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.
You can do both. Not everyone will talk to their kids (lots of both useless and under resourced parents out there), and guardrails are possible, so best to not throw up our hands and say "welp, the world is just a terrible place."
"There is a cost" or "I don't want to" are not reasonable excuses, depending on use case and regulatory regime you're operating under. It sucks, but there are many terrible people out there. Hopefully the EFF and ACLU can work to balance out regulation from government in this space.
(what sites access is gated by age is a distinct conversation)
It's not "the world is just a terrible place", but rather "the world inevitably has things that kids cannot handle". If you want digital entertainment for your kids, then seek out products which explicitly offer this. The unfettered Internet is a less appropriate babysitter than a red light district.
And talking about "age verification" as if it's some straightforward addition is an utterly dishonest framing. The core idea of the distributed Internet is the barest of communication which further complexity/policy can be layered on top of. "Age verification" actually implies the much more draconian and chilling meatspace identity verification.
Nobody has a problem with a DigitalKidsPlayLand which performs identity verification, strictly curates/moderates content, and escrows all activity for later review. It's this push to legally require such things for everyone, based on some idea that everything needs to be made kid-safe, that is horribly authoritarian and needs to be soundly rejected.
Your own link talks about the many downsides, not least of which entrenching the idea that website owners regularly demand government id from their users. No possible downsides to that...
There are always tradeoffs. There is no law that says website owners cannot demand ID already. We might have different belief systems and perspectives on the topic of safety and privacy as it relates to non adults and Internet accessibility, in which case we won't find middle ground. It happens. Democracy is messy. I encourage engagement regardless of your position on the topic. That is how we find (or at least attempt to) the least worst policy.
> There is no law that says they have to, thankfully.
Eight states as of this comment have legislation that has passed requiring age verification. Ten other states have introduced legislation that has not yet passed. (US centric)
> In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring the use of age verification on websites that contain a “substantial portion” (33.33%) of adult content. Websites must utilize commercial age verification systems that check a user’s government identification or “public or private transactional data” to confirm that a user is at least 18 years old. Louisiana’s law has sparked a flurry of copycat legislation to be introduced in state houses around the country.
There is at least GDPR, if you have users of European citizenship, that requires a legal basis to do so if it is mandatory in your registration process
Basic age verification is pretty easy, no? I’m not sure about the details but this seems like a pretty low bar for a site like this. Not that I’m advocating it be required but just that if it were me I would not make something like this without at least making the best possible attempt at age verification.
It’s because the cops can show up and demand ID from everyone inside, they have to make sure everyone has one.
In this case, they have no obligation to ensure everyone has ID on their person.
Can you sue a bar you used fake ID to get into?
My real question wasn’t if there are kids on the system or not, but why are they allowed to sue when they themselves and nobody else have lied about the age verification question?
Yes, kids can and have sued because they got served alcohol while underage - even if they asked for it. The whole premise is as minor they couldn’t understand the consequences, and weren’t fully responsible for their actions.
And establishments get shut down all the time for it.
Your link from an ID verification company says “it depends” wrt fake id liability. I suppose there are sane places and crazy places in the world, for a limited time at least
Only if they ask for ID, check it, and it looks so good no one could tell it was fake. That’s about as far from checkbox in a random website pop up as we can get though, right?
In your new example:
- is there a regulatory reason that it is illegal for them to serve someone named Bob? Or is there a real risk/harm that people named Bob would suffer that they know about and is predictable?
- did they do any of the checks they are legally required to do to prevent someone named Bob from accessing the service and therefore suffering that injury? Or make a good faith effort to not just injure any Bob’s, at a minimum?
If they didn’t, then yet a Bob could sue if he managed to get through and get injured.
What is the "best possible attempt"? There's was a checkbox added (possibly after this suit was filed) that was a "I'm over 18 and understand I'm meeting random people". That's something every teen already clicks past constantly to see increasingly large swathes of the internet. Any actual "verification" seems quite difficult beyond just relying on self-attestation.
> What is the "best possible attempt"? There's was a checkbox added (possibly after this suit was filed)
It was after the suit was filed (prior to the suit, AIUI, Omegle had an over-18 warning (with no confirmation) on the Unmoderated chat option, and a stated policy that users had to be 18+ or 13+ with parents permission.
Also, it may not have been because of this suit, there is at least one other suit that was found not to be barred by Section 230 (this one avoided S230 immunity because it is a product liability suit, not one contingent on their role as a publisher; the other one I've seen, IIRC, was found to raise a triable question of fact regarding whether Omegle's behavior was within the category of knowing involvement in trafficking that brought it out of S230 protection.)
Why wouldn't something based on unlinkable blind signatures work? Basically site issues a token to user, user gets token unlinkably blindly signed by some recognized age verification entity (government agency, bank) that already has their personal information, user returns signed token to site, site verifies it was signed by the recognized age verification entity.
> 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'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're sharp?
Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?
We do implement many things that protect people, sometimes children in particular. They aren't perfect, but they can prevent a lot of damage.
The question, as usual, isn't all or nothing. It's what can we do that will meet all the criteria as best possible: not infringe on freedoms, reduce harm, be affordable, etc.
100% agree i think the bigger issue is at least in the US and many other countries we have lost all faith that the people making those choices will do so in a responsible or ethical manner.
Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don’t think it will ever come back. So where do we go from here?
> Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don’t think it will ever come back. So where do we go from here?
