Omegle 2009-2023
omegle.com
omegle.com
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.
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.)
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.
I'm not sure I would want to imagine that. But then, I'm German.
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.
Not anymore.
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.
Btw, we are living in a golden age. The vast majority of humanity has never had it better.
I would've agreed pre-covid.
Mine was that a level of poverties implying calories deficit exist in the US.
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.
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.
The internet though is mostly chaos. There are gatekeepers, e.g. Google, but they don’t curate much - using a blacklist approach rather than whitelist - and instead just organize the information making it findable.
Niche ideas get air time and now compete in the market place of ideas.
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.
That and barely anyone still dies (excess of eg the flu which kills a bunch of people each year)
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.
It sucks, but you can make it through.
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.
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.
I choose not to believe you because you refused to vaccinate which makes everything you say suspect. Sorry.
Why?
I'll note that I haven't done what you've accused me of, though. Perhaps that counts for something, Perhaps not.
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.
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
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See the idiomatic vs. the mythological meaning on Wiktionary:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
Fewer families being formed => more lonely adults => more people depressed.
Actual data.
I don't know how to solve this problem, either. Covid seems to have only caused all of us to double down on the social isolation that was already introduced by computing/the internet somehow.
As soon as my kid is a little older (he's 2.3 years old and still extremely high-maintenance currently), my partner and I will try to get back to what we used to do and throw more dinner parties/social events.
Spiritually, we are in a deep crisis.
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-...
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.
It's difficult to compare suicide statistics over time, especially over decades, because definitions change. (For one example, in England a coroner used to need to be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a person had died by suicide, and that changed to balance of probabilities in 2018).
It's also important not to use sources like media outlets for suicide statistics, because they often don't understand what's being counted or how it's being counted. Statistics are tricky, and media often get them wrong.
You say that it's easy to show that suicides are at an all time high in many first world countries, but that's not correct. In many countries rates peaked in about 2008 - 2010 because of world wide financial crash, and have been declining since then. We might see another peak because of the financial (and other) distress caused by pandemic, but so far we're not seeing a big increase.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do agree kids _seem_ to be more risk-averse these days.
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”, …
As far as I can tell, books haven't really gotten more (or less) complicated in at least the past 200 years. Or rather: you might be able to detect some trends with a statistical analysis, but the variance is big enough that as a casual reader, you won't notice a trend.
Many of those things can be as cheap or as expensive as you want, the last two do have some cost of entry but, it entirely depends how deep you want to go.
I enjoyed gaming as a kid, but the older I become, the less tolerant of it I am. I was the sort of kid/teen that would dive deep into JRPG's and spend time on gamefaqs.com and other forums - so don't discount me as someone that never understood gaming - but now that I'm an adult I just don't enjoy it. Maybe it's because I understand how games are made, and what meetings/background context goes into publishing a game, maybe it's just that I have less and less freetime so I don't want to be involved in a computer-esque realted software type deal. There's also the whome gamification of society and microtransactions that really draw developers into extracting money every chance, and theres also marketplaces like Xbox Game Pass that offer unlimited gaming for a set fee.
I very much think we are in a true golden age of information exchange - letters - phone calls - instant transmisison via Internet to the point where we're conversing ways to relax with the time we have. And I don't mean to be negative of your hobby. As long as you enjoy the time you spend on it - that's excellent. :) And don't think I don't game now, I have a switch that I never use with a library of games that keeps piling up - heh.
I also enjoyed gaming more as a kid. I found it easier to suspend my disbelief when I was young, and my patience for grinding/clunky interfaces was higher. I've never played a game with microtransactions, seems dangerous!
People pay $20 to be engrossed in a movie for 1.5 hours. Is that addiction?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/
https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri
https://store.steampowered.com/app/219740/Dont_Starve/ (would recommend going into this game as blind as possible)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/368230/Kingdom_Classic/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/107100/Bastion/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/662540/Haque/
If you like puzzles, my roommate (also an engineer) was a huge fan of https://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/
Usually I try to monitor prices using a site like isthereanydeal.com and wait until it's discounted at least 50%.
