Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s.
This is funny to me, because I am old enough to remember when web 2.0 was new, and people were nostalgic for 'web 1.0'. (And, of course, it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.)
it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.
And yet golden eras do occur, or so it would seem.
I’m sure it’s hard to tell when you’re in or near one, which is an interesting topic in its own right, but it doesn’t mean we should dismiss outright the possibility that a passing era might just be taking something truly valuable with it.
Even a non-golden era can have something truly valuable.
Btw, we are living in a golden age. The vast majority of humanity has never had it better.
we are living in a golden age
I would've agreed pre-covid.
Does COVID still exist meaningfully in your part of the world?
In my country the first few waves were very strong, but after a successful vaccination campaign (among other things) COVID has completely disappeared in everybody’s daily lives.
A teammate caught Covid this week, and they're now isolating.
Another teammate's family caught Covid last week.
Me and my wife caught Covid in August.
We're all vaccinated afaik (myself with 5 jabs), and thankfully we only got mild symptoms, but the problem with Covid is how easy it is for it to spread.
Do people in your life do a rapid test when they get sick? The only explanation I see for thinking that Covid has "disappeared", is that barely anyone still tests.
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)
Dying is no longer that much of a concern indeed thanks for the jabs (got my 6th this week) but long covid very much is.
I'm on 0 jabs (apparently they don't slow transmission or virality, so I figured I wouldn't bother) and long covid is still really rough. A few things helped me get through long covid: surprisingly, nicotine and a lot of natural carbs from fresh ripe fruits. And by an excess, I mean 200+ grams a day by macro. It took me a month or two of nicotine gum, about 100lbs of fruit (12.5lbs a week) and so much sleep, but I'm starting to do better.
It sucks, but you can make it through.
do not listen to this guy.
long covid is not something you can combat with fresh fruits, it can cause a life long disability, brain damage and more. it's quite obvious an anti-vaxxer would try to dismiss it as a "sucks but you can make it through". Look up the stories of people who still can barely get out of bed after years of long covid.
I'm offering what worked for me. There's other stuff out there that might work, but I haven't tried. For example, I've heard folks talk about paxlovid working to alleviate symptoms, or using standard courses of antivirals, and so on. I'm here sharing my own experience.
If I've dismissed anyone, I sincerely apologize. That was not my intent.
When I say "it sucks, but you can make it through" my desire is to offer hope to a group of people - that I'm a part of - that often lacks hope given the severity of their symptoms.
As for efficacy, I'd invite you to look into mitochondrial dysfunction and how long covid is related. I'll note that a carb heavy diet is one of the ways to reboot energy production on the body, which can be potent for reducing fatigue.
I'm offering what worked for me
I choose not to believe you because you refused to vaccinate which makes everything you say suspect. Sorry.
suspect
Why?
And long COVID significantly increases your risk of death from other causes, including heart attack and stroke.
I did read recently that a long course of acyclovir may be a working treatment, possibly even cure, for long COVID. But in order to get that out to people, we'd have to start taking long COVID seriously.
Actually, I looked this up for you.
https://derekfranksmusings.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thi...
You see, covid is NOT really a respiratory illness. Researchers at Oxford University call it a “Serious Vascular Disease with Primary Symptoms of a Respiratory Ailment”. So, you need to stop comparing it to colds and flus. No cold killed 30,000+ Americans in less than two months in 2023. Covid did so in January and February. So, please stop comparing them.
Thanks for sharing that article, there's also another recent one with plenty of references about the clusterfuck of the current situation:
https://www.normalcyfugitive.com/p/the-pandemic-isnt-over
One thing that (by skimming again) both articles don't touch is: excess deaths.
I've seen people suggest that we're "past it", because the excess deaths (compared to 2 years before) are now subsiding... While ignoring the fact that excess deaths compared to 2 year before are comparing against when the first few COVID spikes happened (and we didn't have vaccines, so mortality was even higher).
We need to compare our society excess mortality to 2019 (and/or average of years preceding 2020), for the foreseeable future :/
That said, I'm not spending 100% of my day worrying about COVID, and I don't take as many precautions as I could... I wear FFP2 masks in public transport, but I usually don't bother in the office, for example
We're all vaccinated afaik (myself with 5 jabs), and thankfully we only got mild symptoms
You got the shot 5 times, still caught it, and you call it a vaccine...
Serious question. How do you keep making the decision to get the shot?
Yearly flu vaccines have been around since the 1940s and change yearly to adapt to the latest strains. I don't see why covid should be any different in this respect.
because of long covid
I mean, I don't think a flu shot is worth most people's time either. If you're around people with compromised immune systems sure, but for your average person it's really not beneficial.
You got the shot 5 times, still caught it, and you call it a vaccine...
After almost 4 years of this virus, 3 years of covid vaccines, a presumably basic level of biological education, the baseline level of curiosity that I'd have thought would be present in anyone reading HN, and the world of free information at our fingertips, I don't rightly understand why people keep making elementary mistakes like this.
Surely it's obvious? It's because they want to.
I mean, you'd probably still wear a seatbelt after having an accident... It's insurance, like the flu vax, not completely preventative.
By redefining "vaccine" only as something that provides "sterilizing immunity" (which actually only a few of them have ever provided, and thus, this expectation was never actually part of the original definition; see: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-few-vaccines-prevent...) and thus impugning vaccine advocacy (or specifically, COVID vaccine use) as misguided at best, you are actually contributing to a narrative of science/medicine doubt that will literally lead to more death in the world. So please reconsider your carefully-worded position.
Why do you still consider any of this necessary at this point?
This summer we finally relaxed a lot after years of masking, and BAM, a child coughed right on my wife's face and she got long covid. Fortunately she seems to be almost totally recovered now (fingers crossed for no relapse) , but she has spent two months with fatigue and headaches strong enough to prevent her from working or doing many daily activities.
My wife is in her 30s and healthy. COVID can still be quite brutal, although of course the extent of the measures one should take is highly debatable and subjective.
I am done with people. I wear a Cleanspace Halo and hate the world for making me do so. Everyone is free to cough on me, ain't gonna do much.
As an aside: even pre covid I was eagerly waiting for a (somewhat) affordable exoskeleton. I am going to have the best Darth Vader cosplay ever.
I got another round of rona in February of this year and suddenly became so tired. I needed 14+ hours of sleep and concentrating was next to impossible. The fatigue was overwhelming at times. Some six months later I'm on my way out of that now, with more good days than bad.
It's good that she had you to rely on. I did a lot of reading on long covid and there were and so are so many people isolated because they're basically spent all the time.
Because the thing I use to make a living is my brain and COVID had a significant chance to impact it long term.
Perhaps you need a solid booster shot? And if it is for the Pfizer smile.
Have you thought about getting a sixth shot? It ought to work eventually...!
What does the data look like in your country? England had 273 deaths and 3000 hospital admissions in the past week. It's still there, bubbling along in the background, it's just not getting media attention.
Data?!
Here is some for the US: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklyhospi...
I think they are referring less to the actual virus and more to the rapid deterioration of our discourse and politics that accompanied it. Or at least this is what I might mean when using "COVID" as an epoch.
rapid deterioration of our discourse and politics that accompanied it
That has been happening way before Covid.
IMHO it started with the internet. Pre-internet the flow of information is gatekept by traditional media - newspapers, radio, TV, … etc. Everyone watched, listened to, read more or less the same things. This resulted in a more uniform set of opinions and more common ground between people.
The internet broke all that. People could choose what they watch/listen/read and different people picked different things, coming to very different conclusions. In the past you could ask someone if they watched X last night and there is a decent probability they did. Today it’s much harder to find common ground - you could both be on YouTube but watching completely different things.
Edit: Don’t just downvote. You got a problem with this post, say something.
I agree it was happening before COVID. I think the internet could be part of the problem. But it wasn’t freedom of choice that caused the problem, which is what you claim. There’s much less freedom on the internet now, and if anything it’s much worse. If we’re going to blame internet then blame ads and big tech. Don’t blame people for watching cat videos, that’s absurd.
the main risk is long covid, not dying. exact risk of LC per infection is unclear but the order of magnitude of the figures i'm seeing for it are too high. i'm wearing ffp3 indoors in public places
Less than 130 years ago 47% of all children in the USA died before reaching age 5. I think that we are doing just fine even with covid.
A lot of folks are hungry in my state. As in : not enough nutrient a day.
Other states (that are probably run better): Exist
COVID is what saved us from four more years of Trump (and perhaps many more after that of his family and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Steven Miller and Steve Bannon and the list goes on and on...).
That's a bit simplistic.
If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are experiencing secularly stagnating growth, a crisis of democratic representation and its populist backlash, the return of oligarchic inequality to levels not seen since the gilded age, and extreme social atomisation and mental health breakdown.
We are also all hurtling towards catastrophic climate change, an AI revolution that could lead to generalised technological unemployment, and some indeterminate level of conflict between the US and China.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people in advanced economies look back on the post-war decades as a golden age - obviously there were problems, but there was high growth, full employment, good public services, strong unions, and comparatively cheap housing. Others look back to the 1990s as a time of untroubled horizons.
Also, the global 'we' is unhelpful. Have native Americans, Syrians or Greeks never had it so good?
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.
Read the first sentence with which I began. I said it was simplistic, not that it was categorically and completely wrong, and certainly not that its opposite was true.
What I object to is the extraordinarily simplistic, one-dimensional view of progress peddled by the likes of Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker.
True, lot's of material and medical indicators of progress have consistently increased. That's to be celebrated. Certainly, if asked, the vast majority of people in the West would want to be born in the post-war years, and the average would probably slant towards the end of that period. Though I do think a good slice of people would choose against the post-2008 years in particular.
But that binary - better or worse? - is a crude measure of societal health. It lacks any dialectical sense of modernity, of that fact the same socio-technological expansion which brought about that progress, has gone hand-in-hand with extreme oligarchy, world war, nuclear weapons, climate change, the anthropocene. Certainly, the risks of catastrophic global breakdown are greater today than ever before.
I also think it has a superficial and philistine grasp of politics and the common good. Besides utilitarians, few political philosophers would so easily equate the good with material abundance. Hence why I pointed, by way of counterpoint, to today's secular stagnation, crisis of democracy, inequality, and withering of public life. These are not small problems, but speak to fundamental pathologies in our body politic.
"The other two examples, undoubtedly yes they are better than ever."
Many native Americans and Greeks would viscerally disagree with you. Perhaps you're missing something?
"For anyone to think it was better in any other time in history for most of the global population than now, shows such a lack of knowledge of history and the human condition that its hard to take serious."
As above, you have misread what I said, and I think trying to understand and evaluate society solely from the binary standard of 'better or worse' is extremely crude. I have a PhD in history btw.
"Scrolling instagram and fake depressions aren't worse than having 7 miscarriages, half your kids dying as babies or children, being enslaved, starving to death."
True, but I think virtually no one would say otherwise. This is an unhelpful caricature of the argument I was making.
If you think being able to take all variables you can into account and have your model spit out "better" or "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything cause any answer to anything is crude.
The question is simple, given any century throughout history, would a person prefer to be born in 2000 or any century before then, not knowing anything else about their life, where they will be born, who their parents are etc. I'm pretty sure a rational person will always choose 2000 as of today if they are choosing actually thinking of the consequences and not just "I wanna cosplay as a cowboy".
If you don't think you can answer that question you don't have any knowledge. You fell into the trap of "I learned how much I didn't know and now think nothing can be answered because everything is complex" which is a trap some people fall into. At some point laws need to be written and you need answers. What is simplistic to me is saying "aw chucks it's too complex, nobody knows if it's better because for one person over there it's worse". Even complex systems have answers at the end, said another way, whatever the distribution or long tails or whatever, I can still calculate a median. You should "roll up" your knowledge into being able to still answer "yes" or "no" to something. And the answer is yes, the world is better to live in today, regardless of how much hand waving you do about specific subsets of people or caring about 2008 till now vs before as if that realistically mattered on a large scale of centuries of human existence.
It's also funny how its crude when I say it's better for everyone but it's not crude when you say it's worse for Greek people. Also still trying to understand if you think the financial crisis has anything on medieval medical practices and lack of food and societal support systems. I was poor in portugal during that period so pretty much went through the same as the Greeks and let me tell you I'd rather be poor in the 2000s than rich anywhere on earth in the 1400s.
"If you think being able to take all variables you can into account and have your model spit out "better" or "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything cause any answer to anything is crude."
That doesn't follow logically at all!?
Trying to reduce human history down to a summative, categorical and dichotomous judgement of '-1' or '+1' is outrageously simplistic, almost by strict definition. Incidentally, precisely this observation is baked into common idioms, like 'black and white thinking', and Manichean 'good versus evil'.
You also seen to be taking an incongruently natural scientific approach to what is a largely a meta-ethical and historical question - two fields with their own, distinctive methodologies.
I don't think this conversation has been particularly constructive, so let's wish one another the best and park it.
That doesn't follow logically at all!?
The logic implication is that everything is complex :)
Anyway yeah lets park it. I think you should reflect on being able to reduce complex problems to practical answers and I should reflect on not over-simplifying complex topics and if we both do that this conversation is not a waste of time. Hopefully we agree at least on that. Otherwise have a great day!
If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are experiencing secularly stagnating growth
Is growth really what we should care about though? Would you prefer to live in a poor society that's growing rapidly, or a rich society that's stagnating? In terms of your quality of life (medical, food, housing, education, etc.) you're going to have a better time in the stagnant-but-rich society.
The American economy is actually doing super well right now btw: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-american-weal...
I’d much rather be in a poor but growing economy than a rich stagnating one. I’m very sure about that.
Why?
Opportunity and poor, growing countries turn into rich countries within a human lifespan and then don't usually stagnate for another generation or two.
If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are experiencing secularly stagnating growth,
I haven't noticed that. The US is currently in a boom, and unemployment across the rich world is mostly at record lows.
a crisis of democratic representation and its populist backlash,
Not sure what you mean there? Are you talking about US politics?
the return of oligarchic inequality to levels not seen since the gilded age,
Global inequality has gone down considerably in the last few decades. Not sure what you are talking about.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people in advanced economies look back on the post-war decades as a golden age - obviously there were problems, but there was high growth, full employment, good public services, strong unions, and comparatively cheap housing. Others look back to the 1990s as a time of untroubled horizons.
Those 'glorious' post-war years were when global inequality really took off. It's taken the rapid progress of the last few decades to partially undo the damage.
Also worth mentioning the demographic collapse. Many ethnic groups are on their way to extinction.
True, but the rates of depression and general unhappiness in the West are definitely up from 30 years ago.
No, there is more awareness and they are more vocal now.
Wrong. The rates are higher and the main reason is obvious.
Fewer families being formed => more lonely adults => more people depressed.
You know what would instantly greatly help online debates like this?
Actual data.
Sure, here's a couple of references to back my assertion.
That's an extremely simplistic way to dismiss the problem. Depression wasn't something that was invented or discovered in the last decade.
But openness about mental health issues and lower stigma around it is definitely a more modern thing, actually. I don't doubt that some subsets of the population got more depressed while others feel better, but it's very possible that rates would have been the same 30 years ago, had people felt okay with talking about suicidal thoughts, depression or a variety of other things that are at least a bit less stigmatised now. I'm not that old (or at least I like to think I'm not) but I can say with confidence nobody in my circle of friends 25 years ago would even think of saying they're depressed or suicidal. That would get you labelled a weirdo.
Materially, we've never had it better.
Spiritually, we are in a deep crisis.
Depends on your definition of "we" There are regions where the opposite happened. E.g. native tribes who were expelled for resources
Where we ever less in a spiritual crisis? How do you measure these things? And who is 'we'?
The issue is the definition of 'better'. If you think access to food, medication, education, higher life expectancy, then yes.
IMHO though, a more fitting defition of 'better' for the human condition is the amount of happiness you experience while being alife (i.e. decoupled from life expectancy).
I would then conclude (and I am really happy to be proved wrong) that the developed world being/becoming better is considerably more difficult to argue for.
Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs not experienced since WWII. [1] is just from a quick googling and US-only. You won't have trouble finding much more evidence to support this though, for many other 1st world countries.
I would bet there is a direct link to this; between making GPD the driving factor for a country's governance vs. e.g. happiness of its citizens. Look no further than Scandinavian countries (Norway is the exeption, not declining but at least also not increasing)[2].
[1] https://time.com/5609124/us-suicide-rate-increase/
[2] https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2019/08/kronikk/why-suicide-rate-...
a more fitting defition of 'better' for the human condition is the amount of happiness
So, instead of measuring the objective/empirical things that:
1. Keep people alive 2. Keep them from going hungry 3. Make them healthy and pain-free 4. Keep them warm (or cool, where appropriate) 5. Etc etc etc
You instead are suggesting that we measure some subjective mood that no one can define well, test for, or detect with instrumentation? That would be the better measure?
Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs
I would not argue that these are insignificant, but there are methodological problems with both.
Suicide may have been traditionally undercounted for religious reasons. If you're investigating a suicide in the 1950s, it might just have been a gun-cleaning accident instead. Saves the family grief, means the deceased can be buried in the cemetery the family wants, etc.
Depression, while real, might still be subject to the sort of contagious hypochondriac panics that describe the late 20th century and early 21st so well.
Or, alternatively... it might have been undercounted until recently. We're not seeing an increase so much as that people are merely aware of it.
Maybe you’re thinking of a “gilded age” in the sense of Twain. The Golden Age of Hesiod and Ovid was defined by peace and justice amongst a golden race. It’s about ideals and peace rather than material prosperity. The metals debase from gold to silver to bronze to iron as conflict increases and the social contract breaks.
'Golden age' is typically used to mean a historic age of comparative greatness from which society has since fallen.
See the idiomatic vs. the mythological meaning on Wiktionary:
The vast majority of humanity has never had it better
There has been a general upswing since 1600 or so, so you could say that about most years since then, at least in economic terms. In terms of happiness it seems kind of flat though.
That "golden age" is a huge cop-out for any topic that doesn't span hundreds of years
it doesn’t mean we should dismiss outright the possibility that a passing era might just be taking something truly valuable with it.
Our youth is usually the part we're nostalgic for and nothing else. You ever hear the nostalgists crying out to go back to a "simpler time"? It's because they were children and the world is simpler for a child that lacks obligations. Fortunately, my childhood was crappy enough and my adulthood fun enough that I can more than let go of the 80s and 90s without any reservations.
It's also whatever is removed in time because people simply forgot about it.
It's a constant discourse in my country to think of today as "dangerous" and idealize some earlier decades where you'd "leave the door open" while by all metrics crime was actually higher.
We just collectively forgot about it.
That's one of the reasons every age and culture has a golden age/arcadia/Eden mythology.
It's a constant discourse in my country to think of today as "dangerous" and idealize some earlier decades where you'd "leave the door open" while by all metrics crime was actually higher.
This highlights a great point about past media. Films like The Warriors, Class of 1999, and even A Clockwork Orange play into this notion that juveniles have become worse and worse and we can expect a hellscape from future generations of young people.
Truth, though, is that Gen Zs are so laughably well behaved compared to those my age were that we finally have a period where this genre simply has no place. I hear things from my nephews and nieces about "staying home for the weekend" and think of all the money my sister wasted on a home security system to make sure they don't sneak out and get arrested all the time like we did. Leave that door wide open with soundproofing and they still have no desire to sneak out, especially because nobody else their age is out anyway.
I don't think your experience generalises. Kids are still sneaking out.
The news also plays a big role in this. If (in a given city/area) crime happens every day, it’s just business as usual, so nobody bothers to report on it. However, if crime happens once a year, it’s headline news.
That said, I do wonder if times really were simpler back then - in the sense of the way people thought.
Movies seem to be simpler back then. Watched Sleepless in Seattle a while back. I heard it was very popular back in the day. Well … I’m not that impressed, sorry to say. The plot is very simple and a little weird when viewed using today’s social mores. Direction and pacing is adequate. Or maybe I just don’t get it.
I think “things got more complicated” as “information velocity” increased, first with newspapers, then the radio, then TV, and finally the internet - the internet can even be broken down into before ubiquitous social media, before internet video became “trivial”, …
I think we're in a golden age of computer gaming right now. I remember what it was like when I was young: paying $30+ per game (many of which were flash-game quality, and I only learned how good the game was after I bought it), or endlessly scouring the internet for something free. Nowadays I can pay $5 on Steam, GoG, etc. for a game that will engross me for 100+ hours
On the flipside, is it the golden age of computing gaming or golden age of addiction? Paying $5 to be engrossed in a game for 100+ hours?
100 hours over one week, or 100 hours over twenty weeks? Makes a difference.
People pay $20 to be engrossed in a movie for 1.5 hours. Is that addiction?
I'm curious about what about spending $5 to be engrossed for 100+ hours sounds like it's a bad thing to you.
Point taken, but depending on the game it could be a better way to relax than e.g. browsing social media. I'm actually curious what people think a legitimate, cheap way to relax on a weekend or while sick is, if not gaming.
What games would you recommend?
"I wish there was a way to know you're in 'the good old days' before you've actually left them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujJQyhB0dws
That is actually a really useful, affirming thought exercise that I've done before. Simply take a nice present-day experience and run it through the "20 year ago nostalgia filter". Where all the boring/frustrating crap that surrounds the experience is forgotten, and just the good thing remains surrounded by the golden halo of nostalgia. It makes me appreciate the present experience more and dulls the "oh, life was so much nicer 10/20 years ago" nostalgia thing (it wasn't, it just seems that way).
