What happened to her is tragic. However, I don’t think warnings or age verification would change anything. Kids are going to do things regardless if there is a warning or age verification system.I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to them, and to start talking to them early.

&gt; As a young girl, Alice (not her real name) logged on to the popular live video chat website, Omegle, and was randomly paired with a paedophile, who coerced her into becoming a digital sex slave. Nearly 10 years later the young American is suing Omegle in a landmark case that could pave the way for a wave of lawsuits against other social platforms.This is fucked. We shouldn&#x27;t have to put safety padding on everything as a stand-in for something parents are supposed to do, ie. being responsible for their brood.Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?Should we ban kitchen knives because they&#x27;re sharp?Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and&#x2F;or head?

Let the legal process play out.I&#x27;m not a fan of this journalist &quot;ambushing&quot; the founder at his property and staying outside of it until he gets some answers. &quot;He has all the blinds closed&quot; - right.Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and needs to provide answers.Sorry maybe it&#x27;s the aspergers in me but I&#x27;m generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.

Is it this one instance, or is it the fact that it can connect children to adults? Or general moderation problems that include that? Or maybe attacks as in lawyers?

Waiting outside someone&#x27;s house for 7 hours, running after them, and spouting accusations through the door doesn&#x27;t sound like my idea of &quot;trying to have a civilized conversation&quot;. The BBC should be deeply embarrassed.

&quot;Omegle: Suing the website that matched me with my abuser&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791</a>

Thank you. Such a huge wall of text posted, yet the only thing that remotely explains &quot;why&quot; is a vague reference to &quot;attacks.&quot; What attacks??

The A.M. vs Omgele case if I had to guess.

What &quot;attacks&quot; is he referring to?

Can you meet people randomly on any of those services? That would be an interesting feature.

Back to whatsapp and other encrypted services whereby the corporate overlord can plead ignorance of how thier systems are used.  Omegle didnt evolve to meet the new standard: dont connect people.  Let them do that themselves.  Then you cannot be blamed when the wrong two people meet via your system.

What I got from a quick search, the order was:* Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats* Chatroulette launched ~half a year later* Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after thatI&#x27;ve not used either one so I don&#x27;t know if there was more to it. Does explain how I knew about Chatroulette but not this one, even though people up above were talking about how it was an original idea.

We built a website over a year ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ehmeh.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ehmeh.com&#x2F;</a> In there you can video chat with multiple people, similar to Omegle. The difference may be that the video chat is in ASCII and the connection is done in WebRTC, fun alternative.

Back to Chatroulette then? Having not used either platform, what’s the difference?

I&#x27;d never heard of it either. And the comments make it sound like there was a big difference between what it started as and what it turned into.

It&#x27;s unfortunate that I only now found about this site, now that it&#x27;s shut down.

Still, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in.

Alas, the universe can stay unjust longer than we can stay conscious.

&gt;unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.Mandated ID checks are fine as long as we&#x27;re using it to bludgeon the privileged in the process?

How is age verification supposed to work? I don&#x27;t suppose users of the site are going to provide legal documents just to use it. It&#x27;s tantamount to shutting it down.I ask because there was a similar moral outrage around age verification for access to porn sites that I recall being a big issue a while ago. I don&#x27;t recall exactly how it played out in court, but it appeared to amount to nothing, which I can&#x27;t help but to feel was due to the fact that mechanisms to verify someone&#x27;s age online are either trivial to circumvent or present such a high barrier to entry that no reasonable user would surmount it.

I don&#x27;t really see what aspect of this situation involves a false sense of victimhood, unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obamawhitehouse.archives.gov&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;arc-moral-universe-long-it-bends-toward-justice#:~:text=Martin%20Luther%20King%2C%20Jr.%2C,time%2C%20but%20it%20does%20happen" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;obamawhitehouse.archives.gov&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;arc-mor...</a>.

&gt; bends toward justice[citation needed]

Turns out Thrasymachus was right after all.

What makes you think the universe bends towards justice? For the last 10 years, every metric of personal and economic freedom has declined. Most countries peaked in 2007. Its starting to look like personal freedom was an anomaly and we’re now retiring to the historic norm.

To the founder of Omegle, I would say: do not lose heart. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. In the end, we will prevail over those who destroy the good works of others under the guise of false victimhood and social justice, and build a very special place in hell for them, where we will condemn them for all eternity.

Regardless of any arguments about legitimacy, the optics of the EFF and ACLU defending Omegle against a child sex abuse victim are horrible. They need to raise funds from donors and having to explain that they fought against an individual abuse victim seems like the kind of position they would want to avoid. What I imagine they would do is fight against any overzealous legislation some politician tries to throw together in some ham-fisted response to this kind of situation.EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences here.

The article mentions supporting the EFF if you are opposed to this kind of thing. It&#x27;s possible they offered to help but the owner was sick of it all. That&#x27;s the impression I got from reading the piece.

This used to be exactly what the EFF and ACLU were for.

What &quot;basic behavior&quot; is that? Anonymously video chatting strangers on the internet? Can&#x27;t you already do that in many Discord servers? Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g. Chatroulette)? There clearly isn&#x27;t anything fundamentally illegal about the practice, or these would all be shut down.

What do you think Facebook Groups are if not a poorly age-verified way to talk to strangers on the internet?

&gt; It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without batting an eye.Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight Omegle&#x27;s basic behavior, to start with.

