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Omegle 2009-2023

omegle.com

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Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#531

Post by jhatemyjob »

tremere wrote: post #500

The site was rife with perverts, Neo-Nazi propaganda, CSAM distribution, and honeypot operations. I think people are idealizing what it was in recent years, believing it was the same fun as in the early 2010s. It was an absolute shitshow. The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common…

The public internet has always been garbage dude. Ever since eternal september in 93. The trick is a good filter. It seems like you lucked into some good filters in the past, but forgot to rotate them when they stopped working

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#532

Post by terryf »

adamomada wrote: post #133
melvinmelih wrote: post #69

> 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

Yes, 100 times yes. This is one of the big issues with the modern world, that no risk at all is acceptable. And that's bullshit. So many things that are enormous amounts of fun can get shut down because maybe someone gets slightly hurt some time or whatever.

Should we make things safe? yes, of course. But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no". It should be made clear that risk exists and it's everyone's own personal responsibility to take that into account when doing something. And if I happen to be the unlucky guy for whom the risk realizes, then well, guess life sucks for me. Let's move on. That shouldn't stop everyone else from having fun.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#533

Post by s1artibartfast »

dragonwriter wrote: post #490
mrighele wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing, and only the people that actually caused the accident are to blame. If you think that victims of a "catastrophic event" need compensation, why not propose to institute a mandatory insurance for people using the Internet, like many countries do for cars ? (I am assuming here that the website is not ac…

> In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing Its really not; user fees in the form of driver's license fees, vehicle license fees (both of which tend to be legally required for operation on public roads in most US jurisdictions), federal and state gasoline taxes, etc., are used to pay for use of public roads, as well as general fund taxes whic…

I think you are missing the point intentionally. I have seen you make many cogent points over the years, but this is just low effort failure to engage.

Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#534

Post by midasz »

permo-w wrote: post #280
userbinator wrote: post #88

This brings back some amazing memories. If I remember correctly, the original inspiration for Omegle came from 4chan; or more precisely, a user thought of stretching the limits of "anonymous free speech" to realtime communications, and came up with the idea in late 2007. The PoC server for it was nothing more than "telnet to this IP" and it was sporadically advertised on 4chan for a short while. Astonishingly, Google…

>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.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#535

Post by johnnyanmac »

lazide wrote: post #249
hypeatei wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but this is from the site operators perspective. How are you not bound to have abuse everyday on a platform with such low barrier to entry? An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a golf membership.

Is this a serious question? Not everyone with an internet connection ever got on Omeagle, even once. Of the people that went to Omeagle, the odds of this kind of thing happening are clearly astronomically low - it’s been there for over a decade, internationally known, and my guess is only a handful of these types of things have likely happened. Old school AOL chat rooms were clearly more dangerous. And were consisten…

Based on the goodbye letter, it has happened enough that the admin worked with authories, and it was getting toxic enough frequently enough that the owner was feeling psychological damage from moderating it.

I'm not going to say if the boons are worth the burden, but in Leif's case it was now. And he was calling the shots at the end of the day.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#537

Post by terryf »

dragonwriter wrote: post #317
adamomada wrote: post #133

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? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way

> 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…

individual responsibility is the way things need to be handled. Make it clear that if you do X, then there exists a risk of Y, and Z. If you still want to do the thing, and for you the risk is realized, then ... well, sucks to be you I guess. But you knew what you were getting into.

And saying, "oh, but people are bad at analyzing risk" or "some people are too stupid to understand". Well, so what?

Building a world where everyone is wrapped in a soft foam and nothing can be done because there is always some element of risk, is a terrible idea.

"You can get killed walking your doggie" - Heat (1993)

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#538

Post by codersfocus »

system2 wrote: post #452
Ridj48dhsnsh wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a depressing viewpoint. The text chat version of Omegle could have easily been hosted on a single server with some kind of automated spam protection. Donations could have more than covered the costs to run it. The positive value it added to millions of lives far outweighs the negative.

Monthly users reaching 70 million. I doubt a basic server could handle that.

You’d be surprised what a well optimized server can do. Moores law hasn’t stopped. 70 million is a pretty low number, when modern $40 servers can easily do 10-100k requests per second.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#539

Post by terryf »

otteromkram wrote: post #436
Dylan16807 wrote: post #373

Earlier 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.

The owner would probably need city approval to extend their reach onto municipal property (the sidewalk). The store owner might also be required by the city and/or landlord to update their insurance policy to cover the extended liability. But, in general, your proposed scenario never specified what the catastrophic event is and why the store owner would be held liable.

The store owner wants to do something nice for people and in your world the best way to handle that is making them jump through months of bureaucracy and probably paying a lot of money to their insurance and for permits and shit?

Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.

Re: Omegle 2009-2023

#540

Post by berdario »

jannes wrote: post #515
chx wrote: post #437

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.

A teammate caught Covid this week, and they're now isolating.

Another teammate's family caught Covid last week.

Me and my wife caught Covid in August.

We're all vaccinated afaik (myself with 5 jabs), and thankfully we only got mild symptoms, but the problem with Covid is how easy it is for it to spread.

Do people in your life do a rapid test when they get sick? The only explanation I see for thinking that Covid has "disappeared", is that barely anyone still tests.

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