision to
| get the shot?
| fragmede wrote:
| Yearly flu vaccines have been around since the 1940s and
| change yearly to adapt to the latest strains. I don't see
| why covid should be any different in this respect.
| chx wrote:
| because of long covid
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I mean, I don't think a flu shot is worth most people's
| time either. If you're around people with compromised
| immune systems sure, but for your average person it's
| really not beneficial.
| chimprich wrote:
| > You got the shot 5 times, still caught it, and you call
| it a vaccine...
|
| After almost 4 years of this virus, 3 years of covid
| vaccines, a presumably basic level of biological
| education, the baseline level of curiosity that I'd have
| thought would be present in anyone reading HN, and the
| world of free information at our fingertips, I don't
| rightly understand why people keep making elementary
| mistakes like this.
| flir wrote:
| Surely it's obvious? It's because they _want_ to.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I mean, you'd probably still wear a seatbelt after having
| an accident... It's insurance, like the flu vax, not
| completely preventative.
|
| By redefining "vaccine" only as something that provides
| "sterilizing immunity" (which actually only a few of them
| have ever provided, and thus, this expectation was never
| actually part of the original definition; see:
| https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-few-vaccines-
| prevent...) and thus impugning vaccine advocacy (or
| specifically, COVID vaccine use) as misguided at best,
| you are actually contributing to a narrative of
| science/medicine doubt that will literally lead to more
| death in the world. So please reconsider your carefully-
| worded position.
| nicky0 wrote:
| Why do you still consider any of this necessary at this
| point?
| alphager wrote:
| Because the thing I use to make a living is my brain and
| COVID had a significant chance to impact it long term.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| This summer we finally relaxed a lot after years of
| masking, and BAM, a child coughed right on my wife's face
| and she got long covid. Fortunately she seems to be
| almost totally recovered now (fingers crossed for no
| relapse) , but she has spent two months with fatigue and
| headaches strong enough to prevent her from working or
| doing many daily activities.
|
| My wife is in her 30s and healthy. COVID can still be
| quite brutal, although of course the extent of the
| measures one should take is highly debatable and
| subjective.
| chx wrote:
| I am _done_ with people. I wear a Cleanspace Halo and
| hate the world for making me do so. Everyone is free to
| cough on me, ain 't gonna do much.
|
| As an aside: even pre covid I was eagerly waiting for a
| (somewhat) affordable exoskeleton. I am going to have the
| best Darth Vader cosplay ever.
| all2 wrote:
| I got another round of rona in February of this year and
| suddenly became so tired. I needed 14+ hours of sleep and
| concentrating was next to impossible. The fatigue was
| overwhelming at times. Some six months later I'm on my
| way out of that now, with more good days than bad.
|
| It's good that she had you to rely on. I did a lot of
| reading on long covid and there were and so are so many
| people isolated because they're basically spent all the
| time.
| flir wrote:
| What does the data look like in your country? England had
| 273 deaths and 3000 hospital admissions in the past week.
| It's still there, bubbling along in the background, it's
| just not getting media attention.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Data?!
| jdhzzz wrote:
| Here is some for the US: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-
| data-tracker/#trends_weeklyhospi...
| lk251 wrote:
| the main risk is long covid, not dying. exact risk of LC
| per infection is unclear but the order of magnitude of
| the figures i'm seeing for it are too high. i'm wearing
| ffp3 indoors in public places
| DonHopkins wrote:
| COVID is what saved us from four more years of Trump (and
| perhaps many more after that of his family and Rudy
| Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Steven Miller and Steve
| Bannon and the list goes on and on...).
| peyton wrote:
| Maybe you're thinking of a "gilded age" in the sense of
| Twain. The Golden Age of Hesiod and Ovid was defined by
| peace and justice amongst a golden race. It's about
| ideals and peace rather than material prosperity. The
| metals debase from gold to silver to bronze to iron as
| conflict increases and the social contract breaks.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| 'Golden age' is typically used to mean a historic age of
| comparative greatness from which society has since
| fallen.
|
| See the idiomatic vs. the mythological meaning on
| Wiktionary:
|
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/golden_age
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| That's a bit simplistic.
|
| If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are
| experiencing secularly stagnating growth, a crisis of
| democratic representation and its populist backlash, the
| return of oligarchic inequality to levels not seen since
| the gilded age, and extreme social atomisation and mental
| health breakdown.
|
| We are also all hurtling towards catastrophic climate
| change, an AI revolution that could lead to generalised
| technological unemployment, and some indeterminate level
| of conflict between the US and China.
|
| Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people in advanced
| economies look back on the post-war decades as a golden
| age - obviously there were problems, but there was high
| growth, full employment, good public services, strong
| unions, and comparatively cheap housing. Others look back
| to the 1990s as a time of untroubled horizons.
|
| Also, the global 'we' is unhelpful. Have native
| Americans, Syrians or Greeks never had it so good?
| vasco wrote:
| > Also, the global 'we' is unhelpful. Have native
| Americans, Syrians or Greeks never had it so good?
|
| Syrians are starving and in war, so they've been better.
| The other two examples, undoubtedly yes they are better
| than ever. For anyone to think it was better in any other
| time in history for most of the global population than
| now, shows such a lack of knowledge of history and the
| human condition that its hard to take serious. For
| someone so concerned with the future of humanity to
| create a problem with referring to all humans as "we" is
| a bit rich.
|
| Scrolling instagram and fake depressions aren't worse
| than having 7 miscarriages, half your kids dying as
| babies or children, being enslaved, starving to death and
| a million other nice things most humans had to deal with
| that they don't have to deal with now. Basic access to
| medicine, food stability etc, on a large scale is so much
| better. We have the fewest people living in poverty there
| ever was.
|
| Wanting to better ourselves and being aware the Maslow
| hierarchy continues to create infinite steps should not
| blind you to the amount of work millions of humans over
| generations have done to create such an easy mode version
| of the world for us. To not at least acknowledge it and
| just say it all sucks is myopic at the minimum.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| Read the first sentence with which I began. I said it was
| simplistic, not that it was categorically and completely
| wrong, and certainly not that its opposite was true.
|
| What I object to is the extraordinarily simplistic, one-
| dimensional view of progress peddled by the likes of Hans
| Rosling and Steven Pinker.
|
| True, lot's of material and medical indicators of
| progress have consistently increased. That's to be
| celebrated. Certainly, if asked, the vast majority of
| people in the West would want to be born in the post-war
| years, and the average would probably slant towards the
| end of that period. Though I do think a good slice of
| people would choose against the post-2008 years in
| particular.
|
| But that binary - better or worse? - is a crude measure
| of societal health. It lacks any dialectical sense of
| modernity, of that fact the same socio-technological
| expansion which brought about that progress, has gone
| hand-in-hand with extreme oligarchy, world war, nuclear
| weapons, climate change, the anthropocene. Certainly, the
| risks of catastrophic global breakdown are greater today
| than ever before.
|
| I also think it has a superficial and philistine grasp of
| politics and the common good. Besides utilitarians, few
| political philosophers would so easily equate the good
| with material abundance. Hence why I pointed, by way of
| counterpoint, to today's secular stagnation, crisis of
| democracy, inequality, and withering of public life.
| These are not small problems, but speak to fundamental
| pathologies in our body politic.
|
| > "The other two examples, undoubtedly yes they are
| better than ever."
|
| Many native Americans and Greeks would viscerally
| disagree with you. Perhaps you're missing something?
|
| > "For anyone to think it was better in any other time in
| history for most of the global population than now, shows
| such a lack of knowledge of history and the human
| condition that its hard to take serious."
|
| As above, you have misread what I said, and I think
| trying to understand and evaluate society solely from the
| binary standard of 'better or worse' is extremely crude.
| I have a PhD in history btw.
|
| >"Scrolling instagram and fake depressions aren't worse
| than having 7 miscarriages, half your kids dying as
| babies or children, being enslaved, starving to death."
|
| True, but I think virtually no one would say otherwise.
| This is an unhelpful caricature of the argument I was
| making.
| vasco wrote:
| If you think being able to take all variables you can
| into account and have your model spit out "better" or
| "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything cause
| any answer to anything is crude.
|
| The question is simple, given any century throughout
| history, would a person prefer to be born in 2000 or any
| century before then, not knowing anything else about
| their life, where they will be born, who their parents
| are etc. I'm pretty sure a rational person will always
| choose 2000 as of today if they are choosing actually
| thinking of the consequences and not just "I wanna
| cosplay as a cowboy".
|
| If you don't think you can answer that question you don't
| have any knowledge. You fell into the trap of "I learned
| how much I didn't know and now think nothing can be
| answered because everything is complex" which is a trap
| some people fall into. At some point laws need to be
| written and you need answers. What is simplistic to me is
| saying "aw chucks it's too complex, nobody knows if it's
| better because for one person over there it's worse".
| Even complex systems have answers at the end, said
| another way, whatever the distribution or long tails or
| whatever, I can still calculate a median. You should
| "roll up" your knowledge into being able to still answer
| "yes" or "no" to something. And the answer is yes, the
| world is better to live in today, regardless of how much
| hand waving you do about specific subsets of people or
| caring about 2008 till now vs before as if that
| realistically mattered on a large scale of centuries of
| human existence.
|
| It's also funny how its crude when I say it's better for
| everyone but it's not crude when you say it's worse for
| Greek people. Also still trying to understand if you
| think the financial crisis has anything on medieval
| medical practices and lack of food and societal support
| systems. I was poor in portugal during that period so
| pretty much went through the same as the Greeks and let
| me tell you I'd rather be poor in the 2000s than rich
| anywhere on earth in the 1400s.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| >"If you think being able to take all variables you can
| into account and have your model spit out "better" or
| "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything cause
| any answer to anything is crude."
|
| That doesn't follow logically at all!?
|
| Trying to reduce human history down to a summative,
| categorical and dichotomous judgement of '-1' or '+1' is
| outrageously simplistic, almost by strict definition.
| Incidentally, precisely this observation is baked into
| common idioms, like 'black and white thinking', and
| Manichean 'good versus evil'.
|
| You also seen to be taking an incongruently natural
| scientific approach to what is a largely a meta-ethical
| and historical question - two fields with their own,
| distinctive methodologies.
|
| I don't think this conversation has been particularly
| constructive, so let's wish one another the best and park
| it.
| vasco wrote:
| > That doesn't follow logically at all!?
|
| The logic implication is that everything is complex :)
|
| Anyway yeah lets park it. I think you should reflect on
| being able to reduce complex problems to practical
| answers and I should reflect on not over-simplifying
| complex topics and if we both do that this conversation
| is not a waste of time. Hopefully we agree at least on
| that. Otherwise have a great day!
