291–300 of 1001 posts
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.
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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 down…
What "attacks" is he referring to?
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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 c…
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
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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 c…
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 o…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.
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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
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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…
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.
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 c…
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?