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Omegle 2009-2023

omegle.com

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Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#601

Post by will5421 »

Aeolun wrote: post #477
fullarr wrote: post #323

If I could unmake the Internet I would in a second, without hesitation. The lack of local community as everyone moves to a global gray sameness is the grossest thing to happen to this world. Using it as a crutch to fool yourself into what you think is normal is not healthy and it's not a solution to real problems. Omegle disappearing is neither surprising nor sad, and it's nothing personal against them specifically.…

I’m not sure if I’d call the internet itself a net negative. Somewhere around the time it was incepted it was fine. Exchanging emails and whatnot. But what it has become now… I dunno, I regularly have calls with my family on the other side of the world. That’s definitely a positive. Everything attendant to the internet I do not like. The way it’s become nearly a requirement of life.

But would you have moved so far away from your family if you couldn’t have kept in touch with them over the Internet?

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#602

Post by nicky0 »

eru wrote: post #419
maegul wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia. And yet golden eras do occur, or so it would seem. I’m sure it’s hard to tell when you’re in or near one, which is an interesting topic in its own right, but it doesn’t mean we should dismiss outright the possibility that a passing era might just be taking something truly valuable with it.

Even a non-golden era can have something truly valuable. Btw, we are living in a golden age. The vast majority of humanity has never had it better.

Materially, we've never had it better.

Spiritually, we are in a deep crisis.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#603

Post by _8j50 »

For others like me who don't use this service: apparently there were a lot of people "shaking hands with the milkman", hoping their work would be celebrated by rando matches. I wonder why it is difficult to moderate this, one of the first few matches should have been a moderator but maybe they just didn't make enough money to justify such costs.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#604

Post by NKosmatos »

anhner wrote: post #527
NKosmatos wrote: post #493

“ 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.

Yes, I did read it (in fact I always first read the HN posts and then comment).

I fully agree with the author, the introduction of moderation/censorship is not in the right direction and we shouldn't introduce mandatory measures to monitor and restrict activities based on what might happen and how something can be misused.

On the other hand we have to acknowledge that some things/situations are not so easy to judge and human nature plays a very important role in this. I'm sad about this realization of how our society is behaving and on how our lives are affected, but there is no easy way out.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#605

Post by victorbjorklund »

dheera wrote: post #558
andrepd wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> You want a distributed application What would incentivize a huge number of people to run a decentralized and distributed application so that it actually continues to run? (Hint: the hope of a coin mooning)

TOR runs without some shitcoin.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#606

Post by Kovah »

SnooSux wrote: post #333
ijustlovemath wrote: post #198

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…

Stumble Upon used to be so addicting

Maybe https://Cloudhiker.net will bring back this experience.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#607

Post by larodi »

Good opportunity to go out and remember how it is to meet random people live in parks, theatre, sporting centres, libraries, coworking spaces, and of course - bars.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#608

Post by dotandgtfo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #390
dragonwriter wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ri…

I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The numbers are pretty wild.

> There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451

I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities.

IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#609

Post by reliablereason »

justsid wrote: post #286
ijustlovemath wrote: post #198

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…

I didn’t use Omegle much, but I actually met my now wife on there. We used the text only thing where a third person suggests a topic. Must’ve talked for a good 2 hours on there before exchanging informations, I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically. We met 11 years ago on the platform, a completely random fluke. And while I haven’t really used Omegle in a long time,…

The chance of a small glitch or anything that did not happen in the past is as likely as a ghost dinosaur coming up to you and scamming you out of all your money.

Looking at the past through a probabilistic lens is irrational, unless you are doing it to predict the future through information collection.

Sort of, of topic but anyway….

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#610

Post by auxfil »

reliablereason wrote: post #609
justsid wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t use Omegle much, but I actually met my now wife on there. We used the text only thing where a third person suggests a topic. Must’ve talked for a good 2 hours on there before exchanging informations, I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically. We met 11 years ago on the platform, a completely random fluke. And while I haven’t really used Omegle in a long time,…

The chance of a small glitch or anything that did not happen in the past is as likely as a ghost dinosaur coming up to you and scamming you out of all your money. Looking at the past through a probabilistic lens is irrational, unless you are doing it to predict the future through information collection. Sort of, of topic but anyway….

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