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Comment by justsid | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t use Omegle much, but I actually met my now wife on there. We used the text only thing where a third person suggests a topic. Must’ve talked for a good 2 hours on there before exchanging informations, I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically.

We met 11 years ago on the platform, a completely random fluke. And while I haven’t really used Omegle in a long time, it’s always had a soft spot in my heart due to how much it changed the trajectory of my life. It’s a sad day.

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Think about all the infinite numbers of glitches that happened in the past and prevented you to meet other possible wives :)

I tell my wife that she and I always end up together in every multiverse, including the one where our relationship somehow causes that universe to collapse on itself (also that’s the same one where Hacker News is implemented as ASP.Net app)

So a nerdy Everything Everywhere All At Once

What's wrong with ASP.NET? (MVC, not the travesty that is WebForms)

Nothing.

Just a markedly different technology than how it’s implemented in our universe.

What does that even mean?

Nothing. Just like nothing is wrong with Java or JavaScript...

Both power a large majority of the web.

Is that good or bad?

Obviously has a vote of confidence. The companies using it are making money. Just like those using PHP and WordPress.

You can run .NET MVC on Linux/Docker/K8S nowadays natively very easily as a first-class customer.

Nothing; he's just a hater.

If he wants to stay married to his current wife, I advise him not to think about that.

What if this is his latest lifechanging glitch he doesn't yet know about

What if meeting the wife was the glitch?

I think realistically that's what it was. The odds were definitely not in our favour to meet.

Surely he met them all in other universes so the balance is restored.

You posit as if future glitches are improbable ;)

For people who are looking for this -- It's a common refrain on Twitter that Twitter can be a better dating app than actual dating apps. I think the mechanism here is similar -- both Twitter and Omegle encourage a sort of stream-of-consciousness, semi-anonymous communication style that facilitates soul entwinement.

I met my wife because she saw on facebook a screenshot someone has taken from a tweet I did about a terrorist attack. (Charlie Hebdo 2015- Paris).

This encouraged her to read my blog then to get in touch, etc…

So meeting my wife happened because:

1. There was a terrorist attack 2. I tweeted about it 3. The tweet became popular 4. A random someone took the time to screenshot it to share it on Facebook 5. That random screenshot managed to get through my future wife timeline.

To this day, when I look at my son, I wonder how odds were that he exists.

(I told the story in French here for those really curious: https://ploum.net/comment-les-reseaux-sociaux-ont-transforme... )

I shuffled a deck of cards, then spread it on the table. I looked at the cards and though to myself: what are the odds!

Same as the odds of every other child that was ever conceived. It's really easy to look backwards in time, think of every single "if this never happened..." moment, and conclude that the probability is near zero. And you would be right.

exactly. think about your existence. You wouldn't exist if your parents hadn't met and reproduced, and if their parents hadn't met and reproduced, and so on until you get to our monocellular ancestor. Everyone here is the product of a very long, unbroken line of ancestry spanning back billions of years! If any of those ancestors had not chosen to reproduce, you don't exist. It's mindblowing to me. Actually one of the main reasons I wanted children was to continue this line, why should I be the one to break it?

I had a friend who would say the following the middle aged female friends who didn’t have daughters:

Did your mom have a daughter? Female answers “yes”

Did her mom have a daughter? Yes

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”.

Are they still friends?

You could have a son instead, it wouldn't make a difference

And they say engineers aren’t romantics

For most of human history, spouses probably met from a fairly limited pool of suitors in their small band or village. Of course it became different in large cities, or once international travel became possible, and especially now when you can "meet" someone on the other side of the world without leaving your mom's basement.

The odds your son exists are about the same as the chance that the last extant turtle on Earth, swimming alone through the Earth's barren oceans, should happen to swim right through a particular wooden ring, tossed at random into the sea from some vessel a million years earlier.

If something has to happen, it will happen.

I got dates from Amazon reviews (back when I used to write more Amazon reviews).

It never became anything serious but the whole "find people online on not-dating sites just by communicating" is real.

Wow, how they contacted you?

I am unfortunately easily googleable as only 1 other person in the world has my first and last name

No way! That's awesome. You should reach out to the creator of the site and let him know about this (if you haven't already). He'd probably be super happy to hear this story :)

Any platform that is large enough will sooner or later become a 'slice of life'. I've seen this with ww.com/camarades.com, and it was fascinating to see that development up close.

One of the most memorable ones for me was a terminally ill patient in a hospital that was still conscious that used our fledgling video meeting service to stay in touch with family members all over the USA. And random strangers dropping in to wish them well. Some people would protest that this wasn't material that should be shown online but I always defended such uses because (1) it seemed like the right thing to do and (2) life has nice sides and darker sides and I don't think pretending the darker sides don't exist is a realistic position.

> Any platform that is large enough will sooner or later become a 'slice of life'.

I run a smallish website / forum for a video game franchise, we've got a number of couples on there, one of which got married a few weeks ago; some of our members were there, me and my (now ex) gf (also met through that site) watched it on stream. Small communities based around common interests with no pressure to date and no overbearing rules on what communication is allowed or not is great for fostering relationships like that.

Maybe its a good idea to collect a lot of these positive stories and get them up somewhere for all the peeps at Omegle to see.

The chance of a small glitch or anything that did not happen in the past is as likely as a ghost dinosaur coming up to you and scamming you out of all your money.

Looking at the past through a probabilistic lens is irrational, unless you are doing it to predict the future through information collection.

Sort of, of topic but anyway….

I don't know why you were downvoted but it's true. My dad was almost scammed this past weekend. Or kind of scammed. The thing is that of a group of 200, 195 were scammed and he wasn't (or he was, but he got what he paid for in the end). And he wasn't just because a random event, he was very luck.

I kept thinking in how lucky he was and how sad my family would be if he was part of the 195. But it didn't happen. Maybe in an alternate timeline (?), but not on this one. Worry about what could have happened is not worth it. To induce stress for things that did not happen is not worth it. Yes, we can use it to learn for future opportunities, but that should be all.

I kept waiting for the part where the scammer turned out to be the ghost of a dinosaur.

What was the suggested topic?

I don't fully remember, but I think it was about One Direction. We very quickly went off on tangents, but I think the feature was implemented so that the third person can spy on the messages but not interact in any way. I sometimes wonder how long they ended up staying in the conversation.

I happened to realize today that many if not all results we observe today is outcome of one or the other probable event in the past.

How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car accidents that did happen and change lives.

History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent that they covered in books or passed through generations as tales.

Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change entire history of humankind, especially in wars.

Sliding Doors the movie comes to mind

To my recollection "sliding doors" was already a meme (in the Dawkins sense). The movie was based on that. I swear I remember explaining to my then girlfriend the term, as I'd read it on the internet?

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?

> I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically.

Met mine in an MMO and I think about how many ways there are that it could have never happened.

I once met a couple who met in Felwood (the WoW region).

You never know where that person's going to come from! And the best ones seem to come while you're not looking for them directly and just having fun being yourself...

Are you English, and your wife American, by any chance?

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