A bit extreme? It will come back if you choose it, if you do it. The despair, as I posted, is trendy but it's absurd - the most ridiculous, counterproductive philosophical trend I can imagine. Stop philosophizing and just start doing!
I don’t think im being extreme. That is the way I see it. That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
What should I do? I have no one I want to vote for and honestly I don’t care enough to do it myself. At this point it’s just figuring out how you can profit off this and get your own piece of land to check out on.
I don’t find this to be depressing it’s just what I see as facts.
We'd have to redefine depressing to exclude that post. Look at all the ways it advocates quitting; it's impressive in a way.
> That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
Do you think that makes it true? That seems to support my claim that it's trendy, and people repeating these things because others say it are by definition following a trend.
I've seen many trends come and go, but this one - despair as a trend - is the dumbest.
Also, who is going to get anything done? We aren't children; our parents won't fix things if we don't do it. We'd better get to work, like prior generations who sacrificed and built so much. What will you tell your grandkids - 'well, I just quit; it was the fashionable thing to do.'
Have you considered this trend is encouraged by people who don't want you getting in their way? You are handing all your power to them.
> Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?
You’re talking in hyperbole but… yeah, we do a ton of work to make roads safer than they might otherwise be. What purpose do you think pedestrian crossings serve?
It's horrible that this happened and obviously I'm glad the pedophile is in jail, but how exactly was she "coerced"? And how is any of this Omegle's fault?
We can and do, and on the other side of a legal process, it may be found that Omegle is not at all liable for the actions of its users.
... and if the owner of Omegle doesn't want to take the years it'd take (and tens of thousands in legal fees) to find out whether or not they're liable for a silly project they put together for fun, I can't fault 'em.
If the guy was in another country, it's hard for me to imagine how she became a "digital sex slave" (how the article refers it) instead of just blocking the guy. Naturally I'd imagine there was some kind of blackmail for her to comply, but the article doesn't mention anything like that.
It's hard for you to imagine, and I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, because you're not a ten year old girl.
I've been the parent of a ten year old girl, and can say with confidence that it's within the realm of possibility that an adult could manipulate a child in ways that ultimately would make that child afraid, if not utterly terrified, to be disobedient.
You scraping and digging through the comments here imploring to know about how she was coerced suggests to me that what you're really looking for is a justification to blame the ten year old girl. "coercion implies a threat" implies that with no evidence of a threat, the girl must have played along. She must have liked it. That's the vibe you give as you dig in and keep demanding people prove there was a threat. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that vibe.
I apologize that you felt that it was an accusation. I could have been more tactful in expressing what my impressions were of your probing. I'm happy to be wrong.
The blackmail was threatening her into thinking she'd be in legal trouble too. That's not true, but a terrified child isn't exactly running an optimal risk calculus. Even without that the content itself is blackmail material.
How was she coerced? Who knows. I'll take a guess and say she was probably tricked at first into thinking he was someone else. Threatened after that.
(EDIT: and for chrissakes get identifiable information out of your user profile if you're going to argue this hard about something like this! Internet 101, man!)
This was the threat:
"Once he had coerced Alice into sending intimate images, Fordyce convinced her that she was complicit in making and sharing child sexual abuse material. Fearing arrest, she kept everything secret from her family and friends."
Punishing minors for "distributing child pornography" over content of themselves sent in private is completely outrageous. Had you not linked those sources there's no way I'd believe our justice system would be so absurdly inept.
Asking for an explanation as to which part made it "coercion" means I "need a playbook for the sexual exploitation of children?" Wtf kind of leap of logic is that? The article didn't provide any explanation as to how it was coercion, hence the question, which you never answered.
So if I'm reading an article about a crime case and the article lacks details, that means I'm "looking for a playbook to commit that crime?" Give me a break.
Maybe you're a pedophile trying to hide your playbook for sexual exploitation of children? See how easy it is to make insulting, baseless accusations?
If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?
Weird people, pedos, criminals are everywhere.... parents somehow teach about "stranger-danger" offline but not online, and then blame platforms their kids use, even though they are too young to use them in the first place.
>If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?
Well, yes! A different example: with few exceptions (gun manufacturers), when people die everybody even remotely involved gets sued. Examples: Station Nightclub fire, Surfside condominium collapse..
In the case of a pedo at Walmart I could imagine: "Didn't the staff notice the guy dragging the girl out of the store? Why didn't they get involved?" Walmart has much more money than the pedo.
If you want a proper Walmart analogy then you should stick the child in a remote part of a vast parking lot, so that there's no reason to expect the staff to notice.
A more accurate analogy would be if they ushered the child into a backroom where a stranger was seated across from them with a glass divider between them and then they left the room. This is the whole point of Omeagle, to facilitate these interactions. Would it unsettle anyone if Walmart were doing that, and would they be legally responsible for whatever happens in there?
Walmart doesn't invite people of all ages to hang out in a private room together, with no supervision, no rules, no limits.
Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated, somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right, because how could it not be? It's used by so many people, and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be held to some standard, and, right or wrong, put trust in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.
The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the private room scenario I described above. I left out the part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But persuasive people can persuade other people, especially children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only happened to some of the 74 million people using the site, it happened to people. And for those it happened to, those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without Omegle's help.
If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting here about how unique and special Omegle was for people who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot of those comments.
But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle was operating. With 74 million people using it, the smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.