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are
| experiencing secularly stagnating growth
|
| Is growth really what we should care about though? Would
| you prefer to live in a poor society that's growing
| rapidly, or a rich society that's stagnating? In terms of
| your quality of life (medical, food, housing, education,
| etc.) you're going to have a better time in the stagnant-
| but-rich society.
|
| The American economy is actually doing super well right
| now btw: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-
| american-weal...
| 2devnull wrote:
| I'd much rather be in a poor but growing economy than a
| rich stagnating one. I'm very sure about that.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Why?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Opportunity and poor, growing countries turn into rich
| countries within a human lifespan and then don't usually
| stagnate for another generation or two.
| concordDance wrote:
| Also worth mentioning the demographic collapse. Many
| ethnic groups are on their way to extinction.
| eru wrote:
| > If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are
| experiencing secularly stagnating growth,
|
| I haven't noticed that. The US is currently in a boom,
| and unemployment across the rich world is mostly at
| record lows.
|
| > a crisis of democratic representation and its populist
| backlash,
|
| Not sure what you mean there? Are you talking about US
| politics?
|
| > the return of oligarchic inequality to levels not seen
| since the gilded age,
|
| Global inequality has gone down considerably in the last
| few decades. Not sure what you are talking about.
|
| > Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people in advanced
| economies look back on the post-war decades as a golden
| age - obviously there were problems, but there was high
| growth, full employment, good public services, strong
| unions, and comparatively cheap housing. Others look back
| to the 1990s as a time of untroubled horizons.
|
| Those 'glorious' post-war years were when global
| inequality really took off. It's taken the rapid progress
| of the last few decades to partially undo the damage.
| concordDance wrote:
| True, but the rates of depression and general unhappiness
| in the West are definitely up from 30 years ago.
| dotancohen wrote:
| No, there is more awareness and they are more vocal now.
| theclansman wrote:
| That's an extremely simplistic way to dismiss the
| problem. Depression wasn't something that was invented or
| discovered in the last decade.
| WilTimSon wrote:
| But openness about mental health issues and lower stigma
| around it is definitely a more modern thing, actually. I
| don't doubt that some subsets of the population got more
| depressed while others feel better, but it's very
| possible that rates would have been the same 30 years
| ago, had people felt okay with talking about suicidal
| thoughts, depression or a variety of other things that
| are at least a bit less stigmatised now. I'm not that old
| (or at least I like to think I'm not) but I can say with
| confidence nobody in my circle of friends 25 years ago
| would even think of saying they're depressed or suicidal.
| That would get you labelled a weirdo.
| codebolt wrote:
| Wrong. The rates are higher and the main reason is
| obvious.
|
| Fewer families being formed => more lonely adults => more
| people depressed.
| pmarreck wrote:
| You know what would instantly greatly help online debates
| like this?
|
| Actual data.
| codebolt wrote:
| Sure, here's a couple of references to back my assertion.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13049-9
| pdntspa wrote:
| That "golden age" is a huge cop-out for any topic that
| doesn't span hundreds of years
| nicky0 wrote:
| Materially, we've never had it better.
|
| Spiritually, we are in a deep crisis.
| eru wrote:
| Where we ever less in a spiritual crisis? How do you
| measure these things? And who is 'we'?
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "we" There are regions
| where the opposite happened. E.g. native tribes who were
| expelled for resources
| virtualritz wrote:
| The issue is the definition of 'better'. If you think
| access to food, medication, education, higher life
| expectancy, then yes.
|
| IMHO though, a more fitting defition of 'better' for the
| human condition is the amount of happiness you experience
| while being alife (i.e. decoupled from life expectancy).
|
| I would then conclude (and I am really happy to be proved
| wrong) that the developed world being/becoming better is
| considerably more difficult to argue for.
|
| Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the
| ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs not
| experienced since WWII. [1] is just from a quick googling
| and US-only. You won't have trouble finding much more
| evidence to support this though, for many other 1st world
| countries.
|
| I would bet there is a direct link to this; between
| making GPD the driving factor for a country's governance
| vs. e.g. happiness of its citizens. Look no further than
| Scandinavian countries (Norway is the exeption, not
| declining but at least also not increasing)[2].
|
| [1] https://time.com/5609124/us-suicide-rate-increase/
|
| [2] https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2019/08/kronikk/why-
| suicide-rate-...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > a more fitting defition of 'better' for the human
| condition is the amount of happiness
|
| So, instead of measuring the objective/empirical things
| that:
|
| 1. Keep people alive 2. Keep them from going hungry 3.
| Make them healthy and pain-free 4. Keep them warm (or
| cool, where appropriate) 5. Etc etc etc
|
| You instead are suggesting that we measure some
| subjective mood that no one can define well, test for, or
| detect with instrumentation? That would be the better
| measure?
|
| > Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the
| ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs
|
| I would not argue that these are insignificant, but there
| are methodological problems with both.
|
| Suicide may have been traditionally undercounted for
| religious reasons. If you're investigating a suicide in
| the 1950s, it might just have been a gun-cleaning
| accident instead. Saves the family grief, means the
| deceased can be buried in the cemetery the family wants,
| etc.
|
| Depression, while real, might still be subject to the
| sort of contagious hypochondriac panics that describe the
| late 20th century and early 21st so well.
|
| Or, alternatively... it might have been _undercounted_
| until recently. We 're not seeing an increase so much as
| that people are merely aware of it.
| tim333 wrote:
| >The vast majority of humanity has never had it better
|
| There has been a general upswing since 1600 or so, so you
| could say that about most years since then, at least in
| economic terms. In terms of happiness it seems kind of
| flat though.
| gcanyon wrote:
| "I wish there was a way to know you're in 'the good old
| days' before you've actually left them."
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujJQyhB0dws
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| That is actually a really useful, affirming thought
| exercise that I've done before. Simply take a nice
| present-day experience and run it through the "20 year
| ago nostalgia filter". Where all the boring/frustrating
| crap that surrounds the experience is forgotten, and just
| the good thing remains surrounded by the golden halo of
| nostalgia. It makes me appreciate the present experience
| more and dulls the "oh, life was so much nicer 10/20
| years ago" nostalgia thing (it wasn't, it just seems that
| way).
| jakderrida wrote:
| >it doesn't mean we should dismiss outright the possibility
| that a passing era might just be taking something truly
| valuable with it.
|
| Our youth is usually the part we're nostalgic for and
| nothing else. You ever hear the nostalgists crying out to
| go back to a "simpler time"? It's because they were
| children and the world is simpler for a child that lacks
| obligations. Fortunately, my childhood was crappy enough
| and my adulthood fun enough that I can more than let go of
| the 80s and 90s without any reservations.
| riffraff wrote:
| It's also whatever is removed in time because people
| simply forgot about it.
|
| It's a constant discourse in my country to think of today
| as "dangerous" and idealize some earlier decades where
| you'd "leave the door open" while by all metrics crime
| was actually higher.
|
| We just collectively forgot about it.
|
| That's one of the reasons every age and culture has a
| golden age/arcadia/Eden mythology.
| jakderrida wrote:
| >It's a constant discourse in my country to think of
| today as "dangerous" and idealize some earlier decades
| where you'd "leave the door open" while by all metrics
| crime was actually higher.
|
| This highlights a great point about past media. Films
| like The Warriors, Class of 1999, and even A Clockwork
| Orange play into this notion that juveniles have become
| worse and worse and we can expect a hellscape from future
| generations of young people.
|
| Truth, though, is that Gen Zs are so laughably well
| behaved compared to those my age were that we finally
| have a period where this genre simply has no place. I
| hear things from my nephews and nieces about "staying
| home for the weekend" and think of all the money my
| sister wasted on a home security system to make sure they
| don't sneak out and get arrested all the time like we
| did. Leave that door wide open with soundproofing and
| they still have no desire to sneak out, especially
| because nobody else their age is out anyway.
| closewith wrote:
| I don't think your experience generalises. Kids are still
| sneaking out.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| The news also plays a big role in this. If (in a given
| city/area) crime happens every day, it's just business as
| usual, so nobody bothers to report on it. However, if
| crime happens once a year, it's headline news.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| That said, I do wonder if times really were simpler back
| then - in the sense of the way people thought.
|
| Movies seem to be simpler back then. Watched Sleepless in
| Seattle a while back. I heard it was very popular back in
| the day. Well ... I'm not that impressed, sorry to say.
| The plot is very simple and a little weird when viewed
| using today's social mores. Direction and pacing is
| adequate. Or maybe I just don't get it.
|
| I think "things got more complicated" as "information
| velocity" increased, first with newspapers, then the
| radio, then TV, and finally the internet - the internet
| can even be broken down into before ubiquitous social
| media, before internet video became "trivial", ...
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I think we're in a golden age of computer gaming right now.
| I remember what it was like when I was young: paying $30+
| per game (many of which were flash-game quality, and I only
| learned how good the game was after I bought it), or
| endlessly scouring the internet for something free.
| Nowadays I can pay $5 on Steam, GoG, etc. for a game that
| will engross me for 100+ hours
| rootsudo wrote:
| On the flipside, is it the golden age of computing gaming
| or golden age of addiction? Paying $5 to be engrossed in
| a game for 100+ hours?
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Point taken, but depending on the game it could be a
| better way to relax than e.g. browsing social media. I'm
| actually curious what people think a legitimate, cheap
| way to relax on a weekend or while sick is, if not
| gaming.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 100 hours over one week, or 100 hours over twenty weeks?
| Makes a difference.
|
| People pay $20 to be engrossed in a movie for 1.5 hours.
| Is that addiction?
| FFP999 wrote:
| I'm curious about what about spending $5 to be engrossed
| for 100+ hours sounds like it's a bad thing to you.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| What games would you recommend?
| ehnto wrote:
| Flat Design had barely begun, jQuery had a bright future. CSS
| compilation? That's a step too far don't you think?
| theclansman wrote:
| I'm still nostalgic about the pre-facebook internet.
| sneak wrote:
| We're all still here. Start a small online community and
| tell us about it. (I did!)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| My experience begins with BBSs in the late 1980s and runs
| through some of those eras.
|
| I thought the Web 2.0 era was something special! Web 1.0 was
| fun but looking back, it was mostly about the _promise_ of
| what the web /internet would eventually be able to do.
|
| Web 2.0 was where it really came together for me. The
| interwebs started to actually attract more diversity and
| specifically, it started to no longer be overwhelmingly male,
| which started to make the social aspect a lot more fun to me.
|
| Web 2.0 was the era when Javascript started to be semi-
| useful, and there was a lot of cool "remix" type stuff
| happening via open API's and RSS before everybody locked all
| that stuff away, and video on the internet started to be kind
| of practical. And the web hadn't been _completely_ choked by
| naked commercialization. Felt like there were still some cool
| alternative corners of the web that hadn 't yet been paved
| over so they could build a parking lot for a mall.
|
| I also thought that a lot of cool Web 2.0 stuff happened
| because of the post-Web1 "dot com" era layoffs. You had a lot
| of underemployed but talented developers making things.
|
| (but obviously everybody will have their own personal
| favorite eras!)
| justsid wrote:
| I didn't use Omegle much, but I actually met my now wife on
| there. We used the text only thing where a third person
| suggests a topic. Must've talked for a good 2 hours on there
| before exchanging informations, I shudder thinking that even
| the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically.
|
| We met 11 years ago on the platform, a completely random fluke.
| And while I haven't really used Omegle in a long time, it's
| always had a soft spot in my heart due to how much it changed
| the trajectory of my life. It's a sad day.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| What was the suggested topic?
| justsid wrote:
| I don't fully remember, but I think it was about One
| Direction. We very quickly went off on tangents, but I
| think the feature was implemented so that the third person
| can spy on the messages but not interact in any way. I
| sometimes wonder how long they ended up staying in the
| conversation.
| amatecha wrote:
| No way! That's awesome. You should reach out to the creator
| of the site and let him know about this (if you haven't
| already). He'd probably be super happy to hear this story :)
| prox wrote:
| Maybe its a good idea to collect a lot of these positive
| stories and get them up somewhere for all the peeps at
| Omegle to see.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Any platform that is large enough will sooner or later
| become a 'slice of life'. I've seen this with
| ww.com/camarades.com, and it was fascinating to see that
| development up close.
|
| One of the most memorable ones for me was a terminally ill
| patient in a hospital that was still conscious that used
| our fledgling video meeting service to stay in touch with
| family members all over the USA. And random strangers
| dropping in to wish them well. Some people would protest
| that this wasn't material that should be shown online but I
| always defended such uses because (1) it seemed like the
| right thing to do and (2) life has nice sides and darker
| sides and I don't think pretending the darker sides don't
| exist is a realistic position.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Any platform that is large enough will sooner or later
| become a 'slice of life'.
|
| I run a smallish website / forum for a video game
| franchise, we've got a number of couples on there, one of
| which got married a few weeks ago; some of our members
| were there, me and my (now ex) gf (also met through that
| site) watched it on stream. Small communities based
| around common interests with no pressure to date and no
| overbearing rules on what communication is allowed or not
| is great for fostering relationships like that.