A mistake I made in the past was buying games just because there was a really good sale. At a certain point, I realized that the time investment in learning new game mechanics is more important than the cash investment in buying the game. Investing your time in learning the mechanics of a mediocre-but-cheap game isn't a great way to relax.
Another strategy is to use a site like ifttt.com to get alerts for free games on the /r/GameDeals subreddit. You can accumulate a large game library for no cost at all if you're patient enough.
I always like to play on an HDMI TV with a gamepad if possible; hunching over a laptop isn't very relaxing. Almost all the games I recommended above have good gamepad support. Steam has a nifty Big Picture mode that makes it easy to browse your library with a gamepad.
Beware: Having a game library that's too large may cause decision fatigue which makes gaming less fun! :-P
I'm weirdly happy for you that this is your failure mode. For most people, buying games on sale just leads to a bigger and bigger backlog of unplayed games.
The backlog thing is part of why I think we're in a golden age. I remember when I was a kid, it was common for my friends to own a game console (Gamecube, Gameboy, etc.) with less than 5 games for it. We're in an age of abundance now compared to those days.
I try to view my backlog as an asset, not a liability. Think of it as a garden of unexplored delights. It's just a matter of giving a new game 5-10 hours to prove itself to you as you master its mechanics, instead of skipping on to the next game if you aren't immediately hooked.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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….
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.
You can run .NET MVC on Linux/Docker/K8S nowadays natively very easily as a first-class customer.
Just a markedly different technology than how it’s implemented in our universe.
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... )
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”.
It never became anything serious but the whole "find people online on not-dating sites just by communicating" is real.
Wikipedia says the term came from the movie. Obviously the idea didn't; but it's my recollection wrong or can anyone show that Wikipedia is wrong here?
I guess a search on Usenet archives might find something?
Met mine in an MMO and I think about how many ways there are that it could have never happened.
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...
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.
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)
If the only human motivation factor you know is monetary, I deeply pity you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
alas, the only good willed thing on that line of thought has ever been privacy regulations, which did not fix one single thing, just made everything worse because of cookie popups. it was a completely predictable outcome for any competent engineer of software and protocols, too. and it's the consumers fault for not opting to use a simpler protocol that doesn't dox you the moment you do anything.
the US police state won when they went after napster. you all ate that up. it's likely if we ever have a free internet again it will be outlawed, while the main internet has no purpose but to serve corporate propaganda harder and harder and align it with politics like "not buying a doordash mcmeal = racist" and "wanting private browsing = pedo". you will pay a $50 fee for the very most basic thing like permission to screenshot your monitor, and anyone who tries to fight it will be more and more criminalized. statism is the problem, not """libertarianism"""
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)
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.
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.
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.
Imagine they'll hop to a different platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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]
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.
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.
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. .
Someone who has worked incredibly hard at their craft in a very public manner.
The positive vibe he brings makes the internet a little bit better on every encounter.
I almost shed a tear when H.Mack got the opportunity to perform in front of his idols, Ice Cube, who said he was one of the best freestyle rappers he's seen, and had followed his career closely for years. A magical moment :-)
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.
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.Aren't they just neewbs or something? N33wbs?
N00bs?
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.
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.
4chan offensiveness isn't so much a generational thing as it is a personality thing
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.
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.
maybe you haven't been looking or looking with a different perspective, but it was definitely tried and accomplished, imho.
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.
archive link for those who don't want to google
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
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?
That's not generally true, nor should it be.
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.
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.
No the mall isn't a good analogy, it has lights, mall cops, CCTV cameras, crowds of people wandering around, it's a well known public place and it's generally not known as a place to approach strangers unless you're selling something. Omegle happened one-to-one, private, and encouraged chatting directly to strangers.