I miss the good ol’ days of Minitel. Imagine an internet made up almost exclusively of French people.
Imagine an internet made up almost exclusively of French people.
I'm not sure I would want to imagine that. But then, I'm German.
A fox would not want to imagine an internet made up almost exclusively of hens? ))
Those dastardly Frenchmen used to always try and conquer my ancestors.
The long line of Louis didn't get all that far (but their interference in the 30 years wars probably made things worse), but Napoleon finally managed to take a big bit out of German lands for a while.
How expensive was it to participate in message boards. My parents used it so sparingly and with the idea that any minute was addding up. I read 60 francs l'heure, so about 10 euros or more like 17 with inflation. Even spending an hour a day would be a costly hobby.
I'm still nostalgic about the pre-facebook internet.
We’re all still here. Start a small online community and tell us about it. (I did!)
Even though I did miss older stuff in the web 2.0 days, I had a positive outlook (and good reason to have it) for the things that would come next.
Not anymore.
Flat Design had barely begun, jQuery had a bright future. CSS compilation? That's a step too far don't you think?
I was growing up when the first people got BBS' and CompuServe. I don't miss the days of dial-up.
I miss the days just as you learned Google could answer questions you asked in free-form, without the censorship and advertisement preferences they give today. Those were better days on gonewild also.
My experience begins with BBSs in the late 1980s and runs through some of those eras.
I thought the Web 2.0 era was something special! Web 1.0 was fun but looking back, it was mostly about the promise of what the web/internet would eventually be able to do.
Web 2.0 was where it really came together for me. The interwebs started to actually attract more diversity and specifically, it started to no longer be overwhelmingly male, which started to make the social aspect a lot more fun to me.
Web 2.0 was the era when Javascript started to be semi-useful, and there was a lot of cool "remix" type stuff happening via open API's and RSS before everybody locked all that stuff away, and video on the internet started to be kind of practical. And the web hadn't been completely choked by naked commercialization. Felt like there were still some cool alternative corners of the web that hadn't yet been paved over so they could build a parking lot for a mall.
I also thought that a lot of cool Web 2.0 stuff happened because of the post-Web1 "dot com" era layoffs. You had a lot of underemployed but talented developers making things.
(but obviously everybody will have their own personal favorite eras!)
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.
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)
What's wrong with ASP.NET? (MVC, not the travesty that is WebForms)
Nothing. Just like nothing is wrong with Java or JavaScript...
Both power a large majority of the web.
Nothing; he's just a hater.
So a nerdy Everything Everywhere All At Once
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.
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
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... )
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
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”.
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.
If something has to happen, it will happen.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
Sliding Doors the movie comes to mind
Are you English, and your wife American, by any chance?
Maybe we should create a DeFi version of this that doesn't have an owner and can't be sued. Things like Omegle should be likened to an empty grass field in the middle of town, with nobody responsible for what actually happens on it except the people who choose to be there.
This is a bad take on several levels. First the de-fi angle. You want a distributed application, no need to shoehorn crypto into there. But second and most important: the ultralibertarian angle of "you chose to be there so you take respinsabolity for whatever happens to you" is also not good. For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law enforcement is a good thing. Whatever replaces omegle will almost certainly have worse moderation, a less benevolent manager, and less eagerness to cooperate with authorities to, for example, hand over evidence of child predation. Free speech is not incompatible with the attempt to enforce laws.
Children shouldn't be browsing the internet without supervision. If they do I'd argue their parents should be regulated more, not the internet.
How old were you when you first used the internet, and how supervised were you?
I was probably 13, not supervised, but it was also too early. I saw things I would have liked not to see and I did things I am not proud of because I lacked the maturity to evaluate consequences.
Luckily nobody took advantage of me to my knowledge, but it would have been easy.
I believe my parents didn't know what was possible on the internet back then.
10. Very. It was a bad time for a curious mind.
Ironic argument given the article, no? Did the author not just make a fantastic argument for structuring justice to protect rights?
I fail to see the reference. Can you elaborate?
If there is no incentive to operate the network, who will sustain the infrastructure?
If there is no cost to using the system, how do you prevent spam abuse?
This is what crypto solves. It doesn't have to be a get rich scheme, just issue tokens to those that run the network, and have users consume tokens when they send messages.
But it doesn't solve it; it just deters some of it. If all it takes is to pay money, you can wave your penis at anyone. A paid service applies a downward pressure on spam, sure, but you can't go without moderation.
I agree you still need some sort of moderation, but maybe you can ameliorate that too if you scale cost by reputation, and also let users filter by reputation. If you keep waving your penis at people, maybe soon the only people who end up talking to you are people who actually like it and volunteer moderators taking the money to see if you're worth reporting... I don't know, it'd be hard to get the balance right, and you'd need to effectively "punish" people with a fresh identity quite harshly at first or people would just keep starting over, but I'd love to see someone try to tackle it.
I don't quite get your point.
A blockchain is just an infrastructure on top of which you run your business logic. In a sense, it's similar to what AWS would be in a centralised world.
So basically, you can add whatever registration, moderation, etc. logic on top of your infrastructure layer, whether it is built upon a blockchain, AWS, self-hosted or whatnot.
What blockchain gives you is something distributed, battle-tested, and some form of economics between infrastructure providers and platform users.
You can still decide to mimic existing business models of, say, Google on top of it. Give users unlimited free tokens on this blockchain if they provide you read access to their messages. Of course it seems outrageous stated like that, but it's pretty much the same business model than Gmail at the end of the day, with the advantage that users not willing to share their data can just buy usage tokens if they prefer.
You want a distributed application
What would incentivize a huge number of people to run a decentralized and distributed application so that it actually continues to run? (Hint: the hope of a coin mooning)
TOR runs without some shitcoin.
The usefulness of said application. The fun of being part of it. Getting rid of the feeling of sadness expressed by many of the comments here.
If the only human motivation factor you know is monetary, I deeply pity you.
For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law enforcement is a good thing
I think the idea that the government has any place controlling people's ability to freely communicate in private is at least five orders of magnitude more dangerous than allowing children to communicate freely with random adults.
But I expect you're one of those people who thinks everyone should be required to wear a microphone that uploads all nearby comversations to police servers in real time to be sure nothing criminal is going on so establishing common ground will be trickier than usual.
You could have had your first paragraph without the second and the world would have been better for it.
Your analogy is skewed though; if you just show up on a field and get flashed, you aren't responsible for that, the other person is. For example.
also, the person who owns the land is often liable for what happens on it, unless the land is owned by the public (a la BLM land).
The DeFI element, of course, would enable someone to pay so MORE people could see their penis unsolicited
Stumble Upon used to be so addicting
Not exactly the same experience but close enough for me: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
Maybe https://Cloudhiker.net will bring back this experience.
What was the relationship between StumbleUpon and Omegle. I haven't used Omegle but used StumbleUpon and was one unique place where you could discover hidden gems in the longtail.
I think it's that both were websites that catapulted you into truly random, non-targeted interactions -- Omegle with a random person, StumbleUpon with a random site.
Ahh the first days of Web 2.0. Reminds me of http://ytmnd.com You’re the man now, dog!
This place. So bizarre. I loved it so much back in the day. Especially showing friends the latest weird thing I found.
I miss the web where there were services actively trying to help you find new, interesting and weird things, not just the stuff that makes them the most money from ads. Feels like even the things that are supposed to be about "Discovery" are increasingly only showing you things from an ever shrinking walled garden. Despite there being exponentially more stuff and content on the web than say 20 years ago, it actually feels like a much smaller these days.
I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the magic of the early internet we witnessed during our coming of age feels threatened.
I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.
I find it interesting that the "magical period" seems to be determined by your age.
For me, the internet has already lost its magic by the time the mid 2000s came around, well before Omegle came out in 2009.
For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.
In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?
It seems more about the magic of childhood itself than anything to do with the technology.
Also would comport with the explanation that the Internet just gets worse and worse.
Will be interesting to see if kids who grew up with TikTok et al. will, as adults, view it as affectionately as we view our childhood form of the Internet. I do think there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.
there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production
I think this couldn't be further from the truth. You could argue that the production has been heavily centralized, but I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but it's still production nonetheless.
I think TikTok is a substantial aberration on this trigger trend. It’s been great (as a non-user) seeing legitimately funny and creative stuff coming from that platform. It’ll be interesting to see if it stays that way or it does go the way (at least IMO) of YouTube and Instagram: quite commercialized.
Note: All of this based on impressions/vibes, would be keen to hear any stats if people around have ‘em on hand!
TikTok is extremely commercialized; even a lot of the "good" content is extremely carefully crafted part of the acquisition funnel for commercial activities.
I'm not knocking people liking it -- its like people liking SuperBowl ads; just because something is the very much marketing content doesn't mean its not fun and entertaining. But, the idea that becoming "quite commercialized" is a potential way it might go downhill in the future seems to miss that it is very much already there.
I've never used TikTok but definitely not surprised to hear this. I've certainly seen some interesting things escape the app, but yeah quite a shame to hear it's already over that hump already (or started over it)!
Given the investment involved (installing and using an app), I'd recommend trying yourself and drawing your own conclusions, rather than treating one person's experience as gospel
No thanks :) I’m extremely defensive of my information diet + attention allocation, and I know upfront that I don’t need to add a service like TikTok to the mix.
I’m not treating anyone’s experience as gospel in any case. There are no important decisions I’ll be making off this information.
I think the post you are replying to was trying to say this, but less precisely. It used to be that a MySpace, account profile on DeviantArt, Flickr, an online forum, or even a personal website was another human trying to connect with (or troll) someone, and that everyone was putting out content because that’s how you needed to exist.
Nowadays, I’m sure that 95% of all content I see is made by a media company for hire, mega corporation, or, most recently, word soup from an LLM where, in a strange twist of fate, I’m just a lab mouse in a giant, AI created A/B test trying to determine which option gets 0.2% more clicks. The age of casual creator is mostly over. Everything you do must be to build or enhance “your brand” and its a full time job to keep up with huge teams that automate the churn of information regurgitation, otherwise you’ll never be able to get enough of a following to qualify for perks that actual content creators make - and we’ve not even gotten to compensation yet. The gold rush of making money selling your brand online is over and it has been enshitified much like everything else novel and interesting in the world and on the internet.
as much as this doomer drivel might be true, it might be blinding you to the good parts and good people. just not seeing what's "novel and interesting", nor seeking it out.
I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but it's still production nonetheless.
You are correct, but there is a disappointing shift in the nature of said content.
GeoCities sites and the like were at least labors of love. Your site looked like shit but that's ok, nobody's going to see it anyway.
Tumblr was performative garbage that bridged LiveJournal/Myspace and Instagram. Your site looked like shit but if you say something controversial enough, you'll get a lot of views.
The YouTube/Instagram/TikTok crowd only optimize for engagement, to get as many views as possible. Everything is so over-the-top. You're not making anything out of love, you're making what gets you attention. Your content is professionally-polished and staged to attract eyeballs even if you have nothing to say. (No wonder everybody has an identity crisis; everyone's a child star that's been living for the camera since they got their first iPhone.)
That's also what happens when you turn hobbies into jobs that then become necessities. If you want to pay the bills you have to do and say controversial nonsense or be incredibly exaggerated.
Anyone who thinks the internet ‘just get’s worse’ never had a full Usenet feed in the 90’s. shudder
Honestly, 1994-1996ish web was in some ways worse -- yes, there was horrible stuff on Usenet, but you could avoid the worst of the text stuff pretty easily, and to be assaulted by any media other than text you had to expend at least a little effort.
In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.
We don’t talk about 2 girls 1 cup anymore. Or goatse. Ugh, man those were a rough time.
Mudfall, bluewaffle ...
/ alt.binaries.* enters the chat
At one point I was doing support calls for a small regional ISP, and a customer called in about some alt.binaries. group with bestiality in the name.
Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was personally offended.
I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.
That was a definite trial by fire period of accessing the internet. I imagine there exist similar areas today but I’m experienced enough to know I don’t need to go in search of them.
I don't mean "just gets worse" as in it gets worse on every dimension :)
It's free market dynamics. There is a constant push towards things which are more addictive and make more ad click dollars.
That's the opposite of better. Better is made with soul, and often for free.
Google has come full circle. Early Google succeeded in part because of nonintrusive ad words, scamming over banner ads. Now, Youtube.
I'm not sure a market is free in the sense people mean by that term when the market is dominated by network effects. A free market in that sense requires competition and the ability to upset existing players. As an example, you can't upset Google search, and even having a 80B company with an LLM integrated into a 2.5T company is having a hard time displacing them. If that's still a free market then I'm pretty sure we could claim the USSR was a free market and just that Stalin's Communism LLC dominated.
Back then you could post to Craigslist for an anonymous hookup and play poker online for money.
Now the Match Group owns all the dating websites and successfully shittified them. Social media in general has been basically a big loss, with Reddit charging for API access since they don't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
Also back then every other post wasn't full of political echo chamber warfare like your jab about russian propaganda you just couldn't resist throwing in.
Twitter owners did not engage in promotion of conspiracy theories back then
If we look at the Durham Report all the claims that Trump was colluding with Russia were infact a Conspiracy Theory. Like Iraq having WMDs in 2003 was a Conspiracy Theory.
Conspiracy and conspiracy theory are not quite the same. Some things are just false claims. A conspiracy theory usually refers to something that has a semblance of consensus.
The Iraq war had a decent amount of opposition before it happened, there were like 100K people in San Francisco for the protest I went to.
Funny how some conspiracy theories end up actual being factual conspiracies. Remember when your news sources told you that 100% covid did not come from a lab?
I don't believe it's been conclusively proven either way.
Don't forget that everything wants to be a subscription service now, and companies will block open access to their platforms so that only "partners" (other companies that pay them) may access their platform, and they're sure going to show ads on top of that as well.
Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
Propaganda goes both ways in war. In case you were not aware.
Yep, each generation thinks they're special. But I think the early internet was different since it had literally just went from 0->1
IMHO the early internet was different in one important way - you used to have to know how to use a computer that was fairly complex to even get online vs mashing glass on a touchscreen device that is always connected that you have approximately 0% idea of how it works
That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter than the average user today
I went online in 1999 and it was almost always online DSL, so the idiots were just as bad back then. Those that didn't have DSL had AOL which is one click to get online
1999 is not early internet by any measure...
1999 is closer to the invention of the internet than present day
TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 and commercial ISPs didn't exist until 1989
Yeah but even then they had to work to escape AOL's walled garden, which mostly served to keep them in, rather than the rest of us out.
Since you made your statement with quite a lot of condescension it’s morally difficult to seem to agree with any part of it.
But, separately, my own experience is that there is a particular quality to those places where people need to pass a barrier of entry to get in and those are still happening all over the place. I played against highly-skilled players on day 1 of the PS4 launch, had intelligent conversations on Clubhouse when it was invite-only, and regularly find people with clear minds inside certain pay-only doors.
I think the early internet was just that effect on a scale that was more impactful to the public where now everything is so siloed and fragmented.
Media conglomerates and tech oligopolies make it seem like people are “idiots now” but humans are humans and I don’t think that’s changed in the last few decades.
While you have a point there since certain aspects of the internet experienced by each generation were different, I think a shared part of it is just the sheer sanitization of the 'open' internet that has happened since the mid/late-2000s. That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you.
This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the 'old internet' between both me and decade older friends when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.
So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.
That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you.
Is this true? Maybe you just don't know the right places anymore. Im sure there's all kinds of crazy, basically unmoderated shit going down in discord or roblox or vrchat.
There's definitely a bunch of crazy unmoderated stuff going down in those places, but it does seem more underground and out of the way unless you specifically look for it.
Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a lot of resources and guides out there, and if you want to, you can most likely find them.
Ah that's a fair point, I do hang out in a couple of discords where we have that old internet feel, and same with vrchat.
But at least with the former we still have to be a bit reserved since discord can also be pretty heavy handed with moderation. It effectively suppresses less sanitized content in the sense that if your discord grows past a certain size, it's much more likely to catch their attention. So the old internet type content we have there is mostly a handful of private discords from friends with a handful of their friends there. At that point we just ended up setting up a matrix server for stuff we'd rather not leave to the whims of discord.
VRchat has the benefit that if you aren't in public, you're free to do anything. But that does still sort of mean that you need to know the right people to get into those circles, since public is generally unenjoyable, being filled with screaming "Quest kids" (and even if they weren't screaming, it's obviously awkward to be hanging out with children as adults).
when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people
This is a sentiment repeated by almost everyone who finds their niche in the fediverse. Once you settle in, you get that early internet magic of simply connecting with people. The fediverse is all about talking to or showing things to other people.
It's pretty interesting what happens when you talk to people instead of just posting into the void. Interactions become purposeful and meaningful because it's clear there's a real person on the other side.
It really does feel like the earlier internet when we all posted anonymously on small forums with a few thousand users total. There's a sense of community.
There's also a really strong selection bias right now. People who use the fediverse are much more likely to be people sick of modern social media and want to return to the old days. So they went out and they goddamn made their own social media and made it feel like the old days.
I think it's a great place to hang out right now. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve over time. There's a push to bring back small websites, blogs and forums and I really hope that takes off.
Yeah it’s like how my dad says SNL peaked when he was 18 and I say it peaked when I was 18.
Everyone can agree it peak a long time ago.
In 2035, I guarantee they’ll be talking about how nobody could ever match the greatness of Pete Davidson.
I don’t get the SNL hate. It seems fine to me? Maybe I’m not watching enough?
How much was there to find on the internet in the 90s?
I arrived ca. 2001 and found enough high-quality content (folk songs, math puzzles, some books already digitized) to feel like I had discovered a giant library. And it kept growing: Wikipedia arrived, various forums and magazines appeared (most were crap, of course, but there was no shortage of good ones).
As far as I can tell, things started getting worse around 2008, with places such as geocities closing down and social networks rising; then the deprecation of Java and Flash kicked the floor out of some of the good old parts. Other things were still improving, though, up to 2015 or so. It's only recently that I see most "culture production" locked in perennial closed gardens with unaccountable moderation. I wish I could point to some places still on the rise other than arXiv and LibGen...
What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s?
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.
Ah, IRC. Yeah, I came too late to make new friends there (though it was still good for keeping in contact with old ones). Still managed to enjoy the usenet, although the "big" groups were already full of spam.
It's the eternal September and regular nostalgia
Except that things actually changed
That's part of the Eternal September. More and more less-technical users are added and things get changed to their benefit
This is an interesting idea. For me the magical period of the internet was also the nineties to mid-naughts. But I'm not sure. It doesn't seem entirely age-relative to me. It seems like something changed. I really have no way to say for sure. In fact, I was recently talking to someone a couple decades or so younger about similar topics and he indeed seemed to have more of the age-relative view. I plan on talking to him more at some point to get a better understanding of his view. But I don't think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I'm sure many people have a magical period of wonder where their world is expanding. To be perfectly honest, in some ways I've continued to have that even in recent years. There's a really cool corner of YouTube that has tons of incredible content that IMO is revolutionizing education. But I also feel that as a species we humans haven't figured out how to handle the powers of communication that the internet has made available to us. In an age of unprecedented access to the world's information, misinformation still abounds (no matter which side of the political aisle you happen to be on). I don't know that anyone has any really compelling ideas about how to deal with this, but I think it's a significant issue that we all collectively need to work on. The question is, will we be able to come together and do so or have we already been irrevocably torn too far apart?
Non-technical, non-idealistic, non-visionary (pick two of three) people starting putting glossy red ribbons on websites with pink lettering and called it Web 2.0.
A lot of monumentally good things have come from the last ~20 years of technological change, but the Internet breaking out into something mediocre people could exploit has done damage. And that’s a range that encompasses everything from minimally qualified marketing consultants to people drifting by on MBAs to (sorry) serial entrepreneurs who focus more on the launch than the idea.
For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.
In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?
I remember seeing stats/meme that you will hear the best music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our teen years, things make big impact on us.
So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current internet when they are 30+ or so.
I heard something similar: that nostalgia is mostly what was popular when you were 12
You may be right. The author mentioned being in their 30s, and so am I, but I'm at the tail end and they're probably at the start.
Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.
Same here. That’s when we were running a forum hosting site and it was great—until it wasn’t. Slowly then suddenly as they say.
I agree and I think this era absolutely will be remembered fondly by kids who grew up with it. The streamer/YouTuber culture is massive and to many young people now that makes up a big part of their life. Many people are already waxing poetic about the "golden eras" of sites like Twitch.
Or JustinTV… ;)
It's also a question of what we call "magical"
The 90s were special in a certain way that is very different from how the Internet was in 2010.
I enjoyed both. I could call both of them "magical periods". Just different.
One could look at the current AI innovation as a different magical period.
Anything before you were ~10 is "old", things between ~15 and ~20 are natural and right, things between ~20 and ~35 are modern and exciting, and anything that occurs after that is proportionately unnecessary and annoying. :P
/shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure
This is a common sentiment echoed regarding many different topics across the human experience, so I want to, for the sake of discussion, try and articulate exactly what are the two sides of this scale that might be worth debating. David Putnam defined "intra-" and "intercohort" like this in Bowling Alone.