I find it hard to be polite to people who try to blame the world around them for their poor luck and poor parenting.

The BBC went to his house, he clearly didn&#x27;t want to talk, so they stayed there for hours, waiting for him to come out?That&#x27;s is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below the BBC.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;09&#x2F;1211807851&#x2F;omegle-shut-down-leif-k-brooks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;09&#x2F;1211807851&#x2F;omegle-shut-down-l...</a>&quot;The young woman, identified only as A.M., sought $22 million in damages in her lawsuit. Omegle was shut down days after the two sides agreed to settle the lawsuit.&quot;

OP doesn&#x27;t mention anything about a lawsuit - got more information on that?EDIT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791</a>

It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without batting an eye. Apparently Omegle doesn&#x27;t have an army of lawyers.

Yep, each generation thinks they&#x27;re special. But I think the early internet was different since it had literally just went from 0-&gt;1

You may be right. The author mentioned being in their 30s, and so am I, but I&#x27;m at the tail end and they&#x27;re probably at the start.Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.

I agree and I think this era absolutely will be remembered fondly by kids who grew up with it. The streamer&#x2F;YouTuber culture is massive and to many young people now that makes up a big part of their life. Many people are already waxing poetic about the &quot;golden eras&quot; of sites like Twitch.

Also would comport with the explanation that the Internet just gets worse and worse.Will be interesting to see if kids who grew up with TikTok et al. will, as adults, view it as affectionately as we view our childhood form of the Internet. I do think there&#x27;s something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.

I think this is essentially a false dichotomy. It&#x27;s possible to experience the loss of both of those eras, as well as the current one whenever it passes. There&#x27;s no inherent conflict in wanting them all back.

This is an interesting idea.  For me the magical period of the internet was also the nineties to mid-naughts.  But I&#x27;m not sure.  It doesn&#x27;t seem entirely age-relative to me.  It seems like something changed.  I really have no way to say for sure.  In fact, I was recently talking to someone a couple decades or so younger about similar topics and he indeed seemed to have more of the age-relative view.  I plan on talking to him more at some point to get a better understanding of his view.  But I don&#x27;t think the two ideas are mutually exclusive.  I&#x27;m sure many people have a magical period of wonder where their world is expanding.  To be perfectly honest, in some ways I&#x27;ve continued to have that even in recent years.  There&#x27;s a really cool corner of YouTube that has tons of incredible content that IMO is revolutionizing education.  But I also feel that as a species we humans haven&#x27;t figured out how to handle the powers of communication that the internet has made available to us.  In an age of unprecedented access to the world&#x27;s information, misinformation still abounds (no matter which side of the political aisle you happen to be on).  I don&#x27;t know that anyone has any really compelling ideas about how to deal with this, but I think it&#x27;s a significant issue that we all collectively need to work on.  The question is, will we be able to come together and do so or have we already been irrevocably torn too far apart?

Yeah it’s like how my dad says SNL peaked when he was 18 and I say it peaked when I was 18.

This is a common sentiment echoed regarding many different topics across the human experience, so I want to, for the sake of discussion, try and articulate exactly what are the two sides of this scale that might be worth debating. David Putnam defined &quot;intra-&quot; and &quot;intercohort&quot; like this in Bowling Alone.&gt; Because generational change will be an important theme in our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how social change and generational change are interrelated. As a matter of simple accounting, any social change—from the rise of rap music to the decline of newspapers—is always produced by some combination of two very different processes. The first is for many individuals to change their tastes and habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed, and it can be transformed in a different direction just as quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change “intracohort,” because the change is detectable within each age cohort.&gt; The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle, and harder to reverse. If different generations have different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth and death will eventually transform society, even if no individual ever changes. Much of the change in sexual mores over the last several decades has been of this sort. Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and most of those who did actually became more conservative. In the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the last several decades, because a generation with stricter beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change “intercohort,” because the change is detectable only across different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly inexorable.I almost want to say that you&#x27;re arguing internet disappointment (perhaps &quot;perceived enshittification&quot;) is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one&#x27;s life and not, conversely, an intercohort phenomenon through which generational attitudes remain constant, and the world changes around us.On second thought, I don&#x27;t think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you&#x27;ve expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist.Edit: I think the term I am looking for is &quot;Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis),&quot; which I know nothing about.

Back then you could post to Craigslist for an anonymous hookup and play poker online for money.Now the Match Group owns all the dating websites and successfully shittified them. Social media in general has been basically a big loss, with Reddit charging for API access since they don&#x27;t want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda

You are right, people have the same sentiment in regards to many other things. A great example is music. The golden age is often the music you and your generation grew up with.Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it already trends in that direction, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised. Fully expect today&#x27;s teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet&#x27;s magical period.

Tbf on a downward decline, 2009 might still be the highlight, just because someone didn’t experience 1995.For what it’s worth, I always point out that my parents fondest pre-30s memories we’re drinking, smoking and blasting music while riding in the back of a pickup when they were 16-20. All of which is illegal now and will get you years in prison…

&gt; For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.&gt; In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?I remember seeing stats&#x2F;meme that you will hear the best music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our teen years, things make big impact on us.So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current internet when they are 30+ or so.

