241–250 of 1001 posts
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 emotio…
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)
He just did the 100th episode the other day and announced he wouldn't be doing any more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who thinks the internet ‘just get’s worse’ never had a full Usenet feed in the 90’s. shudder
/ alt.binaries.* enters the chat
Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was personally offended.
I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Anyone who thinks the internet ‘just get’s worse’ never had a full Usenet feed in the 90’s. shudder
In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.
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. https://www.…
To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.
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…
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.)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
By that standard I cannot see how any reasonable person could justify building anything at all; most of us, not being evil bastards, have imaginations which will simply fail to suggest such uses.
At the same time, it is hard to imagine someone letting go of implementing an idea because of vague negative future effects that are not real in the present. And there is a lot of money incentivizing betting on lots of new ideas to see what takes off.
So it's like, if we uncover the next transformative technology that we know little about the future effects of, we just have to eat the cost of proliferating it everywhere before countermeasures can be figured out, if they can be created at all?
Sometimes I think the ease of virality in software could be a Great Filter. If not something farfetched like human extinction, then the Great Filter of human isolation, or of lasting intergenerational conflict, or something else that's profound but not totally catastrophic. Not only is new tech too tempting to spontaneously put down, but it's nearly impossible to know when to put it down. I think maybe if information overload and the like was hypothesized about like AI is starting to be today, we would still not be able to leave social media uninvented, because nobody had tried it and witnessed it fail yet. But the Great Filter comes in when maybe you can only witness certain failures once.