The parents blame the platforms because the platforms enabled the harm.
> "Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?"
We do in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives "It’s illegal to: use any knife or weapon in a threatening way, carry most knives or any weapons in public without a ‘good reason’, sell most knives or any weapons to anyone under the age of 18." - And yes that includes kitchen knives because there's a callout - "In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen knives."
> "Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?"
We regulate them or have standards around them[3]: "The Toy Safety Directive, BS EN 71-1, raises attention to plastic bags and plastic sheets. It specifies bags larger than 380mm opening circumference and having a drawstring closure must be made of a material which is permeable to air. Except where application requires airtight sealing, all bags are to be perforated with holes of 4mm diameter minimum, spaced on 30mm grid. Bags for child appealing products and toys must have a minimum of four holes; other bags to have a minimum of two holes".
Your stance "we shouldn't have to do things about dangers" is silly, we do a lot of things to reduce risks in a lot of areas. Learning from other people's tragedies and trying to safeguard others from having to go through them is one of the long-running threads of civilised society.
Should we restrict electric wiring options in houses because electrocution and fires are a thing? Yes. Should we restrict food production options because salmonella is a thing? Yes. Should we have building codes because shoddy buildings fall down and kill people? Yes. Should we have laws about lead and carcinogens and things in products? Yes. Should cars have to meet crash test safety conditions? Yes. etc. etc.
> "Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?"
We do; drivers are surrounded by inflatable airbags. [rant] Look at the social messaging around bike helmets. You never see people telling runners to wear a helmet in case they suddenly come upon a head injury. But take say YouTuber Tom Stanton who makes unusual engineering projects, including a flywheel bike[1] which he rode at walking pace down an empty country lane, and in his next bike video, a homemade supercapacitor bike[2] he's wearing a a helmet because of all the flack he got in the comments on the earlier one.
The point is not whether helmets prevent against brain damage in certain situations, the point is what situations are casual everyday recreational cyclists getting into where they risk brain damage? And the answer is cars. And the social messaging for helmet wearing is to shift blame from car drivers hitting cyclists to cyclists "not taking safety precautions".
I'm not a fan of this journalist "ambushing" the founder at his property and staying outside of it until he gets some answers. "He has all the blinds closed" - right.
Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and needs to provide answers.
Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.
That really sucks; I would have guessed the standard of evidence would be lower than 'conviction of a crime'. Why a default judgment? And where do you live?
Under German law, anyone involved in a criminal case has the right to privacy. The press are free to report on the case, but they cannot identify the suspect or victim. If you watch or read German news, you'll see everything you expect to see in a report about a crime, except for names and faces.
Personally, I think this is an entirely reasonable balance between competing rights. Publicly identifying suspects can cause immense harm to innocent people and prejudice the right to a fair trial based on the presumption of innocence. I cannot see any public interest argument for the general right to publicly identify criminal suspects, beyond mere prurient interest. If there would be substantial investigative benefits to publicly naming a suspect, for example to encourage witnesses or other victims to come forward, that should be a decision for the courts (or at least the police) and that decision should be made based on the individual circumstances of the case.
Multi million Euro fraud, perpetrated for 10+ years in an organized fashion by husband and wife and some helpers from Saxony. Victims were (and are) senior citizens.
The German public broadcast MDR had several stories on them. Yet they don’t even dare to show the office building on which the perpetrators work. Much less their private house, or faces or names.
The press is more afraid of being sued by the perpetrators than the perpetrators are afraid of being prosecuted.
> Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.
I'm starting to feel this is the thing we should have laws against.
This is a really important question for sure and I want to protect the rights of journalists, but in this instance the reporter from the BBC sat in front of Leif's house for 7 hours, fully aware that Leif was there and didn't want to speak to him, and then when he briefly emerged, accused him of not protecting children. It feels more like entrapment and harassment than reporting. It also feels like the type of theater the BBC knows they can get away with because the topic is child abuse and we seem to lose all restraint as a society when this topic comes up.
I don't think that's quite accurate. Aspergers was always a form of Austism, the remove of the separation is more policy than anything. The label is useful for those who want to use it.
So you’re a fan of judges doing their jobs, but not a fan of journalists doing theirs?
Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for actual centuries now.
Investigative reporters should act professionally. They should setup a formal appointment with the accused and remain neutral. In the bbc report they showed up uninvited and asked "We want to know why you're not protecting children, Mr. Brooks" which is a loaded question [1].
That’s not actually a loaded question… they had a source with clear and convincing proof of the criminal victimization of numerous children by one of Mr. Brooks’s users who had weaponized the service he provided, as well as both law enforcement and child protection organizations indicating that Omegle’s service was being actively weaponized against children; as a matter of both rhetoric and law it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Brooks was not protecting children, and there’s obvious public interest in his answer to that question. Arguably it’s something you could criticize as gotcha journalism, but that’s often a weak critique because you saying they’ve got an agenda is predicated on you having your own. Also there is a LONG history of very credible journalists tracking down and confronting those who don’t want light shone on their activities and therefore aren’t exactly inclined to schedule formal appointments… sure, it can be seen as showboating, especially for a television journalist, but it’s still just one of the tools of investigative journalism and you’d call it legit if it was exposing some form of public corruption or criminal activity that was beyond your personal pale.
I wouldn't ever call it legit for a journalist to chase someone around yelling questions at them and then use the footage, because it's the kind of thing that makes the "guest" look guilty regardless of actual guilt.
