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Omegle 2009-2023

omegle.com

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Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#381

Post by yawpitch »

RakutenSatori wrote: post #232
yawpitch wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#382

Post by noirbot »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #219
johntiger1 wrote: post #80

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…

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…

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#383

Post by noirbot »

dragonwriter wrote: post #174
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #16

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.

> 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 do you think Facebook Groups are if not a poorly age-verified way to talk to strangers on the internet?

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#384

Post by Dylan16807 »

jhallenworld wrote: post #225
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#386

Post by Manuel_D »

yawpitch wrote: post #347
Manuel_D wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Dis…

Omegle didn't intentionally put people on a collision course with abusers either. If Omegle was intentionally facilitating abuse as you put it, then so is IRC and effectively any other public communications mechanism: because anyone could be an abuser.

Even just preventing 1% of abuse would probably have been beyond the capabilities of this site. You write that they should flag adult men listing interest in topics associated with children. How are they supposed to identify the gender and age of users? People under 18 are prohibited from the site, yet that clearly failed. Human moderation can't even monitor a fraction of one percent The "many obvious" ways of preventing abuse were in fact attempted [1]:

> Omegle implemented a "monitored" video chat, to monitor misbehavior and protect people under the age of 18 from potentially harmful content, including nudity or sexual content. However, the monitoring is not very effective, and users can often skirt around bans.

Sure, Omegle "randomly put you into head on collision situations with others", but so is every other public communications: IRC, discord, Xbox Live, pretty much anywhere you can meet random people on the Internet fits into this category.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#389

Post by 4star3star »

unethical_ban wrote: post #354
3np wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP doesn't mention anything about a lawsuit - got more information on that? EDIT: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#390

Post by Dylan16807 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #378
Dylan16807 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soc…

> 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)

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