It&#x27;s the eternal September and regular nostalgia

While you have a point there since certain aspects of the internet experienced by each generation were different, I think a shared part of it is just the sheer sanitization of the &#x27;open&#x27; internet that has happened since the mid&#x2F;late-2000s. That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to &#x27;frontier&#x27; places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they&#x27;ll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone&#x27;s walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you.This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the &#x27;old internet&#x27; between both me and decade older friends when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection&#x2F;genuineness with other people&#x27;s content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi&#x27;s &#x27;small internet&#x27; option.So, I think the current generation might miss their &#x27;old internet&#x27; only in the sense that by the time they&#x27;re adults it&#x27;ll probably have gotten even more sanitized.

How much was there to find on the internet in the 90s?I arrived ca. 2001 and found enough high-quality content (folk songs, math puzzles, some books already digitized) to feel like I had discovered a giant library. And it kept growing: Wikipedia arrived, various forums and magazines appeared (most were crap, of course, but there was no shortage of good ones).As far as I can tell, things started getting worse around 2008, with places such as geocities closing down and social networks rising; then the deprecation of Java and Flash kicked the floor out of some of the good old parts. Other things were still improving, though, up to 2015 or so. It&#x27;s only recently that I see most &quot;culture production&quot; locked in perennial closed gardens with unaccountable moderation. I wish I could point to some places still on the rise other than arXiv and LibGen...What had I missed from the 90s that didn&#x27;t make it into the 00s?

And before that people were pointing to 1993 as the date the old internet died <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September</a>Its reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1227&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1227&#x2F;</a> or people saying &quot;kids these days&quot;

I don’t think it has been determined by your age. Internet freedom and its wild wild west aspect has been vanishing gradually since its creation. Everybody has witnessed it.

It&#x27;s also a question of what we call &quot;magical&quot;The 90s were special in a certain way that is very different from how the Internet was in 2010.I enjoyed both. I could call both of them &quot;magical periods&quot;. Just different.One could look at the current AI innovation as a different magical period.

Anything before you were ~10 is &quot;old&quot;, things between ~15 and ~20 are natural and right, things between ~20 and ~35 are modern and exciting, and anything that occurs after that is proportionately unnecessary and annoying. :P&#x2F;shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure

I think it comes down the exploration vs maximization&#x2F;exploitation instincts that grows and changes as a human being grows. For ex: teens&#x2F;early adults has more exploration instinct.(it&#x27;s a hypothesis that&#x27;s true for at least some sections of human society, not sure how far it generalizes).For me it was yahoo chat rooms that filled the need, this omegle founder had created to solve.(at least till it got filled with bots)
The real question is what will a teenager&#x2F;(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives??I don&#x27;t know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life&#x27;s responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there&#x27;s no such tool anymore.

I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s partially the case, but not entirely here (IMO).I used Omegle when it first came out and I was in college. I thought it was amazing, and lost interest in it for awhile as one is wont to do.But I decided to check out the site again and I tried out &quot;Spy Mode&quot; some years ago (my late 20s or early 30s) where someone could choose a topic or ask a question and then two other random people would talk about it. It was fun and chaotic and had the energy that 2009 Omegle had again. I enjoyed it quite a bit. People would sometimes answer the topics and sometimes have their own openings and such. It was chaotic without the negative vibes of many other websites that used to be more fun.The random matching combined with the private one-on-one conversation structure had an advantage of not having a popularity algorithm OR the ability for one person in a bad mood to derail your conversation. So aside from the moderation attempts to stop spam on the back-end, the two participants could choose what they felt was acceptable in their conversation.Sadly, about a quarter of the topics on Spy Mode were spambots linking to questionable sites (likely related to the law enforcement quotes in the article), and when they took down Spy Mode and reverted everything just to plain chat, the spambots were almost all you could talk to with regular Omegle. (I&#x27;ve never used the video chat so I have no insight there)Definitely downhill in a distinct way, and now with stricter liability for site owners that larger sites can tank with lawyers, I think it was inevitable that the whole thing was going to collapse soon anyway.I made a few friends from there, most temporary, but one remains who I am very close to. We never would have met in real life, and honestly I don&#x27;t think we would get along in person, but we talk almost every day and both our lives are better for it.But I think that this truly is a material loss for the internet.

they might, either about pre-ai internet, or the early ai &#x2F; early widespread ai, when it was widely available and accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn&#x27;t yet destroyed entire industries

I find it interesting that the &quot;magical period&quot; seems to be determined by your age.For me, the internet has already lost its magic by the time the mid 2000s came around, well before Omegle came out in 2009.For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?It seems more about the magic of childhood itself than anything to do with the technology.

I had that same feeling with the AOL chatrooms of the early 00s and to a lesser extent forums around that time and after.So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.

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&#x27;t want to be associated with, the content you&#x27;re getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you&#x27;re consuming there is someone&#x27;s passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else&#x27;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.

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.

That’s a good point. I remember when Facebook genuinely allowed people to connect with others whom they hadn’t seen for years. MySpace before it is the source of nostalgia for a lot of my peers. Twitter had many genuine interactions between popular celebrities and their fans. Any of these things are likely to be magical to someone.(Not sure what it means that these examples are all approximately dead to a lot of their previously most active users. That’s actually distinct from Omegle, unfortunately; most of their active users had remained perfectly happy with the platform.)

It’s possible to have multiple periods of “magic” as the internet improves in capability over time and people find new ways to use it.

&gt; The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came....for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September</a>

It was when people learnt how to make money from the internet.The corporatisation of net ruined it.Not much can survive the incentive of profit.

The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.