| reliablereason wrote:
| The chance of a small glitch or anything that did not happen
| in the past is as likely as a ghost dinosaur coming up to you
| and scamming you out of all your money.
|
| Looking at the past through a probabilistic lens is
| irrational, unless you are doing it to predict the future
| through information collection.
|
| Sort of, of topic but anyway....
| 101008 wrote:
| I don't know why you were downvoted but it's true. My dad
| was almost scammed this past weekend. Or kind of scammed.
| The thing is that of a group of 200, 195 were scammed and
| he wasn't (or he was, but he got what he paid for in the
| end). And he wasn't just because a random event, he was
| very luck.
|
| I kept thinking in how lucky he was and how sad my family
| would be if he was part of the 195. But it didn't happen.
| Maybe in an alternate timeline (?), but not on this one.
| Worry about what could have happened is not worth it. To
| induce stress for things that did not happen is not worth
| it. Yes, we can use it to learn for future opportunities,
| but that should be all.
| 20after4 wrote:
| I kept waiting for the part where the scammer turned out
| to be the ghost of a dinosaur.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Think about all the infinite numbers of glitches that
| happened in the past and prevented you to meet other possible
| wives :)
| ignoramous wrote:
| You posit as if future glitches are improbable ;)
| rootsudo wrote:
| What if meeting the wife was the glitch?
| justsid wrote:
| I think realistically that's what it was. The odds were
| definitely not in our favour to meet.
| hollerith wrote:
| If he wants to stay married to his current wife, I advise
| him not to think about that.
| gotbeans wrote:
| What if this is his latest lifechanging glitch he doesn't
| yet know about
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Surely he met them all in other universes so the balance is
| restored.
| balls187 wrote:
| I tell my wife that she and I always end up together in
| every multiverse, including the one where our relationship
| somehow causes that universe to collapse on itself (also
| that's the same one where Hacker News is implemented as
| ASP.Net app)
| benbristow wrote:
| What's wrong with ASP.NET? (MVC, not the travesty that is
| WebForms)
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Nothing; he's just a hater.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Nothing. Just like nothing is wrong with Java or
| JavaScript...
| benbristow wrote:
| Both power a large majority of the web.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| So a nerdy Everything Everywhere All At Once
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| For people who are looking for this -- It's a common refrain
| on Twitter that Twitter can be a better dating app than
| actual dating apps. I think the mechanism here is similar --
| both Twitter and Omegle encourage a sort of stream-of-
| consciousness, semi-anonymous communication style that
| facilitates soul entwinement.
| ploum wrote:
| I met my wife because she saw on facebook a screenshot
| someone has taken from a tweet I did about a terrorist
| attack. (Charlie Hebdo 2015- Paris).
|
| This encouraged her to read my blog then to get in touch,
| etc...
|
| So meeting my wife happened because:
|
| 1. There was a terrorist attack 2. I tweeted about it 3.
| The tweet became popular 4. A random someone took the time
| to screenshot it to share it on Facebook 5. That random
| screenshot managed to get through my future wife timeline.
|
| To this day, when I look at my son, I wonder how odds were
| that he exists.
|
| (I told the story in French here for those really curious:
| https://ploum.net/comment-les-reseaux-sociaux-ont-
| transforme... )
| slingnow wrote:
| Same as the odds of every other child that was ever
| conceived. It's really easy to look backwards in time,
| think of every single "if this never happened..." moment,
| and conclude that the probability is near zero. And you
| would be right.
| roughly wrote:
| And they say engineers aren't romantics
| cdelsolar wrote:
| exactly. think about your existence. You wouldn't exist
| if your parents hadn't met and reproduced, and if their
| parents hadn't met and reproduced, and so on until you
| get to our monocellular ancestor. Everyone here is the
| product of a very long, unbroken line of ancestry
| spanning back billions of years! If any of those
| ancestors had not chosen to reproduce, you don't exist.
| It's mindblowing to me. Actually one of the main reasons
| I wanted children was to continue this line, why should I
| be the one to break it?
| matt-attack wrote:
| I had a friend who would say the following the middle
| aged female friends who didn't have daughters:
|
| Did your mom have a daughter? Female answers "yes"
|
| Did her mom have a daughter? Yes
|
| Did her mom have a daughter? Yes
|
| This lineage of course extends beyond even human history
| back to Proto life forms.
|
| And then you end it with "after all that, you're ending
| the legacy by not having a daughter".
| I_am_uncreative wrote:
| Are they still friends?
| TrnsltLife wrote:
| For most of human history, spouses probably met from a
| fairly limited pool of suitors in their small band or
| village. Of course it became different in large cities,
| or once international travel became possible, and
| especially now when you can "meet" someone on the other
| side of the world without leaving your mom's basement.
| ngc248 wrote:
| If something has to happen, it will happen.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I shuffled a deck of cards, then spread it on the table.
| I looked at the cards and though to myself: what are the
| odds!
| pmarreck wrote:
| I got dates from Amazon reviews (back when I used to write
| more Amazon reviews).
|
| It never became anything serious but the whole "find people
| online on not-dating sites just by communicating" is real.
| safeandsound wrote:
| Sliding Doors the movie comes to mind
| jeffwask wrote:
| > I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have
| changed my life so drastically.
|
| Met mine in an MMO and I think about how many ways there are
| that it could have never happened.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I once met a couple who met in Felwood (the WoW region).
|
| You never know where that person's going to come from! And
| the best ones seem to come while you're not looking for
| them directly and just having fun being yourself...
| eafkuor wrote:
| Are you English, and your wife American, by any chance?
| xjewer wrote:
| I happened to realize today that many if not all results we
| observe today is outcome of one or the other probable event
| in the past.
|
| How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car
| accidents that did happen and change lives.
|
| History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent
| that they covered in books or passed through generations as
| tales.
|
| Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first
| chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change
| entire history of humankind, especially in wars.
| SnooSux wrote:
| Stumble Upon used to be so addicting
| Kovah wrote:
| Maybe https://Cloudhiker.net will bring back this experience.
| patates wrote:
| Not exactly the same experience but close enough for me:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
| dheera wrote:
| Maybe we should create a DeFi version of this that doesn't have
| an owner and can't be sued. Things like Omegle should be
| likened to an empty grass field in the middle of town, with
| nobody responsible for what actually happens on it except the
| people who choose to be there.
| andrepd wrote:
| This is a bad take on several levels. First the de-fi angle.
| You want a distributed application, no need to shoehorn
| crypto into there. But second and most important: the
| ultralibertarian angle of "you chose to be there so you take
| respinsabolity for whatever happens to you" is also not good.
| For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law
| enforcement is a good thing. Whatever replaces omegle will
| almost certainly have worse moderation, a less benevolent
| manager, and less eagerness to cooperate with authorities to,
| for example, hand over evidence of child predation. Free
| speech is not incompatible with the attempt to enforce laws.
| dheera wrote:
| > You want a distributed application
|
| What would incentivize a huge number of people to run a
| decentralized and distributed application so that it
| actually continues to run? (Hint: the hope of a coin
| mooning)
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| TOR runs without some shitcoin.
| alphager wrote:
| The usefulness of said application. The fun of being part
| of it. Getting rid of the feeling of sadness expressed by
| many of the comments here.
|
| If the only human motivation factor you know is monetary,
| I deeply pity you.
| concordDance wrote:
| > For one, there's children. For another, moderation and
| law enforcement is a good thing
|
| I think the idea that the government has any place
| controlling people's ability to freely communicate in
| private is at least five orders of magnitude more dangerous
| than allowing children to communicate freely with random
| adults.
|
| But I expect you're one of those people who thinks everyone
| should be required to wear a microphone that uploads all
| nearby comversations to police servers in real time to be
| sure nothing criminal is going on so establishing common
| ground will be trickier than usual.
| shanusmagnus wrote:
| You could have had your first paragraph without the
| second and the world would have been better for it.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Children shouldn't be browsing the internet without
| supervision. If they do I'd argue their parents should be
| regulated more, not the internet.
| sgammon wrote:
| Ironic argument given the article, no? Did the author not
| just make a fantastic argument for structuring justice to
| protect rights?
| master-lincoln wrote:
| I fail to see the reference. Can you elaborate?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| How old were you when you first used the internet, and
| how supervised were you?
| all2 wrote:
| 10. Very. It was a bad time for a curious mind.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| I was probably 13, not supervised, but it was also too
| early. I saw things I would have liked not to see and I
| did things I am not proud of because I lacked the
| maturity to evaluate consequences.
|
| Luckily nobody took advantage of me to my knowledge, but
| it would have been easy.
|
| I believe my parents didn't know what was possible on the
| internet back then.
| Galanwe wrote:
| If there is no incentive to operate the network, who will
| sustain the infrastructure?
|
| If there is no cost to using the system, how do you prevent
| spam abuse?
|
| This is what crypto solves. It doesn't have to be a get
| rich scheme, just issue tokens to those that run the
| network, and have users consume tokens when they send
| messages.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But it doesn't solve it; it just deters some of it. If
| all it takes is to pay money, you can wave your penis at
| anyone. A paid service applies a downward pressure on
| spam, sure, but you can't go without moderation.
| vidarh wrote:
| I agree you still need some sort of moderation, but maybe
| you can ameliorate that too if you scale cost by
| reputation, and also let users filter by reputation. If
| you keep waving your penis at people, maybe soon the only
| people who end up talking to you are people who actually
| like it and volunteer moderators taking the money to see
| if you're worth reporting... I don't know, it'd be hard
| to get the balance right, and you'd need to effectively
| "punish" people with a fresh identity quite harshly at
| first or people would just keep starting over, but I'd
| love to see someone try to tackle it.
| Galanwe wrote:
| I don't quite get your point.
|
| A blockchain is just an infrastructure on top of which
| you run your business logic. In a sense, it's similar to
| what AWS would be in a centralised world.
|
| So basically, you can add whatever registration,
| moderation, etc. logic on top of your infrastructure
| layer, whether it is built upon a blockchain, AWS, self-
| hosted or whatnot.
|
| What blockchain gives you is something distributed,
| battle-tested, and some form of economics between
| infrastructure providers and platform users.
|
| You can still decide to mimic existing business models
| of, say, Google on top of it. Give users unlimited free
| tokens on this blockchain if they provide you read access
| to their messages. Of course it seems outrageous stated
| like that, but it's pretty much the same business model
| than Gmail at the end of the day, with the advantage that
| users not willing to share their data can just buy usage
| tokens if they prefer.
| uconnectlol wrote:
| > being fine with a way to share your stream on the
| internet without moderation is ultralibertarian
|
| what the actual fuck am i reading. not that i expect much
| better on hn which is a website where people who are
| successful in the .com bubble come to jack each other off
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| The DeFI element, of course, would enable someone to pay so
| MORE people could see their penis unsolicited
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Your analogy is skewed though; if you just show up on a field
| and get flashed, you aren't responsible for that, the other
| person is. For example.
| gentoo wrote:
| also, the person who owns the land is often liable for what
| happens on it, unless the land is owned by the public (a la
| BLM land).
| wslh wrote:
| What was the relationship between StumbleUpon and Omegle. I
| haven't used Omegle but used StumbleUpon and was one unique
| place where you could discover hidden gems in the longtail.
| gentoo wrote:
| I think it's that both were websites that catapulted you into
| truly random, non-targeted interactions -- Omegle with a
| random person, StumbleUpon with a random site.
| simian1983 wrote:
| Ahh the first days of Web 2.0. Reminds me of http://ytmnd.com
| You're the man now, dog!
| all2 wrote:
| This place. So bizarre. I loved it so much back in the day.
| Especially showing friends the latest weird thing I found.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| This was the prototype of the concept that became Vine, and
| thus TikTok.