Because generational change will be an important theme in our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how social change and generational change are interrelated. As a matter of simple accounting, any social change—from the rise of rap music to the decline of newspapers—is always produced by some combination of two very different processes. The first is for many individuals to change their tastes and habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed, and it can be transformed in a different direction just as quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change “intracohort,” because the change is detectable within each age cohort.
The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle, and harder to reverse. If different generations have different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth and death will eventually transform society, even if no individual ever changes. Much of the change in sexual mores over the last several decades has been of this sort. Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and most of those who did actually became more conservative. In the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the last several decades, because a generation with stricter beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change “intercohort,” because the change is detectable only across different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly inexorable.
I almost want to say that you're arguing internet disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one's life and not, conversely, an intercohort phenomenon through which generational attitudes remain constant, and the world changes around us.
On second thought, I don't think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist.
Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis)," which I know nothing about.
they might, either about pre-ai internet, or the early ai / early widespread ai, when it was widely available and accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn't yet destroyed entire industries
I think it comes down the exploration vs maximization/exploitation instincts that grows and changes as a human being grows. For ex: teens/early adults has more exploration instinct.(it's a hypothesis that's true for at least some sections of human society, not sure how far it generalizes).
For me it was yahoo chat rooms that filled the need, this omegle founder had created to solve.(at least till it got filled with bots) The real question is what will a teenager/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives??
I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool anymore.
Tbf on a downward decline, 2009 might still be the highlight, just because someone didn’t experience 1995.
For what it’s worth, I always point out that my parents fondest pre-30s memories we’re drinking, smoking and blasting music while riding in the back of a pickup when they were 16-20. All of which is illegal now and will get you years in prison…
You are right, people have the same sentiment in regards to many other things. A great example is music. The golden age is often the music you and your generation grew up with.
Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it already trends in that direction, I wouldn't be surprised. Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet's magical period.
And before that people were pointing to 1993 as the date the old internet died https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying "kids these days"
I don’t think it has been determined by your age. Internet freedom and its wild wild west aspect has been vanishing gradually since its creation. Everybody has witnessed it.
I'm sure that's partially the case, but not entirely here (IMO).
I used Omegle when it first came out and I was in college. I thought it was amazing, and lost interest in it for awhile as one is wont to do.
But I decided to check out the site again and I tried out "Spy Mode" some years ago (my late 20s or early 30s) where someone could choose a topic or ask a question and then two other random people would talk about it. It was fun and chaotic and had the energy that 2009 Omegle had again. I enjoyed it quite a bit. People would sometimes answer the topics and sometimes have their own openings and such. It was chaotic without the negative vibes of many other websites that used to be more fun.
The random matching combined with the private one-on-one conversation structure had an advantage of not having a popularity algorithm OR the ability for one person in a bad mood to derail your conversation. So aside from the moderation attempts to stop spam on the back-end, the two participants could choose what they felt was acceptable in their conversation.
Sadly, about a quarter of the topics on Spy Mode were spambots linking to questionable sites (likely related to the law enforcement quotes in the article), and when they took down Spy Mode and reverted everything just to plain chat, the spambots were almost all you could talk to with regular Omegle. (I've never used the video chat so I have no insight there)
Definitely downhill in a distinct way, and now with stricter liability for site owners that larger sites can tank with lawyers, I think it was inevitable that the whole thing was going to collapse soon anyway.
I made a few friends from there, most temporary, but one remains who I am very close to. We never would have met in real life, and honestly I don't think we would get along in person, but we talk almost every day and both our lives are better for it.
But I think that this truly is a material loss for the internet.
I think this is essentially a false dichotomy. It's possible to experience the loss of both of those eras, as well as the current one whenever it passes. There's no inherent conflict in wanting them all back.
The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.
The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.
...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September.
So that's what Green Day was signing about
It was when people learnt how to make money from the internet.
The corporatisation of net ruined it.
Not much can survive the incentive of profit.
This is kind of revisionist history though. The early 2010s were not so long ago. Nobody talked about Omegle as some magical safe place of real human connection. It was always viral because of the edginess and danger. There were genuinely good stories you would see about it, but the impact was strong precisely because everyone knew the dark side.
I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time.
People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.
For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity.
My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible.
It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.
I had that same feeling with the AOL chatrooms of the early 00s and to a lesser extent forums around that time and after.
So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.
Just today I was dreaming of how awesome it would be if you could just somehow filter "good sports" and just open a game up for online play without having to think about all the bad behavior. How amazing would that be?
In my eyes during the golden age of the internet that I think of, you could still do that... bad actors now and then but not a huge % and we were all excited just to play together and enjoy how cool everything was.
Try skiing or hiking. Basically anything with high enough effort bar or cost bar is a sufficient proxy for this filter.
hiking is an interesting one to choose. wherever I've gone hiking, I've come across garbage which had to have been left by a fellow hiker. or a bear, I suppose. but which is to say, that effort level bar isn't high enough.
It’s possible to have multiple periods of “magic” as the internet improves in capability over time and people find new ways to use it.
That’s a good point. I remember when Facebook genuinely allowed people to connect with others whom they hadn’t seen for years. MySpace before it is the source of nostalgia for a lot of my peers. Twitter had many genuine interactions between popular celebrities and their fans. Any of these things are likely to be magical to someone.
(Not sure what it means that these examples are all approximately dead to a lot of their previously most active users. That’s actually distinct from Omegle, unfortunately; most of their active users had remained perfectly happy with the platform.)
I remember the magic of USENET! I'd posted a question about how do do some basic piano repair, and got an answer from Marvin Minsky! Who knew he played the piano?!
What "attacks" is he referring to?
"Omegle: Suing the website that matched me with my abuser"
As a young girl, Alice (not her real name) logged on to the popular live video chat website, Omegle, and was randomly paired with a paedophile, who coerced her into becoming a digital sex slave. Nearly 10 years later the young American is suing Omegle in a landmark case that could pave the way for a wave of lawsuits against other social platforms.
This is fucked. We shouldn't have to put safety padding on everything as a stand-in for something parents are supposed to do, ie. being responsible for their brood.
Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?
Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?
Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?
It's horrible that this happened and obviously I'm glad the pedophile is in jail, but how exactly was she "coerced"? And how is any of this Omegle's fault?
how exactly was she "coerced"?
Yeah no this is a terrible take. She was coerced by being an 11 year old talking to a grown adult. How do you think she was coerced?
Well that's the question I'm asking, and you didn't answer the question
coerce - persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats.
What was the threat? Why did she oblige? Why didn't she just block him?
Children, being children, are often gullible and easily manipulated, especially by someone practiced in the matter.
Yes but coercion implies a threat.
If the guy was in another country, it's hard for me to imagine how she became a "digital sex slave" (how the article refers it) instead of just blocking the guy. Naturally I'd imagine there was some kind of blackmail for her to comply, but the article doesn't mention anything like that.
It's hard for you to imagine, and I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, because you're not a ten year old girl.
I've been the parent of a ten year old girl, and can say with confidence that it's within the realm of possibility that an adult could manipulate a child in ways that ultimately would make that child afraid, if not utterly terrified, to be disobedient.
You scraping and digging through the comments here imploring to know about how she was coerced suggests to me that what you're really looking for is a justification to blame the ten year old girl. "coercion implies a threat" implies that with no evidence of a threat, the girl must have played along. She must have liked it. That's the vibe you give as you dig in and keep demanding people prove there was a threat. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that vibe.
Your implied accusation is totally baseless.
I am just logging a protest, I have absolutely no interest in discussing it.
The blackmail was threatening her into thinking she'd be in legal trouble too. That's not true, but a terrified child isn't exactly running an optimal risk calculus. Even without that the content itself is blackmail material.
How was she coerced? Who knows. I'll take a guess and say she was probably tricked at first into thinking he was someone else. Threatened after that.
(EDIT: and for chrissakes get identifiable information out of your user profile if you're going to argue this hard about something like this! Internet 101, man!)
This was the threat: "Once he had coerced Alice into sending intimate images, Fordyce convinced her that she was complicit in making and sharing child sexual abuse material. Fearing arrest, she kept everything secret from her family and friends."
And it is a pretty credible threat: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/maryland-sk-court-case-... https://www.wnyc.org/story/9114-sexting-teens-legal-straits-...
Curiously enough, no one even thinks of holding the government/legal system responsible.
Punishing minors for "distributing child pornography" over content of themselves sent in private is completely outrageous. Had you not linked those sources there's no way I'd believe our justice system would be so absurdly inept.
Usually being coerced would involve some amount of coercion.
Yeah it's unfortunate, but I don't think Omegle is exactly at fault here. Perhaps we should consider the abuser to be the one at fault?
We can and do, and on the other side of a legal process, it may be found that Omegle is not at all liable for the actions of its users.
... and if the owner of Omegle doesn't want to take the years it'd take (and tens of thousands in legal fees) to find out whether or not they're liable for a silly project they put together for fun, I can't fault 'em.
It's easier to blame Omegle than society or her parents failing to educate her about the dangers of the internet.
Yep.
If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?
Weird people, pedos, criminals are everywhere.... parents somehow teach about "stranger-danger" offline but not online, and then blame platforms their kids use, even though they are too young to use them in the first place.
If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?
Well, yes! A different example: with few exceptions (gun manufacturers), when people die everybody even remotely involved gets sued. Examples: Station Nightclub fire, Surfside condominium collapse..
In the case of a pedo at Walmart I could imagine: "Didn't the staff notice the guy dragging the girl out of the store? Why didn't they get involved?" Walmart has much more money than the pedo.
Didn't the staff notice
If you want a proper Walmart analogy then you should stick the child in a remote part of a vast parking lot, so that there's no reason to expect the staff to notice.
And at that point the case seems too weak to try.
A more accurate analogy would be if they ushered the child into a backroom where a stranger was seated across from them with a glass divider between them and then they left the room. This is the whole point of Omeagle, to facilitate these interactions. Would it unsettle anyone if Walmart were doing that, and would they be legally responsible for whatever happens in there?
Probably should sue whoever manufactured the device, the ISP, and definitely whoever provided her with the device and paid for her internet access.
If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue Walmart too?
Yes, meatspace public venues used by traffickers are frequently sued for enabling the trafficking [0], its not something unique to cyberspace venues.
[0] e.g., https://guestban.com/2023/07/12/the-unseen-side-of-luxury-ho...
Walmart doesn't invite people of all ages to hang out in a private room together, with no supervision, no rules, no limits.
Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated, somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right, because how could it not be? It's used by so many people, and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be held to some standard, and, right or wrong, put trust in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.
The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the private room scenario I described above. I left out the part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But persuasive people can persuade other people, especially children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only happened to some of the 74 million people using the site, it happened to people. And for those it happened to, those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without Omegle's help.
If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting here about how unique and special Omegle was for people who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot of those comments.
But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle was operating. With 74 million people using it, the smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.
The parents blame the platforms because the platforms enabled the harm.
We do implement many things that protect people, sometimes children in particular. They aren't perfect, but they can prevent a lot of damage.
The question, as usual, isn't all or nothing. It's what can we do that will meet all the criteria as best possible: not infringe on freedoms, reduce harm, be affordable, etc.
100% agree i think the bigger issue is at least in the US and many other countries we have lost all faith that the people making those choices will do so in a responsible or ethical manner.
Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don’t think it will ever come back. So where do we go from here?
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!
I don’t think im being extreme. That is the way I see it. That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
What should I do? I have no one I want to vote for and honestly I don’t care enough to do it myself. At this point it’s just figuring out how you can profit off this and get your own piece of land to check out on.
I don’t find this to be depressing it’s just what I see as facts.
I don’t find this to be depressing
We'd have to redefine depressing to exclude that post. Look at all the ways it advocates quitting; it's impressive in a way.
That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
Do you think that makes it true? That seems to support my claim that it's trendy, and people repeating these things because others say it are by definition following a trend.
I've seen many trends come and go, but this one - despair as a trend - is the dumbest.
Also, who is going to get anything done? We aren't children; our parents won't fix things if we don't do it. We'd better get to work, like prior generations who sacrificed and built so much. What will you tell your grandkids - 'well, I just quit; it was the fashionable thing to do.'
Have you considered this trend is encouraged by people who don't want you getting in their way? You are handing all your power to them.
Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?
You’re talking in hyperbole but… yeah, we do a ton of work to make roads safer than they might otherwise be. What purpose do you think pedestrian crossings serve?
To make the bodies easier to collect? (/s kinda)
In the US, they serve to shift blame from distracted drivers for running someone over sadly (crappy j-walking laws) in addition to the normal use.
"Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?"
We do in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives "It’s illegal to: use any knife or weapon in a threatening way, carry most knives or any weapons in public without a ‘good reason’, sell most knives or any weapons to anyone under the age of 18." - And yes that includes kitchen knives because there's a callout - "In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen knives."
"Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?"
We regulate them or have standards around them[3]: "The Toy Safety Directive, BS EN 71-1, raises attention to plastic bags and plastic sheets. It specifies bags larger than 380mm opening circumference and having a drawstring closure must be made of a material which is permeable to air. Except where application requires airtight sealing, all bags are to be perforated with holes of 4mm diameter minimum, spaced on 30mm grid. Bags for child appealing products and toys must have a minimum of four holes; other bags to have a minimum of two holes".
Your stance "we shouldn't have to do things about dangers" is silly, we do a lot of things to reduce risks in a lot of areas. Learning from other people's tragedies and trying to safeguard others from having to go through them is one of the long-running threads of civilised society.
Should we restrict electric wiring options in houses because electrocution and fires are a thing? Yes. Should we restrict food production options because salmonella is a thing? Yes. Should we have building codes because shoddy buildings fall down and kill people? Yes. Should we have laws about lead and carcinogens and things in products? Yes. Should cars have to meet crash test safety conditions? Yes. etc. etc.
"Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?"
We do; drivers are surrounded by inflatable airbags. [rant] Look at the social messaging around bike helmets. You never see people telling runners to wear a helmet in case they suddenly come upon a head injury. But take say YouTuber Tom Stanton who makes unusual engineering projects, including a flywheel bike[1] which he rode at walking pace down an empty country lane, and in his next bike video, a homemade supercapacitor bike[2] he's wearing a a helmet because of all the flack he got in the comments on the earlier one.
The point is not whether helmets prevent against brain damage in certain situations, the point is what situations are casual everyday recreational cyclists getting into where they risk brain damage? And the answer is cars. And the social messaging for helmet wearing is to shift blame from car drivers hitting cyclists to cyclists "not taking safety precautions".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gahKxbwUcYw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_f8Q2_Q_J0
[3] https://qualityinspired.co.uk/2020/03/suffocation-warning-re...
Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?
How about spoons? https://nypost.com/2019/05/16/police-station-mocked-for-phot...
What happened to her is tragic. However, I don’t think warnings or age verification would change anything. Kids are going to do things regardless if there is a warning or age verification system.
I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to them, and to start talking to them early.
Basic age verification is pretty easy, no? I’m not sure about the details but this seems like a pretty low bar for a site like this. Not that I’m advocating it be required but just that if it were me I would not make something like this without at least making the best possible attempt at age verification.
How is age verification easy?
Why isn’t having an “over 18?” checkbox enough to have lawsuits brought by children (at the time or later) thrown out unceremoniously?
Because kids can check checkboxes no problem? And it’s not even a real attempt at verification?
Is this a real question?
If someone showed up at a bar, would a bouncer accept that?
It’s because the cops can show up and demand ID from everyone inside, they have to make sure everyone has one.
In this case, they have no obligation to ensure everyone has ID on their person.
Can you sue a bar you used fake ID to get into?
My real question wasn’t if there are kids on the system or not, but why are they allowed to sue when they themselves and nobody else have lied about the age verification question?
Yes, kids can and have sued because they got served alcohol while underage - even if they asked for it. The whole premise is as minor they couldn’t understand the consequences, and weren’t fully responsible for their actions.
And establishments get shut down all the time for it.
[https://ftxidentity.com/blog/abc-laws-if-minor-is-served/]
Next question?
Your link from an ID verification company says “it depends” wrt fake id liability. I suppose there are sane places and crazy places in the world, for a limited time at least
Sure, here’s a lawyers take - https://www.robertnkatz.com/amp/liability-for-selling-alcoho...
Even he mentions that the shop is not liable if they ask for ID.
Anyway, it’s really twisted my original point your leaning into alcohol laws that do not apply.
If I make a service that says nobody named Bob can use it, have a checkbox Not Bob? - how can I get sued by someone named Bob?
Only if they ask for ID, check it, and it looks so good no one could tell it was fake. That’s about as far from checkbox in a random website pop up as we can get though, right?
In your new example:
- is there a regulatory reason that it is illegal for them to serve someone named Bob? Or is there a real risk/harm that people named Bob would suffer that they know about and is predictable?
- did they do any of the checks they are legally required to do to prevent someone named Bob from accessing the service and therefore suffering that injury? Or make a good faith effort to not just injure any Bob’s, at a minimum?
If they didn’t, then yet a Bob could sue if he managed to get through and get injured.
Pretty weird example though.
Because that’s not really verification, probably.
"I’m not sure about the details"
What is the "best possible attempt"? There's was a checkbox added (possibly after this suit was filed) that was a "I'm over 18 and understand I'm meeting random people". That's something every teen already clicks past constantly to see increasingly large swathes of the internet. Any actual "verification" seems quite difficult beyond just relying on self-attestation.
What is the "best possible attempt"? There's was a checkbox added (possibly after this suit was filed)
It was after the suit was filed (prior to the suit, AIUI, Omegle had an over-18 warning (with no confirmation) on the Unmoderated chat option, and a stated policy that users had to be 18+ or 13+ with parents permission.
Also, it may not have been because of this suit, there is at least one other suit that was found not to be barred by Section 230 (this one avoided S230 immunity because it is a product liability suit, not one contingent on their role as a publisher; the other one I've seen, IIRC, was found to raise a triable question of fact regarding whether Omegle's behavior was within the category of knowing involvement in trafficking that brought it out of S230 protection.)
Age verification in a way that is both robust and privacy respecting is an impossibility.
Pick one.
Why wouldn't something based on unlinkable blind signatures work? Basically site issues a token to user, user gets token unlinkably blindly signed by some recognized age verification entity (government agency, bank) that already has their personal information, user returns signed token to site, site verifies it was signed by the recognized age verification entity.
You can do both. Not everyone will talk to their kids (lots of both useless and under resourced parents out there), and guardrails are possible, so best to not throw up our hands and say "welp, the world is just a terrible place."
"There is a cost" or "I don't want to" are not reasonable excuses, depending on use case and regulatory regime you're operating under. It sucks, but there are many terrible people out there. Hopefully the EFF and ACLU can work to balance out regulation from government in this space.
(what sites access is gated by age is a distinct conversation)
https://www.theverge.com/23721306/online-age-verification-pr...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23494175/facebook-dating-...
https://www.yoti.com/wp-content/uploads/Yoti-Age-Estimation-...
Your own link talks about the many downsides, not least of which entrenching the idea that website owners regularly demand government id from their users. No possible downsides to that...
There are always tradeoffs. There is no law that says website owners cannot demand ID already. We might have different belief systems and perspectives on the topic of safety and privacy as it relates to non adults and Internet accessibility, in which case we won't find middle ground. It happens. Democracy is messy. I encourage engagement regardless of your position on the topic. That is how we find (or at least attempt to) the least worst policy.
There is no law that says they have to, thankfully.
There is no law that says they have to, thankfully.
Eight states as of this comment have legislation that has passed requiring age verification. Ten other states have introduced legislation that has not yet passed. (US centric)
In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring the use of age verification on websites that contain a “substantial portion” (33.33%) of adult content. Websites must utilize commercial age verification systems that check a user’s government identification or “public or private transactional data” to confirm that a user is at least 18 years old. Louisiana’s law has sparked a flurry of copycat legislation to be introduced in state houses around the country.
https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bill...
That's a facile handwaving of some pretty large ones.
There is at least GDPR, if you have users of European citizenship, that requires a legal basis to do so if it is mandatory in your registration process
It's not "the world is just a terrible place", but rather "the world inevitably has things that kids cannot handle". If you want digital entertainment for your kids, then seek out products which explicitly offer this. The unfettered Internet is a less appropriate babysitter than a red light district.
And talking about "age verification" as if it's some straightforward addition is an utterly dishonest framing. The core idea of the distributed Internet is the barest of communication which further complexity/policy can be layered on top of. "Age verification" actually implies the much more draconian and chilling meatspace identity verification.
Nobody has a problem with a DigitalKidsPlayLand which performs identity verification, strictly curates/moderates content, and escrows all activity for later review. It's this push to legally require such things for everyone, based on some idea that everything needs to be made kid-safe, that is horribly authoritarian and needs to be soundly rejected.
Let the legal process play out.
I'm not a fan of this journalist "ambushing" the founder at his property and staying outside of it until he gets some answers. "He has all the blinds closed" - right.
Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and needs to provide answers.
Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.
So you’re a fan of judges doing their jobs, but not a fan of journalists doing theirs?
Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for actual centuries now.
When judges do their job, you the accused have due process and legal representation.
I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would need legal and competent representation if I were accused of something.