Try skiing or hiking. Basically anything with high enough effort bar or cost bar  is a sufficient proxy for this filter.

Just today I was dreaming of how awesome it would be if you could just somehow filter &quot;good sports&quot; and just open a game up for online play without having to think about all the bad behavior. How amazing would that be?In my eyes during the golden age of the internet that I think of, you could still do that... bad actors now and then but not a huge % and we were all excited just to play together and enjoy how cool everything was.

I remember the magic of USENET! I&#x27;d posted a question about how do do some basic piano repair, and got an answer from Marvin Minsky! Who knew he played the piano?!

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s able to move onto other projects which aren&#x27;t as stressful.

See my second paragraph; I&#x27;m not really talking about this person.

Sounds like he&#x27;s been fighting for a long time and eventually tired.It&#x27;s a bit presumptuous to say that his actions &#x2F; statement are due to despair being trendy. Everyone has their own &quot;It&#x27;s not worth it anymore&quot; moment.

Despair is trendy, which makes doing it easier; it makes it normalized. Perhaps previously a &#x27;I&#x27;m not going to give up; I&#x27;m going to keep fighting for what I care about!&#x27; message would be normalized, and because of that the Omegle founder would feel strong and supported instead of alone.(I don&#x27;t know the person or much about their situation; I&#x27;m just using what I read to make a general observation.)

Damn I spent time on Omegle, haha minefield but sometimes you find good people.

Job review sites suggest he&#x27;s had many employees over the years. Potentially over 200.

One is fewer than 30. Did he have any? How was he making money at all?

Omegle has fewer than 30 employees, according to some sites online. I can&#x27;t help but wonder whether having a more robust ops and legal team would have prevented this outcome. Founders shouldn&#x27;t feel like they&#x27;re going to have a heart attack at 30 if they&#x27;ve hired the right size of team. One (probably frivolous) lawsuit for a nearly 15-year-old company shouldn&#x27;t be existential.

&gt; 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 host to charge an appropriate amount warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do this.

Yes, 100 times yes. This is one of the big issues with the modern world, that no risk at all is acceptable. And that&#x27;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 &quot;if there is any risk at all, then no&quot;. It should be made clear that risk exists and it&#x27;s everyone&#x27;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&#x27;s move on. That shouldn&#x27;t stop everyone else from having fun.

&gt; isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other wayHad 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 &quot;recovered&quot;.But lesson here is - if you don&#x27;t have a deep wallet, right mindset and access to therapist, don&#x27;t start a website today or keep it small and off the main internet.

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

Golf also requires a membership and equipment to play, as well as physically being there. Omegle is (was?) a free online service with no signup required.

No, but if you operate enough golf courses you better be ready for the eventuality.

Playing golf, no. Providing a golf field service in the US - yes, absolutely.

Just because someone got struck by lightning while playing golf, doesn’t make golf dangerous to play.

Don&#x27;t you have to sign a waver for that type of accident. Maybe that&#x27;s what we are missing from the internet. But that would likely require a real proof of age to work

&gt; I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks.And they are regularly sued for injuries (even short of death), and sometimes lose.Picking one case out of many because it was a ice rink on a cruise ship:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mariettainjurylawyer.com&#x2F;federal-court-holds-royal-caribbean-liable-for-cruise-ship-ice-skating-injury&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mariettainjurylawyer.com&#x2F;federal-court-holds-roy...</a>

Business insurance is what prevents isolated disasters from killing off businesses.Insurance takes on many useful forms.For instance, you can hire a winter season snow removal service from companies that indemnify you from people slipping and falling on your property based on their having an insurance umbrella that covers all their customers.May not be relevant to Omegle. It takes a healthy income to be able to afford serious coverage. And it wouldn&#x27;t help with the policing work or the protests of pearl clutchers who don&#x27;t care about precautions, effort and resources for victim support, and just can&#x27;t handle any failure of any kind.

I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks. I&#x27;m amazed they haven&#x27;t been sued into oblivion to where helmets are required to be worn.So it seems like we do have SOME semblance of understanding risk vs reward.

I think lot of problems from real world get projected to social media in meta form, we can also say lives of people has gone worse since web 2.0, hence rise of such cases, but increase scale of platform also contribute to probability of malice

&gt; 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 defend against no matter what you do.

This is a remarkably bad take that indicates a severe lack of understanding about how abusers operate. Do better.

The victim of this abuse had to log on to a computer each and every time they were “abused” which is lowering the bar further than I ever thought possible for there to be a victim

This is true. Maybe I should have said &quot;also placing blame on the service as well as the abuser&quot;

When there&#x27;s money involved, blame always gets placed on the deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost never an individual person. If I spill a soda on the floor at Walmart and someone slips on it, they&#x27;re going to sue Walmart and probably not me.

&gt; But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on the service, not the abuser.Blame is not exclusive or zero-sum, and while there is obviously blame being placed on the service, I don&#x27;t see any evidence that blame is not being placed on the abuser (or that less blame is placed on them than would have been if blame wasn&#x27;t placed on the service as well.)

You&#x27;re comparing paper cuts to sexual abuse. Don&#x27;t do that.

No, dude. I was abducted, and my captors tormented me by giving me papercuts all over my body. Naturally, I feel strongly that paper should be outlawed. It would be illogical to allow for the possibility of someone else going through what I went through. Down with pulp!