| rfwhyte wrote:
| I miss the web where there were services actively trying to
| help you find new, interesting and weird things, not just the
| stuff that makes them the most money from ads. Feels like even
| the things that are supposed to be about "Discovery" are
| increasingly only showing you things from an ever shrinking
| walled garden. Despite there being exponentially more stuff and
| content on the web than say 20 years ago, it actually feels
| like a much smaller these days.
| lettergram wrote:
| The author was right on point, the government and the people
| moralizing want exactly what they described --- an internet fed
| to users, with minimal interaction.
|
| This gives more power and stability to government and those
| moralizing (who are currently in power). Notice the constant
| censorship, it comes directly from the politicians who argue "we
| have to remove encryption - for the children!" Arguments. Those
| same individuals in government, censor opposition where they can
| and promote imo very authoritarian views.
|
| I also agree, everyone has a breaking point. It's been amazing to
| watch the increasing attacks since 2016, it's been unrelenting.
|
| > Virtually every online communication service has been subject
| to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are
| much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have
| their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide
| turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist,
| and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up
| version of TV - focused largely on passive consumption, with much
| less opportunity for active participation and genuine human
| connection.
| empathy_m wrote:
| Wonder how Chris Poole is doing. I loved using his site in the
| 2000s and have been amazed to see the creativity it has
| unleashed, some for good and some not so much.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| moot sold 4chan long ago
| glandium wrote:
| to the founder of 2chan.
| robobro wrote:
| 2channel. not futaba / "2chan"
| mardifoufs wrote:
| He worked at Google for a pretty long time after selling 4chan,
| then moved to Japan semi recently iirc.
| THENATHE wrote:
| Can't say I didn't see this coming... Omegle today is very
| different than historically. I remember when I was much younger I
| would find a bot or a person just looking for sexting maybe once
| in 5. Now it seems that the genuine "wanna make a friend" people
| are 1-100. It is wild how it turned into just a horny site, and
| it makes me sad that it never had the opportunity for a
| resurgence.
| smt88 wrote:
| Maybe it's because of my age, but this is the first I'm
| learning that it wasn't always just a horny site. I never
| visited it for that reason.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Even until a few years ago, Spy Mode was mostly devoid of the
| "M?" hookup posters, and the bots were somehow relegated to
| the "questioner" rather than the chatters.
| clnq wrote:
| > In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more
| ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with
| political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become
| faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other's shared
| humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of
| attacks on communication services
|
| I've been feeling this very acutely as well, but most people I
| spoke to say nothing has changed. Good to know it's not just me,
| although it's unfortunate things are changing this way.
| jawns wrote:
| Yes, this message from the founder sounds very heartfelt and
| earnest. But if he truly could not anticipate the many ways that
| this service would be abused, and in fact the ways it is
| especially attractive to people with bad intentions, then he is
| profoundly naive.
|
| It reminds me of Craigslist. Similarly well-intentioned, but
| eventually the company has gotta face the facts about how the
| service you're offering is conducive to bad conduct, even if
| unintentionally so. And if you can't build in sufficient
| safeguards, yes, it's practically inevitable that you'll face
| legal pressure.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| He implemented algorithms to automatically time out people who
| were mentioning a variety of rapey terms and paid moderators
| and built AI algorithms to (mostly successfully) wipe out the
| rampant sex pest behavior in video chats.
|
| He did about the best job you can do without a team that costs
| tens of millions of dollars, and the result was being sued and
| accused of being a pedophile.
| tempestn wrote:
| It's a shame. Even before Omegle, I remember when ICQ had a
| random match text chat feature. I had some great conversations on
| there. Briefly used Omegle for the same, but even years back when
| I tried it the signal to noise was a lot lower. I'd love it if
| someone found a way to do it sustainably.
| system2 wrote:
| I met so many people from ICQ random friend searches. Met them
| in real life, still talking to some. Skype had voice channels
| too, admins of channels similar to IRC. They shut it down for
| the same reasons.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| The original HN discussion of Omegle
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=539753
|
| The site has only been featured here twice, for its birth and
| death.
| m4jor wrote:
| The yin and yang of tech
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The Alphle and Omegle, if you will
| romanhn wrote:
| Omegles come and go, but "how is it hacker news?" is here
| forever.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I first used Omegle in 2009 in college. I did not realize
| Hacker News had been around that long lol.
| dnissley wrote:
| Such classic hn comments:
|
| "Not very interesting."
|
| "This is a lot of fun actually - but how is it hacker news?"
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This makes me so mad, and it should make you mad too. Omegle
| isn't substantively different from Reddit or Discord or an MMORPG
| chat channel, but it's currently being dragged through the legal
| system while presumably the others are not.
|
| The truth is, Omegle's real sin is being midsized. There's a real
| risk in being a certain-sized company. Large enough that suing
| you is likely to result in a payout, but small enough that you
| can't just absorb the lawsuit cost.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Shouldn't make you mad. Thats just how the nature of things go.
|
| Basically, the hipster viewpoint is ironically correct -
| anything that gets popular turns to shit. Once you start making
| something that appeals to a broad reach of people, you start
| optimizing for the lowest common denominator of society.
|
| Imagine if Omegle was structured in a way where you had to
| download an app, for linux specifically, and instead of a
| central website, you had to set up STUN servers to do direct
| peer to peer chat. This is far to complex for "normal" people,
| but it would be still around today, as well as much higher
| quality.
|
| This is even true of software development. Think about this
| next time you hear someone say how they don't want to have to
| tweak settings to get Linux to work, and instead buy a Mac for
| some bullshit reason like battery life, not realizing they are
| buying into a system that is opposite in spirit of software
| development (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundlere
| sources/en...).
| fullarr wrote:
| If I could unmake the Internet I would in a second, without
| hesitation.
|
| The lack of local community as everyone moves to a global gray
| sameness is the grossest thing to happen to this world.
|
| Using it as a crutch to fool yourself into what you think is
| normal is not healthy and it's not a solution to real problems.
|
| Omegle disappearing is neither surprising nor sad, and it's
| nothing personal against them specifically.
|
| I expect to get down voted to oblivion because no one likes to
| hear harsh truths, but the internet has been a net negative for
| us all
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'd call the internet itself a net negative.
| Somewhere around the time it was incepted it was fine.
| Exchanging emails and whatnot.
|
| But what it has become now... I dunno, I regularly have calls
| with my family on the other side of the world. That's
| definitely a positive. Everything attendant to the internet I
| do not like. The way it's become nearly a requirement of life.
| will5421 wrote:
| But would you have moved so far away from your family if you
| couldn't have kept in touch with them over the Internet?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Probably, yeah. Phone calls would have sufficed. Video adds
| something, but sending regular letters and pictures would
| have been fun in a completely different way.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Except for potentially most of the population, the internet
| provided a more vibrant, welcoming, supportive and rich
| community than their local community ever could. The "gray
| sameness" is a recent phenomena and commanded by legal and
| state abuse, that a lot of the commenters above here lament
| about.
| fullarr wrote:
| I would say that the online community has always been
| superficial
|
| It feels good but you are still alone
|
| It's never been a good thing, it's been a time sync and it's
| why birth rates are down, depression is up, loneliness is
| rampant, and everyone is addicted to narcissism machines
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| We must refuse the Khala to maintain our individuality. Like
| the Nerazim.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| > Omegle is the direct target of these attacks
|
| Does anyone here have any more details about exactly what types
| of attacks Omegle was being targeted?
|
| > In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more
| ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with
| political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become
| faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other's shared
| humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of
| attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the
| behavior of a malicious subset of users.
| cloudwalk9 wrote:
| My guess would be activists and strong regulatory/legislative
| pressure, moral panic. Kinda resonates with the recent
| legislative attacks on E2EE.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| warrant canary perhaps?
| fwungy wrote:
| Part of a larger move to kill off the free corners of the
| internet. The UN and G7 governments freely talk and plan their
| means to reestablish the narrative dominance they had before the
| internet.
|
| Just about anyone or anything can be taken down with the pairing
| of q woman willing to publicly claim abuse, with no proof
| required beyond her word, and a lawyer willing to take the case.
| didibus wrote:
| Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your
| children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no
| parental controls.
|
| And at the same time I do think computer providers, Windows, Mac
| OS and all that don't offer good enough parental control.
|
| Age verification is a problem as well, but it's foolish to think
| every website and app will implement proper safeguards. I mean,
| Omegle could simply be replaced by some darker Russian clone with
| even less effort put towards fighting crime.
|
| Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in to
| Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And only
| apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be included.
|
| And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child
| accounts.
|
| The idea that some KYC would be forced on all online website and
| apps just doesn't make sense otherwise.
|
| And now it would be fair to sue websites that claim to be child
| safe and have opted in, if they turn out not to be.
| Cloudef wrote:
| I still remember the times we were educated to be anonymous in
| internet and never reveal personal details. How times have
| changed...
| serf wrote:
| > Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let
| your children do whatever they want online with no supervision
| and no parental controls.
|
| for those of us who were kids when the internet was basically a
| social unknown, it's not something that 'became normal', the
| internet didn't come about censored from the get-go -- these
| moderation/censorship tools were added in after-the-fact to
| cope with parental and (more importantly) government worries
| that children were being victimized via exposure.
|
| and, for the most part, we grew up OK even without the heavy-
| handed censorship.
|
| >Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in
| to Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And
| only apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be
| included.
|
| i'm not necessarily anti-censorship, and i'm never having kids
| -- my opinion on this is worthless for all practical sake --
| but i'll say this : If I didn't have the freedom to tinker and
| explore with the systems that took up my free-time as a child
| there is no way I would have grown up to have such expertise
| now.
|
| Take that however you will. I know nothing of child care but I
| do recognize the opportunities in my own life that made me grow
| as an individual; having 'cyber-space' as my 'home' from an
| early age offered a lot of opportunities that were unique and
| self-improving.
| didibus wrote:
| I feel there's plenty of space for children to tinker, even
| in an accept list scenario. In fact, it's more so the spaces
| that empower you to create that would be on it, since they
| involve no "dangerous" social interaction. Programming
| environments, drawing and writing applications, game makers,
| etc.
|
| That said, parents could decide to let their kids use adult
| user accounts, maybe supervised, or if they trust their
| child, or depending on their exact age. And if they do,
| they'd be taking the liability, not the platform whose EULA
| specifies otherwise.
|
| At least this all seems a much better approach to balance
| safety of children on the internet, while leaving adults to
| have whatever free and wild spaces they want for themselves.
|
| The alternative seems to block it for everyone. Or to have
| some ridiculous requirements like full blown KYC that either
| mean complete loss of anonymity for everyone, or
| unsustainable rules that indirectly mean it's not tenable to
| offer such spaces even to adults.
| devbent wrote:
| > Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let
| your children do whatever they want online with no supervision
| and no parental controls.
|
| I got handed a modem at age 9 and I started dialing into local
| BBSs.
|
| I learned how to use paragraphs because I got made fun of for
| posting giant blocks of text.
|
| The reason I wasn't using paragraphs initially is that they
| hadn't been taught to me yet in school.
|
| A couple of years later I got on to the Internet proper.
|
| In many ways it was wonderful. The optimism, the feeling that
| something amazing was happening. The hope that once everyone
| could talk to each other that a new era of global understanding
| could be reached.
|
| At the age of 13 I was able to go on technical forums and if I
| put enough thought into what I said, my ideas were considered
| to be of no lesser or greater worth than the ideas put forth by
| others.
|
| Although, back then the Internet was a bit more mature on
| average so I felt that I needed to at least try and put thought
| into what I said. (Not saying I always succeeded...)
|
| > And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child
| accounts.
|
| Or how about, when someone under 18 is using a computer, every
| hour a giant message appears on the screen "DON'T SEND NUDES TO
| ANYONE. NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY. PS: ALSO DON'T BUY GIFT CARDS
| FOR ANYONE ONLINE."