There is a concept, I forget the name of it (not the bystander effect) where if you are in a strange place in public and need help then you can call out to the bystanders for help, or you can point to one specific bystander and ask for help. Say you are a tipsy woman lost her bag, and you call out to anyone for help then the self-interested predator can step forwards, but if you point to one person and ask them to call you a cab then you are unlikely to randomly pick the self-interested predator. So even though most people who try to help a stranger in need are good people, calling out to the void leaves a big opportunity for any bad people to take advantage of. Both can be true - that most people are good and that one arrangement leaves more room for any predators who are present than another arrangement does. Omegle had a reputation for being risqué - like DickRoulette (ChatRoulette), so that means people wouldn't tend to use it in a library, or on a family PC in the living room with other people around.
So people going on Omegle would be more likely younger because they have more free time and less money to spend on things and less ability / money to go out instead, are more likely to go on behind closed doors to avoid people seeing anything rude on their screens, then they'd get matched with a stranger, encouraged to chat with the stranger, and of course the reasonable adults matched with a young child who shouldn't be there would move on, leaving the effect above and the predators room be the ones who pretended to be friendly, and none of the protections of a crowd at a mall - well-meaning strangers ("it takes a village") could see something odd happening and interrupt or check-in.
It's not that everyone on the site was in that situation, it's that the site design and social status left that to happen way way more often than a mall or a shop bench would.
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)
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.)
Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year -- I knew someone who was killed, and I've had a couple close shaves. In fact, today I was kiting and witnessed a kiter get rescued by the Coast Guard. It's understandable that society would want to have some say due to the externalities (loss of productive members of society, cost of rescues, risk to bystanders, etc).
IMO it's not the case that 'no risk is acceptable' -- it's just that the risk tolerance for various things seems really arbitrary & out of proportion to reward. For instance, if we didn't accept any risks as a society, we'd ban alcohol & tobacco along with kitesurfing, skydiving and motorcycles, but we don't.
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.
No one is ‘accidentally’ using Omeagle, anymore than they would ‘accidentally’ go golfing.
An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a golf membership.
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.
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.
> 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.
So it seems like we do have SOME semblance of understanding risk vs reward.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://blog.ucsusa.org/jimmy-odea/electric-vs-diesel-vs-nat...
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.
> 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.
No, it really doesn't sound like that.
Trains, and other public transport vehicles, in comparison to the damage that individual traffic does, ARE a contributing solution to global warming.
> Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.
Oh really? Then how did cities come to be in the first place?
But you know what really makes cities a hell to live in? Covering them with multi-lane roads and giant parking lots for those flotillas of pointless metal boxes with rubber wheels.
Because it was and is the only way to escape poverty for many people.
I grew up in a small city and the majority of my classmates had to go to larger city to get a good job.
This effect was very extreme during the early 1900s especially when the Great Depression hit. Either starve on the farm or move to filthy city. Cities being desirable for anyone but the rich is a very recent phenomenon.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first:
Does it matter more than keeping our habitat viable to support the continuous exstence of our species? No. No it does not.
With that out of the way: I don't see why individual freedom to move would be impacted by this. Imagine a world where we invest as much into public transport as we now do into cars. Imagine how spacious, frequent and comfortable the public transport is in that world.
Additionally, focusing on PublicTransport doesn't mean cars need to be abolished completely. Need a car for a day? Where I live I can rent one (and a nice one at that) within minutes on my phone, and get it from a public garage where it is stored.
We will need to have street infrastructure in the future as well anyway: Local delivery, emergency vehicles, construction, etc. That's fine. That can stay. And so can rentable cars for those in-between times when people actually need a car.
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...
/jk
> 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
sounds like the war shouldn't have happened, and the correct solution was not to do that
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.
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.
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.
can't find "un office of generation labels" please advise
Likewise, most of our prominent entrepreneurs are all Gen X try-hards who found fortune because of the consumption patterns that millennials adopted and were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on it. Millennial consumption patterns of course having been heavily influenced by gen xers and boomers by proxy, the few that got that good job and kept it forever are quite happy to upgrade their iPhone every year, buy TVs and cars for no reason, and move to the boonies not realizing that Gen Xers mistakenly gave up their sense of community to follow in the boomers' footsteps; they'll borrow and pay anything possible for the privilege.
