641–650 of 1001 posts
More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
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.…
Except for potentially most of the population, the internet provided a more vibrant, welcoming, supportive and rich community than their local community ever could. The "gray sameness" is a recent phenomena and commanded by legal and state abuse, that a lot of the commenters above here lament about.
It feels good but you are still alone
It's never been a good thing, it's been a time sync and it's why birth rates are down, depression is up, loneliness is rampant, and everyone is addicted to narcissism machines
More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.
The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.
To be fair, if Omegle was operating anonymously on some sort of real-time blockchain, that would make it harder to prevent abuse. But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in any app store, which would filter out the sort of vulnerable/naive users who are at the greatest risk.
Gives 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)
It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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…
The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way
More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
Maybe this needs to start over somewhere in a civil law country (most of Europe) where suing you for something like this is almost impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? Assuming the 74 million are really getting lots of value from it, compensating the victims of the catastrophic event is more than worth it. Holding the host liable for the harms, and trusting the…
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.