|
| That'd probably solve 60% of problems that underage users get
| into.
|
| Jokes aside, I get it. The Internet is a worse place than when
| I first joined. But I'm more scared of kids running into
| curated video feeds that lead them down paths of extremism
| (e.g. red pill, gamergate) than I am of pedophiles.
| codezero wrote:
| What a powerful sign off.
| beckingz wrote:
| Good for them!
|
| Knowing when to call it quits is very wise. I mourn the end of a
| characteristic internet site, but I respect the founder.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Yeah given the prevalence of bots in its final years, I can see
| how eventually the effort:reward ratio dropped, especially with
| legal issues on top of that.
|
| But Omegle will be missed for sure.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| would direct connections instead really impact the nature of the
| communication that much? i'm not sure that it would. a much less
| centralized/controlled version of omegle could exist on a quite
| small budget, perhaps much to the dismay of those who seek it's
| closure.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more
| ornery
|
| Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are
| lazy") or is it measurably true?
|
| I _feel_ like it 's obviously true.
| _factor wrote:
| In developing countries, living conditions improve and reduce
| the perceived value of work.
| tpetry wrote:
| We had some years of kind-of stability in the world with no
| significant big wars. But with recent events the world is
| feeling like "it is burning". Just because we got accustomed to
| the more peacefull live.
|
| So, I wouldn't say its like "we always thought that". Its more
| like we had a good short phase and now its back to normal. Or
| maybe the good phase is the normal and the pendulum swings
| back?
| password54321 wrote:
| The world would be much better if people learnt that wars
| even in places far from them such as between the middle east
| and the US, would have a network affect and bring instability
| to other parts of the world and soon near them. The world
| started "burning" again with the war on Iraq / Afghanistan.
| grumple wrote:
| > The world started "burning" again with the war on Iraq /
| Afghanistan.
|
| If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11,
| those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11 started
| it. Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide
| than ever during those two wars (although this does a
| terrible job of capturing deaths caused by war, but not
| directly from combat): https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-
| peace
|
| The 90s were relatively peaceful compared to the previous
| few decades, but we still had the Yugoslav Wars, Israeli-
| Palestine at times, the Gulf war, Rwanda.
| password54321 wrote:
| > If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on
| 9/11, those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11
| started it.
|
| The narrative to push the war on Iraq largely also
| revolved around "WMDs" while the legality of the war
| still remains debatable.
|
| > Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide
| than ever during those two wars
|
| I wouldn't measure peace just by number of deaths, but
| even if we were to do so, it is also worth taking into
| account the increased security measures and the less
| freedom we have to prevent deaths.
| slikrick wrote:
| so basically, you're suggesting that the terrorists goal
| to attack the US and destabilize the globe is correct,
| and the terrorists won?
|
| sounds like the war shouldn't have happened, and the
| correct solution was not to do that
| Danidada wrote:
| You could also argue that without the US financing the
| Afghan side in the Soviet-Afghan war and the Iraq side in
| the Iraq-Iran war then the Taliban wouldn't have taken
| advantage of the Afghan power vacuum post civil war and
| that Iraq wouldn't have attacked Kuwait to avoid paying
| their debts, starting the Gulf War which was the prelude
| to the Iraq War
| maxwell wrote:
| Yeah we definitely got what we paid for with Operation
| Cyclone. Unclear how things would have unfolded if Soviet
| expansion hadn't been opposed though.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's measurable, but not in an agreeable fashion. I'm sure if
| you tracked curse words, or simply looked at the number or
| reports an admin has managed, you can track a change.
|
| But you then argue with the metric. Maybe curse words aren't a
| good measure of hostility. Maybe the admin was overzealous, or
| underzealous and then corrected. That's what makes it hard to
| come to a consensus.
|
| Anectodally, on the internet, I would agree. I feel post 2016
| saw an uptick in hostility, and then the pandemic years of
| 2021/2022 saw another uptick.
| panki27 wrote:
| > Have people always thought this [...]?
|
| Yes. https://history.stackexchange.com/q/28169
| trabant00 wrote:
| That does not support that they "_always_ thought this", it
| only means that this happened in the past. Another
| interpretation is that periods of hardship are followed by
| ones of stability and the generation that lived through the
| hardship notices differences in their young.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Even if people have "always" thought this, that doesn't mean
| they're wrong to think it today or that the complaint has
| always been invalid.
|
| It's entirely possible that people have always been
| complaining about X _and also_ that X is more prevalent today
| than it used to be.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yes; moaning about both the youth of today and old people goes
| back, at least, millennia (though there are sometimes cultural
| taboos against moaning about old people which dampens that
| down).
|
| My pet half-serious theory is that we currently talk a lot
| about the dastardly millennials and boomers because senior
| media staff are largely genX; note that we don't hear much
| about genX these days. This will start to change in a few years
| as genX starts to age out, and suddenly everyone will be
| complaining about genX and genZ. Whole new stereotypes will
| have to be forged (the old genX stereotypes from the 80s are
| very youth-of-today oriented and won't work for moaning about
| old people), and no-one will ever mention avocados again.
| gosub100 wrote:
| the whole generation-labelling thing is fabricated, likely
| because it gives the media something else to divide us with.
| the only officially labelled generation was the baby boomers.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Our mouthpiece to complain and share outrage is what changed.
| In Desert Storm or Bosnia, you'd get a 5 minute update on the
| war, tucked inside a 30m national news cast (not speaking for
| everyone but the majority of Americans). Now you get nonstop
| almost-live combat footage, citizen journalists (a good thing),
| along with disinformation from bad actors trying to manipulate
| the narrative.
| sizzle wrote:
| Anyone know the tech stack this awesome 18 yr old used to create
| this service back in the day that was able to support so many
| concurrent users?
| orly01 wrote:
| p2p?
| lubutu wrote:
| I looked around and found an AMA [1].
|
| > Python, using the Twisted framework for networking.
|
| > Omegle runs on just one server: a Linode 2880. It used to be
| on a 720, which was very close to sufficient. No database at
| the moment, but if it never needs one, I'll most likely use
| PostgreSQL.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9vbd7/i_made_omegleco...
| Aeolun wrote:
| The link to the proof is dead :(
| __rito__ wrote:
| Here's a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/201512280837
| 34/http://omegle.com...
| buffalobuffalo wrote:
| It used webRTC, at least in the early days. Same as Chat
| Roulette. That was why it was able to scale the way it did.
| JellyYelly wrote:
| How? WebRTC came out in 2011 and wasn't even widely supported
| in web browsers until years later. Omegle came out in 2009,
| and launched video in 2010.
| buffalobuffalo wrote:
| Ah, you're right. The video chat was definitely p2p though,
| I remember reading about it when it came out. I just tried
| to check what p2p video chat implementations were available
| back then, but no luck. Maybe a java plugin?
| est wrote:
| A Flash plugin
| pavlov wrote:
| Flash.
| spaer wrote:
| Redis is/was part of the stack
|
| https://x.com/leifkb/status/241079586144800769
| sizzle wrote:
| Why didn't he sell to Facebook or something?
| surfsvammel wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of rap freestyler Harry Mack. He has used Omegle
| to do incredible freestyle raps for random people. I guess that
| is now over :(
| golol wrote:
| I met my SO on Omegle...
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| > I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell
| in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have
| something closer to a souped-up version of TV - focused largely
| on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active
| participation and genuine human connection.
|
| You're not alone my friend. The "old good times" internet is long
| gone and the situation is evolving very fast.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| It's still there, the old internet. You just uave a hard time
| finding it with corporate tools like the modern google.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It also just feels much smaller. Outside of maybe 4chan, none
| of those classic style forums feel anywhere close to as
| acitve as their heyday. Like, we're talking maybe 2-3
| comments per day.
|
| It definitely doesn't need to be Twitter/Reddit active, but a
| cozy but empty forum isn't a community so much as a small
| gathering.
| doublemint2203 wrote:
| feels like this entire thread is complaining about the
| prisoners' dilemma. everything wrong with the modern
| internet can be explained through microeconomics.
|
| or microbiology if you prefer: bacteria (individual agents
| in a capitalist system) find a new source of food (the
| internet). the bacteria evolve to optimize their food
| collection, irrespective of what is "good" for the
| ecosystem. the food chain shakes up, the predators become
| apex, and when they've taken too much, they die off in a
| cycle.
|
| right now we're at the "taking too much" stage. but I don't
| think anybody is dying off.
| southwesterly wrote:
| The old internet is still definitely knocking around. Head out
| past the walled-gardens into the hinterlands and it's there.
| You're gonna need your own map though.
| system2 wrote:
| The Internet we grew up with is dying. I wish we could go back to
| dial-up days.
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| The internet some of us grew up with has been gone a long time.
| Even back in the early days of AOL/Yahoo chat rooms, people
| were inappropriate with children though.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Omegle will be sorely missed. It was one of the last censorship-
| free (or perhaps more charitably, uncurated) places you could
| still go to. I remember the very early days of text-only mode and
| was using it up until very recently. Unfortunately bad actors
| will always try to muck up censorship-free zones, maliciously and
| deliberately.
| psyclobe wrote:
| I feel sad cause I just now heard of this haha
| jbk wrote:
| > In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more
| ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with
| political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become
| faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other's shared
| humanity.
|
| I feel a bit the same, but why?
| martyfmelb wrote:
| .
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| RIP and a hearty fuck you to every bastard who helped kill it
| NKosmatos wrote:
| " All that said, the fight against crime isn't one that can ever
| truly be won."
|
| This is something that most people don't understand and fail to
| accept. The human species for millennia has been fighting,
| stealing, rapping, killing and kept doing bad things to each
| other. This is in our nature and will never change. No matter how
| much moderation, AI checks, safety measures and good "players"
| exist, there will always be bad actors with new ways to
| abuse/misuse your service.
|
| This is a sad fact we all need to accept :-(
| Eisenstein wrote:
| We can't stop genuinely sick people from committing crimes
| because they want to, but it is entirely possible to reduce the
| motivation for many crimes.
|
| Removing motivation is usually about economics, policy,
| removing access or ability, and whatever the word is for making
| it hard via structures (example: a company with a culture of
| 'look the other way' will make it easy to commit white collar
| crimes).
|
| Combine that with a rule of law which treats all people equally
| and ensures that even small offenders get caught will make most
| people not consider it. The 'punishment' need not be harsh as
| long as the perpetrator is found. There is good evidence that
| it is the likelyhood of being being caught that deters crime
| much more than the sentence.
|
| The first thing we could do is remove laws which make people
| criminals for doing things that are not viewed as criminal. One
| of the reasons prohibition was so terrible for American culture
| was that it make most adults into de facto criminals for doing
| something they viewed as normal. Once everyone is a criminal
| then many people are acclimated to it and see all laws as 'if I
| don't get caught, then who cares?'.
|
| That said, if someone really wants to rape someone no law in
| the world is going to stop them from doing it, and someone who
| is in a jealous rage will not be pacified by laws either.
| anhner wrote:
| Have you read the article? It feels like you are defending the
| very idea the author is fighting against. Yes, we must accept
| that fact, and no, we must not let it affect our freedoms and
| our lives.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Yes, I did read it (in fact I always first read the HN posts
| and then comment).
|
| I fully agree with the author, the introduction of
| moderation/censorship is not in the right direction and we
| shouldn't introduce mandatory measures to monitor and
| restrict activities based on what might happen and how
| something can be misused.
|
| On the other hand we have to acknowledge that some
| things/situations are not so easy to judge and human nature
| plays a very important role in this. I'm sad about this
| realization of how our society is behaving and on how our
| lives are affected, but there is no easy way out.
| tremere wrote:
| The site was rife with perverts, Neo-Nazi propaganda, CSAM
| distribution, and honeypot operations. I think people are
| idealizing what it was in recent years, believing it was the same
| fun as in the early 2010s. It was an absolute shitshow.