Anyway, I'm already working on my Gen X material.
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.
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)
EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you.
> Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.
No. Please read my comment again. I claim no such thing.
Didn’t they used to specifically and notably not care about this? See ACLU defense of neo nazi march.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
Never thought I’d get whiplash just from reading a comment on Hacker News.
Can we sit down and define it, or are we to forever just throw it around as a convenient "bad people"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
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
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.
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.
I got my impression from following the actual court cases and related news. Weird eh?
But go ahead and project all you want.
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.
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
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.
Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight Omegle's basic behavior, to start with.
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.
That's assuming the evidence I would like to actually see.
Age limits can have a perverse effect on kids, or even young adults, eager to prove to themselves and their peers how "mature" they are. Retail stores and clubs where I live have exploited this for a long time.
For instance, there is no government-imposed limits on the age you need to be to buy energy drinks, but the grocery stores have coordinated to institute a 15 year limit. I'm pretty sure they do this simply to increase sales, not over concern for overcaffeinated kids.
They also used to have big signs saying "Over 18? PROVE IT!" with a big foaming glass of beer. I'm sure that flew over the head of most adults, but there was nothing about showing ID there.
Here's Chatroulette's login screen:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Over the years, the handful of times I’ve gone on CR, I’ve never seen any form of required registration or age verification beyond maybe an “I’m 18+” checkbox or something.
On balance I still think Omegle should win the case, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.
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.
That's is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below the BBC.
> 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.
"The young woman, identified only as A.M., sought $22 million in damages in her lawsuit. Omegle was shut down days after the two sides agreed to settle the lawsuit."
> 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.
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.
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
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.
They don't seem to go after the communication channels, they go after the discovery mechanisms.
* 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.
The site has only been featured here twice, for its birth and death.
"Not very interesting."
"This is a lot of fun actually - but how is it hacker news?"
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.
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.
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?)
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.
Which would also filter out all non tech savvy people, for better or worse.
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
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:
To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.
Crimes happen on all technologies and in all venues, and they likely always will.
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
You’re not alone my friend. The “old good times” internet is long gone and the situation is evolving very fast.
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.
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.
I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.
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.
That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter than the average user today
TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 and commercial ISPs didn't exist until 1989
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.
Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.
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.
Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was personally offended.
I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.
In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.
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.
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.
Note: All of this based on impressions/vibes, would be keen to hear any stats if people around have ‘em on hand!
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.
I’m not treating anyone’s experience as gospel in any case. There are no important decisions I’ll be making off this information.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
there's evidence to suggest that there were two separate events from different strains at the start of the pandemic
this doesn't disprove the lab leak theory, but then they would have to be studying two separate very related strains and it would be strange if they just kept leaking different strains
You could, of course, take it as proof that the lab leak happened at around the same time as lineage B, while lineage A is from bats
Propaganda goes both ways in war. In case you were not aware.
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.
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…
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying "kids these days"
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.
/shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure
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.
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.
So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.
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.
(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.)
...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September.
The corporatisation of net ruined it.
Not much can survive the incentive of profit.
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.
“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.
Maybe abusing webtorrent trackers to do discovery might work, but would likely be trickier.
Of course, it's probably a bad idea to stand up a clone of the site that's impossible to properly moderate.
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.
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.
Mandated ID checks are fine as long as we're using it to bludgeon the privileged in the process?
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.
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.
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.
[citation needed]
Knowing when to call it quits is very wise. I mourn the end of a characteristic internet site, but I respect the founder.
But Omegle will be missed for sure.
Don't make your problem into everybody's problem.
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.
If he is well within his right and the law to host it can't he just... ignore them entirely?
I don't understand.
Oh well :/
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
Edit: was it because of the video component of Omegle?
> 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...
Do tech companies need to verify government issued IDs to register new users?
Like proving I am at least 18 years old without giving out my birth date or name.
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.
