Good riddance and here's why: Jon Minadeo II ( https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/neo-nazi-jon-mina...) had been using Omegle for sometime to spread racist and antisemitic ideas to young kids. With no way to police this activity and no law against doing so, he appeared to be increasing his following. I used to be a "free internet" advocate, but the older I get and as a parent, my thinking has changed. We have to stand for something that protects our children, and an anything goes internet isn't that. I know this may be an unpopular viewpoint.
Omegle 2009-2023
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#822Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still there, the old internet. You just uave a hard time finding it with corporate tools like the modern google.
It also just feels much smaller. Outside of maybe 4chan, none of those classic style forums feel anywhere close to as acitve as their heyday. Like, we're talking maybe 2-3 comments per day. It definitely doesn't need to be Twitter/Reddit active, but a cozy but empty forum isn't a community so much as a small gathering.
feels like this entire thread is complaining about the prisoners' dilemma.
everything wrong with the modern internet can be explained through microeconomics.
or microbiology if you prefer: bacteria (individual agents in a capitalist system) find a new source of food (the internet). the bacteria evolve to optimize their food collection, irrespective of what is "good" for the ecosystem. the food chain shakes up, the predators become apex, and when they've taken too much, they die off in a cycle.
right now we're at the "taking too much" stage. but I don't think anybody is dying off.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#823Gives 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)
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.
Man, i stayed up way past bedtime watching the Frank Tedesco youtubes. I was completely blown away, his ability to listen to 20 seconds of a song on his phone and then get it mostly right on the piano is incredible. What an amazing individual. hah, the reactions were golden too, very funny and endearing.
edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to cross it.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#824Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on
Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups.
So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was also a place that felt very "old school internet" due to the "wild west style". And what's wrong with that. The current internet feels like a playground where we are forced to fall in order to the wall garden owner. When you use the internet you should have the sense that the domain your going to access requires yourself to need to apply self caution. Letting a 11 year old online without supervision is just…
A playground where every surface is foam-lined, and the whole place is relentlessly patrolled by fascists in mickey-mouse costumes.
Don't forget the ads
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#826Earlier 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,…
For people who are looking for this -- It's a common refrain on Twitter that Twitter can be a better dating app than actual dating apps. I think the mechanism here is similar -- both Twitter and Omegle encourage a sort of stream-of-consciousness, semi-anonymous communication style that facilitates soul entwinement.
I got dates from Amazon reviews (back when I used to write more Amazon reviews).
It never became anything serious but the whole "find people online on not-dating sites just by communicating" is real.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#827Earlier 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,…
> I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically. Met mine in an MMO and I think about how many ways there are that it could have never happened.
I once met a couple who met in Felwood (the WoW region).
You never know where that person's going to come from! And the best ones seem to come while you're not looking for them directly and just having fun being yourself...
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#828I 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.
This is kind of revisionist history though. The early 2010s were not so long ago. Nobody talked about Omegle as some magical safe place of real human connection. It was always viral because of the edginess and danger. There were genuinely good stories you would see about it, but the impact was strong precisely because everyone knew the dark side.
I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time.
People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.
For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity.
My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible.
It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.
Re: Omegle 2009-2023
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
I met my wife because she saw on facebook a screenshot someone has taken from a tweet I did about a terrorist attack. (Charlie Hebdo 2015- Paris). This encouraged her to read my blog then to get in touch, etc… So meeting my wife happened because: 1. There was a terrorist attack 2. I tweeted about it 3. The tweet became popular 4. A random someone took the time to screenshot it to share it on Facebook 5. That random s…
Same as the odds of every other child that was ever conceived. It's really easy to look backwards in time, think of every single "if this never happened..." moment, and conclude that the probability is near zero. And you would be right.
And they say engineers aren’t romantics