|
| The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet
| explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull
| shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common
| encounter is a pervert who quickly ends the chat. I probably
| would have needed to sink 300+ hours on the platform in order to
| meet one. And by the time I would have met this professor, I
| would most likely have gained nothing from the exchange.
| Therefore, in my experience, I have found such innocent
| encounters to be the exception. By far. There is no corner on the
| internet where that happens organically. Even on HN, where
| comments are verbose and technical, it's only because of the
| perceived clout and proximity to VC money. The open connectedness
| of the internet has little to do with it.
|
| If you access Tor, which is considered the peak of anonymous
| interconnectedness, you will also find a draught of intellectual
| activity. I would love to find intellectual discussions occurring
| on Tor, if anyone knows one please let me know the onion address.
| (Pro-tip: it's an impossible quest.) Instead all you will find
| are CSAM, scams, and honeypots.
|
| I have found that my life has gotten immeasurably better since I
| generally stopped using the internet. The reddit API lockdown
| woke me up and I realized pretty much everything on the internet
| is garbage. Even HN is of lower quality than before, with the
| average post being a flex of one's social status rather than a
| helpful tip from one hacker to another.
|
| Fuck all this noise. The internet is so full of low quality
| social content that it is overall not worth using for social
| connection.
| okasaki wrote:
| The internet's not great, but unless you live in an elite city
| with a well-paying job, you're not going to find better
| interactions outside.
| fragmede wrote:
| even if you are, quality interactions don't just fall in your
| lap.
| tremere wrote:
| I have taken out the word "outside" from my post, because you
| seem to be addressing a very minor component of my overall
| message. Please note: My main point is that pure,
| intellectual connection is almost nowhere to be found. It is
| drowned out in a sea of shit.
|
| While I did criticize HN in my post, I will note that it is
| sort of a last bastion of intellectual conversation. I
| believe the motives are not as pure as before, and I lament
| that. There simply is not a space for intellectual
| conversation for intellectual conversation's sake on the
| internet anymore. It is all twisted.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| The public internet has always been garbage dude. Ever since
| eternal september in 93. The trick is a good filter. It seems
| like you lucked into some good filters in the past, but forgot
| to rotate them when they stopped working
| tremere wrote:
| Humor me. Recommend a filter for me to get me started. It
| doesn't even have to be that good and if I'm disappointed I
| won't be able to reply anyway.
| carabiner wrote:
| It's specifically FOSTA that has harmed Omegle, killed craigslist
| personals and affected other sites with social networking
| features: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-
| fosta-u...
| guerrilla wrote:
| This is pretty sad. Are there any alternatives to Omegle?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Chatroulette
| tyiz wrote:
| This is so sad to read. He hits the point about where our society
| is going.
| yafbum wrote:
| Every social app is a party, and every party peters out one way
| or another. Too few people? It's dead. Too many people? Chilling
| effects. No budget to police the place? It becomes a magnet for
| abuse / spam / porn / scams / human trafficking / you name it.
| This party lasted more than most, they should be proud to have
| had such a long run.
| Aicy wrote:
| Not sure what parties you are going to but mine have never had
| human trafficking
| linkdd wrote:
| Can you even call it a party then?
|
| /jk
| yafbum wrote:
| Neither do mine, but it happens in some night clubs for
| example.
| HaZeust wrote:
| This hits me particularly hard. I met relationships, mentors,
| peers, pupils, friends of philosophy, fellow software developers,
| builders, dreamers, businessmen - and everything in between -
| from Omegle, all in different stages of my life.
|
| I've messaged each and every one of them, just now, about the
| news - on the many platforms I added friends from Omegle with.
|
| Conversations on Omegle changed my politics, it changed my
| beliefs, it changed my belief on systems of structure, changed my
| thoughts on strangers and humanity at large (as built by 8
| billion of them).
|
| Tragic. Thank you, Leif.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Is it something from a long time ago or did you manage to do
| that in recent years too? Just curious.
| HaZeust wrote:
| In the last 3 months, I managed to meet at least one example
| for all nine types of people I gave.
|
| Used tags: politics, constitution, trump, reddit, liberal,
| conservative, democrat, republican, philosophy, music,
| compsci, computers, socialmedia, debate, ama, business,
| america
|
| (I found that these tags made for the best conversations over
| the years. None of them stand as an endorsement)
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The beauty of the internet. Thanks for sharing.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong, but my impression is that it has been a living-
| dead service for many years already. I'm old enough to remember
| when it was actually exciting to use Omegle and chat roulette,
| but I've tried on and off for many years now and my impression is
| that, even at the slight chance that you got someone other than a
| naked horny weirdo, nobody was really paying attention to the
| conversation or interested in anything other than 15-second
| meaningless interaction. We certainly lost something nice here at
| some point but I'm not sure it happened today.
| sublimefire wrote:
| Multiple years ago it was something to us - something new.
| There are too many people who do not care about it (similar
| services) these days, people are born with the internet and
| just take it for granted.
|
| Another analogy could be the gas car industry. We just look at
| it differently nowadays, we prioritize pollution and do not
| think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the
| world in any of these gas guzzlers. You could not do it in a
| Tesla or any other electric car, yet many want to just kill it
| off.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I think that's a very important and true argument, and
| something I have thought about for a while.
|
| The thing is that these places only have value if people put
| in an effort, which is more likely to be the case when the
| platform and/or technology is new and only known by people
| who a priori have put in an effort to access it at all. When
| you mostly accessed web sites from desktop computers, you
| would be limited to use online platforms in the relatively
| small time window where you had free time at home, so the
| personal cost of using the platform was higher because you
| had to choose to take that time from other tasks that also
| required your computer.
|
| Now everyone have a smartphone in their pockets and can
| access any online service at any time of the day, so the
| required effort to use them is a small fraction of what it
| used to be. As a result, the average user is not motivated to
| actually put in any effort, and because of this the quality
| suffers tremendously.
|
| Maybe we should raise that lower bound on effort by requiring
| users to solve CAPTPTYCs - Completely Automated Programs To
| Prove That You Care - before you were allowed to interact
| with anyone online. A sort of proof-of-work for people to
| ensure that they have spent at least as much time on the
| content as they have on solving the puzzle that allowed them
| to publicize it.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > yet many want to just kill it off.
|
| That's not because we take what cars can do for granted, it's
| because individual traffic is a major contributor to the
| mechanism that is actively killing our habitat. That isn't an
| opinion, it's a proven, peer reviewed, often-challenged-
| never-falsified fact.
|
| And no, EVs will not make that better. They are just a
| different instance of the same problem.
|
| So yes, we do want to "kill off" cars. Not because we take
| them for granted, but because they suck as an idea, have
| always sucked as an idea, and will always suck as an idea, no
| matter how they are powered.
| tylerjdurden wrote:
| What do you think of the argument that EVs actually do make
| this better, albeit not entirely, due to the efficiency
| difference between[0] (coal-fired) power plants and
| internal combustion engines in gasoline powered vehicles?
|
| [0] https://blog.ucsusa.org/jimmy-odea/electric-vs-diesel-
| vs-nat...
| picture wrote:
| There are many more ways that cars cause problems to our
| habitat much beyond carbon emission, they include:
| requiring roads which pave over local ecosystems and
| create heat islands and exasperates drainage, requiring
| large open parking lots which make a city less
| traversable in any form of transportation beside cars
| (but parking structures are better I suppose), creating
| noise pollution (a bit part of it is tire noise, EVs
| aren't silent at medium to high speeds), causing
| eutrophication and health issues when ablated tire
| particles get collected into runoff, also that cars are
| much deadlier per capita than most other forms of
| transportation like walking, biking, subway, airplane,
| (but safer than motorcycles if I remember correctly)
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > What do you think of the argument...
|
| I think that a single train can hold over 1000 people,
| and requires much less energy, not to mention space,
| materials, infrastructure and maintenance, than hundreds
| of individual cars in which these 1000 people sit in 1s
| or maybe 2s.
|
| Again, it doesn't matter how they are powered; cars suck
| as an idea; simply because of how horribly they scale.
| They require tons of resources to build, they require
| tons of resources to maintain. They eat up tons of space.
| They kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. They
| are energy inefficienct compared to trains.
|
| Oh, and railway-based public transport systems would be
| trivially easy to automate, compared to cars.
|
| If we invested even a sizeable fraction of the resources
| into public transport that we waste on building ever more
| lanes and ever bigger parking lot hells right through our
| cities (aka. our livingspace), barely anyone outside of
| actual rural areas, would even need a car.
|
| And this isn't a pipe dream. This is how actual people in
| actual cities live, _today_. Many european and asian
| cities are completely accessible by public transport.
| kortilla wrote:
| It sounds like you're more interested in trains than
| solutions to global warming.
|
| > This is how actual people in actual cities live, today.
| Many european and asian cities are completely accessible
| by public transport.
|
| And many people hate it too. Look at the popularity of
| cabs/ubers/limos in those cities.
|
| Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities
| is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.
| smolder wrote:
| I disagree that they suck as an idea, they're just a
| misapplied one. Cars and combustion engines have done a lot
| for humanity. The bad ideas were: making excuses to sell as
| many cars as possible, investing in car infrastructure over
| mass transit, deceiving the public about the dangers of
| global warming once discovered, and for 50 years
| afterwards, ignoring/downplaying other externalities of
| fossil fuel extraction and use... Cars aren't really the
| villains in this story. It's just people being foolish and
| greedy, which they'll still be for the foreseeable future.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact
| that you could easily travel around the world in any of these
| gas guzzlers
|
| This example supports your point, but not in the way you
| think.
|
| Back when Bertha Benz (wife of Karl Benz, the founder of
| Mercedes-Benz) took the first 'road trip' to another part of
| Germany, she had to fill up the tank at a local chemist, had
| to cool the engine with water from ditches and streams, and
| had to have her brakes repaired by a local cobbler. [1]
|
| Nowadays, people take it for granted that cars are reliable
| and that there are gas stations everywhere.
|
| [1] https://www.hotcars.com/the-story-of-bertha-benz-and-the-
| fir...
| slikrick wrote:
| when the planet is dead we can't go anywhere
| menzoic wrote:
| I wonder if using GPT-4 vision api would make moderating Omegle
| significantly cheaper and automated. AI could save the company.
| halflings wrote:
| That's like killing a mosquito with a bazooka.
|
| Using GPT-4 vision on all users would be extremely expensive.
| Way simpler models can detect nudity. (and they do mention they
| had great success using those) And if the idea was to detect
| child abuse from text, it would also be quite expensive to use
| the language capabilities on every discussion.
| thrawn0r wrote:
| More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits
| of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| buf wrote:
| Couldn't this have been any website with a messaging system on
| it? Twitter, facebook, even email.
|
| I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
|
| Edit: was it because of the video component of Omegle?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom and all
| those companies with UGC have this, responsible ones report
| it (Meta does lots, not sure Twitter does anymore, Telegram
| never did).
|
| > I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
|
| Take it as a sign that if tech community doesn't wake up and
| own up to this and try to solve the issue somehow then not
| just individual services but the entire idea of e2ee
| messaging is going to become illegal...
| buf wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly the tech community needs to own up to.
| Allowing an 11 year old who has irresponsible parents to
| use the internet?
|
| Do tech companies need to verify government issued IDs to
| register new users?
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| In some countries: yes.