This is so sad.For all the conventional reasons: the victim of the abuse deserves sympathy, and that abuse shouldn&#x27;t happen.But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on the service, not the abuser. And that&#x27;s sad because instead of being able to just make interesting stuff and put them online, we are being forced to consider &quot;what&#x27;s the worst possible thing that some evil bastard could use this for?&quot; and prevent that. Again, like the responsibility is on us to not make things that could be used for evil, rather than the responsibility being on the evil bastard to not do evil things.And ultimately, it means we&#x27;ll go the same route as Omegle; it&#x27;s just easier to not make stuff than fight this misallocation of blame. The world will be poorer without random quirky websites. Evil bastards will do their evil offline still, so no-one will be better off. But apparently that&#x27;s what we want. It&#x27;s so sad.

Only thing I know about Omegle is all the pranking videos and people playing music for others on youtube. Like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@SomethingAboutChickens">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@SomethingAboutChickens</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qKbLGu4xsPE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qKbLGu4xsPE</a>

sure that is very cool. thanks for sharing. shows the possibility of this medium.  i didnt mean that the author did a bad thing.

&gt; its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and amplify the evil forces that harms other people including children?Care to elaborate on your accusation? In my world, Omegle was about things like these: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q</a>

well yeah, that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s shut down

its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and amplify the evil forces that harms other people including children?+ the tool creator shouldnt be at the helm when it goes super viral. cos once everyone shows up, it will as the microbiologist and ecologist rene dubois observed, &quot;[any successful social innovation can be] pushed to the point of absurdity&quot;.when a tool goes viral i suppose it should be &quot;taken over&quot; (reeks of totalitarianism no?) by the community but it clashes with the ethos of proprietary, capitalist and indivdualist culture, the need for the culture to spotlight one person, they want them to become very famous and become very rich which leads to hate directed at them. where is the compassion for a mark zuckerberg say?its not that evil shut this person and their service down, its more like a hammer finally whacking a nail down thats been sticking out too long.better to be anonymous and not so successful. nothing fails like success. u could meet random people on IRC too, because its not so sticking out, its still operating.

This is like suing Google because a scammer used Gmail

This really summed up my feelings about it. Were there creeps and people trying to get up to illegal stuff on the site? Absolutely. I ran into plenty over the years, but two hits of ESC later and I was on to someone else.It some ways, it was kinda like Craigslist Missed Connections or something like that. Just people looking for... something into the void of the internet. And sometimes you met something you didn&#x27;t want at all, and sometimes you met someone you really connected with, either for just a moment or for long enough that you wanted to keep up with them.

&gt; Omegle, as one of the last places that didn&#x27;t tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm.I&#x27;m not sure about that, hasn&#x27;t omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person&#x27;s IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn&#x27;t even attempt to preserve this basic private data can&#x27;t be considered anonymous IMO

I found this passage particularly relevant:&gt; Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shieldOmegle, as one of the last places that didn&#x27;t tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm. Obviously there were creeps on there, but not interacting with them was easy and the only way for anyone to seriously harm you was to give them information about who you were outside of omegle.A while back I was curious about what sorts of awful things could happen from omegle chats and when you look into it, every single case ultimately involves people continuing conversations via Snap or Instagram.It&#x27;s sad that this free, no-harm site has to shut down while Snap&#x2F;Insta routinely ignore legitimate criticism of their ability to encourage abuse and have enough lawyers to ensure they&#x27;ll never have to face any consequences for enabling abuse.

While I totally understand there&#x27;s the potential for abuse, I don&#x27;t think Omegle should be penalized for stuff like this. From my understanding, there&#x27;s no addictive, profit-maximizing matchmaking or anything going on - it&#x27;s just a service which lets two strangers talk to one another. Of course you will have bad actors target any platform, but for a lowkey site, it seems sad that they would need to shut down because of something like this.

Complaining about newposters is just something you do. It would be weird otherwise.

&gt;newposters all the way back in 2007My recollection is that newposters was coined around 2007 for everyone who joined after the Habbo raids that had made &#x2F;b&#x2F; much more popular. These newposters from Habbo were &quot;ruining&quot; the site.

Eternal September is an observable phenomenon whenever a new demographic in a community outstrips the old guard. This is fundamentally different than &quot;kids these days&quot;, though you may find some overlap.

On an anonymous website, that&#x27;s the only differentiator

&gt; and what&#x27;s more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.Which was no longer a thing, with many people using Omegle to create content and upload it to youtube. It became far less anonymous in some cases than an image&#x2F;discussion board.

God, they&#x27;re complaining about newposters all the way back in 2007. Is the problem really Eternal September or is it just &quot;kids these days&quot;?Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into his posts<pre><code> I don&#x27;t know why exactly I think a one on one chat system would be different from an imageboard. When one makes a post on an image or discussion board, I think one does take into account that his words are going to be judged by the whole community. Even he isn&#x27;t worried about preserving some identity, he still identifies with those words and responds to the reactions they get, and I think that ultimately leads to self-censorship and conformity. When there&#x27;s only one person passing judgment, it doesn&#x27;t have nearly the same negative impact, and what&#x27;s more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.</code></pre>

I will forever respect and cherish 4chan because it&#x27;s pure, undiluted humanity in all its goodness and badness.

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

A community is defined by the selection process.People who aren&#x27;t sensitive to the general offensiveness of these communities come from all backgrounds and are effectively tolerant of each other in ways that are meaningful to them.

