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Omegle 2009-2023

omegle.com

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Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#401

Post by Swizec »

generationP wrote: post #300
cortesoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#402

Post by MiddleEndian »

smt88 wrote: post #248
THENATHE wrote: post #237

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#403

Post by ActorNightly »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #320

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 t…

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...).

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#405

Post by Tao3300 »

veeti wrote: post #3
Laaas wrote: post #2

What "attacks" is he referring to?

"Omegle: Suing the website that matched me with my abuser" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#406

Post by owenpalmer »

reverse_no wrote: post #93

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 site you are currently leaving a comment on operates on the old model. so far it's working pretty well.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#407

Post by _shantaram »

userbinator wrote: post #88

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…

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#408

Post by Tao3300 »

RagnarD wrote: post #8

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#409

Post by buffington »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #82
echelon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 everythin…

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.

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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#410

Post by strken »

yawpitch wrote: post #372
hgs3 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

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 conc…

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.

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