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/gaming-china-crackdown
| master-lincoln wrote:
| That would be a reasonable solution if there would be any
| government who could provide a digital attestation scheme
| that allows to prove attributes without giving out the
| identity. Afaik it's possible technically. Just not
| wanted apparently
|
| Like proving I am at least 18 years old without giving
| out my birth date or name.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Orders of magnitude more grooming and misconduct is done
| over SMS than was ever done over Omegle.
|
| Is it up to telecom engineers to "wake up" and own that
| they're facilitating this abuse? It seems like one of those
| finger pointing cases which falls apart when any level of
| scrutiny is applied.
| nottorp wrote:
| They probably couldn't afford to sue a mobile phone
| provider :)
|
| But some ambulance chasing lawyer told them they have a
| chance to win in this case.
| concordDance wrote:
| A large portion of commentators here greatly dislike the
| idea of unmonitored interactions between humans. Their
| ideal is that every person's cellphone continuously
| records nearby conversations and sends them to the police
| where they can run large language models to provide a
| shortlist of dangerous communications that a policeman
| can then look at and charge for.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| We all know this is not true, not even close. Read
| through the comments here, there's a clear overwhelming
| majority opinion blaming the family rather than the
| company. Even beyond this post, I've never seen this
| called for on this site.
|
| You are in a clear majority position but still pretend to
| be persecuted and victimized by an imagined boogeyman.
| 2devnull wrote:
| This thread is about what exactly?
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Several hundred Hackernews act incredulous about the
| Omegle shut down?
| nyx wrote:
| Ahh... I miss n-gate's webshit weekly. You know he'd have
| been all over this thread.
|
| Omegle (business model: "Uber for child grooming")
| 2devnull wrote:
| If having as you claim support from the majority and yet
| they are still being shutdown, maybe their claim to
| unfair treatment from a coordinated opposition has some
| merit?
|
| I had no view either way until reading this thread, and
| seeing that many adults used the site, which it seems did
| nothing illegal. Their greatest sin it seems was allowing
| humans to connect with one another. Something that's
| increasingly seen as a danger that requires government
| intervention into.
|
| If people could go back in time, we would never have
| public education because "it attracts predators and
| facilitates child victimization!"
|
| See how stupid that is?
| concordDance wrote:
| I agree I'm in the majority here on hackernews, but I'm
| also in the minority in my country (the UK) given the
| monitoring provisions now required by social media
| companies and where private communication of ideas
| between individuals is punishable[1].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67331657
| miki123211 wrote:
| Maybe this needs to start over somewhere in a civil law country
| (most of Europe) where suing you for something like this is
| almost impossible.
| fullarr wrote:
| No one in Europe made an Omegle like website since 2009?
| master-lincoln wrote:
| An 11 year old alone on the internet...their parents should be
| prosecuted, not the messaging platform
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| In that article she was 11 when using Omegle. She was using
| internet without appropriate supervision. That's almost like
| allowing a kid to drive a car, leading to an accident, and then
| trying to ban cars because they are dangerous to kids.
|
| The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can
| find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid
| should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't
| think we want to close wikipedia.
|
| The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's
| not an excuse for parental neglect.
| loxdalen wrote:
| Realistically, kids are on the Internet.
|
| I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the
| Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My
| school had computers with Internet, there were two computers
| at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but
| they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing
| by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under
| 18 years of age.
|
| I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume
| kids are on the Internet.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| They sure are, but we can argue they shouldn't, or that
| they should be supervised.
|
| Not that it's going to happen. Too many people slap a
| device in front of their kids with an unlimited data plan
| and no supervision.
|
| It's a hard problem to solve, probably as unsolvable as any
| other wide-scale problem.
| donkeyd wrote:
| I've been on the internet since I was about 10 years old (I
| estimate). My parents knew (and understood) maybe 10% of
| what I did on there. As a minor, I did multiple criminal
| things online, some of them successful, others not so much.
| If I was a kid in 2023, I probably would've been arrested
| at some point in time.
|
| Because of what I know about the internet and because I
| know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much
| of this burden should be with the parents. For every
| successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop
| up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive
| sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year
| olds a smart phone.
|
| As long as parents are never held accountable for their
| kids online behavior and the blame is put on service
| providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples
| of parents who track their kids' phones because they're
| scared something will happen to them in the real world.
| Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to
| where their kids venture in the online world, let alone
| with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.
| subpixel wrote:
| I volunteer in my local public school in the US. The sad
| fact is that stable family structure, by any definition,
| is collapsing and that kids are suffering. The percentage
| of kids in grade school who have an absent, incarcerated,
| addicted, mentally unhealthy, or generally dysfunctional
| parent is off the charts.
|
| Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they
| need to avoid getting shunted into special education on
| account of their behavior are in no position to supervise
| their online activity.
|
| I make a habit of looking up kids parents on FB - it
| generally tracks that the worse the kids behavior and
| educational outlook, the greater the parent's (singular
| in most cases) social media presence. I'm no longer
| surprised when I find a mother's Onlyfans link, FFS.
|
| Where I live a full 1/3 of 1st graders are in a special
| education track. All the research points to the impact of
| the home and family on these outcomes.
|
| Tl;dr many parents are incapable of the rational
| parenting you suggest.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > I'm no longer surprised when I find a mother's Onlyfans
| link, FFS.
|
| It's far more likely that lower income is the reason for
| poor parenting than "mom has an onlyfans".
| alexandre_m wrote:
| There's a lot of money to be made in this industry.
|
| There was a local university student in UQAM who made the
| news a few years ago and she publicly bragged she was
| earning a million a year.
|
| Not everyone is going to be a top earner like this, but
| don't be delusional that it's only an option for lowest
| income individuals.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| There was an implication that they didn't fulfill
| parenting duties in part because their job was onlyfans.
|
| If they were making a lot of money, and not as poor,
| there is a higher chance their parenting duties were
| fulfilled.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| I misinterpreted parent's post underlying message then,
| fault on me.
|
| There's certainly a strong link about kids doing bad in
| school and the housing quality and home atmosphere.
| subpixel wrote:
| There is no _one_ reason, and I don't present that
| particular phenomenon as a causal factor but as a symptom
| of the greater problem - which certainly includes poverty
| but is even more closely aligned to the opioid epidemic.
|
| All this is in the context of asking parents to provide
| their children the guidance required to avoid child-
| inappropriate content.
|
| My point stands: a large and growing contingent of
| parents lack the stability/ability/support required to
| even keep their children's behavior within acceptable
| boundaries. It's a fool's errand to think keeping kids
| away from bad actors on the internet can be added to
| their plate.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Are you suggesting that the internet keeping bad actors
| away is not a fool's errand? Everything you say is
| correct but entirely irrelevant.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I've been on the internet since I was a similar age. I
| even obeyed all my parents' instructions (e.g. no using
| Google, no social media), but it's really only me being a
| certain kind of person - and a little luck - that kept me
| in any way resembling safe. Those rules, as stated to me,
| were absolutely not sufficient (e.g. I used Bing, and
| joined forums, and booted into QuickWeb to play _The
| Fancy Pants Adventures_ because that wasn 't _disabling_
| the filter). No way were my parents capable of policing
| my activity.
|
| I, uh, _mostly_ kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But
| they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one
| occasion, and those were all things I _hadn 't_ told them
| about (some of which I even realised were big deals
| _before_ they blew up). I 'm quite lucky that none of
| that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't _think_
| any of it was criminal, but that 's pure serendipity: I
| had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity
| were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple
| governments without even knowing I should _probably ask
| my parents_ about this cool new programming idea I had.)
|
| The places I frequent _these days_ are all safe for the
| kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much
| bigger than that - and, I suspect, more hostile than it
| was. I have no illusions that I could provide good,
| useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| > But major platforms like TikTok are also massive
| sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10
| year olds a smart phone.
|
| I've never used TikTok, but I find myself scrolling
| through Instagram reels quite often. It's so addicting.
| Recently, I've been seeing some extreme gore: people
| being lit on fire, bones snapping, fatal car accidents,
| sexually explicit content (cheating, etc.), etc.
|
| It's gotten to the point of me no longer wanting to watch
| those reels - they're very, very dark and depressing. If
| children are seeing this stuff as well, that's a major
| problem.
| slothtrop wrote:
| you'll grant however that when we were young, it was more
| of an unknown wild west. Parents didn't know what to make
| of it or fear, there was generally more freedom afforded.
| We were the first generation with stupid-easy access to
| pirated pornography. No one had any idea of health
| concerns, at best you heard a blanket moral stance that
| didn't convince anyone.
|
| I think today parents have access to far better means of
| regulating access, should they so choose, and they're more
| conscious of it. I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but the
| overhead is enough to dissuade kids from spending too much
| time and getting into trouble.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Focusing on nothing but parental neglect doesn't do much for
| the victims, though.
|
| Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and
| manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say
| "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we
| also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids
| to adults?
|
| For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would
| expect _some_ sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have
| been better than what Omegle had (nothing).
| Aurornis wrote:
| The legal situation is more complicated than blaming the
| parents. To extend your analogy: If someone had a business
| that rented cars and somehow 11 year olds were renting the
| cars and driving them, the rental car company couldn't shrug
| it off and blame the parents.
|
| That's why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal
| or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform,
| there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to
| address the situation. The expectation isn't perfect
| enforcement because it's not reasonable to shut every large
| business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform
| becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then
| their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in
| this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-
| for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a
| platform for bored kids, it's not surprising that the
| lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization
| options it's not surprising that they choose to close rather
| than deal with legal battles.
| blharr wrote:
| In this case, the car is the internet itself.
|
| Every form of social media is an open window for groomers
| and filled with abuse. You just don't see it as openly, and
| it's often relegated to DMs. But Instagram, X, Snapchat,
| Discord, Reddit, YouTube etc... and there are hundreds of
| influencers who use TikTok or other platforms to market
| their OnlyFans content, sometimes specifically focusing on
| younger demographics.
| maxwell wrote:
| Did the 11 year old set up and pay for internet access?
|
| Sounds more like an 11 year old stole their parents' rental
| car and the family turned around and sued the rental car
| company. It's a stretch to even suggest Omegle was akin to
| "rental car company" since they didn't charge, it was more
| like a P2P car sharing app.
| Fatnino wrote:
| How is this possibly omegles fault or problem?
|
| She met him once on omegle and _gave him her contact info_. She
| could have met him on the train or in the street and it would
| have ended the same way.
|
| Parents are supposed to teach kids about stranger danger. She
| should be suing her folks.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| That video would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.
|
| The reporters literally camped outside this guys house, ran
| across his lawn shouting at him, chased him to his door, and
| immediately accused him of harming children. Then the scene
| cuts to the reporter describing that as a "civil conversation".
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| Ah, "for the children". The best argument there is to deprive
| you of all the rights possible.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Really? We want to protect the rights of pedophiles? Where
| could this argument be going.
| ouEight12 wrote:
| Right, because everyone on the internet, and who ever
| possibly enjoyed Omegle is either a sex abused child, or
| the pedophile who preyed upon them.
|
| I had forgot, this is 2023 where there's never a middle
| ground in any discourse, regardless of topic. Thanks for
| the reminder.
| cy_hauser wrote:
| Nobody but you is suggesting we protect the rights of
| pedophiles. This argument is going where it always goes ...
| as the author pointed out. There are bad people in the
| world. They make up a small percentage of the population.
| You don't change society as a whole based on the behavior
| of these bad people. You do what is reasonable and within
| your ability. Did you even read article? By your logic
| would you allow the Catholic church to exist? They were
| literally protecting pedophiles for years.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Slippery slope fallacy. How many people are pedophiles? How
| many people who aren't will need to give up their rights so
| that that minority... actually just keeps on doing what
| they do, because there's always alternatives?