We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay with.
If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an investigation, carried out by the designated representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.
He wasn’t being accused of a criminal act, ergo he didn’t need legal representation on hand. He was being asked by a professional journalist for a world-renowned publishing source why he wasn’t doing more as the responsible officer to keep his company’s product from putting children into harms way in exactly the way his product was designed to perform… he had neither any right to avoid being questioned nor any real interest in avoiding providing comment. He might not like being approached, and if he has some condition that makes such in-person discussion difficult I’m certainly sympathetic but he could just as certainly have communicated by email as he had been asked to do, but chose not to.
As for the reputational risk you’re pointing to, nothing here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc… the journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him into changing his business’s product to prevent the very real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he wasn’t doing more to prevent his platform’s weaponization when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for exactly that use case.
Answer me honestly, have you stopped beating your spouse yet? Yes or no answers only accepted.
We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Your actions as the officer of a company are generally considered to be "public".
You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you certainly don't have to answer questions from a journalist either, but they're not generally invading your privacy by merely asking them).
Investigative reporters should act professionally. They should setup a formal appointment with the accused and remain neutral. In the bbc report they showed up uninvited and asked "We want to know why you're not protecting children, Mr. Brooks" which is a loaded question [1].
That’s not actually a loaded question… they had a source with clear and convincing proof of the criminal victimization of numerous children by one of Mr. Brooks’s users who had weaponized the service he provided, as well as both law enforcement and child protection organizations indicating that Omegle’s service was being actively weaponized against children; as a matter of both rhetoric and law it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Brooks was not protecting children, and there’s obvious public interest in his answer to that question. Arguably it’s something you could criticize as gotcha journalism, but that’s often a weak critique because you saying they’ve got an agenda is predicated on you having your own. Also there is a LONG history of very credible journalists tracking down and confronting those who don’t want light shone on their activities and therefore aren’t exactly inclined to schedule formal appointments… sure, it can be seen as showboating, especially for a television journalist, but it’s still just one of the tools of investigative journalism and you’d call it legit if it was exposing some form of public corruption or criminal activity that was beyond your personal pale.
I wouldn't ever call it legit for a journalist to chase someone around yelling questions at them and then use the footage, because it's the kind of thing that makes the "guest" look guilty regardless of actual guilt.
Showing up and getting actual answers, sure, but if you chased me around yelling questions about why I'm not protecting the children I would 100% run away rather than give you an in-depth interview. It looks bad until you think about it for five seconds and realise how confronting the situation is to even an innocent man, just like the Reid technique etc.
If they were journalists they would know something about journalism ethics.
Asking loaded questions and trying to aggressively ambush you is definitely not "getting the other side of the story".
It certainly is when you attempt to avoid making public comment over some matter to which the public has an overriding interest.
In terms of ethics, I’ll side with the journalist’s here over the guy running a service that randomly matches adults with children for video chat when he didn’t immediately shut down the service for a top-to-bottom rethink the moment he found out it’d been used by a serial pedophile.
There is no journalist here to side with unfortunately. Ethics are infringed upon whether the other party is responsible for worse violations or not. It's not an either-or situation.
You can't shut down everything once a bad actor does heinous things. There would be nothing left around. No more streets, no more cafes, no more trash bins, no more cars. Nothing.
As it has been pointed out, omegle did arguably provide more protection against bad actors that lots of other services around today. If you're in a situation you don't like, just press next and it's over. Nobody can contact you or recognise you in any way.
The crimes happen when you're not anonymous anymore, after exchanging snapchat or instagram accounts for example. They don't happen in a months long omegle conversation.
The root of the problem is being careless and providing identifying information. Obviously kids are too young to understand all the dangers, that's what parents are for. You wouldn't let your kids alone in the middle of the city and then sue it when a pedophile gets access to them. You can't let your kids use the Internet without keeping an eye on what is going on and warning them of the perils.
Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.
I'm starting to feel this is the thing we should have laws against.
How exactly do you imagine those laws would be structured?
Harassment law would probably suffice with case law and precedent starting to cover the specific type of harassment
How would you separate legitimate journalism from harassment?
This is a really important question for sure and I want to protect the rights of journalists, but in this instance the reporter from the BBC sat in front of Leif's house for 7 hours, fully aware that Leif was there and didn't want to speak to him, and then when he briefly emerged, accused him of not protecting children. It feels more like entrapment and harassment than reporting. It also feels like the type of theater the BBC knows they can get away with because the topic is child abuse and we seem to lose all restraint as a society when this topic comes up.
The same way you do today: by examining the circumstances and the actions.
How would that work? The public wouldn't know anything about anything unless a judge convicted someone.
Under German law, anyone involved in a criminal case has the right to privacy. The press are free to report on the case, but they cannot identify the suspect or victim. If you watch or read German news, you'll see everything you expect to see in a report about a crime, except for names and faces.
Personally, I think this is an entirely reasonable balance between competing rights. Publicly identifying suspects can cause immense harm to innocent people and prejudice the right to a fair trial based on the presumption of innocence. I cannot see any public interest argument for the general right to publicly identify criminal suspects, beyond mere prurient interest. If there would be substantial investigative benefits to publicly naming a suspect, for example to encourage witnesses or other victims to come forward, that should be a decision for the courts (or at least the police) and that decision should be made based on the individual circumstances of the case.
Under German law, anyone involved in a criminal case has the right to privacy.
Until convicted, I presume?
Are the identites of those arrested (and possibly prosecuted but acquitted) protected forever?
The legal process has played out. The Omegle founder has been faced with having to spend possibly hundreds of thousands in legal fees, and as such has decided to turn off the site without going to court.
The legal process playing out rarely ever means that a judge or jury makes a decision, rather it usually plays out as an economic problem, one of "does everyone involved have 10s of thousands of dollars to burn".
Usually the answer is "no", so usually it settles out of court.
Is it this one instance, or is it the fact that it can connect children to adults? Or general moderation problems that include that? Or maybe attacks as in lawyers?
Waiting outside someone's house for 7 hours, running after them, and spouting accusations through the door doesn't sound like my idea of "trying to have a civilized conversation". The BBC should be deeply embarrassed.
Absolutely ridiculous in every way.
Thank you. Such a huge wall of text posted, yet the only thing that remotely explains "why" is a vague reference to "attacks." What attacks??
The A.M. vs Omgele case if I had to guess.
It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without batting an eye. Apparently Omegle doesn't have an army of lawyers.
This used to be exactly what the EFF and ACLU were for.
Regardless of any arguments about legitimacy, the optics of the EFF and ACLU defending Omegle against a child sex abuse victim are horrible. They need to raise funds from donors and having to explain that they fought against an individual abuse victim seems like the kind of position they would want to avoid. What I imagine they would do is fight against any overzealous legislation some politician tries to throw together in some ham-fisted response to this kind of situation.
EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences here.
optics
Didn’t they used to specifically and notably not care about this? See ACLU defense of neo nazi march.
The ACLU is not the same organization that it used to be. That neo nazi march they defended was almost 50 years ago. It is doubtful they would take a similar stance today.
The ACLU of Virginia did defend the rights of white supremacists to organize in Charlottesville in 2017. I believe the resulting violence triggered some aclu soul searching and I’m not sure where the organization landed on defending the free speech of nazis and the like. Speaking for myself, I hope they keep to their principles.
I hope they keep to their principles.
Not anymore. The Charlottesville incident was the straw that broke the camel's back [0][1][2].
There was a revolt from donors and plenty of lawyers against their stance during Charlottesville.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendm...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-speec...
damn, that's rough. It's a shame because yes, the first amendment does include "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"
But that's the rub, PEACEABLY. Clearly what happened in Charlottesville violated that and is no longer protected under the constitution. But we can't ever truly predict the actions of an individual in a large group.
I'm very torn. I feel like we veer into Minority Report if we start having to predict what assemblies are prone to violation or not.
Sure, but then what happened.
I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature of freedoms. Or the public that funds it has and it realized that it can't do any good if donors pull support because it keeps supporting Nazis. Maybe distinction without a difference.
I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature of freedoms.
Of all the targets of ire for "woke culture" etc., I'm really surprised that ACLU, SPLC and similar aren't getting more heat. They're actually highly consequential in people's daily lives and can clearly be ideologically captured by a rather small group of people, given that the orgs themselves are so small.
Much better targets of critique than random Twitter mobs.
It’s mostly because they’re frankly irrelevant anymore (near as I can tell).
They sure did, but they've changed. They helped obtain permits for the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, which devolved into a MAGA riot that ended with a white supremacist murdering one protestor and injuring 35 others. Since then the ACLU has become far more squeamish about their clients and has been willing to compromise on their historical principles.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnn...
I think the ACLU is still a good organization, but it's no longer the ACLU. It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
I think the ACLU is still a good organization
It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
Never thought I’d get whiplash just from reading a comment on Hacker News.
Money corrupts all.
You’re acting like the ACLU hasn’t _specifically_ stood up for child molesters in cases about sexual offense notification. It’s not about that. They just care more about cases that will give them free publicity than defending a floundering website.
They have changed their direction considerably since 2016. The cases they take on now tend not to align with an absolutist stance on freedom of speech and due process.
When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
This is their plea for donations: "Abortion care, trans people’s right to live freely, people’s right to vote – our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and nationwide."
Now I am not saying these are bad causes but it seems their priorities have shifted. They don't seem to be defending deeply unpopular people anymore
And frankly, they always had a very selective list of things they bothered to get involved in. There are a ton of civil liberties they always avoided doing anything about.
But they’re mostly irrelevant anymore - the causes they’ve started going after have a thousand other non-profits doing as much for, or better now.
But they’re mostly irrelevant anymore
The ACLU war chest has been over $400M the last few years, with many thousands of people in pretty much every state working with the organization in some capacity.
There's absolutely no evidence to support your claims that either the ACLU is irrelevant, nor that it has somehow shifted its momentum considerably since 2016 in what class of cases it handles (especially given the age of the organization and number of shifts vs. overall societal/cultural changes).
On the contrary, I can find many recent examples of legal actions spread headed by the ACLU across dozens of issues all over the country. If you can't find any it's because you're not looking, though you can start with their Annual Reports.
Oh my, their annual reports!
I got my impression from following the actual court cases and related news. Weird eh?
Your multiple statements of the ACLU's irrelevance tells me you don't have reliable sources. I would wager you've spent more time on these comments, than actually reading up on the ACLU and its activities. You're welcome to hold any opinion you want about the organization, though without supporting evidence I doubt anyone else is going to share it with you.
I was a card carrying member for over a decade, and still read their reports.
But go ahead and project all you want.
When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
Hard to square this assessment with the last news item I caught about the ACLU: fighting a gag order against Donald Trump on free speech grounds.
That is noble they did that and shows that they still have that element in them. I do not support Trump, and it shows objectivity to defend someone like him when his rights are infringed as they seem to be in that case.
The NY Times has covered the internal friction in the ACLU to take on more progressive causes as well. I was wrong to say they have completely strayed from defending speech absolutely but they do seem to have moved focus away. [1]
1.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
This is the pretty standard issue of, as the US drifts further and further to the right, anyone who stays relatively stable is now accused of being liberal or leftist.
Didn't the ALCU defend Nazis in the past?
The nazis, or free speech and freedom of assmbly?
A Nazi's right to free speech and assembly, yes.
Nazis are people, and being a nazi is not a crime. Until they commit some sort of crime they should be afforded all the same basic human rights and freedoms as everyone else. That's just basic common sense.
Everyone here keeps using that word, and I'm sitting here confused.
Can we sit down and define it, or are we to forever just throw it around as a convenient "bad people"?
In the case I expect the OP meant[1], it was the National Socialist Party of America, an explicitly neo-Nazi organization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
And satanists. And homophobic churches. They used to know no point on the political compass and would defend all liberties.
Except anything second amendment (and a few others).
Framing this as "what about the children" is an easy way to attack just about anything that's not strictly top-down from some large corporate vendor.
On the other hand, I do wonder if "talk to strangers" is indeed a reasonable model. Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers. Clearly that model works there. But then again the neurons are simple (relatively) cells with much more cohesive goals and behavior, while humans are complex entities with behavior ranging from the cooperative to the ghastly predatorial.
Ultimately it seems any such service can't be anonymous. Talk to strangers... fine. But you need to register first, with your name, face, age, and meet consequences for what you're doing on the service, if your intent is less than noble. Alas this takes people and money which Omegle apparently didn't have.
Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers.
This is nonsense. Our neurons don’t talk to strangers. They talk with other neurons from the same individual. There is more in common between any two connected neurons than between two family members.
And besides there is no reason to think that what happens between cells is a good model to base human behaviour on whatsoever.
you're taking a metaphor overly serious.
Socialization is important (we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement), and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life. If only because we biologically have urges to reproduce and are aware enough of biology to know that family reproduction is a horrible idea.
you're taking a metaphor overly serious.
I just point it out that it is a bad one.
Socialization is important.
Yes.
we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement
Yes.
and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life
Yes.
see how easy it was to write it without asserting falsehoods about neurons, and without drawing unsupported conclusions from said falsehood?
A metaphor can be faulty even if the conclusion it purports to end up with is true. And if we can do away without the obscuring metaphor (as you did in this very comment I'm responding to) then we should.
What an odd response. I'm not even sure how to react. Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.
What an odd response.
Thank you.
Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.
No. Please read my comment again. I claim no such thing.
For people who agree with the libertarian stance, the optics aren't horrible, of course, they are good. The question is whether there are enough of those people to sustain an organization like the EFF.
I donate a large sum yearly to the EFF and so should all of you. Great org overall.
The ACLU speaks up for the rights of murderers and rapists that we don't like, because we don't want the system to be able to abrogate the rights of politically inconvenient people that the powers that be don't like. Like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. The ACLU and the EFF aren't about optics, but the underlying rule of law. We are better than a mob with pitchforks, even when we really don't like the perpetrator.
That’s the aclu of pre trump America. The new aclu is no longer willing to fight for that
fuck the optics.
Really, I’d like to flip the script here and dare anyone against EFF protecting Omegle to post their real life resume/linkedin/etc.
I’ll do my part to make sure you’re unhirable, because the “optics” of destroying something as simple and innocent as this are terrible, and what’s actually happening is pseudo-anonymous pressure.
no, that's what they are for. The entire point is that they don't care about optics. I let my membership go when it came obvious they were starting to care.
The article mentions supporting the EFF if you are opposed to this kind of thing. It's possible they offered to help but the owner was sick of it all. That's the impression I got from reading the piece.
It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without batting an eye.
Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight Omegle's basic behavior, to start with.
What "basic behavior" is that? Anonymously video chatting strangers on the internet? Can't you already do that in many Discord servers? Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g. Chatroulette)? There clearly isn't anything fundamentally illegal about the practice, or these would all be shut down.
You'll notice that all of those sites have registrations where you have to create an account and affirm that you're over the age of 13 rather than just putting "Don't use this if you're under 13" in tiny print at the bottom of a page. Even Chatroulette has a big popup where you have to affirm you're over 18 and that you agree to their terms and conditions before using the site..
When has that ever effectively stopped anything? Is it that it seems more careful?
It's like having a "no trespassing" sign and a fence around your pool. You still might be in legal trouble if a kid hops your fence and drowns, but you're vastly better off from a legal perspective than the alternative of not having any barrier whatsoever.
That comparison hinges on having to click "yes, I'm over 13" being more of a fence+sign than a "tiny" text saying you should only use the website if you are 13 or older. I'm sure some lawyer will argue that's the case - since I'm not one: Sounds rather flimsy.
It's certainly the case, especially legally.
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.
I expect at least some kids to be scared off by this.
The BBC article above states that Omegle is being mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13", that would be 10 cases fewer.
What does this accomplish?
A minimal level of protection against lawsuits like the one that just killed Omegle.
Yes, obviously, but what does it prevent in terms of the outcome we care about, i.e child abuse?
We shouldn't just take zealous well-paid lawyers as a fact of nature. If those "defense against lawsuits"-actions actually don't make a difference in terms of reducing child abuse, then we should not let them make a difference in the legal system either.
Another case of not making perfect the enemy of good. Some percentage of children who see a disclaimer saying, "Do not use if you're under 18, click here to confirm you're 18+" and decide not to lie and login -- so as a base level, sites that are dangerous for kids should do that.. the should also do a bunch of other stuff, and it certainly should be mitigating to Omegle's liability that they were doing a bunch of other stuff, but they apparently didn't do a few easy things which may cost them.
it's the difference between an open and closed (unlocked) door. Very small actions can be a surprising deterrent for many people.
How does any of this assist in safety? These just sound like things they do to cover there asses.
Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g. Chatroulette)?
Chatroulette, the one most similar to Omegle, like Omegle, was started by a teenager alone (at about the same time), with the additional advantage (from the point of vulnerability to civil liability) of being in Russia.
But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and adults-only very early on, had an easier way to report inappropriate content, automatic temporary bans for too many reports too close together, and adopted other mitigations beyond what Omegle has.
Discord is not anonymous and chatroulette is next on the choppingblock
What do you think Facebook Groups are if not a poorly age-verified way to talk to strangers on the internet?
OP doesn't mention anything about a lawsuit - got more information on that?
I find it hard to be polite to people who try to blame the world around them for their poor luck and poor parenting.
What happened to the plaintiff was really messed up, but I don't see how it's the site's problem. Suppose you answer a newspaper personal ad, meet up with the person and get all your limbs chopped off. Yeah, that fucking sucks, but we're not about to shut down the newspaper.
Maybe... But if this is a real problem with Omegle (the article mentions that it is a common grooming platform) then it's not like there's nothing they could do. Did it even have age verification?
On balance I still think Omegle should win the case, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.
Did the internet provider have age verification? The DNS Resolution service? The SSL certificate authority? What about the electricity company? Or any other service or non-service provider which contributes in one way or another to online streaming, such as Logitech for providing a webcam, Dell for the computer, Nvidia for the graphics card.
After all, no grooming happened on omegle, that's just where they shared contact details. Grooming apparently happened on other platforms, and the common denominator seems to be the internet and everything that makes it work, not omegle.
Age verification would probably require some form of ID, killing the site.
my thoughts exactly. I don't understand why people are so hasty to blame any and all tangentially related to societal issues. But it happens all the time for websites who exist and let people post content.
The BBC went to his house, he clearly didn't want to talk, so they stayed there for hours, waiting for him to come out?
That's is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below the BBC.
The reporter seems insufferable.
Yells at the man's house "Why aren't you protecting children?"
Turns to camera "I just wanted to have a civil conversation. He doesn't want to talk... ever"
Sure man, civil conversation.
article is from february
Gives me chills, that was so heartfelt and raw. Hurt on all sides, but this is a bit like losing access to a public space because someone committed crimes there.
One of the greatest things Omegle enabled is this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is (Harry Mack freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+ episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)
a bit like losing access to a public space
It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.
And so now they’ll have to choose one of the other, even seedier bars. The kids aren’t any better off.
You’ve made a poor analogy, though, since obviously it’s very trivial for a bar to validate age at the door. If such a thing were easy for Omegle to do, I’m sure they would.
If it’s trivial for a bar to validate, why not the same for a web site?
With websites, you can have one person serving ten million people, and support that on a single income. With bars, you can only fit about a hundred people in, and enough of them have to be paying customers that you can afford to keep the bar running – but that also means you can physically look at everyone's identification papers.
If you can’t validate the age of the people using Omegle, perhaps the service is not appropriate to exist.
I think my right to privacy out weighs a "think of the children" argument.
The anything goes / mass surveillance dichotomy is false. It is possible to have small-scale, individually-moderated websites, if the software to host them is available and easy to run, without sacrificing privacy (or even accountability). Pseudonymity is usually good enough, especially for things like Omegle.
Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when most people's primary computing device was capable of acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard enough I'm sure we can get there.
How do you propose verifying a users age without sacrificing privacy?
Even knowing their age at all is giving up some privacy.
If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
How do you propose verifying a users age without sacrificing privacy?
It's usually obvious if you can have a short conversation with the person in question. Throughout my childhood escapades, I'm certain that most, if not all, the responsible adults I interacted with knew pretty much exactly how old I was. (I'd managed to navigate a legal loophole that, I believe, still exists in GDPR today, so they weren't required to kick me off – but while I was treated as an equal, I wasn't treated the same way I'm treated now.)
If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
That's quite illegal, and quite easy to detect (just give slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks). Most people don't commit crimes: individuals just don't have the kinds of incentive to buy and sell people's personal data that organisations like Facebook, Taboola and Oracle have. (And what would they get for betraying these people's trust? $30? Sure… I'd totally go for that.)
How do you propose to give slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks when you have to have a short conversation with the person in question?
Seems like a good opening for a service that could validate your age for a low cost and provide a token good for logging on to adults-only sites.
This bar had a complex tunnel system leading up to it that was completely unlit. In the beginning you could run right through, but eventually they made you yell "I'm over 18" and took your word on it.
This bar also had special partitions in each room that were practically indestructible, allowing sound and light through but protecting from physical harm.
[EDIT: I don't mean to imply that the check is easy! The reality of Omegle's difficulties is understood. I'm just riffing on the metaphor]
Why? Anything on Omegle could happen in a park. Or a library. Omegle can't keep kids off their platform: their parents need to.
