801–810 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A park is in public view. > A library is in public view. And yet heinous acts of abuse/violence/etc have occurred in both. By your logic, we should pave all the parks and burn down the libraries.
How many sex crimes are reported in your local park? Hundreds of thousands were reported to Omegle.
This is devastating. I have so many fond memories of meeting fellow weirdos over text. The days where StumbleUpon always took you somewhere exciting, cool, beautiful, interesting, funny, or novel. Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s. I even used it during pandemic times…
> Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s. This is funny to me, because I am old enough to remember when web 2.0 was new, and people were nostalgic for 'web 1.0'. (And, of course, it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.)
I thought the Web 2.0 era was something special! Web 1.0 was fun but looking back, it was mostly about the promise of what the web/internet would eventually be able to do.
Web 2.0 was where it really came together for me. The interwebs started to actually attract more diversity and specifically, it started to no longer be overwhelmingly male, which started to make the social aspect a lot more fun to me.
Web 2.0 was the era when Javascript started to be semi-useful, and there was a lot of cool "remix" type stuff happening via open API's and RSS before everybody locked all that stuff away, and video on the internet started to be kind of practical. And the web hadn't been completely choked by naked commercialization. Felt like there were still some cool alternative corners of the web that hadn't yet been paved over so they could build a parking lot for a mall.
I also thought that a lot of cool Web 2.0 stuff happened because of the post-Web1 "dot com" era layoffs. You had a lot of underemployed but talented developers making things.
(but obviously everybody will have their own personal favorite eras!)
More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
In that article she was 11 when using Omegle. She was using internet without appropriate supervision. That's almost like allowing a kid to drive a car, leading to an accident, and then trying to ban cars because they are dangerous to kids. The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I…
Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids to adults?
For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would expect some sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have been better than what Omegle had (nothing).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A park is in public view. > A library is in public view. And yet heinous acts of abuse/violence/etc have occurred in both. By your logic, we should pave all the parks and burn down the libraries.
How many sex crimes are reported in your local park? Hundreds of thousands were reported to Omegle.
This is devastating. I have so many fond memories of meeting fellow weirdos over text. The days where StumbleUpon always took you somewhere exciting, cool, beautiful, interesting, funny, or novel. Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s. I even used it during pandemic times…
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,…
> 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
Had a friend who started a social network website at his parents house. Pushing 20 million monthly users. Death threats, competition uploading illegal content and then reporting it, whistleblowers and more threats, people having beef and looking for arbitration, more threats for getting banned etc. He become extremely stressed, stopped going out, paranoia kicked in and then suicide attempts. His friends helped him close the site and he "recovered".
But lesson here is - if you don't have a deep wallet, right mindset and access to therapist, don't start a website today or keep it small and off the main internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're in a golden age of computer gaming right now. I remember what it was like when I was young: paying $30+ per game (many of which were flash-game quality, and I only learned how good the game was after I bought it), or endlessly scouring the internet for something free. Nowadays I can pay $5 on Steam, GoG, etc. for a game that will engross me for 100+ hours
On the flipside, is it the golden age of computing gaming or golden age of addiction? Paying $5 to be engrossed in a game for 100+ hours?
People pay $20 to be engrossed in a movie for 1.5 hours. Is that addiction?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're in a golden age of computer gaming right now. I remember what it was like when I was young: paying $30+ per game (many of which were flash-game quality, and I only learned how good the game was after I bought it), or endlessly scouring the internet for something free. Nowadays I can pay $5 on Steam, GoG, etc. for a game that will engross me for 100+ hours
On the flipside, is it the golden age of computing gaming or golden age of addiction? Paying $5 to be engrossed in a game for 100+ hours?
This is devastating. I have so many fond memories of meeting fellow weirdos over text. The days where StumbleUpon always took you somewhere exciting, cool, beautiful, interesting, funny, or novel. Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s. I even used it during pandemic times…
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,…
Met mine in an MMO and I think about how many ways there are that it could have never happened.
More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
In that article she was 11 when using Omegle. She was using internet without appropriate supervision. That's almost like allowing a kid to drive a car, leading to an accident, and then trying to ban cars because they are dangerous to kids. The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I…
That’s why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform, there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to address the situation. The expectation isn’t perfect enforcement because it’s not reasonable to shut every large business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a platform for bored kids, it’s not surprising that the lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization options it’s not surprising that they choose to close rather than deal with legal battles.