Showing up and getting actual answers, sure, but if you chased me around yelling questions about why I'm not protecting the children I would 100% run away rather than give you an in-depth interview. It looks bad until you think about it for five seconds and realise how confronting the situation is to even an innocent man, just like the Reid technique etc.
It certainly is when you attempt to avoid making public comment over some matter to which the public has an overriding interest.
In terms of ethics, I’ll side with the journalist’s here over the guy running a service that randomly matches adults with children for video chat when he didn’t immediately shut down the service for a top-to-bottom rethink the moment he found out it’d been used by a serial pedophile.
There is no journalist here to side with unfortunately. Ethics are infringed upon whether the other party is responsible for worse violations or not. It's not an either-or situation.
You can't shut down everything once a bad actor does heinous things. There would be nothing left around. No more streets, no more cafes, no more trash bins, no more cars. Nothing.
As it has been pointed out, omegle did arguably provide more protection against bad actors that lots of other services around today. If you're in a situation you don't like, just press next and it's over. Nobody can contact you or recognise you in any way.
The crimes happen when you're not anonymous anymore, after exchanging snapchat or instagram accounts for example. They don't happen in a months long omegle conversation.
The root of the problem is being careless and providing identifying information. Obviously kids are too young to understand all the dangers, that's what parents are for. You wouldn't let your kids alone in the middle of the city and then sue it when a pedophile gets access to them. You can't let your kids use the Internet without keeping an eye on what is going on and warning them of the perils.
When judges do their job, you the accused have due process and legal representation.
I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would need legal and competent representation if I were accused of something.
We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay with.
If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an investigation, carried out by the designated representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.
> We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Your actions as the officer of a company are generally considered to be "public".
You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you certainly don't have to answer questions from a journalist either, but they're not generally invading your privacy by merely asking them).
He wasn’t being accused of a criminal act, ergo he didn’t need legal representation on hand. He was being asked by a professional journalist for a world-renowned publishing source why he wasn’t doing more as the responsible officer to keep his company’s product from putting children into harms way in exactly the way his product was designed to perform… he had neither any right to avoid being questioned nor any real interest in avoiding providing comment. He might not like being approached, and if he has some condition that makes such in-person discussion difficult I’m certainly sympathetic but he could just as certainly have communicated by email as he had been asked to do, but chose not to.
As for the reputational risk you’re pointing to, nothing here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc… the journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him into changing his business’s product to prevent the very real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he wasn’t doing more to prevent his platform’s weaponization when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for exactly that use case.
The legal process has played out. The Omegle founder has been faced with having to spend possibly hundreds of thousands in legal fees, and as such has decided to turn off the site without going to court.
The legal process playing out rarely ever means that a judge or jury makes a decision, rather it usually plays out as an economic problem, one of "does everyone involved have 10s of thousands of dollars to burn".
Usually the answer is "no", so usually it settles out of court.
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's house for 7 hours, running after them, and spouting accusations through the door doesn't sound like my idea of "trying to have a civilized conversation". The BBC should be deeply embarrassed.
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.
At least in the country where I live the "people near me" features have been removed/blocked from WeChat/Zalo/Telegram because they are overwhelmingly (like 99% of the time) used for prostitution.
* Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats
* Chatroulette launched ~half a year later
* Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after that
I've not used either one so I don'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 https://ehmeh.com/ 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.
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.
I don'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.
How is age verification supposed to work? I don't suppose users of the site are going to provide legal documents just to use it. It'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't recall exactly how it played out in court, but it appeared to amount to nothing, which I can't help but to feel was due to the fact that mechanisms to verify someone's age online are either trivial to circumvent or present such a high barrier to entry that no reasonable user would surmount it.
It's supposed to work perfectly. That was easy. Next?
But in all seriousness, age verification will soon be a legal reality. It's only "hard" because it's optional. When the government makes it required, they'll also have to make it possible - or those laws won't stand up in court. It'll probably require government issued digital IDs and MFA hardware.
I think it's likely just to result in offshoring of site, which is a net negative, imo, for constructive regulation of these sites. I think the effort for age verification is going to turn back the clock on progress that has been made in content moderation done by the bigger sites in the US, by pushing eyeballs to less regulated sites overall.
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.
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't have an army of lawyers.
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.
Framing this as "what about the children" is an easy way to attack just about anything that's not strictly top-down from some large corporate vendor.
On the other hand, I do wonder if "talk to strangers" is indeed a reasonable model. Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers. Clearly that model works there. But then again the neurons are simple (relatively) cells with much more cohesive goals and behavior, while humans are complex entities with behavior ranging from the cooperative to the ghastly predatorial.
Ultimately it seems any such service can't be anonymous. Talk to strangers... fine. But you need to register first, with your name, face, age, and meet consequences for what you're doing on the service, if your intent is less than noble. Alas this takes people and money which Omegle apparently didn't have.
> Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers.
This is nonsense. Our neurons don’t talk to strangers. They talk with other neurons from the same individual. There is more in common between any two connected neurons than between two family members.
And besides there is no reason to think that what happens between cells is a good model to base human behaviour on whatsoever.
Socialization is important (we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement), and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life. If only because we biologically have urges to reproduce and are aware enough of biology to know that family reproduction is a horrible idea.
> we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement
Yes.