A park is in public view.
A library is in public view.
Omegle was in private, away from public view.
No one needs to keep anyone off Omegle now, it is gone.
A park is in public view. > A library is in public view.
And yet heinous acts of abuse/violence/etc have occurred in both.
By your logic, we should pave all the parks and burn down the libraries.
How many sex crimes are reported in your local park? Hundreds of thousands were reported to Omegle.
Hundreds of thousands? Do you have a link?
You've got an axe to grind don't you? Does it really not seem obvious to you that the damage of a single sexual harassment in a park outweighs any number of online interactions?
Depends on the park. Some are known for it. Parents know to keep their kids away from those parks. For that reason, it’s better to have one really cruisy park that everyone knows about and can easily avoid but which also acts to contain the pervs. Maybe Omegle closing will just make the predators harder to spot and keep away from?
Or this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5poLSRa3cpHBfiJ6wQdT...
Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.
Is there a word for whatever the human thing is that makes people want to watch reaction videos?
Mirror neurons
Empathy?
Philanthropy? Humans are social creatures.
mirror neurons
As others have said, empathy and/or mirror neurons; it's the modern day equivalent of a laugh track.
Are they much different from book or restaurant reviews?
Also see these musicians with many "play for strangers on Omegle" videos:
Marcus Veltri, piano, https://www.youtube.com/@MarcusVeltri
Rob Landis, violin, https://www.youtube.com/@RobLandes
Billy Wilkins, guitar and vocals, https://www.youtube.com/@BillyWilkins
The Doo, guitar and piana and otamatone, https://www.youtube.com/@TheDooo
Both Frank Tedesco and Marcus Veltri frequently did joint Omegle videos with Rob Landis. Tedesco and Veltri also have some joint videos. I seem to also recall some Wilkins, Landis, and Tedesco collaborations.
Harry Mack
Harry Mack has done a few collaborations with Marcus Veltri and Rob Landis:
Man, i stayed up way past bedtime watching the Frank Tedesco youtubes. I was completely blown away, his ability to listen to 20 seconds of a song on his phone and then get it mostly right on the piano is incredible. What an amazing individual. hah, the reactions were golden too, very funny and endearing.
edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to cross it.
While.we are on the subject of Omegle youtubers, I also love Something About Chickens
Looking for the explainer on this one!
For that one it may be a combination of two things.
1. He starts out by asking if he can show them a magic trick. They say yes or nod yes. He then exits stage right. He then returns either through the back door or some the side stage left. Where he enters from is too far away from where he left for him to have walked or even ran there in the time between entrance and exit.
The part up to where he exists stage left could be pre-recorded. His wording and gestures change slightly with different people but he could have several different pre-recorded segments for this.
As Teller once observed:
Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect
Penn has said something similar:
The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth
It could then switch to live for his return, where he then actually converses with them to prove that he's live.
2. If he encounters someone whose responses to the pre-recorded segment don't fit in, he skips them. Remember, we don't see how many people he had to try this with to get enough good ones for a video, and recall Teller's quote from above.
The one he's done that has me baffled is the one where he does this:
1. He asks them what city they live in.
2. He then tells them he used to live in that city and gives the address of where he lived. It is their address or an address of a close neighbor.
He also does this except instead of asking the city he tells them he has a talent for guessing people's names, and then tells them their name.
I can see in general how to do these, by using fake disconnects. He uses fake disconnects in one of his most common routines where he asks someone if he can show them a magic trick, starts a "pick a card" type routine, and then disconnects just has he's revealing their card. Then later when the person is connected to someone else either that someone else says "is this your card?" and holds up the correct card or he walks into that someone else's room and shows the card.
The key here is that he doesn't really disconnect. He just shows the disconnect screen, and then switches to feeding them video of the other person. They think that they have connected to someone new on Omegle but it is him the whole time.
With fake disconnects he could have his subjects in the "tell them their name" bit first talk to an accomplice who gets their name, fake disconnect and fake connect with him, and then he can do his name guess.
That should be fairly easy because people often exchange names on Omegle. But full addresses? I'd hope that would be rare, rare enough that even a Penn/Teller level of time would not be enough to get many people.
This definitely may have destroyed the career of a large number of widely popular youtubers... It certainly destroyed their format anyway.
Imagine they'll hop to a different platform.
Tbh the sad thing isn't any youtuber losing a platform, it's that Omegle was really a place people went when they were having a hard time and other people went there to cheer them up. I really hope there's another platform like it, but I don't know it.
not video based, but captures some of the spontaneous spirit of omegle. it lets you have live interactions with anyone on the same web page as you.
Some of them were already on OmeTV, so I imagine that’s where most will move.
He just did the 100th episode the other day and announced he wouldn't be doing any more.
The journey of those episodes is really inspiring. Practising in that environment he pushes the boundaries of so many areas of human achievement in one, and once he's better than anyone else in the world (maybe half way through the series) he then starts surpassing himself faster and faster.
I’m so glad to see Harry Mack getting love on here. It’s wild that he just shared his last episode on Friday and now the site is shutting down. Glad he already took off and found success.
His Omegle 100[0] video is one of the best one yet, Harry is a legend. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk
There's an interesting progression watching him over time. While his technical ability has dramatically improved, so too has the engagement. Now you start to get more clips of people saying "Wait. I've seen you on Youtube/TikTok". Love his journey.
Definitely, it's been a crazy and inspiring journey. I'm kind of bummed it's coming to an end, it was my favorite series of his.
My first thought was, what is Harry Mack going to do now??
The Doo and Marcus Veltri too. So many world class musicians show up randomly on omegle
Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn't ever come across Harry Mack. That guy is fantastic. And he gave so much happiness to those people he was rapping for! Just seeing all the delight on their faces gave me a tear in my eye. There's a lot of lonely people in the world, and for a moment, he improved their lives. We need better ways to connect; today I can VC with anyone in the world in a second, but we don't know how to connect like he does. Creators, work to make that kind of connection happen.
So happy you've discovered it! In every single video in the series he lifts up a bunch of people who are struggling in a really personal, memorable, inspiring way. I reckon he's saved a few lives (at least).
Harry Mack has a very active channel on TikTok where he posts recordings from Omegle. 12/10 highly recommend. Never seen anyone like him.
Thanks for sharing Harry Mack, never heard of him, but this took me down an emotional rabbit hole. Amazing what music can do.
Great analogy. And.. thank you so much for posting this. HMack is a legend. Every time I listen to him I get stuck for hours. He is mindblowing constantly, pure love. It's worth the excursion every time, no one can amaze and impress like him every time. I've seen some Omegle videos with him before, but this one was really special. Super appreciate this.
I'm not getting the economics here.
With so many big names using it, and it is so popular.
Why was it a financial drain? Why can't it keep going?
Surely if was making enough money. .
More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
In that article she was 11 when using Omegle. She was using internet without appropriate supervision. That's almost like allowing a kid to drive a car, leading to an accident, and then trying to ban cars because they are dangerous to kids.
The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.
The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.
Realistically, kids are on the Internet.
I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.
I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.
I've been on the internet since I was about 10 years old (I estimate). My parents knew (and understood) maybe 10% of what I did on there. As a minor, I did multiple criminal things online, some of them successful, others not so much. If I was a kid in 2023, I probably would've been arrested at some point in time.
Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much of this burden should be with the parents. For every successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
As long as parents are never held accountable for their kids online behavior and the blame is put on service providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples of parents who track their kids' phones because they're scared something will happen to them in the real world. Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to where their kids venture in the online world, let alone with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.
I volunteer in my local public school in the US. The sad fact is that stable family structure, by any definition, is collapsing and that kids are suffering. The percentage of kids in grade school who have an absent, incarcerated, addicted, mentally unhealthy, or generally dysfunctional parent is off the charts.
Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they need to avoid getting shunted into special education on account of their behavior are in no position to supervise their online activity.
I make a habit of looking up kids parents on FB - it generally tracks that the worse the kids behavior and educational outlook, the greater the parent’s (singular in most cases) social media presence. I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.
Where I live a full 1/3 of 1st graders are in a special education track. All the research points to the impact of the home and family on these outcomes.
Tl;dr many parents are incapable of the rational parenting you suggest.
I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.
It's far more likely that lower income is the reason for poor parenting than "mom has an onlyfans".
There's a lot of money to be made in this industry.
There was a local university student in UQAM who made the news a few years ago and she publicly bragged she was earning a million a year.
Not everyone is going to be a top earner like this, but don't be delusional that it's only an option for lowest income individuals.
There was an implication that they didn't fulfill parenting duties in part because their job was onlyfans.
If they were making a lot of money, and not as poor, there is a higher chance their parenting duties were fulfilled.
I misinterpreted parent's post underlying message then, fault on me.
There's certainly a strong link about kids doing bad in school and the housing quality and home atmosphere.
There is no _one_ reason, and I don't present that particular phenomenon as a causal factor but as a symptom of the greater problem - which certainly includes poverty but is even more closely aligned to the opioid epidemic.
All this is in the context of asking parents to provide their children the guidance required to avoid child-inappropriate content.
My point stands: a large and growing contingent of parents lack the stability/ability/support required to even keep their children's behavior within acceptable boundaries. It's a fool's errand to think keeping kids away from bad actors on the internet can be added to their plate.
Are you suggesting that the internet keeping bad actors away is not a fool’s errand? Everything you say is correct but entirely irrelevant.
I've been on the internet since I was a similar age. I even obeyed all my parents' instructions (e.g. no using Google, no social media), but it's really only me being a certain kind of person – and a little luck – that kept me in any way resembling safe. Those rules, as stated to me, were absolutely not sufficient (e.g. I used Bing, and joined forums, and booted into QuickWeb to play The Fancy Pants Adventures because that wasn't disabling the filter). No way were my parents capable of policing my activity.
I, uh, mostly kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one occasion, and those were all things I hadn't told them about (some of which I even realised were big deals before they blew up). I'm quite lucky that none of that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't think any of it was criminal, but that's pure serendipity: I had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple governments without even knowing I should probably ask my parents about this cool new programming idea I had.)
The places I frequent these days are all safe for the kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much bigger than that – and, I suspect, more hostile than it was. I have no illusions that I could provide good, useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.
But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
I've never used TikTok, but I find myself scrolling through Instagram reels quite often. It's so addicting. Recently, I've been seeing some extreme gore: people being lit on fire, bones snapping, fatal car accidents, sexually explicit content (cheating, etc.), etc.
It's gotten to the point of me no longer wanting to watch those reels - they're very, very dark and depressing. If children are seeing this stuff as well, that's a major problem.
you'll grant however that when we were young, it was more of an unknown wild west. Parents didn't know what to make of it or fear, there was generally more freedom afforded. We were the first generation with stupid-easy access to pirated pornography. No one had any idea of health concerns, at best you heard a blanket moral stance that didn't convince anyone.
I think today parents have access to far better means of regulating access, should they so choose, and they're more conscious of it. I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but the overhead is enough to dissuade kids from spending too much time and getting into trouble.
They sure are, but we can argue they shouldn't, or that they should be supervised.
Not that it's going to happen. Too many people slap a device in front of their kids with an unlimited data plan and no supervision.
It's a hard problem to solve, probably as unsolvable as any other wide-scale problem.
The legal situation is more complicated than blaming the parents. To extend your analogy: If someone had a business that rented cars and somehow 11 year olds were renting the cars and driving them, the rental car company couldn’t shrug it off and blame the parents.
That’s why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform, there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to address the situation. The expectation isn’t perfect enforcement because it’s not reasonable to shut every large business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a platform for bored kids, it’s not surprising that the lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization options it’s not surprising that they choose to close rather than deal with legal battles.
Did the 11 year old set up and pay for internet access?
Sounds more like an 11 year old stole their parents' rental car and the family turned around and sued the rental car company. It's a stretch to even suggest Omegle was akin to "rental car company" since they didn't charge, it was more like a P2P car sharing app.
In this case, the car is the internet itself.
Every form of social media is an open window for groomers and filled with abuse. You just don't see it as openly, and it's often relegated to DMs. But Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord, Reddit, YouTube etc... and there are hundreds of influencers who use TikTok or other platforms to market their OnlyFans content, sometimes specifically focusing on younger demographics.
Focusing on nothing but parental neglect doesn't do much for the victims, though.
Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids to adults?
For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would expect some sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have been better than what Omegle had (nothing).
Couldn't this have been any website with a messaging system on it? Twitter, facebook, even email.
I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
Edit: was it because of the video component of Omegle?
Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom and all those companies with UGC have this, responsible ones report it (Meta does lots, not sure Twitter does anymore, Telegram never did).
I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
Take it as a sign that if tech community doesn't wake up and own up to this and try to solve the issue somehow then not just individual services but the entire idea of e2ee messaging is going to become illegal...
Orders of magnitude more grooming and misconduct is done over SMS than was ever done over Omegle.
Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up” and own that they’re facilitating this abuse? It seems like one of those finger pointing cases which falls apart when any level of scrutiny is applied.
A large portion of commentators here greatly dislike the idea of unmonitored interactions between humans. Their ideal is that every person's cellphone continuously records nearby conversations and sends them to the police where they can run large language models to provide a shortlist of dangerous communications that a policeman can then look at and charge for.
We all know this is not true, not even close. Read through the comments here, there's a clear overwhelming majority opinion blaming the family rather than the company. Even beyond this post, I've never seen this called for on this site.
You are in a clear majority position but still pretend to be persecuted and victimized by an imagined boogeyman.
This thread is about what exactly?
Several hundred Hackernews act incredulous about the Omegle shut down?
Ahh... I miss n-gate's webshit weekly. You know he'd have been all over this thread.
Omegle (business model: "Uber for child grooming")
If having as you claim support from the majority and yet they are still being shutdown, maybe their claim to unfair treatment from a coordinated opposition has some merit?
I had no view either way until reading this thread, and seeing that many adults used the site, which it seems did nothing illegal. Their greatest sin it seems was allowing humans to connect with one another. Something that’s increasingly seen as a danger that requires government intervention into.
If people could go back in time, we would never have public education because “it attracts predators and facilitates child victimization!”
See how stupid that is?
I agree I'm in the majority here on hackernews, but I'm also in the minority in my country (the UK) given the monitoring provisions now required by social media companies and where private communication of ideas between individuals is punishable[1].
They probably couldn't afford to sue a mobile phone provider :)
But some ambulance chasing lawyer told them they have a chance to win in this case.
I'm not sure exactly the tech community needs to own up to. Allowing an 11 year old who has irresponsible parents to use the internet?
Do tech companies need to verify government issued IDs to register new users?
That would be a reasonable solution if there would be any government who could provide a digital attestation scheme that allows to prove attributes without giving out the identity. Afaik it's possible technically. Just not wanted apparently
Like proving I am at least 18 years old without giving out my birth date or name.
In some countries: yes.
Ah, “for the children”. The best argument there is to deprive you of all the rights possible.
Really? We want to protect the rights of pedophiles? Where could this argument be going.
Slippery slope fallacy. How many people are pedophiles? How many people who aren't will need to give up their rights so that that minority... actually just keeps on doing what they do, because there's always alternatives?
We should forbidden streets. Full of pedophiles!
Right, because everyone on the internet, and who ever possibly enjoyed Omegle is either a sex abused child, or the pedophile who preyed upon them.
I had forgot, this is 2023 where there's never a middle ground in any discourse, regardless of topic. Thanks for the reminder.
I also want pedophiles to have access to clean drinking water if it's access to clean drinking water for everyone.
Nobody but you is suggesting we protect the rights of pedophiles. This argument is going where it always goes ... as the author pointed out. There are bad people in the world. They make up a small percentage of the population. You don't change society as a whole based on the behavior of these bad people. You do what is reasonable and within your ability. Did you even read article? By your logic would you allow the Catholic church to exist? They were literally protecting pedophiles for years.
We want to protect the rights of every single human being without a single exception.
Maybe this needs to start over somewhere in a civil law country (most of Europe) where suing you for something like this is almost impossible.
No one in Europe made an Omegle like website since 2009?
That video would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
The reporters literally camped outside this guys house, ran across his lawn shouting at him, chased him to his door, and immediately accused him of harming children. Then the scene cuts to the reporter describing that as a “civil conversation”.
Read the article. I don't understand the logic of this. It's like leaving loaded gun on the desk and its gun fault (tool) when your kid shoot someone with it. IMO this is bad parenting. Any tool that provide anonimity and privacy can be abused. It is not like anyone was forced to use it. You have to go there explicitly. Adding random video chat to i.e Signal app makes it another Omegle "problem" ?
An 11 year old alone on the internet...their parents should be prosecuted, not the messaging platform
so when are they going after google for providing free email and such?
internet watch foundation is about censorship. they only "protect the children" so you can't contradict them without looking like a criminal. they actually give criminals a legal defense as their content hash system is easy to prove a false positive.
also they are going after the only service which contributed to arrests. lol. you think criminals don't use facebook/Instagram/telegram/tiktok/email/googlemeet/msteams/etc just because you haven't heard about arests?!
How is this possibly omegles fault or problem?
She met him once on omegle and gave him her contact info. She could have met him on the train or in the street and it would have ended the same way.
Parents are supposed to teach kids about stranger danger. She should be suing her folks.
But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users.
The law of big numbers dictate that if there’s even a tiny chance of a catastrophic event it has close to 100% probability of happening if n is just large enough (in the case of millions of daily users, probably multiple catastrophic events per day). This kind of asymmetrical risk is very hard to defend against no matter what you do.
The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way
The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue?
Assuming the 74 million are really getting lots of value from it, compensating the victims of the catastrophic event is more than worth it. Holding the host liable for the harms, and trusting the host to charge an appropriate amount warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do this.
If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service.
Imagine a store owner downtown adding a flowerbed and a couple benches at the front of their property. If someone gets hurt via rare catastrophic event, it seems bad to make the owner pay, and even worse to suggest they're supposed to be charging bench users 20 cents each to fund payouts like this.
If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service.
A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn’t free in a way that makes that really true, and even if the service was free, if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
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)
I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The numbers are pretty wild.
There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451
I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities.
IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.
it's the nazi bar story. If you are lax in moderation at the beginning the problems compound because word spreads that you are lax. If you are strict from the beginning word spreads that you are strict and corruption finds a better niche.
Only if the host captures the lion's share if the benefits. This is hard (transaction costs are a big free market issue).
The owner would probably need city approval to extend their reach onto municipal property (the sidewalk).
The store owner might also be required by the city and/or landlord to update their insurance policy to cover the extended liability.
But, in general, your proposed scenario never specified what the catastrophic event is and why the store owner would be held liable.
The store owner wants to do something nice for people and in your world the best way to handle that is making them jump through months of bureaucracy and probably paying a lot of money to their insurance and for permits and shit?
Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
If anyone is injured on your property, you’re liable.
Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
Right, if that is really true as a blanket statement, then it's an idiotic and short sighted law.
I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye. According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury?
Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
A store attracts people with money (adults) interested in the products the store sells and the bench out front is in public. But the catastrophic events in question are somewhere that attracts easily amused people with time on their hands (often children) and predators (among others, but specifically predators in a way a shop bench doesn't), and the catastrophe is deliberate targeted harm and not natural disaster or innocent accident. The two aren’t comparable.
A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on
Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups.
So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing, and only the people that actually caused the accident are to blame.
If you think that victims of a "catastrophic event" need compensation, why not propose to institute a mandatory insurance for people using the Internet, like many countries do for cars ? (I am assuming here that the website is not actively trying to help crime, but this doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing
Its really not; user fees in the form of driver's license fees, vehicle license fees (both of which tend to be legally required for operation on public roads in most US jurisdictions), federal and state gasoline taxes, etc., are used to pay for use of public roads, as well as general fund taxes which are directed to roads (making even the indirect use of roads by ordering goods, etc., not really free.)
I think you are missing the point intentionally. I have seen you make many cogent points over the years, but this is just low effort failure to engage.
Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.
Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers.
Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the road, true.
They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a general legal requirement for using public roads, though you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage.
Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free with the idea that “well, a bunch of people will be damaged, but there is no need to assure that those damages are reasonably covered because other people will benefit”, it has lots of costs associated with use, and a number of them (both the licensing regime and the insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the expense of potential beneficial use and assuring compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes, its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary for a service that has benefits for most users and acute harms for some.
I think that mandatory insurance for roads was already acknowledged by the parent poster. They invoked it directly by suggesting internet users should have to carry liability insurance if the central concern is victim restitution or compensation (like roads). You are making the same point you objected to.
The fundamental question is what is the legal objective here, and what do we want it to be?
1) Is the goal to make sure that victims are compensated?
2) Do we think companies like omegle are negligent, and are we trying to hold them accountable?
3) Do we actually think neither?
If the answer is 1 but not 2, then making Omegles pay is clearly an injustice, and we should be looking into some sort of mandatory user insurance.
Putting my cards on the table, I am in camp 3. Just because bad things happen, doesnt mean can or should find a way to compensate the injured party.
In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet
Yet EV's still have to pass insane standards because 1/10th, 1/100th of deaths would be too much... it's all about our monkey brain's perception, negativity bias (i.e. 100x good thing equals 1x bad thing) and emotions. We are tied to these things until we leave our carbon meat suits.
