> we are living in a golden age I would've agreed pre-covid.
Does COVID still exist meaningfully in your part of the world? In my country the first few waves were very strong, but after a successful vaccination campaign (among other things) COVID has completely disappeared in everybody’s daily lives.
I think they are referring less to the actual virus and more to the rapid deterioration of our discourse and politics that accompanied it. Or at least this is what I might mean when using "COVID" as an epoch.
The site was rife with perverts, Neo-Nazi propaganda, CSAM distribution, and honeypot operations. I think people are idealizing what it was in recent years, believing it was the same fun as in the early 2010s. It was an absolute shitshow. The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common…
The internet's not great, but unless you live in an elite city with a well-paying job, you're not going to find better interactions outside.
I have taken out the word "outside" from my post, because you seem to be addressing a very minor component of my overall message. Please note: My main point is that pure, intellectual connection is almost nowhere to be found. It is drowned out in a sea of shit.
While I did criticize HN in my post, I will note that it is sort of a last bastion of intellectual conversation. I believe the motives are not as pure as before, and I lament that. There simply is not a space for intellectual conversation for intellectual conversation's sake on the internet anymore. It is all twisted.
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…
> Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm.
I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO
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…
Maybe we should create a DeFi version of this that doesn't have an owner and can't be sued. Things like Omegle should be likened to an empty grass field in the middle of town, with nobody responsible for what actually happens on it except the people who choose to be there.
This is a bad take on several levels. First the de-fi angle. You want a distributed application, no need to shoehorn crypto into there. But second and most important: the ultralibertarian angle of "you chose to be there so you take respinsabolity for whatever happens to you" is also not good. For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law enforcement is a good thing. Whatever replaces omegle will almost certainly have worse moderation, a less benevolent manager, and less eagerness to cooperate with authorities to, for example, hand over evidence of child predation. Free speech is not incompatible with the attempt to enforce laws.
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 af…
It's all baked into the premiums.
No, the catastrophic risks are borne by society - the are limits to liability insurance and there is a limit at which limited liability companies can pay or individuals behind companies can pay.
“ All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won.” This is something that most people don’t understand and fail to accept. The human species for millennia has been fighting, stealing, rapping, killing and kept doing bad things to each other. This is in our nature and will never change. No matter how much moderation, AI checks, safety measures and good “players” exist, there will always be…
Have you read the article? It feels like you are defending the very idea the author is fighting against. Yes, we must accept that fact, and no, we must not let it affect our freedoms and our lives.
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.
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.…
So they sue the platform that got them to meet, but not the one that allowed CSAM to be exchanged?
correct, like suing the city because you met a podophile in the city park
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…
most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It's not like some magical growth threshold crossed in 2010s, More and more of this audience was born internet-native too. It seems to be a cultural shift instead