> and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life
Yes.
see how easy it was to write it without asserting falsehoods about neurons, and without drawing unsupported conclusions from said falsehood?
A metaphor can be faulty even if the conclusion it purports to end up with is true. And if we can do away without the obscuring metaphor (as you did in this very comment I'm responding to) then we should.
I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature of freedoms. Or the public that funds it has and it realized that it can't do any good if donors pull support because it keeps supporting Nazis. Maybe distinction without a difference.
> I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature of freedoms.
Of all the targets of ire for "woke culture" etc., I'm really surprised that ACLU, SPLC and similar aren't getting more heat. They're actually highly consequential in people's daily lives and can clearly be ideologically captured by a rather small group of people, given that the orgs themselves are so small.
Much better targets of critique than random Twitter mobs.
The ACLU is not the same organization that it used to be. That neo nazi march they defended was almost 50 years ago. It is doubtful they would take a similar stance today.
The ACLU of Virginia did defend the rights of white supremacists to organize in Charlottesville in 2017. I believe the resulting violence triggered some aclu soul searching and I’m not sure where the organization landed on defending the free speech of nazis and the like. Speaking for myself, I hope they keep to their principles.
damn, that's rough. It's a shame because yes, the first amendment does include "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"
But that's the rub, PEACEABLY. Clearly what happened in Charlottesville violated that and is no longer protected under the constitution. But we can't ever truly predict the actions of an individual in a large group.
I'm very torn. I feel like we veer into Minority Report if we start having to predict what assemblies are prone to violation or not.
They sure did, but they've changed. They helped obtain permits for the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, which devolved into a MAGA riot that ended with a white supremacist murdering one protestor and injuring 35 others. Since then the ACLU has become far more squeamish about their clients and has been willing to compromise on their historical principles.
no, that's what they are for. The entire point is that they don't care about optics. I let my membership go when it came obvious they were starting to care.
Nazis are people, and being a nazi is not a crime. Until they commit some sort of crime they should be afforded all the same basic human rights and freedoms as everyone else. That's just basic common sense.
You’re acting like the ACLU hasn’t _specifically_ stood up for child molesters in cases about sexual offense notification. It’s not about that. They just care more about cases that will give them free publicity than defending a floundering website.
They have changed their direction considerably since 2016. The cases they take on now tend not to align with an absolutist stance on freedom of speech and due process.
When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
This is their plea for donations:
"Abortion care, trans people’s right to live freely, people’s right to vote – our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and nationwide."
Now I am not saying these are bad causes but it seems their priorities have shifted. They don't seem to be defending deeply unpopular people anymore
And frankly, they always had a very selective list of things they bothered to get involved in. There are a ton of civil liberties they always avoided doing anything about.
But they’re mostly irrelevant anymore - the causes they’ve started going after have a thousand other non-profits doing as much for, or better now.
The ACLU war chest has been over $400M the last few years, with many thousands of people in pretty much every state working with the organization in some capacity.
There's absolutely no evidence to support your claims that either the ACLU is irrelevant, nor that it has somehow shifted its momentum considerably since 2016 in what class of cases it handles (especially given the age of the organization and number of shifts vs. overall societal/cultural changes).
On the contrary, I can find many recent examples of legal actions spread headed by the ACLU across dozens of issues all over the country. If you can't find any it's because you're not looking, though you can start with their Annual Reports.
Your multiple statements of the ACLU's irrelevance tells me you don't have reliable sources. I would wager you've spent more time on these comments, than actually reading up on the ACLU and its activities. You're welcome to hold any opinion you want about the organization, though without supporting evidence I doubt anyone else is going to share it with you.
> When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
Hard to square this assessment with the last news item I caught about the ACLU: fighting a gag order against Donald Trump on free speech grounds.
This is the pretty standard issue of, as the US drifts further and further to the right, anyone who stays relatively stable is now accused of being liberal or leftist.
That is noble they did that and shows that they still have that element in them. I do not support Trump, and it shows objectivity to defend someone like him when his rights are infringed as they seem to be in that case.
The NY Times has covered the internal friction in the ACLU to take on more progressive causes as well. I was wrong to say they have completely strayed from defending speech absolutely but they do seem to have moved focus away. [1]
For people who agree with the libertarian stance, the optics aren't horrible, of course, they are good. The question is whether there are enough of those people to sustain an organization like the EFF.
The ACLU speaks up for the rights of murderers and rapists that we don't like, because we don't want the system to be able to abrogate the rights of politically inconvenient people that the powers that be don't like. Like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. The ACLU and the EFF aren't about optics, but the underlying rule of law. We are better than a mob with pitchforks, even when we really don't like the perpetrator.
Really, I’d like to flip the script here and dare anyone against EFF protecting Omegle to post their real life resume/linkedin/etc.
I’ll do my part to make sure you’re unhirable, because the “optics” of destroying something as simple and innocent as this are terrible, and what’s actually happening is pseudo-anonymous pressure.
The article mentions supporting the EFF if you are opposed to this kind of thing. It's possible they offered to help but the owner was sick of it all. That's the impression I got from reading the piece.
> 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's basic behavior, to start with.
What "basic behavior" is that? Anonymously video chatting strangers on the internet? Can't you already do that in many Discord servers? Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g. Chatroulette)? There clearly isn't anything fundamentally illegal about the practice, or these would all be shut down.