Are you confusing electric with autonomous here?
individual responsibility is the way things need to be handled. Make it clear that if you do X, then there exists a risk of Y, and Z. If you still want to do the thing, and for you the risk is realized, then ... well, sucks to be you I guess. But you knew what you were getting into.
And saying, "oh, but people are bad at analyzing risk" or "some people are too stupid to understand". Well, so what?
Building a world where everyone is wrapped in a soft foam and nothing can be done because there is always some element of risk, is a terrible idea.
"You can get killed walking your doggie" - Heat (1993)
The issue here is that the host is capturing only a very small fraction of the value here, which may not be enough to cover liability.
Yes, 100 times yes. This is one of the big issues with the modern world, that no risk at all is acceptable. And that's bullshit. So many things that are enormous amounts of fun can get shut down because maybe someone gets slightly hurt some time or whatever.
Should we make things safe? yes, of course. But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no". It should be made clear that risk exists and it's everyone's own personal responsibility to take that into account when doing something. And if I happen to be the unlucky guy for whom the risk realizes, then well, guess life sucks for me. Let's move on. That shouldn't stop everyone else from having fun.
The big issue here is that us monkeys really can't comprehend scale (insert classic links to studies on scope insensitivity here). Heuristics that work well for groups of up to a few thousand people stop working when there are hundreds of millions.
There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
This is one of the root causes of many of the issues in modern society. The creeping safety is taking the fun out of everything, especially kids. Kids nowadays rarely have any play time anymore, which has an immense cost to their later growth and well being. If you want to read a book about this with some related topics, I recommend "The Coddling of the American Mind"
I'm honestly surprised that I'm still allowed to put myself on two wheels with an engine in between, and ride down the autobahn at an insane amount of speed.
isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way
Had a friend who started a social network website at his parents house. Pushing 20 million monthly users. Death threats, competition uploading illegal content and then reporting it, whistleblowers and more threats, people having beef and looking for arbitration, more threats for getting banned etc. He become extremely stressed, stopped going out, paranoia kicked in and then suicide attempts. His friends helped him close the site and he "recovered".
But lesson here is - if you don't have a deep wallet, right mindset and access to therapist, don't start a website today or keep it small and off the main internet.
Just because someone got struck by lightning while playing golf, doesn’t make golf dangerous to play.
Golf also requires a membership and equipment to play, as well as physically being there. Omegle is (was?) a free online service with no signup required.
Which requires a computer, internet connection (subscription based!), and actually going to the website and interacting with it on an ongoing basis.
No one is ‘accidentally’ using Omeagle, anymore than they would ‘accidentally’ go golfing.
Yeah, but this is from the site operators perspective. How are you not bound to have abuse everyday on a platform with such low barrier to entry?
An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a golf membership.
Is this a serious question? Not everyone with an internet connection ever got on Omeagle, even once.
Of the people that went to Omeagle, the odds of this kind of thing happening are clearly astronomically low - it’s been there for over a decade, internationally known, and my guess is only a handful of these types of things have likely happened.
Old school AOL chat rooms were clearly more dangerous. And were consistently implicated in all sorts of nefarious child trafficking operations.
Based on the goodbye letter, it has happened enough that the admin worked with authories, and it was getting toxic enough frequently enough that the owner was feeling psychological damage from moderating it.
I'm not going to say if the boons are worth the burden, but in Leif's case it was now. And he was calling the shots at the end of the day.
See, when I read:
> Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
To me this sounds like the problem isn't the malicious users, so much as people using the malicious users as an argument to shut down Omegle.
You can moderate people showing their dicks, you can't moderate people suing you because you didn't do enough to stop little 16 year old Timmy seeing a dick.
No, but if you operate enough golf courses you better be ready for the eventuality.
Playing golf, no. Providing a golf field service in the US - yes, absolutely.
I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks. I'm amazed they haven't been sued into oblivion to where helmets are required to be worn.
So it seems like we do have SOME semblance of understanding risk vs reward.
Business insurance is what prevents isolated disasters from killing off businesses.
Insurance takes on many useful forms.
For instance, you can hire a winter season snow removal service from companies that indemnify you from people slipping and falling on your property based on their having an insurance umbrella that covers all their customers.
May not be relevant to Omegle. It takes a healthy income to be able to afford serious coverage. And it wouldn't help with the policing work or the protests of pearl clutchers who don't care about precautions, effort and resources for victim support, and just can't handle any failure of any kind.
It's all baked into the premiums.
No, the catastrophic risks are borne by society - the are limits to liability insurance and there is a limit at which limited liability companies can pay or individuals behind companies can pay.
I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks.
And they are regularly sued for injuries (even short of death), and sometimes lose.
Picking one case out of many because it was a ice rink on a cruise ship:
https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-roy...
Don't you have to sign a waver for that type of accident. Maybe that's what we are missing from the internet. But that would likely require a real proof of age to work
I think lot of problems from real world get projected to social media in meta form, we can also say lives of people has gone worse since web 2.0, hence rise of such cases, but increase scale of platform also contribute to probability of malice
This brings back some amazing memories. If I remember correctly, the original inspiration for Omegle came from 4chan; or more precisely, a user thought of stretching the limits of "anonymous free speech" to realtime communications, and came up with the idea in late 2007. The PoC server for it was nothing more than "telnet to this IP" and it was sporadically advertised on 4chan for a short while.
Astonishingly, Google still remembers after 16 years: "forced_anon chat" (with the quotes) finds the very origin, if you want to go down that dark and probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole.
God, they're complaining about newposters all the way back in 2007. Is the problem really Eternal September or is it just "kids these days"?
Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into his posts
I don't know why exactly I think a one on one chat system would be different from an imageboard. When one makes a post on an image or discussion board, I think one does take into account that his words are going to be judged by the whole community. Even he isn't worried about preserving some identity, he still identifies with those words and responds to the reactions they get, and I think that ultimately leads to self-censorship and conformity. When there's only one person passing judgment, it doesn't have nearly the same negative impact, and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.Complaining about newposters is just something you do. It would be weird otherwise.
Calling it newposters is already weird
For real. I've never heard of that term until this thread.
Aren't they just neewbs or something? N33wbs?
N00bs?
They use "newf*gs" on 4chan, I assume that word is banned here so the above posters are censoring it.
newfags? if you see this comment, then it is not censored
Or the people who manually moderate HackerNews just haven't gotten to it yet.
I can read it, so it's not even (yet) shadowbanned.
Newfriends.
I haven't seen newposters anywhere before, it's always been newfriends as the slur replacement
You know how brits call a cigarette? For some reason 4chan calls new-posters new-cigarettes.
They have a different term over on 4chan...
newposters all the way back in 2007
My recollection is that newposters was coined around 2007 for everyone who joined after the Habbo raids that had made /b/ much more popular. These newposters from Habbo were "ruining" the site.
protip: it was never good
and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.
Which was no longer a thing, with many people using Omegle to create content and upload it to youtube. It became far less anonymous in some cases than an image/discussion board.
Lurk more
Eternal September is an observable phenomenon whenever a new demographic in a community outstrips the old guard. This is fundamentally different than "kids these days", though you may find some overlap.
On an anonymous website, that's the only differentiator
probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole
4chan offensiveness isn't so much a generational thing as it is a personality thing
Teenage me loved the edginess. Adult me just finds it boring. More like a phase thing to me.
100%. Adults who still enjoy that "edgy" style of communication and entertainment always come off as super immature.
There's something in there about human development and pushing boundaries in your youth, I'm certain.
Also, it did feel great as a teen from a very backwards rural area, to be on the very bleeding edge of internet culture. Knowing the memes before anyone else was secretly satisfying.
I think there's a phrase for it: Kids are assholes.
As a father (29) whose daughter (5) told him that she didn't like his gray hair because it means he is gonna die soon, can confirm.
Our generation grew up on offensive / edginess, things like late 90's shock rock, South Park, Jackass, Saw, etc. Nobody cares anymore, and it feels like nobody's tried to out-edge series like South Park. It feels like we've reached rock bottom so the only way is up. Which is a good thing btw.
With the exception of the "break glass to reboot/one more time the IP" moments
It has felt like a natural end to the long term cultural battled for acceptance of such basic expressions of working class language and humor, in a kind of "needing to break it down so we can build it back up" sort of way.
I'd dread to think of a cultural landscape where the previous puritanical average continued letting air out of the balloon at an excruciatingly slow rate, as opposed to the admittedly immature fart sound we reveled in for a few moments.
Series like Paradise PD are more trash and less politically edgy. I think you're right.
I find people who love edginess to feel some sort of moral or intellectual superiority to the commons or people they often communicate (example, in high school where you really have a random mixture of all kinds of personalities). Definitely a phase kind of thing
I will forever respect and cherish 4chan because it's pure, undiluted humanity in all its goodness and badness.
Dunno, it feels very diluted nowadays to me.
A community is defined by the selection process.
People who aren't sensitive to the general offensiveness of these communities come from all backgrounds and are effectively tolerant of each other in ways that are meaningful to them.
That Google search you suggested appears (barring some UI thing I'm missing because I'm on Mobile) to only have two results, your comment and the 4chan archive. Is there a name for a google search with exactly two results? I know one with one single result is called a Googlewhack.
A Twooglewhack.
Sounds like a 19th century robber baron
It's cheating if you use quotes.
https://archive.tinychan.net/read/img/1196772434
archive link for those who don't want to google
Very prophetic:
is this meant as a new scheme to pick up underage children by getting them one-on-one with no one else to monitor the two-way conversation?
FYI, ICQ had popularized this type of random chat long before 4chan existed.
Any time I used it in the last five years I had to wade through about ten obvious bots advertising some pornsite or scam before I got to a real person.
Then when you do get to a real person, 90% of the time they said "M or F?" and if you said M they'd instantly leave
To the founder of Omegle, I would say: do not lose heart. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. In the end, we will prevail over those who destroy the good works of others under the guise of false victimhood and social justice, and build a very special place in hell for them, where we will condemn them for all eternity.
I don't really see what aspect of this situation involves a false sense of victimhood, unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.
How is age verification supposed to work? I don't suppose users of the site are going to provide legal documents just to use it. It's tantamount to shutting it down.
I ask because there was a similar moral outrage around age verification for access to porn sites that I recall being a big issue a while ago. I don't recall exactly how it played out in court, but it appeared to amount to nothing, which I can't help but to feel was due to the fact that mechanisms to verify someone's age online are either trivial to circumvent or present such a high barrier to entry that no reasonable user would surmount it.
It's supposed to work perfectly. That was easy. Next?
But in all seriousness, age verification will soon be a legal reality. It's only "hard" because it's optional. When the government makes it required, they'll also have to make it possible - or those laws won't stand up in court. It'll probably require government issued digital IDs and MFA hardware.
How do you verify someone's age anonymously? More practically, how do you do this in a framework that works globally?
How do you verify someone's age anonymously
No anonymity on social media sites. Not saying that's desirable - but it's the logical conclusion. You can run your own site anonymously.
how do you do this in a framework that works globally
Lots of things work globally but are subject to local laws.
age verification wouldve killed it. most legitimate users use the site because they can just open the site and start talking without sign up
unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.
Mandated ID checks are fine as long as we're using it to bludgeon the privileged in the process?
Alas, the universe can stay unjust longer than we can stay conscious.
Still, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in.
Platitudes might help maintain optimism, but how do you get old clear-cutters and strip-miners to start planting trees?
A stitch in time is worth two in the bush
What makes you think the universe bends towards justice? For the last 10 years, every metric of personal and economic freedom has declined. Most countries peaked in 2007. Its starting to look like personal freedom was an anomaly and we’re now retiring to the historic norm.
Turns out Thrasymachus was right after all.
bends toward justice
[citation needed]
I truly admire your optimism.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery
Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are lazy") or is it measurably true?
I feel like it's obviously true.
We had some years of kind-of stability in the world with no significant big wars. But with recent events the world is feeling like "it is burning". Just because we got accustomed to the more peacefull live.
So, I wouldn't say its like "we always thought that". Its more like we had a good short phase and now its back to normal. Or maybe the good phase is the normal and the pendulum swings back?
The world would be much better if people learnt that wars even in places far from them such as between the middle east and the US, would have a network affect and bring instability to other parts of the world and soon near them. The world started "burning" again with the war on Iraq / Afghanistan.
The world started "burning" again with the war on Iraq / Afghanistan.
If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11, those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11 started it. Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide than ever during those two wars (although this does a terrible job of capturing deaths caused by war, but not directly from combat): https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
The 90s were relatively peaceful compared to the previous few decades, but we still had the Yugoslav Wars, Israeli-Palestine at times, the Gulf war, Rwanda.
You could also argue that without the US financing the Afghan side in the Soviet-Afghan war and the Iraq side in the Iraq-Iran war then the Taliban wouldn't have taken advantage of the Afghan power vacuum post civil war and that Iraq wouldn't have attacked Kuwait to avoid paying their debts, starting the Gulf War which was the prelude to the Iraq War
Yeah we definitely got what we paid for with Operation Cyclone. Unclear how things would have unfolded if Soviet expansion hadn't been opposed though.
so basically, you're suggesting that the terrorists goal to attack the US and destabilize the globe is correct, and the terrorists won?
sounds like the war shouldn't have happened, and the correct solution was not to do that
If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11, those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11 started it.
The narrative to push the war on Iraq largely also revolved around "WMDs" while the legality of the war still remains debatable.
Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide than ever during those two wars
I wouldn't measure peace just by number of deaths, but even if we were to do so, it is also worth taking into account the increased security measures and the less freedom we have to prevent deaths.
Have people always thought this [...]?
That does not support that they "_always_ thought this", it only means that this happened in the past. Another interpretation is that periods of hardship are followed by ones of stability and the generation that lived through the hardship notices differences in their young.
Even if people have "always" thought this, that doesn't mean they're wrong to think it today or that the complaint has always been invalid.
It's entirely possible that people have always been complaining about X and also that X is more prevalent today than it used to be.
Yes; moaning about both the youth of today and old people goes back, at least, millennia (though there are sometimes cultural taboos against moaning about old people which dampens that down).
My pet half-serious theory is that we currently talk a lot about the dastardly millennials and boomers because senior media staff are largely genX; note that we don't hear much about genX these days. This will start to change in a few years as genX starts to age out, and suddenly everyone will be complaining about genX and genZ. Whole new stereotypes will have to be forged (the old genX stereotypes from the 80s are very youth-of-today oriented and won't work for moaning about old people), and no-one will ever mention avocados again.
the whole generation-labelling thing is fabricated, likely because it gives the media something else to divide us with. the only officially labelled generation was the baby boomers.
It's measurable, but not in an agreeable fashion. I'm sure if you tracked curse words, or simply looked at the number or reports an admin has managed, you can track a change.
But you then argue with the metric. Maybe curse words aren't a good measure of hostility. Maybe the admin was overzealous, or underzealous and then corrected. That's what makes it hard to come to a consensus.
Anectodally, on the internet, I would agree. I feel post 2016 saw an uptick in hostility, and then the pandemic years of 2021/2022 saw another uptick.
Our mouthpiece to complain and share outrage is what changed. In Desert Storm or Bosnia, you'd get a 5 minute update on the war, tucked inside a 30m national news cast (not speaking for everyone but the majority of Americans). Now you get nonstop almost-live combat footage, citizen journalists (a good thing), along with disinformation from bad actors trying to manipulate the narrative.
In developing countries, living conditions improve and reduce the perceived value of work.
Back to Chatroulette then? Having not used either platform, what’s the difference?
Back to whatsapp and other encrypted services whereby the corporate overlord can plead ignorance of how thier systems are used. Omegle didnt evolve to meet the new standard: dont connect people. Let them do that themselves. Then you cannot be blamed when the wrong two people meet via your system.
Can you meet people randomly on any of those services? That would be an interesting feature.
No, but you can join massive "private" groups and find rando people yourself.
Is it anonymous?
Is HN? What degree of anonymity qualifies?
We were talking about substitutes for Omegle, so that degree of anonymity.
ome tv, and monkey app both require sign up
WeChat has a shake feature, also a people near me feature. I think telegram also has a location based feature.
At least in the country where I live the "people near me" features have been removed/blocked from WeChat/Zalo/Telegram because they are overwhelmingly (like 99% of the time) used for prostitution.
Prostitution happens over WA, SMS, plain old phone calls and everything under the sun.
They don't seem to go after the communication channels, they go after the discovery mechanisms.
"People near me" is sort of the opposite of Omegle.
We built a website over a year ago https://ehmeh.com/ In there you can video chat with multiple people, similar to Omegle. The difference may be that the video chat is in ASCII and the connection is done in WebRTC, fun alternative.
What I got from a quick search, the order was:
* Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats
* Chatroulette launched ~half a year later
* Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after that
I've not used either one so I don't know if there was more to it. Does explain how I knew about Chatroulette but not this one, even though people up above were talking about how it was an original idea.
So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn't want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?
Is there a list of websites that have been shut down due to this type of attrition? I'm aware of at least one other site[0] that has met the same fate. It would be interesting to see an exhaustive list.
[0] freeimage.us
The owner is currently being sued by a woman who used the site as a minor and was matched with a pedophile who convinced her to make and send CSAM. This isn't the usual kind of "CSAM intermediary liablility" lawsuit; the plaintiff is actually making an ordinary product liability claim. i.e. Omegle has no safety bars to keep kids from using the service ergo they are liable for me being abused by an adult.
That seems nuts to me. It's just a generic venue for people meeting people, like a cafe that happens to be online.
To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.
No cafe would allow an adult to sexually groom a child while sitting at a table.
Yes, 90% of cafes would, because just like Omegle, it's not their job or ability to monitor every single interaction between every single person and identify whether a conversation is appropriate.
Crimes happen on all technologies and in all venues, and they likely always will.
By their own case the explicit activity didn't even take place on omegle. The perv met the kid and went elsewhere. Of course that wouldn't be prevented in a cafe.
No parent would allow their child to communicate with a groomer.
No grooming happened on Omegle, she just shared her personal info there and kept in touch off the platform.
So they sue the platform that got them to meet, but not the one that allowed CSAM to be exchanged?
correct, like suing the city because you met a podophile in the city park
The decentralized cryptonet can't come fast enough!
So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn't want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?
No, not spam of CSAM (in the sense of distribution of material where the abuse occurred elsewhere), but actual grooming and abuse happening through the site.
e.g., https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/virginia-m...
the more specific proximate cause, I believe, is one of the current suits that has gotten past S230 immunity, possibly the ongoing product liability lawsuit:
Anyone know the tech stack this awesome 18 yr old used to create this service back in the day that was able to support so many concurrent users?
It used webRTC, at least in the early days. Same as Chat Roulette. That was why it was able to scale the way it did.
How? WebRTC came out in 2011 and wasn't even widely supported in web browsers until years later. Omegle came out in 2009, and launched video in 2010.
Ah, you're right. The video chat was definitely p2p though, I remember reading about it when it came out. I just tried to check what p2p video chat implementations were available back then, but no luck. Maybe a java plugin?
Flash.
A Flash plugin
I looked around and found an AMA [1].
Python, using the Twisted framework for networking.
Omegle runs on just one server: a Linode 2880. It used to be on a 720, which was very close to sufficient. No database at the moment, but if it never needs one, I'll most likely use PostgreSQL.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9vbd7/i_made_omegleco...
The link to the proof is dead :(
Here's a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20151228083734/http://omegle.com...
Redis is/was part of the stack
p2p?
Maybe I’m wrong, but my impression is that it has been a living-dead service for many years already. I’m old enough to remember when it was actually exciting to use Omegle and chat roulette, but I’ve tried on and off for many years now and my impression is that, even at the slight chance that you got someone other than a naked horny weirdo, nobody was really paying attention to the conversation or interested in anything other than 15-second meaningless interaction. We certainly lost something nice here at some point but I’m not sure it happened today.
Multiple years ago it was something to us - something new. There are too many people who do not care about it (similar services) these days, people are born with the internet and just take it for granted.
Another analogy could be the gas car industry. We just look at it differently nowadays, we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the world in any of these gas guzzlers. You could not do it in a Tesla or any other electric car, yet many want to just kill it off.
yet many want to just kill it off.
That's not because we take what cars can do for granted, it's because individual traffic is a major contributor to the mechanism that is actively killing our habitat. That isn't an opinion, it's a proven, peer reviewed, often-challenged-never-falsified fact.
And no, EVs will not make that better. They are just a different instance of the same problem.
So yes, we do want to "kill off" cars. Not because we take them for granted, but because they suck as an idea, have always sucked as an idea, and will always suck as an idea, no matter how they are powered.
What do you think of the argument that EVs actually do make this better, albeit not entirely, due to the efficiency difference between[0] (coal-fired) power plants and internal combustion engines in gasoline powered vehicles?
[0] https://blog.ucsusa.org/jimmy-odea/electric-vs-diesel-vs-nat...
What do you think of the argument...
I think that a single train can hold over 1000 people, and requires much less energy, not to mention space, materials, infrastructure and maintenance, than hundreds of individual cars in which these 1000 people sit in 1s or maybe 2s.
Again, it doesn't matter how they are powered; cars suck as an idea; simply because of how horribly they scale. They require tons of resources to build, they require tons of resources to maintain. They eat up tons of space. They kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. They are energy inefficienct compared to trains.