&gt;probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole4chan offensiveness isn&#x27;t so much a generational thing as it is a personality thing

That Google search you suggested appears (barring some UI thing I&#x27;m missing because I&#x27;m on Mobile) to only have two results, your comment and the 4chan archive. Is there a name for a google search with exactly two results? I know one with one single result is called a Googlewhack.

Very prophetic:&gt; is this meant as a new scheme to pick up underage children by getting them one-on-one with no one else to monitor the two-way conversation?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.tinychan.net&#x2F;read&#x2F;img&#x2F;1196772434" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.tinychan.net&#x2F;read&#x2F;img&#x2F;1196772434</a>archive link for those who don&#x27;t want to google

FYI, ICQ had popularized this type of random chat long before 4chan existed.

Any time I used it in the last five years I had to wade through about ten obvious bots advertising some pornsite or scam before I got to a real person.Then when you do get to a real person, 90% of the time they said &quot;M or F?&quot; and if you said M they&#x27;d instantly leave

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 &quot;anonymous free speech&quot; to realtime communications, and came up with the idea in late 2007. The PoC server for it was nothing more than &quot;telnet to this IP&quot; and it was sporadically advertised on 4chan for a short while.Astonishingly, Google still remembers after 16 years: &quot;forced_anon chat&quot; (with the quotes) finds the very origin, if you want to go down that dark and probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole.

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

depressing that people have to pay for the services and goods that they use? well i do agree that its pretty depressing that captcha is broken. AI seems ever closer to displacing humans… in the mean time we have to pay for internet services

That&#x27;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.

the site you are currently leaving a comment on operates on the old model. so far it&#x27;s working pretty well.

most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It&#x27;s not like some magical growth threshold crossed in 2010s, More and more of this audience was born internet-native too. It seems to be a cultural shift instead

wow. i remember using omegle in 2010. the whole chat roulette craze. this guy dresses up the issue in some pretty overly dramatic and sentimental clothing… in reality this is the failure of yet another company that uses the old model. the model of the early internet where everything is free and everyone is anonymous. its just unviable and becomes less viable as the internet grows. captcha is broken… the old model is dead.when you have a free service and broken captcha then you will be a magnet for crime, spam and you will hemorrhage money. maybe youll get advertisers if you sanitize the platform and now youve defeated the point anyway. or you can sell user data. at the end of the day people have to pay.

The journey of those episodes is really inspiring. Practising in that environment he pushes the boundaries of so many areas of human achievement in one, and once he&#x27;s better than anyone else in the world (maybe half way through the series) he then starts surpassing himself faster and faster.

He just did the 100th episode the other day and announced he wouldn&#x27;t be doing any more.

Also see these musicians with many &quot;play for strangers on Omegle&quot; videos:Marcus Veltri, piano, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@MarcusVeltri">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@MarcusVeltri</a>Rob Landis, violin, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@RobLandes">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@RobLandes</a>Billy Wilkins, guitar and vocals, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BillyWilkins">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BillyWilkins</a>The Doo, guitar and piana and otamatone, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@TheDooo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@TheDooo</a>Both Frank Tedesco and Marcus Veltri frequently did joint Omegle videos with Rob Landis. Tedesco and Veltri also have some joint videos. I seem to also recall some Wilkins, Landis, and Tedesco collaborations.

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

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&#x27;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.

Or this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL5poLSRa3cpHBfiJ6wQdTQDiI1FruzvN0">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL5poLSRa3cpHBfiJ6wQdT...</a>Frank Tedesco, pianist &#x2F; musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn&#x27;t know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.

Tbh the sad thing isn&#x27;t any youtuber losing a platform, it&#x27;s that Omegle was really a place people went when they were having a hard time and other people went there to cheer them up. I really hope there&#x27;s another platform like it, but I don&#x27;t know it.

Some of them were already on OmeTV, so I imagine that’s where most will move.

This definitely may have destroyed the career of a large number of widely popular youtubers... It certainly destroyed their format anyway.Imagine they&#x27;ll hop to a different platform.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;-4e3hi9AWVs" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;-4e3hi9AWVs</a>

While.we are on the subject of Omegle youtubers, I also love Something About Chickens

So happy you&#x27;ve discovered it! In every single video in the series he lifts up a bunch of people who are struggling in a really personal, memorable, inspiring way. I reckon he&#x27;s saved a few lives (at least).

Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn&#x27;t ever come across Harry Mack. That guy is fantastic. And he gave so much happiness to those people he was rapping for! Just seeing all the delight on their faces gave me a tear in my eye. There&#x27;s a lot of lonely people in the world, and for a moment, he improved their lives. We need better ways to connect; today I can VC with anyone in the world in a second, but we don&#x27;t know how to connect like he does. Creators, work to make that kind of connection happen.

Great analogy.  And.. thank you so much for posting this.  HMack is a legend. Every time I listen to him I get stuck for hours. He is mindblowing constantly, pure love. It&#x27;s worth the excursion every time, no one can amaze and impress like him every time.  I&#x27;ve seen some Omegle videos with him before, but this one was really special. Super appreciate this.

The Doo and Marcus Veltri too. So many world class musicians show up randomly on omegle

My first thought was, what is Harry Mack going to do now??

Thanks for sharing Harry Mack, never heard of him, but this took me down an emotional rabbit hole. Amazing what music can do.

And so now they’ll have to choose one of the other, even seedier bars. The kids aren’t any better off.You’ve made a poor analogy, though, since obviously it’s very trivial for a bar to validate age at the door. If such a thing were easy for Omegle to do, I’m sure they would.