You'll notice that all of those sites have registrations where you have to create an account and affirm that you're over the age of 13 rather than just putting "Don't use this if you're under 13" in tiny print at the bottom of a page. Even Chatroulette has a big popup where you have to affirm you're over 18 and that you agree to their terms and conditions before using the site..
Yes, obviously, but what does it prevent in terms of the outcome we care about, i.e child abuse?
We shouldn't just take zealous well-paid lawyers as a fact of nature. If those "defense against lawsuits"-actions actually don't make a difference in terms of reducing child abuse, then we should not let them make a difference in the legal system either.
Another case of not making perfect the enemy of good. Some percentage of children who see a disclaimer saying, "Do not use if you're under 18, click here to confirm you're 18+" and decide not to lie and login -- so as a base level, sites that are dangerous for kids should do that.. the should also do a bunch of other stuff, and it certainly should be mitigating to Omegle's liability that they were doing a bunch of other stuff, but they apparently didn't do a few easy things which may cost them.
> Some percentage of children who see a disclaimer saying, "Do not use if you're under 18, click here to confirm you're 18+" and decide not to lie and login
That's assuming the evidence I would like to actually see.
Age limits can have a perverse effect on kids, or even young adults, eager to prove to themselves and their peers how "mature" they are. Retail stores and clubs where I live have exploited this for a long time.
For instance, there is no government-imposed limits on the age you need to be to buy energy drinks, but the grocery stores have coordinated to institute a 15 year limit. I'm pretty sure they do this simply to increase sales, not over concern for overcaffeinated kids.
They also used to have big signs saying "Over 18? PROVE IT!" with a big foaming glass of beer. I'm sure that flew over the head of most adults, but there was nothing about showing ID there.
It's like having a "no trespassing" sign and a fence around your pool. You still might be in legal trouble if a kid hops your fence and drowns, but you're vastly better off from a legal perspective than the alternative of not having any barrier whatsoever.
That comparison hinges on having to click "yes, I'm over 13" being more of a fence+sign than a "tiny" text saying you should only use the website if you are 13 or older. I'm sure some lawyer will argue that's the case - since I'm not one: Sounds rather flimsy.
And from Archive.org, here's how Omegle's looked when the girl who is now suing them joined the site. "Tiny text" isn't an exaggeration. The call to action to start a text chat is a 200x50 button -- the 'don't use if you're under 13' text is 0.75em font:
It should be obvious to everyone, not just 'some lawyer' that the former is more of a barrier than the latter. There's also the concept of overt acts in many statutes - lying to a website by clicking a button that says "I'm over 18" when you're not demonstrates that you read the disclaimer and disregarded it, where you can plausibly claim you never saw the copy when it's just legalese on the bottom of the page.
I expect at least some kids to be scared off by this.
The BBC article above states that Omegle is being mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13", that would be 10 cases fewer.
> Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g. Chatroulette)?
Chatroulette, the one most similar to Omegle, like Omegle, was started by a teenager alone (at about the same time), with the additional advantage (from the point of vulnerability to civil liability) of being in Russia.
But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and adults-only very early on, had an easier way to report inappropriate content, automatic temporary bans for too many reports too close together, and adopted other mitigations beyond what Omegle has.
> But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and adults-only very early on
Over the years, the handful of times I’ve gone on CR, I’ve never seen any form of required registration or age verification beyond maybe an “I’m 18+” checkbox or something.
What happened to the plaintiff was really messed up, but I don't see how it's the site's problem. Suppose you answer a newspaper personal ad, meet up with the person and get all your limbs chopped off. Yeah, that fucking sucks, but we're not about to shut down the newspaper.
Maybe... But if this is a real problem with Omegle (the article mentions that it is a common grooming platform) then it's not like there's nothing they could do. Did it even have age verification?
On balance I still think Omegle should win the case, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.
Did the internet provider have age verification? The DNS Resolution service? The SSL certificate authority? What about the electricity company? Or any other service or non-service provider which contributes in one way or another to online streaming, such as Logitech for providing a webcam, Dell for the computer, Nvidia for the graphics card.
After all, no grooming happened on omegle, that's just where they shared contact details. Grooming apparently happened on other platforms, and the common denominator seems to be the internet and everything that makes it work, not omegle.
my thoughts exactly. I don't understand why people are so hasty to blame any and all tangentially related to societal issues. But it happens all the time for websites who exist and let people post content.
"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."
I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the magic of the early internet we witnessed during our coming of age feels threatened.
I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.
IMHO the early internet was different in one important way - you used to have to know how to use a computer that was fairly complex to even get online vs mashing glass on a touchscreen device that is always connected that you have approximately 0% idea of how it works
That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter than the average user today
I went online in 1999 and it was almost always online DSL, so the idiots were just as bad back then. Those that didn't have DSL had AOL which is one click to get online
Since you made your statement with quite a lot of condescension it’s morally difficult to seem to agree with any part of it.
But, separately, my own experience is that there is a particular quality to those places where people need to pass a barrier of entry to get in and those are still happening all over the place. I played against highly-skilled players on day 1 of the PS4 launch, had intelligent conversations on Clubhouse when it was invite-only, and regularly find people with clear minds inside certain pay-only doors.
I think the early internet was just that effect on a scale that was more impactful to the public where now everything is so siloed and fragmented.
Media conglomerates and tech oligopolies make it seem like people are “idiots now” but humans are humans and I don’t think that’s changed in the last few decades.