But some ambulance chasing lawyer told them they have a chance to win in this case.
You are in a clear majority position but still pretend to be persecuted and victimized by an imagined boogeyman.
Omegle (business model: "Uber for child grooming")
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?
Of this thread. I presume the vast majority of people don't really care about Omegle, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the nostalgic commenters here haven't actually used it since 2009. I have semi recently, and let me tell you there was a lot more dick on there than I remember.
I do find it weird that most of this post is blaming (in order) the family, the government, woke society. It seems fairly obvious to me we should be blaming the people showing their dicks to everyone and the pedophiles.
Overall I understand any site choosing to shut down rather than having to foot the bill of policing their users, I probably would too.
> If people could go back in time, we would never have public education because “it attracts predators and facilitates child victimization!”
We both know this isn't true. We still have church after all.
There is no point in blaming parts of the system that we can't change. As a society, we have mechanisms for changing liability laws and allowing/banning free communication. But there is no mechanism that has a worthwhile cost for ensuring there are no pedophiles in the world.
Yeah, you should bring up snail mail next.
Even if we imagine someone using SMS in this day and age, still no one uses it to send photos or videos or broadcast live abuse.
> Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up”
For better or worse a lot of what they do is considered essential service (calling emergency, disaster response etc).
e2ee messaging isn't essential, and yes ordinary non-tech people are waking up to harmful uses of it. If tech industry doesn't own up to that and work to combat those, someone else will and in that case rest assured you will not like the result:)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's far more likely that lower income is the reason for poor parenting than "mom has an onlyfans".
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.
If they were making a lot of money, and not as poor, there is a higher chance their parenting duties were fulfilled.
There's certainly a strong link about kids doing bad in school and the housing quality and home atmosphere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
I had forgot, this is 2023 where there's never a middle ground in any discourse, regardless of topic. Thanks for the reminder.
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?!
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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/bundleresources/en...).
"Omegle (/oʊˈmɛɡəl/[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."
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.
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.
I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to them, and to start talking to them early.
"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-...
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.
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...
Is this a real question?
If someone showed up at a bar, would a bouncer accept that?
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?
And establishments get shut down all the time for it.
[https://ftxidentity.com/blog/abc-laws-if-minor-is-served/]
Next question?
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?
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.
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.)
Pick one.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
... 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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
I am just logging a protest, I have absolutely no interest in discussing it.
I apologize that you felt that it was an accusation. I could have been more tactful in expressing what my impressions were of your probing. I'm happy to be wrong.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if Walmart had a thousand anonymous meeting rooms it wouldn't be Walmart anymore, so the analogy falls apart at that point.
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...
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.
How about spoons? https://nypost.com/2019/05/16/police-station-mocked-for-phot...
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...
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.
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.
Until convicted, I presume?
Are the identites of those arrested (and possibly prosecuted but acquitted) protected forever?
Multi million Euro fraud, perpetrated for 10+ years in an organized fashion by husband and wife and some helpers from Saxony. Victims were (and are) senior citizens.
The German public broadcast MDR had several stories on them. Yet they don’t even dare to show the office building on which the perpetrators work. Much less their private house, or faces or names.
The press is more afraid of being sued by the perpetrators than the perpetrators are afraid of being prosecuted.
It’s the other extreme.
I'm starting to feel this is the thing we should have laws against.
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.
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.
Asking loaded questions and trying to aggressively ambush you is definitely not "getting the other side of the story".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 :-(
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.
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.
I feel a bit the same, but why?
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.
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.
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.
+ 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.
Care to elaborate on your accusation? In my world, Omegle was about things like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q
https://sharegpt.com/c/yhV8Hjh
Is this a sign of falling GPT quality? I think this was extremely easy to infer.
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.
But I understand. It’s always the case - one’s revolutionary is another’s terrorist.
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?
making false allegations of racism ins't a "feeling", it's not an emotion, it's lying. Sorry I exposed you for lying.
(I don't know the person or much about their situation; I'm just using what I read to make a general observation.)
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.
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.
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.
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.