Why? Anything on Omegle could happen in a park. Or a library. Omegle can&#x27;t keep kids off their platform: their parents need to.

the worst thing that could happen on omegle is that a child shows herself naked. this in fact, is not the end of the world, and certainly doesn&#x27;t justify some bullshit where we have to ask for permission before making a website or internet service plus photo ID for this and that party or whatever the hell you consider part of your solution.

&gt; a bit like losing access to a public spaceIt&#x27;s more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn&#x27;t check they weren&#x27;t giving access to minors, and didn&#x27;t check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.

Harry Mack has a very active channel on TikTok where he posts recordings from Omegle. 12&#x2F;10 highly recommend. Never seen anyone  like him.

I&#x27;m not getting the economics here.With so many big names using it, and it is so popular.Why was it a financial drain? Why can&#x27;t it keep going?Surely if was making enough money.
.

There&#x27;s an interesting progression watching him over time. While his technical ability has dramatically improved, so too has the engagement. Now you start to get more clips of people saying &quot;Wait. I&#x27;ve seen you on Youtube&#x2F;TikTok&quot;. Love his journey.

His Omegle 100[0] video is one of the best one yet, Harry is a legend. [0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk</a>

I&#x27;ve been following Harry Mack for years now and he still never ceases to amaze me.Someone who has worked incredibly hard at their craft in a very public manner.The positive vibe he brings makes the internet a little bit better on every encounter.I almost shed a tear when H.Mack got the opportunity to perform in front of his idols, Ice Cube, who said he was one of the best freestyle rappers he&#x27;s seen, and had followed his career closely for years. A magical moment :-)

Yup, Harry Mack is my boy ... I don&#x27;t even use Omegle but am full aware of due to HMack ... RIP Omegle

Gives 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... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is</a> (Harry Mack freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+ episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)

He was retiring the series at 100 episodes anyway, but yeah a sad day.

The loss of Harry Mack’s Omegle Bars was the first thing that came to mind for me.

I just discovered him yesterday and ended up watching something like 20 videos last night. This was also the first thought that came to my mind when I was reading the announcement.

I&#x27;ve never used Omegle myself, but I&#x27;ve watched all of Harry Mack&#x27;s Omegle Bars videos (freestyle rapping) and they are golden. Always fun to see him matched with some random kids and brighten their day:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk</a>

I&#x27;m really sad about this. I know that a lot of really desperate people used the text chat feature when they needed someone to listen, and there&#x27;s certainly a lot of people who are alive and happy today because they found someone to talk to there when they needed it. I can&#x27;t deny that there have also been cases where people&#x27;s lives have been made worse or ruined because of something that happened to them, but I think on the balance the site made the world a better place.

&gt; So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn&#x27;t want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?No, not spam of CSAM (in the sense of distribution of material where the abuse occurred elsewhere), but actual grooming and abuse happening through the site.e.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wusa9.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;virginia&#x2F;virginia-man-omegle-make-child-pornography-1000-victims&#x2F;65-fe368887-f318-492b-99e2-bbbdc5f55705" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wusa9.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;virginia&#x2F;virginia-m...</a>the more specific proximate cause, I believe, is one of the current suits that has gotten past S230 immunity, possibly the ongoing product liability lawsuit:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791</a>

That seems nuts to me. It&#x27;s just a generic venue for people meeting people, like a cafe that happens to be online.To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.

The decentralized cryptonet can&#x27;t come fast enough!

So they sue the platform that got them to meet, but not the one that allowed CSAM to be exchanged?

The owner is currently being sued by a woman who used the site as a minor and was matched with a pedophile who convinced her to make and send CSAM. This isn&#x27;t the usual kind of &quot;CSAM intermediary liablility&quot; lawsuit; the plaintiff is actually making an ordinary product liability claim. i.e. Omegle has no safety bars to keep kids from using the service ergo they are liable for me being abused by an adult.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791</a>

So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn&#x27;t want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?Is there a list of websites that have been shut down due to this type of attrition? I&#x27;m aware of at least one other site[0] that has met the same fate. It would be interesting to see an exhaustive list.[0] freeimage.us

Wow fuck, I was on there sketching portraits of people just yesterday. This really sucks. RIP

Even more disconcerting is the possibility they believe they&#x27;re pursuing righteousness genuinely rather than just for the reward.

The reporter, Joe Tidy, isn&#x27;t virtue signaling. He is an honest zealot full of righteous fury. He is 100% confident he&#x27;s right, just like those who killed heretics during crusades a couple thousand years ago, burned witches a few hundred years ago, or exterminated capitalists as part of Cambodian Khmer Rouge a few decades ago.

In that video he asserts through the closed door that Omegle hasn&#x27;t done anything &quot;for the children&quot; and then in the article they have one measly line about how Omegle actually has been productive on that front. The text now on the Omegle site seems to support that they did what they could as well. Of course they&#x27;re not going to get a good conversation with him when that&#x27;s how they&#x27;re going to frame it compared to reality. Whether Omegle was doing enough or should exist to begin with are different arguments but the premise of &quot;Omegle is doing nothing&quot; appears very wrong and I imagine offensive to creator&#x2F;employees.

The guy can file a stalking and harassment case on BBC can&#x27;t he ?