I agree and I think this era absolutely will be remembered fondly by kids who grew up with it. The streamer/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 "golden eras" 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's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.
That was a definite trial by fire period of accessing the internet. I imagine there exist similar areas today but I’m experienced enough to know I don’t need to go in search of them.
Honestly, 1994-1996ish web was in some ways worse -- yes, there was horrible stuff on Usenet, but you could avoid the worst of the text stuff pretty easily, and to be assaulted by any media other than text you had to expend at least a little effort.
In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.
I'm not sure a market is free in the sense people mean by that term when the market is dominated by network effects. A free market in that sense requires competition and the ability to upset existing players. As an example, you can't upset Google search, and even having a 80B company with an LLM integrated into a 2.5T company is having a hard time displacing them. If that's still a free market then I'm pretty sure we could claim the USSR was a free market and just that Stalin's Communism LLC dominated.
> there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production
I think this couldn't be further from the truth. You could argue that the production has been heavily centralized, but I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but it's still production nonetheless.
I think TikTok is a substantial aberration on this trigger trend. It’s been great (as a non-user) seeing legitimately funny and creative stuff coming from that platform. It’ll be interesting to see if it stays that way or it does go the way (at least IMO) of YouTube and Instagram: quite commercialized.
Note: All of this based on impressions/vibes, would be keen to hear any stats if people around have ‘em on hand!
TikTok is extremely commercialized; even a lot of the "good" content is extremely carefully crafted part of the acquisition funnel for commercial activities.
I'm not knocking people liking it -- its like people liking SuperBowl ads; just because something is the very much marketing content doesn't mean its not fun and entertaining. But, the idea that becoming "quite commercialized" is a potential way it might go downhill in the future seems to miss that it is very much already there.
I've never used TikTok but definitely not surprised to hear this. I've certainly seen some interesting things escape the app, but yeah quite a shame to hear it's already over that hump already (or started over it)!
Given the investment involved (installing and using an app), I'd recommend trying yourself and drawing your own conclusions, rather than treating one person's experience as gospel
No thanks :) I’m extremely defensive of my information diet + attention allocation, and I know upfront that I don’t need to add a service like TikTok to the mix.
I’m not treating anyone’s experience as gospel in any case. There are no important decisions I’ll be making off this information.
> I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but it's still production nonetheless.
You are correct, but there is a disappointing shift in the nature of said content.
GeoCities sites and the like were at least labors of love. Your site looked like shit but that's ok, nobody's going to see it anyway.
Tumblr was performative garbage that bridged LiveJournal/Myspace and Instagram. Your site looked like shit but if you say something controversial enough, you'll get a lot of views.
The YouTube/Instagram/TikTok crowd only optimize for engagement, to get as many views as possible. Everything is so over-the-top. You're not making anything out of love, you're making what gets you attention. Your content is professionally-polished and staged to attract eyeballs even if you have nothing to say. (No wonder everybody has an identity crisis; everyone's a child star that's been living for the camera since they got their first iPhone.)
That's also what happens when you turn hobbies into jobs that then become necessities. If you want to pay the bills you have to do and say controversial nonsense or be incredibly exaggerated.
I think the post you are replying to was trying to say this, but less precisely. It used to be that a MySpace, account profile on DeviantArt, Flickr, an online forum, or even a personal website was another human trying to connect with (or troll) someone, and that everyone was putting out content because that’s how you needed to exist.
Nowadays, I’m sure that 95% of all content I see is made by a media company for hire, mega corporation, or, most recently, word soup from an LLM where, in a strange twist of fate, I’m just a lab mouse in a giant, AI created A/B test trying to determine which option gets 0.2% more clicks. The age of casual creator is mostly over. Everything you do must be to build or enhance “your brand” and its a full time job to keep up with huge teams that automate the churn of information regurgitation, otherwise you’ll never be able to get enough of a following to qualify for perks that actual content creators make - and we’ve not even gotten to compensation yet. The gold rush of making money selling your brand online is over and it has been enshitified much like everything else novel and interesting in the world and on the internet.
as much as this doomer drivel might be true, it might be blinding you to the good parts and good people. just not seeing what's "novel and interesting", nor seeking it out.
I think this is essentially a false dichotomy. It's possible to experience the loss of both of those eras, as well as the current one whenever it passes. There'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'm not sure. It doesn'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't think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I'm sure many people have a magical period of wonder where their world is expanding. To be perfectly honest, in some ways I've continued to have that even in recent years. There'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'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's information, misinformation still abounds (no matter which side of the political aisle you happen to be on). I don't know that anyone has any really compelling ideas about how to deal with this, but I think it'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?
Non-technical, non-idealistic, non-visionary (pick two of three) people starting putting glossy red ribbons on websites with pink lettering and called it Web 2.0.
A lot of monumentally good things have come from the last ~20 years of technological change, but the Internet breaking out into something mediocre people could exploit has done damage. And that’s a range that encompasses everything from minimally qualified marketing consultants to people drifting by on MBAs to (sorry) serial entrepreneurs who focus more on the launch than the idea.
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 "intra-" and "intercohort" like this in Bowling Alone.
> 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.
> 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're arguing internet disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one'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't think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist.
Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis)," 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't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
Also back then every other post wasn't full of political echo chamber warfare like your jab about russian propaganda you just couldn't resist throwing in.
