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.
Omegles come and go, but "how is it hacker news?" is here forever.
Omegle 2009-2023
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#342Gives 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)
While.we are on the subject of Omegle youtubers, I also love Something About Chickens
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#343> 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…
[deleted]
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#344> 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.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#345> 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…
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.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#346warrant canary perhaps?
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems to me there is an obvious qualitative difference between a company that manufacturers cars or kitchen knives and a company that creates a service that uses random matchmaking to repeatedly introduce a serial pedophile to unsuspecting underage victims. Sure, people _can_ abuse any service, this seems like a service that wasn’t just ripe for abuse, it was essentially perfectly designed to enable it. Moreover in t…
Ford might manufacture a car driven by a serial drunk driver. Perhaps they need to install breathalyzers in all their cars, by default. I'm not really sure how much more ripe for abuse Omegle was compared to, say, Discord. Pretty much any video chat service can be abused to send or receive illegal content, and to abuse and manipulate other people. These are risks inherent to anything enabling communication. Short of…
Again the pointless and frankly silly comparison to cars… they’re categorically unrelated product classes: Ford‘s cars didn’t intentionally, as a feature of the vehicle, randomly put you into head on collision situations with others, which is essentially what Omegle did by design, while also NOT (in any sense) being fruitfully comparable to a manufacturer of vehicles.
Same with the equally pointless comparison to Discord… Omegle wasn’t merely a video chat service, it made random matches that the user could narrow by identifying their own interests; an adult male user identifying as being deeply interested in things only children would be interested in could readily and easily (and obviously) weaponize the platform, and Omegle absolutely could have (and should have) used the many and obvious means available for profiling and identifying such incongruous users, which (sure) would include human moderators.
There’s an enormous ethical difference between not doing anything whatsoever to prevent abuse and perfectly preventing abuse, and you seem to think they had no obligation to prevent any because they couldn’t prevent all… they don’t exist any more (thankfully) because lawyers started to (correctly) point out that that isn’t how either ethics or tort law work.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#348[flagged]
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#349I 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.
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 ev…
Try skiing or hiking. Basically anything with high enough effort bar or cost bar is a sufficient proxy for this filter.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#350So 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.…
The decentralized cryptonet can't come fast enough!