&quot;He was definitely home, all the blinds were drawn&quot;
5 minutes later, Leif is seen going from his car to his houseYou can&#x27;t make this stuff up.Every time I see a BBC clip it&#x27;s something ridiculous. There&#x27;s probably a good business opportunity doing a mystery science theater 3000 version of BBC news at this point.

Elsewhere in the thread this article with an embedded video was linked: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-64618791</a>The video, showing a BBC “journalist” attempting to ambush Leif, is one of the most… existentially disgusting? videos I’ve seen in a long, long time.It’s so utterly performative. Such a transparent attempt by the “journalist” at painting himself as a certain sort of person. Not a single genuine emotion, action, expression, or word. Absolutely soulless and desperate attempt to virtue signal in the even more desperate hope of furthering his career. This “man” is no better than someone selling themselves on onlyfans. Actually, I’d posit he’s worse: the entire schtick requires disingenuous postering.I don’t know what to do when seeing stuff like this. It’s depressing. I hope one day there’s a return to a much smaller internet and these people deign to just leave us alone. He’s a sad man and the fact his doing this will may well advantage him is even sadder. I guess I’ll go take a walk.

Redistribution of consequences strikes again.

&gt; From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.This was a not-unusual story for people active online in the &#x27;80s.I wonder how the world-expanding has changed, now that everyone&#x27;s online. I feel like I only have a partial and rough high-level understanding.Nowadays, for example, every gay kid in every small town knows they&#x27;re not alone, which is a great advance for humanity.But everyone is also being bombarded, conditioned, tracked, manipulated, and exploited pervasively online.What things can we contemporary techbros do, to keep all the goodness of making online accessible to everyone, but remove much of the current badness?(I mean, after we spend 5 minutes removing various kinds of third-party trackers from sites we control, what&#x27;s the next thing we can do?)

Wikipedia is so fast, soon they will predict the news

Amazing. This post is 1 hour old and Wikipedia is already updated:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Omegle" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Omegle</a>&quot;Omegle (&#x2F;oʊˈmɛɡəl&#x2F;[1]) was a free online chat website that allowed users to socialize with others without the need to register. The service randomly paired users in one-on-one chat sessions where they would chat anonymously using the names &quot;You&quot; and &quot;Stranger&quot;. It operated from 2009 to 2023.&quot;...&quot;On November 8, 2023, K-Brooks posted an announcement describing the challenges of running the site, and the ultimate decision to suspend the service. Challenges listed was online exploitation of children and attacks on communication services. K-Brooks concluded that his decision revolved around internet misuse and asked users to consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to combat misuse.&quot;

Didn&#x27;t know Leif founded Omegle but he&#x27;s struck me as one of the most sincere and well intensioned people I&#x27;ve encountered.

I was growing up when the first people got BBS&#x27; and CompuServe. I don&#x27;t miss the days of dial-up.I miss the days just as you learned Google could answer questions you asked in free-form, without the censorship and advertisement preferences they give today. Those were better days on gonewild also.

I miss the good ol’ days of Minitel. Imagine an internet made up almost exclusively of French people.

Even though I did miss older stuff in the web 2.0 days, I had a positive outlook (and good reason to have it) for the things that would come next.Not anymore.

&gt; it&#x27;s turtles all the way down with nostalgia.And yet golden eras do occur, or so it would seem.I’m sure it’s hard to tell when you’re in or near one, which is an interesting topic in its own right, but it doesn’t mean we should dismiss outright the possibility that a passing era might just be taking something truly valuable with it.

Flat Design had barely begun, jQuery had a bright future. CSS compilation? That&#x27;s a step too far don&#x27;t you think?

I&#x27;m still nostalgic about the pre-facebook internet.

My experience begins with BBSs in the late 1980s and runs through some of those eras.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&#x2F;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 &quot;remix&quot; type stuff happening via open API&#x27;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&#x27;t been completely choked by naked commercialization. Felt like there were still some cool alternative corners of the web that hadn&#x27;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 &quot;dot com&quot; era layoffs. You had a lot of underemployed but talented developers making things.(but obviously everybody will have their own personal favorite eras!)

&gt; 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 &#x27;web 1.0&#x27;. (And, of course, it&#x27;s turtles all the way down with nostalgia.)

No way!  That&#x27;s awesome.  You should reach out to the creator of the site and let him know about this (if you haven&#x27;t already).  He&#x27;d probably be super happy to hear this story  :)

The chance of a small glitch or anything that did not happen in the past is as likely as a ghost dinosaur coming up to you and scamming you out of all your money.Looking at the past through a probabilistic lens is irrational, unless you are doing it to predict the future through information collection.Sort of, of topic but anyway….

Think about all the infinite numbers of glitches that happened in the past and prevented you to meet other possible wives :)

For people who are looking for this -- It&#x27;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.

&gt; 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.

Are you English, and your wife American, by any chance?

I happened to realize today that many if not all results we observe today is outcome of one or the other probable event in the past.How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car accidents that did happen and change lives.History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent that they covered in books or passed through generations as tales.Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change entire history of humankind, especially in wars.

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, it’s always had a soft spot in my heart due to how much it changed the trajectory of my life. It’s a sad day.

Maybe <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Cloudhiker.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Cloudhiker.net</a> will bring back this experience.

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 as a way to dance with strangers over video; putting on ridiculous outfits and playing disco were some of the moments from those dark times that I still cherish.RIP Omegle! You will be missed, by me and many others.

Omegle 2009-2023