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| We should forbidden streets. Full of pedophiles!
| hbn wrote:
| I also want pedophiles to have access to clean drinking
| water if it's access to clean drinking water for everyone.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| We want to protect the rights of every single human being
| without a single exception.
| falit94 wrote:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/09/omegle-.
| ..
| fyokdrigd wrote:
| so when are they going after google for providing free email
| and such?
|
| internet watch foundation is about censorship. they only
| "protect the children" so you can't contradict them without
| looking like a criminal. they actually give criminals a legal
| defense as their content hash system is easy to prove a false
| positive.
|
| also they are going after the only service which contributed to
| arrests. lol. you think criminals don't use
| facebook/Instagram/telegram/tiktok/email/googlemeet/msteams/etc
| just because you haven't heard about arests?!
| sp0ck wrote:
| Read the article. I don't understand the logic of this. It's
| like leaving loaded gun on the desk and its gun fault (tool)
| when your kid shoot someone with it. IMO this is bad parenting.
| Any tool that provide anonimity and privacy can be abused. It
| is not like anyone was forced to use it. You have to go there
| explicitly. Adding random video chat to i.e Signal app makes it
| another Omegle "problem" ?
| bertil wrote:
| Did they ever resolve the question about how it's supposed to be
| pronounced? O-mee-GLE, O-mI-gl', Om-hi-GLE?
| badrabbit wrote:
| For others like me who don't use this service: apparently there
| were a lot of people "shaking hands with the milkman", hoping
| their work would be celebrated by rando matches. I wonder why it
| is difficult to moderate this, one of the first few matches
| should have been a moderator but maybe they just didn't make
| enough money to justify such costs.
| larodi wrote:
| Good opportunity to go out and remember how it is to meet random
| people live in parks, theatre, sporting centres, libraries,
| coworking spaces, and of course - bars.
| Madmallard wrote:
| What attacks were happening to this site?
|
| If he is well within his right and the law to host it can't he
| just... ignore them entirely?
|
| I don't understand.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Once upon a time, I was aimless and ended up on omegle after
| someone suggested it to me. For 8+ months I kinda lived on it,
| and watching countries come and go depending on timezones was
| quite funny, you could recognize speech/writing patterns in
| different cultures. You'd know in a minute if someone was chinese
| or colombian. A fun anthropological experiment.
| heroiccocoa wrote:
| It was the purest form of social media before social media was
| even a thing. In an age where it's increasingly more difficult
| for people to meet a lot of others accessibly, it's a shame.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Powerful statement, I hope everyone reads it.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Omegle was always a horny and abusive place and a place that was
| so very skin colour sensitive (as usual this skipped the
| discourse). Pretty much nothing else. I am amused by the mentions
| of magical place people are lamenting. Besides it was a direct
| copy of Chatroulette.
|
| But I understand. It's always the case - one's revolutionary is
| another's terrorist.
| backspace_ wrote:
| What do you mean by skin colour sensitive? Did the service
| favour a person with specific skin colour or did it purposely
| exclude people with a specific skin colour?
| gosub100 wrote:
| > Omegle was always a horny and abusive place and a place that
| was so very skin colour sensitive
|
| So they had php or python code that did skin detection and
| altered the code branches according to the melanin level?
| That's interesting, can you elaborate on why they did such a
| thing?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Why the fuck would you and the other commentor assume I am
| talking about the tech stack! Can you please read the comment
| again and the see the part that points to the tech stack?
| gosub100 wrote:
| you're just horrible at articulating yourself, or else
| you're doing it on purpose (hand waving). my question was
| rhetorical because your comment was bs.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| You comment on articulation and then you add that your
| question was rhetorical. Either, you really have severe
| comprehension issues, or you just can't make up your
| mind. Either way, go away, Internet stranger. I shared
| what I felt. If you needed to ask something about it, at
| least don't ask rhetorical questions. Or if you already
| think it was bs then please downvote and move on.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > I shared what I felt.
|
| making false allegations of racism ins't a "feeling",
| it's not an emotion, it's lying. Sorry I exposed you for
| lying.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| It's times like this that I become sad that the world of
| cryptocurrency and DAOs is so overrun with scams. So often that
| stuff is a solution in search of a problem. Finally we have a
| case where there's an actual problem to be solved wrt operating
| in a legal grey area, but is crypto even up to the job here if
| there's no obvious profit to be made?
|
| To be fair, if Omegle was operating anonymously on some sort of
| real-time blockchain, that would make it harder to prevent abuse.
| But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in any
| app store, which would filter out the sort of vulnerable/naive
| users who are at the greatest risk.
| z3dd wrote:
| > But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in
| any app store
|
| Which would also filter out all non tech savvy people, for
| better or worse.
| burtekd wrote:
| I love how the only two omegle.com links on hackernews are one
| from opening in 2009 and one from closing in 2023
| poszlem wrote:
| After reading his statement go and watch the psychopathic BBC
| reporter going to his house shouting "why don't you want to
| protect children". Then his decision will be easy to understand.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| LauraMedia wrote:
| Omegle was a horrible place that was not moderated enough and
| enabled groomers. It was also a place that felt very "old school
| internet" due to the "wild west style".
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > It was also a place that felt very "old school internet" due
| to the "wild west style".
|
| And what's wrong with that. The current internet feels like a
| playground where we are forced to fall in order to the wall
| garden owner.
|
| When you use the internet you should have the sense that the
| domain your going to access requires yourself to need to apply
| self caution.
|
| Letting a 11 year old online without supervision is just lazy
| neglected parenting.
| btbuildem wrote:
| A playground where every surface is foam-lined, and the whole
| place is relentlessly patrolled by fascists in mickey-mouse
| costumes.
| delfinom wrote:
| Don't forget the ads
| gosub100 wrote:
| Microsoft and Apple enable groomers. they are platforms where
| abuse images are shown (despite telemetry being able to detect
| and stop it), they could easily detect someone using their OS
| to groom a minor but yet their hands are clean? come on.
| PokestarFan wrote:
| Didn't Apple try to implement client-side CSAM scanning and
| then everyone threw a huge hissy fit over it? I mean the idea
| was flawed for privacy reasons but you cannot stop everyone
| without stripping all privacy from everyone.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I'm not actually pro-CSAM-scanning, I'm making a point that
| pointing the finger at a one-man-show website saying "he
| should have prevented this" is unfair because the whole
| tech stack could be attacked similiarly.
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| Parents allowing children to have limitless, unmonitored access
| to the internet is more to blame than any given platform.
| doubloon wrote:
| The Verge:
|
| "Omegle gained a reputation as a breeding ground for sexual abuse
| of minors, leading to a prominent lawsuit "
|
| Take any physical space that developed this reputation, it would
| also have been shut down by lawsuits.
| jkgatt wrote:
| Some good memories were made over there thats for sure!
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Is he referring to some specific event or it was generally just
| too difficult to run?
| mbix77 wrote:
| Internet is becoming sadder and sadder. Mega corporations being
| mega corporations, ads, dark patterns, community-focused websites
| becoming mega corporations...
| huggingmouth wrote:
| Whenever a giant tree falls, many saplings get a chance to grow.
| Hope we see even better omegles take its place.
|
| To op: please consider open sourcing your abuse detection tech if
| it doesn't give the bad guys an edge. I'd hate for bad people to
| abuse these new services.
| timnetworks wrote:
| Wow I'm glad Harry Mack (https://youtube.com/harrymack) got his
| time in on there. What a collection of memories he racked up.
|
| Sad to hear that the platform is shutting down due to lawsuits.
| It doesn't make much sense to change the speed limit of a street
| where kids run around unattended in the middle of the night. Sad
| to hear the instances of abuse even more though.
|
| TCPIP Omegle
| frozenwind wrote:
| I didn't want to spend time reading that wall of text, so I
| wanted a summarized version of it. Asked ChatGPT (4) to do it for
| me and it told me that Omegle is not going to close. My intuition
| told me otherwise, so the irony is that I spent more time than
| needed on this.
|
| https://sharegpt.com/c/yhV8Hjh
|
| Is this a sign of falling GPT quality? I think this was extremely
| easy to infer.
| lionkor wrote:
| PEBCAK, I went to omegle.com and was able to infer exactly what
| the author meant. It took me approx. 2 minutes to do so. Using
| ChatGPT to read short things like this is akin to only reading
| the headline of an article -- you tell me if the latter makes
| much sense usually.
| frozenwind wrote:
| 2 minutes is quite fast, congrats.
|
| I inferred this information by seeing the number of comments
| on HN (a relevant parameter in estimating the importance of
| an event imo), the time period 2009-2023 and then immediately
| after clicking seeing a tombstone. This took me under 2-3
| seconds.
|
| The rest of the info I wasn't going time to spend on was the
| motives etc. It's not the first postmortem I see, I was just
| curious to why by skipping all of the boilerplate. Omegle is
| not important to me, but I know it was quite a phenomenon .
|
| My point was that GPT failed blatantly at inferring this same
| easy task.
| dkarras wrote:
| Claude nails it without a sweat.
| neontomo wrote:
| I don't have much to add except that this was very thoughtfully
| written, and I appreciate the sentiment very much.
|
| I'll leave a quote spoken by Keanu Reeves in To the Bone:
|
| "This idea you have, that there's a way to be safe, it's childish
| and cowardly. It stops you from experiencing anything, including
| anything good."
| cyrillite wrote:
| A blow to serendipity. What a shame. RIP.
| whymauri wrote:
| The Internet is dying.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| I'm not sure why Omegle isn't being propped up by big tech
| players for this case. If Omegle loses it sets a tremendously bad
| precedent.
|
| My patience and understanding for the woman suing is completely
| dried up. She's trying to make the entire world of communication
| a worse place.
|
| What's next, the ISP is sued for carrying the traffic? It's
| absurd. She must go down.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Good riddance and here's why: Jon Minadeo II (
| https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/neo-nazi-jon-mina...)
| had been using Omegle for sometime to spread racist and
| antisemitic ideas to young kids. With no way to police this
| activity and no law against doing so, he appeared to be
| increasing his following. I used to be a "free internet"
| advocate, but the older I get and as a parent, my thinking has
| changed. We have to stand for something that protects our
| children, and an anything goes internet isn't that. I know this
| may be an unpopular viewpoint.
| gptforall wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953620/omegle-anonymous...
| darajava wrote:
| I have no sympathy for this, he should have moderated it far, far
| better. He let it become what it was before he shut it down. He
| should have shut it down 10 years ago.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Omegle was something I always intended to try but was too chicken
| to.
|
| Oh well :/
| dcow wrote:
| Is there a specific political action group or organization behind
| the pressure Omegle received that isn't being called out? Or is
| it just that the general social context has enabled people across
| the board to attack more freedoms more successfully. If anything
| I think the pendulum is slowly starting to swing back but maybe
| not on the "for the children" front.
| yckaraoke wrote:
| Reading through the comments, I'm surprised that no one has yet
| mentioned the Yahoo Chat era. YC was huge!
| neonsunset wrote:
| A reminder that the kind of public that got Omegle shutdown will
| likely never face consequences for the actions they have done
| throughout their lives.
| water9 wrote:
| The app is full of pedophiles. It will not be missed.
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| Only because the platform also has kids on it. Both groups
| still exist. My guess is both groups will just spend more time
| on other platforms like Roblox.
| i-use-nixos-btw wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't the Omegle brand and domain
| name be worth a considerable amount - with the caveat that it be
| sold to a responsible buyer?
|
| It seems like the creator is in a rough patch and faced rising
| social and financial problems from Omegle, and it has seen a BIT
| of a decline, but it's a name we all know, and the image/use/etc
| can be turned around and the creator could even still be involved
| in whatever capacity he wishes.
|
| Just seems kind of a waste to replace it with a goodbye page.
| chefandy wrote:
| This is one things on my long list of things to try that I never
| got around to, and now, never will.
| kortilla wrote:
| Is there a central registry of these parties that attack
| anonymity? We should name and shame them. Document their
| strategies and what to watch out for.
| uconnectlol wrote:
| what is the tl;dr of the giant text wall? is it "internet bad
| because some kid shared a naked pic of herself" (which is the
| "unspeakable heinous crime" he alludes to) or is it saying people
| who believe in such idiocy are bad? i don't care about some php
| webdev from 2006's philosophy on the subject, the internet should
| just not be regulated, period. it doesn't even begin to make
| sense.
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