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Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

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Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#51

Post by alephnerd »

dragonwriter wrote: post #41
alephnerd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I post CSAM on HN I am 100% going to be reported and sent to jail. HN has only 2-3 mods, yet I don't see a plethora of old men's schlongs on here. Yet Omegle made more money and had more users than HN ever would, but consistently failed at moderation. > small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like…

> HN has only 2-3 mods, yet I don't see a plethora of old men's schlongs on here. HN doesn't even allow text formatting changes beyond monospace and italics, much less posting pictures or video . Even without moderation, you'd only be at risk of ASCII art schlongs.

HN allows links, yet I haven't seen any X-rated or X-rating adjacent links on here. It's a nontrivial moderation problem.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#52

Post by ipaddr »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #21
dmitrygr wrote: post #5

Please punch a hole on your “once again, a lack of parenting being solved by something other than better parenting” card.

I don't know how you understand "parenting" but it's not supposed to involve 24/7 second by second monitoring of a teenager's life. It's complicated. I don't blame Omegle, but sometimes there's no one to blame, except the perpetrators. Now, thanks to AI, we could recreate Omegle and make it safer, like detect children using it, and detect abusers. Of course this may trigger an arm's race of filters. But I think we ha…

Parenting a teen is re-forcing values taught earlier in life. Expecting society to share parenting responsibilities doesn't work.

It could be safer but it's up to you to decide your family's risk/reward ratio. Safer getting a dick video online then in person and a teachable moment. These dicks are out there in the world. This could belong to your teacher, friend's dad, brother.. if you ever see this again call 911 and rin.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#53

Post by echelon »

Gigachad wrote: post #46
Always_Anon wrote: post #12

If you used Omegle for more than 30 seconds, you'd know it was filled with sexual predators exposing themselves to children. I'm surprised it lasted this long. I'm sympathetic to the creator, I don't think tools should be banned because there are bad users, but Omegle's user base has its reputation for a reason.

HN treats it like the last bastion of intellectual free speech.

All sorts of online spaces deserve to exist. Pruning the internet to just Facebook is unhealthy.

Parents should be responsible for their own children. They shouldn't keep trying to remove things from the world they deem as unfriendly to their children. If they dislike the Wild West of the Internet, they can create their own digital curfew and rules.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#54

Post by kelseyfrog »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #48
buzzdenver wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposing yourself without consent is a crime in most places. Omegle was full of that. Watching porn is obviously voluntary.

I'm sorry these statements are simply not congruent. A private website that had quite a ubiquitous reputation (factual or not, consistent or not) for sexual web-cam encounters is not "most places." And you're being disingenuous by pretending it counts as such. Going to Omegle is voluntary. Watching people's web cams is voluntary. Interacting with strangers from your own personal device on a site is voluntary. There i…

Going to anywhere is voluntary and we still have public indecency laws. Doing it on the internet doesn't have an essential difference.

Besides, the expectation is that members will follow the rules and the Omegle Community Guidelines clearly state

> Nudity, pornography and sexually explicit conduct and content are prohibited

This is opposed to a strip club where there is an expectation of nudity. It's like going to a grocery store. "Well that's the grocery store where everyone jacks off," really isn't a convincing argument.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#56

Post by buzzdenver »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #48
buzzdenver wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposing yourself without consent is a crime in most places. Omegle was full of that. Watching porn is obviously voluntary.

I'm sorry these statements are simply not congruent. A private website that had quite a ubiquitous reputation (factual or not, consistent or not) for sexual web-cam encounters is not "most places." And you're being disingenuous by pretending it counts as such. Going to Omegle is voluntary. Watching people's web cams is voluntary. Interacting with strangers from your own personal device on a site is voluntary. There i…

IANAL, but having a certain reputation is not enough. If you run a site where the mean time before penis is 30 seconds, you probably have to be upfront about that and promote it as a sex chat place, not "Talk to strangers! The Internet is full of cool people; Omegle lets you meet them. When you use Omegle, we pick someone else at random so you can have a one-on-one chat." (cut&pasted from Omegle).

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#57

Post by injeolmi_love »

Gigachad wrote: post #46
Always_Anon wrote: post #12

If you used Omegle for more than 30 seconds, you'd know it was filled with sexual predators exposing themselves to children. I'm surprised it lasted this long. I'm sympathetic to the creator, I don't think tools should be banned because there are bad users, but Omegle's user base has its reputation for a reason.

HN treats it like the last bastion of intellectual free speech.

And where exactly is free speech left? Every public platform I’ve used over the last 20 years that had freedom of speech was shut down. Currently if you want to discuss ideas or issues that are outside of the publicly approved consensus, the only choice left is private chats. Even there the options are continually shrinking.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#58

Post by idiotsecant »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #48
buzzdenver wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposing yourself without consent is a crime in most places. Omegle was full of that. Watching porn is obviously voluntary.

I'm sorry these statements are simply not congruent. A private website that had quite a ubiquitous reputation (factual or not, consistent or not) for sexual web-cam encounters is not "most places." And you're being disingenuous by pretending it counts as such. Going to Omegle is voluntary. Watching people's web cams is voluntary. Interacting with strangers from your own personal device on a site is voluntary. There i…

This is a wild argument. Going to a coffee shop is voluntary too. You good with it if someone slaps their junk down on your table?

There are standards of behaviour that apply to people regardless of context. Non-consensual sexual behaviour is one of those pretty standard basic ones.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#59

Post by mikeyouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #35
mattigames wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least you agree that is because big companies have enough money to buy enough moderation correct? So in the best case scenario is jut another part of society that small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough.

> So in the best case scenario is jut another part of society that small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough. Small companies can participate, as long as their moderation resources are proportionate to their scale. Yes, if they aren't, you are going to have more liability problems, just like if you operate a theme park with inadequate maintenance staff to prevent the rides from flying…

That feels like a good analogy -- we do have different standards for small carnivals than we do for large amusement parks, and accidents do happen at both, but you'd never be allowed to operate a small carnival with dangerous rides and absolutely no maintenance by claiming it was too expensive.

Re: Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit from a Sexual Abuse Survivor

#60

Post by DoreenMichele »

alephnerd wrote: post #50
DoreenMichele wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few quick searches suggests to me that Omegle had more users -- 73 million monthly versus maybe 5 million or so on HN -- but they were only worth $5 million dollars. Hacker News is not and never has been a "business" in its own right. It's part of the business model of a VC fund -- Y Combinator -- and Forbes indicates they were worth $5 billion as of 2021. Also, I don't think we know how many people moderate HN and…

> It's part of the business model of a VC fund -- Y Combinator It's part of YC but I can confidently say only around 4-5 people are working on it including moderation. I can also say confidently that more resources are spent by YC on Bookface and their own internal BI tools than HN.

According to this comment, it had 30 moderators in 2010 when it was a lot smaller:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1837288

It's source page gives a 404 "not found" error.

The current official mod in charge pretty consistently says "no moderators did x."

This handle of mine only dates to 2017, but I originally joined in 2009, so I have no idea how long you have been hanging here, but I would be really shocked if they needed 30 moderators in 2010 and now have literally one guy doing all the moderation work by himself entirely.

I also doubt that people really in the know are posting here with "insider" info that wasn't cleared by staff.

It's not my business. I don't feel they need to tell me such info. But I have no reason to believe your uncited assertion that you can say X "with confidence" is reliable info of any sort.

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