Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Omegle 2009-2023

omegle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#711

Post by pxoe »

cortesoft wrote: post #61
SamPatt wrote: post #18

I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the magic of the early internet we witnessed during our coming of age feels threatened. I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.

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…

they might, either about pre-ai internet, or the early ai / early widespread ai, when it was widely available and accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn't yet destroyed entire industries

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#712

Post by krisoft »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #670
krisoft wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers. This is nonsense. Our neurons don’t talk to strangers. They talk with other neurons from the same individual. There is more in common between any two connected neurons than between two family members. And besides there is no reason to think that what happens between cells is a good model to base human behaviour on whatsoever.

What an odd response. I'm not even sure how to react. Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.

> What an odd response.

Thank you.

> Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.

No. Please read my comment again. I claim no such thing.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#713

Post by [deleted] »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #590
_cs2017_ wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reporter, Joe Tidy, isn't virtue signaling. He is an honest zealot full of righteous fury. He is 100% confident he's right, just like those who killed heretics during crusades a couple thousand years ago, burned witches a few hundred years ago, or exterminated capitalists as part of Cambodian Khmer Rouge a few decades ago.

He must be stopped at all cost.

[deleted]

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#714

Post by ignoramous »

huseyinkeles wrote: post #623
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,…

Think about all the infinite numbers of glitches that happened in the past and prevented you to meet other possible wives :)

You posit as if future glitches are improbable ;)

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#715

Post by pxoe »

samtho wrote: post #217
xmprt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production I think this couldn't be further from the truth. You could argue that the production has been heavily centralized, but I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace pa…

I think the post you are replying to was trying to say this, but less precisely. It used to be that a MySpace, account profile on DeviantArt, Flickr, an online forum, or even a personal website was another human trying to connect with (or troll) someone, and that everyone was putting out content because that’s how you needed to exist. Nowadays, I’m sure that 95% of all content I see is made by a media company for hir…

as much as this doomer drivel might be true, it might be blinding you to the good parts and good people. just not seeing what's "novel and interesting", nor seeking it out.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#716

Post by mbix77 »

Internet is becoming sadder and sadder. Mega corporations being mega corporations, ads, dark patterns, community-focused websites becoming mega corporations...

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#717

Post by jodrellblank »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #373
dragonwriter wrote: post #317

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.

A store attracts people with money (adults) interested in the products the store sells and the bench out front is in public. But the catastrophic events in question are somewhere that attracts easily amused people with time on their hands (often children) and predators (among others, but specifically predators in a way a shop bench doesn't), and the catastrophe is deliberate targeted harm and not natural disaster or innocent accident. The two aren’t comparable.

A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#718

Post by concordDance »

joenot443 wrote: post #680
throwaway290 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom and all those companies with UGC have this, responsible ones report it (Meta does lots, not sure Twitter does anymore, Telegram never did). > I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this. Take it as a sign that if tech community doesn't wake up and own up to this and try to solve the issue somehow then not just individual services but the entire idea of e2ee messagin…

Orders of magnitude more grooming and misconduct is done over SMS than was ever done over Omegle. Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up” and own that they’re facilitating this abuse? It seems like one of those finger pointing cases which falls apart when any level of scrutiny is applied.

A large portion of commentators here greatly dislike the idea of unmonitored interactions between humans. Their ideal is that every person's cellphone continuously records nearby conversations and sends them to the police where they can run large language models to provide a shortlist of dangerous communications that a policeman can then look at and charge for.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#719

Post by huggingmouth »

Whenever a giant tree falls, many saplings get a chance to grow. Hope we see even better omegles take its place.

To op: please consider open sourcing your abuse detection tech if it doesn't give the bad guys an edge. I'd hate for bad people to abuse these new services.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#720

Post by [deleted] »

jodrellblank wrote: post #305
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…

> " Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp? " We do in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives "It’s illegal to: use any knife or weapon in a threatening way, carry most knives or any weapons in public without a ‘good reason’, sell most knives or any weapons to anyone under the age of 18." - And yes that includes kitchen knives because there's a callout - "In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN