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Omegle 2009-2023

omegle.com

771–780 of 1001 posts

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#771

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…

Children shouldn't be browsing the internet without supervision. If they do I'd argue their parents should be regulated more, not the internet.

How old were you when you first used the internet, and how supervised were you?

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5poLSRa3cpHBfiJ6wQdT... Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.

Is there a word for whatever the human thing is that makes people want to watch reaction videos?

As others have said, empathy and/or mirror neurons; it's the modern day equivalent of a laugh track.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, “for the children”. The best argument there is to deprive you of all the rights possible.

Really? We want to protect the rights of pedophiles? Where could this argument be going.

Slippery slope fallacy. How many people are pedophiles? How many people who aren't will need to give up their rights so that that minority... actually just keeps on doing what they do, because there's always alternatives?

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#774

I didn't want to spend time reading that wall of text, so I wanted a summarized version of it. Asked ChatGPT (4) to do it for me and it told me that Omegle is not going to close. My intuition told me otherwise, so the irony is that I spent more time than needed on this. https://sharegpt.com/c/yhV8Hjh Is this a sign of falling GPT quality? I think this was extremely easy to infer.

PEBCAK, I went to omegle.com and was able to infer exactly what the author meant. It took me approx. 2 minutes to do so. Using ChatGPT to read short things like this is akin to only reading the headline of an article -- you tell me if the latter makes much sense usually.

2 minutes is quite fast, congrats.

I inferred this information by seeing the number of comments on HN (a relevant parameter in estimating the importance of an event imo), the time period 2009-2023 and then immediately after clicking seeing a tombstone. This took me under 2-3 seconds.

The rest of the info I wasn't going time to spend on was the motives etc. It's not the first postmortem I see, I was just curious to why by skipping all of the boilerplate. Omegle is not important to me, but I know it was quite a phenomenon .

My point was that GPT failed blatantly at inferring this same easy task.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#775
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole 4chan offensiveness isn't so much a generational thing as it is a personality thing

Teenage me loved the edginess. Adult me just finds it boring. More like a phase thing to me.

Our generation grew up on offensive / edginess, things like late 90's shock rock, South Park, Jackass, Saw, etc. Nobody cares anymore, and it feels like nobody's tried to out-edge series like South Park. It feels like we've reached rock bottom so the only way is up. Which is a good thing btw.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#776
post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With websites, you can have one person serving ten million people, and support that on a single income. With bars, you can only fit about a hundred people in, and enough of them have to be paying customers that you can afford to keep the bar running – but that also means you can physically look at everyone's identification papers.

If you can’t validate the age of the people using Omegle, perhaps the service is not appropriate to exist.

I think my right to privacy out weighs a "think of the children" argument.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, kids are on the Internet. I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.…

I've been on the internet since I was about 10 years old (I estimate). My parents knew (and understood) maybe 10% of what I did on there. As a minor, I did multiple criminal things online, some of them successful, others not so much. If I was a kid in 2023, I probably would've been arrested at some point in time. Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I t…

I've been on the internet since I was a similar age. I even obeyed all my parents' instructions (e.g. no using Google, no social media), but it's really only me being a certain kind of person – and a little luck – that kept me in any way resembling safe. Those rules, as stated to me, were absolutely not sufficient (e.g. I used Bing, and joined forums, and booted into QuickWeb to play The Fancy Pants Adventures because that wasn't disabling the filter). No way were my parents capable of policing my activity.

I, uh, mostly kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one occasion, and those were all things I hadn't told them about (some of which I even realised were big deals before they blew up). I'm quite lucky that none of that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't think any of it was criminal, but that's pure serendipity: I had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple governments without even knowing I should probably ask my parents about this cool new programming idea I had.)

The places I frequent these days are all safe for the kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much bigger than that – and, I suspect, more hostile than it was. I have no illusions that I could provide good, useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#778
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenage me loved the edginess. Adult me just finds it boring. More like a phase thing to me.

100%. Adults who still enjoy that "edgy" style of communication and entertainment always come off as super immature. There's something in there about human development and pushing boundaries in your youth, I'm certain. Also, it did feel great as a teen from a very backwards rural area, to be on the very bleeding edge of internet culture. Knowing the memes before anyone else was secretly satisfying.

I think there's a phrase for it: Kids are assholes.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I volunteer in my local public school in the US. The sad fact is that stable family structure, by any definition, is collapsing and that kids are suffering. The percentage of kids in grade school who have an absent, incarcerated, addicted, mentally unhealthy, or generally dysfunctional parent is off the charts. Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they need to avoid getting shunted into special educati…

> I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS. It's far more likely that lower income is the reason for poor parenting than "mom has an onlyfans".

There's a lot of money to be made in this industry.

There was a local university student in UQAM who made the news a few years ago and she publicly bragged she was earning a million a year.

Not everyone is going to be a top earner like this, but don't be delusional that it's only an option for lowest income individuals.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#780

> In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are lazy") or is it measurably true? I feel like it's obviously true.

Our mouthpiece to complain and share outrage is what changed. In Desert Storm or Bosnia, you'd get a 5 minute update on the war, tucked inside a 30m national news cast (not speaking for everyone but the majority of Americans). Now you get nonstop almost-live combat footage, citizen journalists (a good thing), along with disinformation from bad actors trying to manipulate the narrative.
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