Oh, and railway-based public transport systems would be trivially easy to automate, compared to cars.
If we invested even a sizeable fraction of the resources into public transport that we waste on building ever more lanes and ever bigger parking lot hells right through our cities (aka. our livingspace), barely anyone outside of actual rural areas, would even need a car.
And this isn't a pipe dream. This is how actual people in actual cities live, today. Many european and asian cities are completely accessible by public transport.
There are many more ways that cars cause problems to our habitat much beyond carbon emission, they include: requiring roads which pave over local ecosystems and create heat islands and exasperates drainage, requiring large open parking lots which make a city less traversable in any form of transportation beside cars (but parking structures are better I suppose), creating noise pollution (a bit part of it is tire noise, EVs aren't silent at medium to high speeds), causing eutrophication and health issues when ablated tire particles get collected into runoff, also that cars are much deadlier per capita than most other forms of transportation like walking, biking, subway, airplane, (but safer than motorcycles if I remember correctly)
I disagree that they suck as an idea, they're just a misapplied one. Cars and combustion engines have done a lot for humanity. The bad ideas were: making excuses to sell as many cars as possible, investing in car infrastructure over mass transit, deceiving the public about the dangers of global warming once discovered, and for 50 years afterwards, ignoring/downplaying other externalities of fossil fuel extraction and use... Cars aren't really the villains in this story. It's just people being foolish and greedy, which they'll still be for the foreseeable future.
I think that's a very important and true argument, and something I have thought about for a while.
The thing is that these places only have value if people put in an effort, which is more likely to be the case when the platform and/or technology is new and only known by people who a priori have put in an effort to access it at all. When you mostly accessed web sites from desktop computers, you would be limited to use online platforms in the relatively small time window where you had free time at home, so the personal cost of using the platform was higher because you had to choose to take that time from other tasks that also required your computer.
Now everyone have a smartphone in their pockets and can access any online service at any time of the day, so the required effort to use them is a small fraction of what it used to be. As a result, the average user is not motivated to actually put in any effort, and because of this the quality suffers tremendously.
Maybe we should raise that lower bound on effort by requiring users to solve CAPTPTYCs - Completely Automated Programs To Prove That You Care - before you were allowed to interact with anyone online. A sort of proof-of-work for people to ensure that they have spent at least as much time on the content as they have on solving the puzzle that allowed them to publicize it.
when the planet is dead we can't go anywhere
we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the world in any of these gas guzzlers
This example supports your point, but not in the way you think.
Back when Bertha Benz (wife of Karl Benz, the founder of Mercedes-Benz) took the first ‘road trip’ to another part of Germany, she had to fill up the tank at a local chemist, had to cool the engine with water from ditches and streams, and had to have her brakes repaired by a local cobbler. [1]
Nowadays, people take it for granted that cars are reliable and that there are gas stations everywhere.
[1] https://www.hotcars.com/the-story-of-bertha-benz-and-the-fir...
This is so sad.
For all the conventional reasons: the victim of the abuse deserves sympathy, and that abuse shouldn't happen.
But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on the service, not the abuser. And that's sad because instead of being able to just make interesting stuff and put them online, we are being forced to consider "what's the worst possible thing that some evil bastard could use this for?" and prevent that. Again, like the responsibility is on us to not make things that could be used for evil, rather than the responsibility being on the evil bastard to not do evil things.
And ultimately, it means we'll go the same route as Omegle; it's just easier to not make stuff than fight this misallocation of blame. The world will be poorer without random quirky websites. Evil bastards will do their evil offline still, so no-one will be better off. But apparently that's what we want. It's so sad.
But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on the service, not the abuser.
Blame is not exclusive or zero-sum, and while there is obviously blame being placed on the service, I don't see any evidence that blame is not being placed on the abuser (or that less blame is placed on them than would have been if blame wasn't placed on the service as well.)
When there's money involved, blame always gets placed on the deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost never an individual person. If I spill a soda on the floor at Walmart and someone slips on it, they're going to sue Walmart and probably not me.
When there's money involved, blame always gets placed on the deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost never an individual person.
The individual abuser was located, arrested, criminally convicted, and sentenced to 8.5 years of prison and 20 years of restricted supervised release.
Many would consider that a significant form of blame.
This is true. Maybe I should have said "also placing blame on the service as well as the abuser"
The victim of this abuse had to log on to a computer each and every time they were “abused” which is lowering the bar further than I ever thought possible for there to be a victim
This is a remarkably bad take that indicates a severe lack of understanding about how abusers operate. Do better.
No, dude. I was abducted, and my captors tormented me by giving me papercuts all over my body. Naturally, I feel strongly that paper should be outlawed. It would be illogical to allow for the possibility of someone else going through what I went through. Down with pulp!
You're comparing paper cuts to sexual abuse. Don't do that.
Elsewhere in the thread this article with an embedded video was linked: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
The video, showing a BBC “journalist” attempting to ambush Leif, is one of the most… existentially disgusting? videos I’ve seen in a long, long time.
It’s so utterly performative. Such a transparent attempt by the “journalist” at painting himself as a certain sort of person. Not a single genuine emotion, action, expression, or word. Absolutely soulless and desperate attempt to virtue signal in the even more desperate hope of furthering his career. This “man” is no better than someone selling themselves on onlyfans. Actually, I’d posit he’s worse: the entire schtick requires disingenuous postering.
I don’t know what to do when seeing stuff like this. It’s depressing. I hope one day there’s a return to a much smaller internet and these people deign to just leave us alone. He’s a sad man and the fact his doing this will may well advantage him is even sadder. I guess I’ll go take a walk.
"He was definitely home, all the blinds were drawn" 5 minutes later, Leif is seen going from his car to his house
You can't make this stuff up.
Every time I see a BBC clip it's something ridiculous. There's probably a good business opportunity doing a mystery science theater 3000 version of BBC news at this point.
The guy can file a stalking and harassment case on BBC can't he ?
I was wondering about that. If someone is sitting at my doorstep for hours, no matter their intention or field of work, I'm calling the cops to have them removed
The reporter, Joe Tidy, isn't virtue signaling. He is an honest zealot full of righteous fury. He is 100% confident he's right, just like those who killed heretics during crusades a couple thousand years ago, burned witches a few hundred years ago, or exterminated capitalists as part of Cambodian Khmer Rouge a few decades ago.
He must be stopped at all cost.
In that video he asserts through the closed door that Omegle hasn't done anything "for the children" and then in the article they have one measly line about how Omegle actually has been productive on that front. The text now on the Omegle site seems to support that they did what they could as well. Of course they're not going to get a good conversation with him when that's how they're going to frame it compared to reality. Whether Omegle was doing enough or should exist to begin with are different arguments but the premise of "Omegle is doing nothing" appears very wrong and I imagine offensive to creator/employees.
Even more disconcerting is the possibility they believe they're pursuing righteousness genuinely rather than just for the reward.
Omegle was a horrible place that was not moderated enough and enabled groomers. It was also a place that felt very "old school internet" due to the "wild west style".
Microsoft and Apple enable groomers. they are platforms where abuse images are shown (despite telemetry being able to detect and stop it), they could easily detect someone using their OS to groom a minor but yet their hands are clean? come on.
Didn't Apple try to implement client-side CSAM scanning and then everyone threw a huge hissy fit over it? I mean the idea was flawed for privacy reasons but you cannot stop everyone without stripping all privacy from everyone.
I'm not actually pro-CSAM-scanning, I'm making a point that pointing the finger at a one-man-show website saying "he should have prevented this" is unfair because the whole tech stack could be attacked similiarly.
It was also a place that felt very "old school internet" due to the "wild west style".
And what's wrong with that. The current internet feels like a playground where we are forced to fall in order to the wall garden owner.
When you use the internet you should have the sense that the domain your going to access requires yourself to need to apply self caution.
Letting a 11 year old online without supervision is just lazy neglected parenting.
A playground where every surface is foam-lined, and the whole place is relentlessly patrolled by fascists in mickey-mouse costumes.
Don't forget the ads
Parents allowing children to have limitless, unmonitored access to the internet is more to blame than any given platform.
wow. i remember using omegle in 2010. the whole chat roulette craze. this guy dresses up the issue in some pretty overly dramatic and sentimental clothing… in reality this is the failure of yet another company that uses the old model. the model of the early internet where everything is free and everyone is anonymous. its just unviable and becomes less viable as the internet grows. captcha is broken… the old model is dead.
when you have a free service and broken captcha then you will be a magnet for crime, spam and you will hemorrhage money. maybe youll get advertisers if you sanitize the platform and now youve defeated the point anyway. or you can sell user data. at the end of the day people have to pay.
That's a depressing viewpoint.
The text chat version of Omegle could have easily been hosted on a single server with some kind of automated spam protection. Donations could have more than covered the costs to run it. The positive value it added to millions of lives far outweighs the negative.
Monthly users reaching 70 million. I doubt a basic server could handle that.
You’d be surprised what a well optimized server can do. Moores law hasn’t stopped. 70 million is a pretty low number, when modern $40 servers can easily do 10-100k requests per second.
the site you are currently leaving a comment on operates on the old model. so far it's working pretty well.
Ironically it is technically VC backed
most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It's not like some magical growth threshold crossed in 2010s, More and more of this audience was born internet-native too. It seems to be a cultural shift instead
If I could unmake the Internet I would in a second, without hesitation.
The lack of local community as everyone moves to a global gray sameness is the grossest thing to happen to this world.
Using it as a crutch to fool yourself into what you think is normal is not healthy and it's not a solution to real problems.
Omegle disappearing is neither surprising nor sad, and it's nothing personal against them specifically.
I expect to get down voted to oblivion because no one likes to hear harsh truths, but the internet has been a net negative for us all
I’m not sure if I’d call the internet itself a net negative. Somewhere around the time it was incepted it was fine. Exchanging emails and whatnot.
But what it has become now… I dunno, I regularly have calls with my family on the other side of the world. That’s definitely a positive. Everything attendant to the internet I do not like. The way it’s become nearly a requirement of life.
But would you have moved so far away from your family if you couldn’t have kept in touch with them over the Internet?
Probably, yeah. Phone calls would have sufficed. Video adds something, but sending regular letters and pictures would have been fun in a completely different way.
Except for potentially most of the population, the internet provided a more vibrant, welcoming, supportive and rich community than their local community ever could. The "gray sameness" is a recent phenomena and commanded by legal and state abuse, that a lot of the commenters above here lament about.
I would say that the online community has always been superficial
It feels good but you are still alone
It's never been a good thing, it's been a time sync and it's why birth rates are down, depression is up, loneliness is rampant, and everyone is addicted to narcissism machines
We must refuse the Khala to maintain our individuality. Like the Nerazim.
Omegle was always a horny and abusive place and a place that was so very skin colour sensitive (as usual this skipped the discourse). Pretty much nothing else. I am amused by the mentions of magical place people are lamenting. Besides it was a direct copy of Chatroulette.
But I understand. It’s always the case - one’s revolutionary is another’s terrorist.
Omegle was always a horny and abusive place and a place that was so very skin colour sensitive
So they had php or python code that did skin detection and altered the code branches according to the melanin level? That's interesting, can you elaborate on why they did such a thing?
Why the fuck would you and the other commentor assume I am talking about the tech stack! Can you please read the comment again and the see the part that points to the tech stack?
you're just horrible at articulating yourself, or else you're doing it on purpose (hand waving). my question was rhetorical because your comment was bs.
You comment on articulation and then you add that your question was rhetorical. Either, you really have severe comprehension issues, or you just can’t make up your mind. Either way, go away, Internet stranger. I shared what I felt. If you needed to ask something about it, at least don’t ask rhetorical questions. Or if you already think it was bs then please downvote and move on.
I shared what I felt.
making false allegations of racism ins't a "feeling", it's not an emotion, it's lying. Sorry I exposed you for lying.
What do you mean by skin colour sensitive? Did the service favour a person with specific skin colour or did it purposely exclude people with a specific skin colour?
The site was rife with perverts, Neo-Nazi propaganda, CSAM distribution, and honeypot operations. I think people are idealizing what it was in recent years, believing it was the same fun as in the early 2010s. It was an absolute shitshow.
The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common encounter is a pervert who quickly ends the chat. I probably would have needed to sink 300+ hours on the platform in order to meet one. And by the time I would have met this professor, I would most likely have gained nothing from the exchange. Therefore, in my experience, I have found such innocent encounters to be the exception. By far. There is no corner on the internet where that happens organically. Even on HN, where comments are verbose and technical, it's only because of the perceived clout and proximity to VC money. The open connectedness of the internet has little to do with it.
If you access Tor, which is considered the peak of anonymous interconnectedness, you will also find a draught of intellectual activity. I would love to find intellectual discussions occurring on Tor, if anyone knows one please let me know the onion address. (Pro-tip: it's an impossible quest.) Instead all you will find are CSAM, scams, and honeypots.
I have found that my life has gotten immeasurably better since I generally stopped using the internet. The reddit API lockdown woke me up and I realized pretty much everything on the internet is garbage. Even HN is of lower quality than before, with the average post being a flex of one's social status rather than a helpful tip from one hacker to another.
Fuck all this noise. The internet is so full of low quality social content that it is overall not worth using for social connection.
The internet's not great, but unless you live in an elite city with a well-paying job, you're not going to find better interactions outside.
I have taken out the word "outside" from my post, because you seem to be addressing a very minor component of my overall message. Please note: My main point is that pure, intellectual connection is almost nowhere to be found. It is drowned out in a sea of shit.
While I did criticize HN in my post, I will note that it is sort of a last bastion of intellectual conversation. I believe the motives are not as pure as before, and I lament that. There simply is not a space for intellectual conversation for intellectual conversation's sake on the internet anymore. It is all twisted.
even if you are, quality interactions don't just fall in your lap.
The public internet has always been garbage dude. Ever since eternal september in 93. The trick is a good filter. It seems like you lucked into some good filters in the past, but forgot to rotate them when they stopped working
Humor me. Recommend a filter for me to get me started. It doesn't even have to be that good and if I'm disappointed I won't be able to reply anyway.
The original HN discussion of Omegle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=539753
The site has only been featured here twice, for its birth and death.
The yin and yang of tech
The Alphle and Omegle, if you will
Omegles come and go, but "how is it hacker news?" is here forever.
Such classic hn comments:
"Not very interesting."
"This is a lot of fun actually - but how is it hacker news?"
I first used Omegle in 2009 in college. I did not realize Hacker News had been around that long lol.
I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.
You’re not alone my friend. The “old good times” internet is long gone and the situation is evolving very fast.
It's still there, the old internet. You just uave a hard time finding it with corporate tools like the modern google.
It also just feels much smaller. Outside of maybe 4chan, none of those classic style forums feel anywhere close to as acitve as their heyday. Like, we're talking maybe 2-3 comments per day.
It definitely doesn't need to be Twitter/Reddit active, but a cozy but empty forum isn't a community so much as a small gathering.
feels like this entire thread is complaining about the prisoners' dilemma. everything wrong with the modern internet can be explained through microeconomics.
or microbiology if you prefer: bacteria (individual agents in a capitalist system) find a new source of food (the internet). the bacteria evolve to optimize their food collection, irrespective of what is "good" for the ecosystem. the food chain shakes up, the predators become apex, and when they've taken too much, they die off in a cycle.
right now we're at the "taking too much" stage. but I don't think anybody is dying off.
The old internet is still definitely knocking around. Head out past the walled-gardens into the hinterlands and it’s there. You’re gonna need your own map though.
While I totally understand there's the potential for abuse, I don't think Omegle should be penalized for stuff like this. From my understanding, there's no addictive, profit-maximizing matchmaking or anything going on - it's just a service which lets two strangers talk to one another. Of course you will have bad actors target any platform, but for a lowkey site, it seems sad that they would need to shut down because of something like this.
I found this passage particularly relevant:
Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield
Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm. Obviously there were creeps on there, but not interacting with them was easy and the only way for anyone to seriously harm you was to give them information about who you were outside of omegle.
A while back I was curious about what sorts of awful things could happen from omegle chats and when you look into it, every single case ultimately involves people continuing conversations via Snap or Instagram.
It's sad that this free, no-harm site has to shut down while Snap/Insta routinely ignore legitimate criticism of their ability to encourage abuse and have enough lawyers to ensure they'll never have to face any consequences for enabling abuse.
Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm.
I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO
IP alone makes it fairly tricky for non-state actors to identify someone, just roughly geolocate them. Good for freaking out people that don't know how the web works, but not useful for much more.
The flip side is that p2p means that nobody is snooping in on those video conversations. Omegle couldn't spy on it's users once they had entered a video chat. It was also fairly easy to see how they implemented the monitoring they did if you have a webdev background: periodically in between chats the omegle client requested an image from your cam.
I believe the whole video chat component, while initially using flash, was ultimately implemented using WebRTC, which is pretty cool and as shame more places don't make use of this.
This really summed up my feelings about it. Were there creeps and people trying to get up to illegal stuff on the site? Absolutely. I ran into plenty over the years, but two hits of ESC later and I was on to someone else.
It some ways, it was kinda like Craigslist Missed Connections or something like that. Just people looking for... something into the void of the internet. And sometimes you met something you didn't want at all, and sometimes you met someone you really connected with, either for just a moment or for long enough that you wanted to keep up with them.
Wonder how Chris Poole is doing. I loved using his site in the 2000s and have been amazed to see the creativity it has unleashed, some for good and some not so much.
moot sold 4chan long ago
to the founder of 2chan.
2channel. not futaba / "2chan"
He worked at Google for a pretty long time after selling 4chan, then moved to Japan semi recently iirc.
Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no parental controls.
And at the same time I do think computer providers, Windows, Mac OS and all that don't offer good enough parental control.
Age verification is a problem as well, but it's foolish to think every website and app will implement proper safeguards. I mean, Omegle could simply be replaced by some darker Russian clone with even less effort put towards fighting crime.
Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in to Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And only apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be included.
And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child accounts.
The idea that some KYC would be forced on all online website and apps just doesn't make sense otherwise.
And now it would be fair to sue websites that claim to be child safe and have opted in, if they turn out not to be.
Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no parental controls.
for those of us who were kids when the internet was basically a social unknown, it's not something that 'became normal', the internet didn't come about censored from the get-go -- these moderation/censorship tools were added in after-the-fact to cope with parental and (more importantly) government worries that children were being victimized via exposure.
and, for the most part, we grew up OK even without the heavy-handed censorship.
Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in to Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And only apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be included.
i'm not necessarily anti-censorship, and i'm never having kids -- my opinion on this is worthless for all practical sake -- but i'll say this : If I didn't have the freedom to tinker and explore with the systems that took up my free-time as a child there is no way I would have grown up to have such expertise now.
Take that however you will. I know nothing of child care but I do recognize the opportunities in my own life that made me grow as an individual; having 'cyber-space' as my 'home' from an early age offered a lot of opportunities that were unique and self-improving.
I feel there's plenty of space for children to tinker, even in an accept list scenario. In fact, it's more so the spaces that empower you to create that would be on it, since they involve no "dangerous" social interaction. Programming environments, drawing and writing applications, game makers, etc.
That said, parents could decide to let their kids use adult user accounts, maybe supervised, or if they trust their child, or depending on their exact age. And if they do, they'd be taking the liability, not the platform whose EULA specifies otherwise.
At least this all seems a much better approach to balance safety of children on the internet, while leaving adults to have whatever free and wild spaces they want for themselves.
The alternative seems to block it for everyone. Or to have some ridiculous requirements like full blown KYC that either mean complete loss of anonymity for everyone, or unsustainable rules that indirectly mean it's not tenable to offer such spaces even to adults.
Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no parental controls.
I got handed a modem at age 9 and I started dialing into local BBSs.
I learned how to use paragraphs because I got made fun of for posting giant blocks of text.
The reason I wasn't using paragraphs initially is that they hadn't been taught to me yet in school.
A couple of years later I got on to the Internet proper.
In many ways it was wonderful. The optimism, the feeling that something amazing was happening. The hope that once everyone could talk to each other that a new era of global understanding could be reached.
At the age of 13 I was able to go on technical forums and if I put enough thought into what I said, my ideas were considered to be of no lesser or greater worth than the ideas put forth by others.
Although, back then the Internet was a bit more mature on average so I felt that I needed to at least try and put thought into what I said. (Not saying I always succeeded...)
And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child accounts.
Or how about, when someone under 18 is using a computer, every hour a giant message appears on the screen "DON'T SEND NUDES TO ANYONE. NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY. PS: ALSO DON'T BUY GIFT CARDS FOR ANYONE ONLINE."
That'd probably solve 60% of problems that underage users get into.
Jokes aside, I get it. The Internet is a worse place than when I first joined. But I'm more scared of kids running into curated video feeds that lead them down paths of extremism (e.g. red pill, gamergate) than I am of pedophiles.
I still remember the times we were educated to be anonymous in internet and never reveal personal details. How times have changed...
I've never used Omegle myself, but I've watched all of Harry Mack's Omegle Bars videos (freestyle rapping) and they are golden. Always fun to see him matched with some random kids and brighten their day:
The loss of Harry Mack’s Omegle Bars was the first thing that came to mind for me.
He was retiring the series at 100 episodes anyway, but yeah a sad day.
Wow, he finished that just in time (ep 100 was released just last week).
I just discovered him yesterday and ended up watching something like 20 videos last night. This was also the first thought that came to my mind when I was reading the announcement.
Every social app is a party, and every party peters out one way or another. Too few people? It's dead. Too many people? Chilling effects. No budget to police the place? It becomes a magnet for abuse / spam / porn / scams / human trafficking / you name it. This party lasted more than most, they should be proud to have had such a long run.
Not sure what parties you are going to but mine have never had human trafficking
Neither do mine, but it happens in some night clubs for example.
Can you even call it a party then?
/jk
its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and amplify the evil forces that harms other people including children?
+ the tool creator shouldnt be at the helm when it goes super viral. cos once everyone shows up, it will as the microbiologist and ecologist rene dubois observed, "[any successful social innovation can be] pushed to the point of absurdity".
when a tool goes viral i suppose it should be "taken over" (reeks of totalitarianism no?) by the community but it clashes with the ethos of proprietary, capitalist and indivdualist culture, the need for the culture to spotlight one person, they want them to become very famous and become very rich which leads to hate directed at them. where is the compassion for a mark zuckerberg say?
its not that evil shut this person and their service down, its more like a hammer finally whacking a nail down thats been sticking out too long.
better to be anonymous and not so successful. nothing fails like success. u could meet random people on IRC too, because its not so sticking out, its still operating.
its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and amplify the evil forces that harms other people including children?
Care to elaborate on your accusation? In my world, Omegle was about things like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q
sure that is very cool. thanks for sharing. shows the possibility of this medium. i didnt mean that the author did a bad thing.
well yeah, that's why it's shut down
I didn't want to spend time reading that wall of text, so I wanted a summarized version of it. Asked ChatGPT (4) to do it for me and it told me that Omegle is not going to close. My intuition told me otherwise, so the irony is that I spent more time than needed on this.
https://sharegpt.com/c/yhV8Hjh
Is this a sign of falling GPT quality? I think this was extremely easy to infer.
PEBCAK, I went to omegle.com and was able to infer exactly what the author meant. It took me approx. 2 minutes to do so. Using ChatGPT to read short things like this is akin to only reading the headline of an article -- you tell me if the latter makes much sense usually.
2 minutes is quite fast, congrats.
I inferred this information by seeing the number of comments on HN (a relevant parameter in estimating the importance of an event imo), the time period 2009-2023 and then immediately after clicking seeing a tombstone. This took me under 2-3 seconds.
The rest of the info I wasn't going time to spend on was the motives etc. It's not the first postmortem I see, I was just curious to why by skipping all of the boilerplate. Omegle is not important to me, but I know it was quite a phenomenon .
My point was that GPT failed blatantly at inferring this same easy task.
Claude nails it without a sweat.
“ All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won.”
This is something that most people don’t understand and fail to accept. The human species for millennia has been fighting, stealing, rapping, killing and kept doing bad things to each other. This is in our nature and will never change. No matter how much moderation, AI checks, safety measures and good “players” exist, there will always be bad actors with new ways to abuse/misuse your service.
This is a sad fact we all need to accept :-(
Have you read the article? It feels like you are defending the very idea the author is fighting against. Yes, we must accept that fact, and no, we must not let it affect our freedoms and our lives.
Yes, I did read it (in fact I always first read the HN posts and then comment).
I fully agree with the author, the introduction of moderation/censorship is not in the right direction and we shouldn't introduce mandatory measures to monitor and restrict activities based on what might happen and how something can be misused.
On the other hand we have to acknowledge that some things/situations are not so easy to judge and human nature plays a very important role in this. I'm sad about this realization of how our society is behaving and on how our lives are affected, but there is no easy way out.
We can't stop genuinely sick people from committing crimes because they want to, but it is entirely possible to reduce the motivation for many crimes.
Removing motivation is usually about economics, policy, removing access or ability, and whatever the word is for making it hard via structures (example: a company with a culture of 'look the other way' will make it easy to commit white collar crimes).
Combine that with a rule of law which treats all people equally and ensures that even small offenders get caught will make most people not consider it. The 'punishment' need not be harsh as long as the perpetrator is found. There is good evidence that it is the likelyhood of being being caught that deters crime much more than the sentence.
The first thing we could do is remove laws which make people criminals for doing things that are not viewed as criminal. One of the reasons prohibition was so terrible for American culture was that it make most adults into de facto criminals for doing something they viewed as normal. Once everyone is a criminal then many people are acclimated to it and see all laws as 'if I don't get caught, then who cares?'.
That said, if someone really wants to rape someone no law in the world is going to stop them from doing it, and someone who is in a jealous rage will not be pacified by laws either.
This hits me particularly hard. I met relationships, mentors, peers, pupils, friends of philosophy, fellow software developers, builders, dreamers, businessmen - and everything in between - from Omegle, all in different stages of my life.
I've messaged each and every one of them, just now, about the news - on the many platforms I added friends from Omegle with.
Conversations on Omegle changed my politics, it changed my beliefs, it changed my belief on systems of structure, changed my thoughts on strangers and humanity at large (as built by 8 billion of them).
Tragic. Thank you, Leif.
Is it something from a long time ago or did you manage to do that in recent years too? Just curious.
In the last 3 months, I managed to meet at least one example for all nine types of people I gave.
Used tags: politics, constitution, trump, reddit, liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, philosophy, music, compsci, computers, socialmedia, debate, ama, business, america
(I found that these tags made for the best conversations over the years. None of them stand as an endorsement)
The beauty of the internet. Thanks for sharing.
Despair is trendy, which makes doing it easier; it makes it normalized. Perhaps previously a 'I'm not going to give up; I'm going to keep fighting for what I care about!' message would be normalized, and because of that the Omegle founder would feel strong and supported instead of alone.
(I don't know the person or much about their situation; I'm just using what I read to make a general observation.)
Sounds like he's been fighting for a long time and eventually tired.
It's a bit presumptuous to say that his actions / statement are due to despair being trendy. Everyone has their own "It's not worth it anymore" moment.
See my second paragraph; I'm not really talking about this person.
Omegle has fewer than 30 employees, according to some sites online. I can't help but wonder whether having a more robust ops and legal team would have prevented this outcome. Founders shouldn't feel like they're going to have a heart attack at 30 if they've hired the right size of team. One (probably frivolous) lawsuit for a nearly 15-year-old company shouldn't be existential.
One is fewer than 30. Did he have any? How was he making money at all?
Job review sites suggest he's had many employees over the years. Potentially over 200.
Can't say I didn't see this coming... Omegle today is very different than historically. I remember when I was much younger I would find a bot or a person just looking for sexting maybe once in 5. Now it seems that the genuine "wanna make a friend" people are 1-100. It is wild how it turned into just a horny site, and it makes me sad that it never had the opportunity for a resurgence.
Maybe it's because of my age, but this is the first I'm learning that it wasn't always just a horny site. I never visited it for that reason.
Even until a few years ago, Spy Mode was mostly devoid of the "M?" hookup posters, and the bots were somehow relegated to the "questioner" rather than the chatters.
This is like suing Google because a scammer used Gmail
No, it’s like shutting down a house that brings in kids and then puts them in a room with adults who want to fuck them or sell them or whore them out or all of the above.
It’s like shutting down a trap house that drug dealers setup and sit inside by the door where junkies stay and have to pass the dealer offering a reup to get out the front door.
If someone is raped in a mall they don’t shutdown the mall. If the mall turned into the place everyone goes to because that’s where you rape people, they’d shut it down without hesitation.
The people doing the bad shit are also being dealt with but shutting down the places that facilitate the bad shit is part of stopping the bad shit, especially when the owners of the place didn’t seem too concerned with prevention and almost seemed like they kinda knew about and allowed it wink wink. Gmail isn’t anything like what Omegle was and your comparison is nonsense.
The app is full of pedophiles. It will not be missed.
Only because the platform also has kids on it. Both groups still exist. My guess is both groups will just spend more time on other platforms like Roblox.
It's a shame. Even before Omegle, I remember when ICQ had a random match text chat feature. I had some great conversations on there. Briefly used Omegle for the same, but even years back when I tried it the signal to noise was a lot lower. I'd love it if someone found a way to do it sustainably.
I met so many people from ICQ random friend searches. Met them in real life, still talking to some. Skype had voice channels too, admins of channels similar to IRC. They shut it down for the same reasons.
The Internet we grew up with is dying. I wish we could go back to dial-up days.
The internet some of us grew up with has been gone a long time. Even back in the early days of AOL/Yahoo chat rooms, people were inappropriate with children though.
Omegle is the direct target of these attacks
Does anyone here have any more details about exactly what types of attacks Omegle was being targeted?
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
My guess would be activists and strong regulatory/legislative pressure, moral panic. Kinda resonates with the recent legislative attacks on E2EE.
This makes me so mad, and it should make you mad too. Omegle isn't substantively different from Reddit or Discord or an MMORPG chat channel, but it's currently being dragged through the legal system while presumably the others are not.
The truth is, Omegle's real sin is being midsized. There's a real risk in being a certain-sized company. Large enough that suing you is likely to result in a payout, but small enough that you can't just absorb the lawsuit cost.
Shouldn't make you mad. Thats just how the nature of things go.
Basically, the hipster viewpoint is ironically correct - anything that gets popular turns to shit. Once you start making something that appeals to a broad reach of people, you start optimizing for the lowest common denominator of society.
Imagine if Omegle was structured in a way where you had to download an app, for linux specifically, and instead of a central website, you had to set up STUN servers to do direct peer to peer chat. This is far to complex for "normal" people, but it would be still around today, as well as much higher quality.
This is even true of software development. Think about this next time you hear someone say how they don't want to have to tweak settings to get Linux to work, and instead buy a Mac for some bullshit reason like battery life, not realizing they are buying into a system that is opposite in spirit of software development (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...).
I wonder if using GPT-4 vision api would make moderating Omegle significantly cheaper and automated. AI could save the company.
That's like killing a mosquito with a bazooka.
Using GPT-4 vision on all users would be extremely expensive. Way simpler models can detect nudity. (and they do mention they had great success using those) And if the idea was to detect child abuse from text, it would also be quite expensive to use the language capabilities on every discussion.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity.
I feel a bit the same, but why?
.
Yes, this message from the founder sounds very heartfelt and earnest. But if he truly could not anticipate the many ways that this service would be abused, and in fact the ways it is especially attractive to people with bad intentions, then he is profoundly naive.
It reminds me of Craigslist. Similarly well-intentioned, but eventually the company has gotta face the facts about how the service you're offering is conducive to bad conduct, even if unintentionally so. And if you can't build in sufficient safeguards, yes, it's practically inevitable that you'll face legal pressure.
He implemented algorithms to automatically time out people who were mentioning a variety of rapey terms and paid moderators and built AI algorithms to (mostly successfully) wipe out the rampant sex pest behavior in video chats.
He did about the best job you can do without a team that costs tens of millions of dollars, and the result was being sued and accused of being a pedophile.
Amazing. This post is 1 hour old and Wikipedia is already updated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle
"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."
Wikipedia is so fast, soon they will predict the news
This is pretty sad. Are there any alternatives to Omegle?
Chatroulette
Good for them!
Knowing when to call it quits is very wise. I mourn the end of a characteristic internet site, but I respect the founder.
Yeah given the prevalence of bots in its final years, I can see how eventually the effort:reward ratio dropped, especially with legal issues on top of that.
But Omegle will be missed for sure.
It's unfortunate that I only now found about this site, now that it's shut down.
I'd never heard of it either. And the comments make it sound like there was a big difference between what it started as and what it turned into.
It's times like this that I become sad that the world of cryptocurrency and DAOs is so overrun with scams. So often that stuff is a solution in search of a problem. Finally we have a case where there's an actual problem to be solved wrt operating in a legal grey area, but is crypto even up to the job here if there's no obvious profit to be made?
To be fair, if Omegle was operating anonymously on some sort of real-time blockchain, that would make it harder to prevent abuse. But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in any app store, which would filter out the sort of vulnerable/naive users who are at the greatest risk.
But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in any app store
Which would also filter out all non tech savvy people, for better or worse.
warrant canary perhaps?
Reading through the comments, I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned the Yahoo Chat era. YC was huge!
I’m surprised seeing all the positive comments here. I’ve been on the internet since it started, but only recently within the last couple years had heard of Omegle. I’ve never actually used it. My personal experience was that whenever it was mentioned, it was never for anything good. Most often it would be mentioned with heavy implications that it was the place to do shady shit with underage people. I never once heard it mentioned for any positive reason. The fact it was only ever talked about in ways that implied screwed up stuff is why I never cared to go use the site and see what it actually was. I’m not special or unique, and my outlook is basically that if I’ve heard of something, since I’m an average person, then it must by that point be pretty commonplace. So if my experience was that I only heard mention of Omegle by people who were shady, then it’s safe to say that it was commonplace for that site. Mind you this was on another shady app, whisper, where this was always happening, but the amount of times it was mentioned was not insignificant. Based on what I experienced, the app was used by shady people doing shady things and it was known for that. That’s the only experience I have with the name Omegle, so it shutting down isn’t something I am bothered by. The positive comments here are the surprising part honestly. How could a site be a wholesome good thing for so many people yet also a seemingly well known vehicle for illegal underage activity, on a roulette style app, and yet those two worlds never crossed paths? That seems impossible to me but then again I’ve no idea how it worked to be able to say. Good riddance imo, because I only ever heard bad shit about it.
RIP and a hearty fuck you to every bastard who helped kill it
The Internet is dying.
This is so sad to read. He hits the point about where our society is going.
Wow I'm glad Harry Mack (https://youtube.com/harrymack) got his time in on there. What a collection of memories he racked up.
Sad to hear that the platform is shutting down due to lawsuits. It doesn't make much sense to change the speed limit of a street where kids run around unattended in the middle of the night. Sad to hear the instances of abuse even more though.
TCPIP Omegle
Wow fuck, I was on there sketching portraits of people just yesterday. This really sucks. RIP
Powerful statement, I hope everyone reads it.
Didn't know Leif founded Omegle but he's struck me as one of the most sincere and well intensioned people I've encountered.
I’m a huge fan of rap freestyler Harry Mack. He has used Omegle to do incredible freestyle raps for random people. I guess that is now over :(
Why didn’t he sell to Facebook or something?
I feel sad cause I just now heard of this haha
After reading his statement go and watch the psychopathic BBC reporter going to his house shouting "why don't you want to protect children". Then his decision will be easy to understand. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
Omegle was something I always intended to try but was too chicken to.
Oh well :/
I don't have much to add except that this was very thoughtfully written, and I appreciate the sentiment very much.
I'll leave a quote spoken by Keanu Reeves in To the Bone:
"This idea you have, that there's a way to be safe, it's childish and cowardly. It stops you from experiencing anything, including anything good."
A reminder that the kind of public that got Omegle shutdown will likely never face consequences for the actions they have done throughout their lives.
From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.
This was a not-unusual story for people active online in the '80s.
I wonder how the world-expanding has changed, now that everyone's online. I feel like I only have a partial and rough high-level understanding.
Nowadays, for example, every gay kid in every small town knows they're not alone, which is a great advance for humanity.
But everyone is also being bombarded, conditioned, tracked, manipulated, and exploited pervasively online.
What things can we contemporary techbros do, to keep all the goodness of making online accessible to everyone, but remove much of the current badness?
(I mean, after we spend 5 minutes removing various kinds of third-party trackers from sites we control, what's the next thing we can do?)
Omegle will be sorely missed. It was one of the last censorship-free (or perhaps more charitably, uncurated) places you could still go to. I remember the very early days of text-only mode and was using it up until very recently. Unfortunately bad actors will always try to muck up censorship-free zones, maliciously and deliberately.
Internet is becoming sadder and sadder. Mega corporations being mega corporations, ads, dark patterns, community-focused websites becoming mega corporations...
The author was right on point, the government and the people moralizing want exactly what they described —- an internet fed to users, with minimal interaction.
This gives more power and stability to government and those moralizing (who are currently in power). Notice the constant censorship, it comes directly from the politicians who argue “we have to remove encryption - for the children!” Arguments. Those same individuals in government, censor opposition where they can and promote imo very authoritarian views.
I also agree, everyone has a breaking point. It’s been amazing to watch the increasing attacks since 2016, it’s been unrelenting.
Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.
Good opportunity to go out and remember how it is to meet random people live in parks, theatre, sporting centres, libraries, coworking spaces, and of course - bars.
Touching
Only thing I know about Omegle is all the pranking videos and people playing music for others on youtube. Like https://www.youtube.com/@SomethingAboutChickens or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKbLGu4xsPE
Some good memories were made over there thats for sure!
Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn’t the Omegle brand and domain name be worth a considerable amount - with the caveat that it be sold to a responsible buyer?
It seems like the creator is in a rough patch and faced rising social and financial problems from Omegle, and it has seen a BIT of a decline, but it’s a name we all know, and the image/use/etc can be turned around and the creator could even still be involved in whatever capacity he wishes.
Just seems kind of a waste to replace it with a goodbye page.
Whenever a giant tree falls, many saplings get a chance to grow. Hope we see even better omegles take its place.
To op: please consider open sourcing your abuse detection tech if it doesn't give the bad guys an edge. I'd hate for bad people to abuse these new services.
Is he referring to some specific event or it was generally just too difficult to run?
Good riddance and here's why: Jon Minadeo II ( https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/neo-nazi-jon-mina...) had been using Omegle for sometime to spread racist and antisemitic ideas to young kids. With no way to police this activity and no law against doing so, he appeared to be increasing his following. I used to be a "free internet" advocate, but the older I get and as a parent, my thinking has changed. We have to stand for something that protects our children, and an anything goes internet isn't that. I know this may be an unpopular viewpoint.
It was the purest form of social media before social media was even a thing. In an age where it's increasingly more difficult for people to meet a lot of others accessibly, it's a shame.
I met my SO on Omegle...
Damn I spent time on Omegle, haha minefield but sometimes you find good people.
Part of a larger move to kill off the free corners of the internet. The UN and G7 governments freely talk and plan their means to reestablish the narrative dominance they had before the internet.
Just about anyone or anything can be taken down with the pairing of q woman willing to publicly claim abuse, with no proof required beyond her word, and a lawyer willing to take the case.
The Verge:
“Omegle gained a reputation as a breeding ground for sexual abuse of minors, leading to a prominent lawsuit “
Take any physical space that developed this reputation, it would also have been shut down by lawsuits.
Is there a specific political action group or organization behind the pressure Omegle received that isn’t being called out? Or is it just that the general social context has enabled people across the board to attack more freedoms more successfully. If anything I think the pendulum is slowly starting to swing back but maybe not on the “for the children” front.
I have no sympathy for this, he should have moderated it far, far better. He let it become what it was before he shut it down. He should have shut it down 10 years ago.
A blow to serendipity. What a shame. RIP.
What a powerful sign off.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services
I’ve been feeling this very acutely as well, but most people I spoke to say nothing has changed. Good to know it’s not just me, although it’s unfortunate things are changing this way.
This is one things on my long list of things to try that I never got around to, and now, never will.
It's specifically FOSTA that has harmed Omegle, killed craigslist personals and affected other sites with social networking features: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-fosta-u...
I love how the only two omegle.com links on hackernews are one from opening in 2009 and one from closing in 2023
Did they ever resolve the question about how it’s supposed to be pronounced? O-mee-GLE, O-mI-gl’, Om-hi-GLE?
For others like me who don't use this service: apparently there were a lot of people "shaking hands with the milkman", hoping their work would be celebrated by rando matches. I wonder why it is difficult to moderate this, one of the first few matches should have been a moderator but maybe they just didn't make enough money to justify such costs.
Redistribution of consequences strikes again.
Once upon a time, I was aimless and ended up on omegle after someone suggested it to me. For 8+ months I kinda lived on it, and watching countries come and go depending on timezones was quite funny, you could recognize speech/writing patterns in different cultures. You'd know in a minute if someone was chinese or colombian. A fun anthropological experiment.
I’m not sure why Omegle isn’t being propped up by big tech players for this case. If Omegle loses it sets a tremendously bad precedent.
My patience and understanding for the woman suing is completely dried up. She’s trying to make the entire world of communication a worse place.
What’s next, the ISP is sued for carrying the traffic? It’s absurd. She must go down.
What attacks were happening to this site?
If he is well within his right and the law to host it can't he just... ignore them entirely?
I don't understand.
I'm really sad about this. I know that a lot of really desperate people used the text chat feature when they needed someone to listen, and there's certainly a lot of people who are alive and happy today because they found someone to talk to there when they needed it. I can't deny that there have also been cases where people's lives have been made worse or ruined because of something that happened to them, but I think on the balance the site made the world a better place.
would direct connections instead really impact the nature of the communication that much? i'm not sure that it would. a much less centralized/controlled version of omegle could exist on a quite small budget, perhaps much to the dismay of those who seek it's closure.
This is devastating. I have so many fond memories of meeting fellow weirdos over text. The days where StumbleUpon always took you somewhere exciting, cool, beautiful, interesting, funny, or novel. Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s.
I even used it during pandemic times as a way to dance with strangers over video; putting on ridiculous outfits and playing disco were some of the moments from those dark times that I still cherish.
RIP Omegle! You will be missed, by me and many others.