If we look at the Durham Report all the claims that Trump was colluding with Russia were infact a Conspiracy Theory. Like Iraq having WMDs in 2003 was a Conspiracy Theory.
Conspiracy and conspiracy theory are not quite the same. Some things are just false claims. A conspiracy theory usually refers to something that has a semblance of consensus.
The Iraq war had a decent amount of opposition before it happened, there were like 100K people in San Francisco for the protest I went to.
Funny how some conspiracy theories end up actual being factual conspiracies. Remember when your news sources told you that 100% covid did not come from a lab?
there's evidence to suggest that there were two separate events from different strains at the start of the pandemic
this doesn't disprove the lab leak theory, but then they would have to be studying two separate very related strains and it would be strange if they just kept leaking different strains
You could, of course, take it as proof that the lab leak happened at around the same time as lineage B, while lineage A is from bats
Don't forget that everything wants to be a subscription service now, and companies will block open access to their platforms so that only "partners" (other companies that pay them) may access their platform, and they're sure going to show ads on top of that as well.
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't be surprised. Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet'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…
> 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?
I remember seeing stats/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.
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 'open' internet that has happened since the mid/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 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone'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 'old internet' 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/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.
So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.
>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 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you.
Is this true? Maybe you just don't know the right places anymore. Im sure there's all kinds of crazy, basically unmoderated shit going down in discord or roblox or vrchat.
There's definitely a bunch of crazy unmoderated stuff going down in those places, but it does seem more underground and out of the way unless you specifically look for it.
Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a lot of resources and guides out there, and if you want to, you can most likely find them.
Ah that's a fair point, I do hang out in a couple of discords where we have that old internet feel, and same with vrchat.
But at least with the former we still have to be a bit reserved since discord can also be pretty heavy handed with moderation. It effectively suppresses less sanitized content in the sense that if your discord grows past a certain size, it's much more likely to catch their attention. So the old internet type content we have there is mostly a handful of private discords from friends with a handful of their friends there. At that point we just ended up setting up a matrix server for stuff we'd rather not leave to the whims of discord.
VRchat has the benefit that if you aren't in public, you're free to do anything. But that does still sort of mean that you need to know the right people to get into those circles, since public is generally unenjoyable, being filled with screaming "Quest kids" (and even if they weren't screaming, it's obviously awkward to be hanging out with children as adults).
> when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people
This is a sentiment repeated by almost everyone who finds their niche in the fediverse. Once you settle in, you get that early internet magic of simply connecting with people. The fediverse is all about talking to or showing things to other people.
It's pretty interesting what happens when you talk to people instead of just posting into the void. Interactions become purposeful and meaningful because it's clear there's a real person on the other side.
It really does feel like the earlier internet when we all posted anonymously on small forums with a few thousand users total. There's a sense of community.
There's also a really strong selection bias right now. People who use the fediverse are much more likely to be people sick of modern social media and want to return to the old days. So they went out and they goddamn made their own social media and made it feel like the old days.
I think it's a great place to hang out right now. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve over time. There's a push to bring back small websites, blogs and forums and I really hope that takes off.
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's only recently that I see most "culture production" 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't make it into the 00s?
> What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s?
IRC was a big one. Back when you hopped on a server, typed in #cityname, and joined a lively realtime conversation with folks in your area. That was cool.
I’m too young for usenet, but I’ve been hearing about how cool and amazing it was for like 25 years now. Apparently the web never quite managed to capture that magic.
Ah, IRC. Yeah, I came too late to make new friends there (though it was still good for keeping in contact with old ones). Still managed to enjoy the usenet, although the "big" groups were already full of spam.
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.
Anything before you were ~10 is "old", 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
I think it comes down the exploration vs maximization/exploitation instincts that grows and changes as a human being grows. For ex: teens/early adults has more exploration instinct.(it's a hypothesis that'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/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives??
I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool anymore.
I'm sure that'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 "Spy Mode" 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'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'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 / early widespread ai, when it was widely available and accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn't yet destroyed entire industries
This is kind of revisionist history though. The early 2010s were not so long ago. Nobody talked about Omegle as some magical safe place of real human connection. It was always viral because of the edginess and danger. There were genuinely good stories you would see about it, but the impact was strong precisely because everyone knew the dark side.
I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time.
People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.
For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity.
My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible.
It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.
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.)
Just today I was dreaming of how awesome it would be if you could just somehow filter "good sports" 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.
hiking is an interesting one to choose. wherever I've gone hiking, I've come across garbage which had to have been left by a fellow hiker. or a bear, I suppose. but which is to say, that effort level bar isn't high enough.
I remember the magic of USENET! I'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?!
Despair is trendy, which makes doing it easier; it makes it normalized. Perhaps previously a 'I'm not going to give up; I'm going to keep fighting for what I care about!' message would be normalized, and because of that the Omegle founder would feel strong and supported instead of alone.
(I don't know the person or much about their situation; I'm just using what I read to make a general observation.)
Sounds like he's been fighting for a long time and eventually tired.
It's a bit presumptuous to say that his actions / statement are due to despair being trendy. Everyone has their own "It's not worth it anymore" moment.
Omegle has fewer than 30 employees, according to some sites online. I can't help but wonder whether having a more robust ops and legal team would have prevented this outcome. Founders shouldn't feel like they're going to have a heart attack at 30 if they've hired the right size of team. One (probably frivolous) lawsuit for a nearly 15-year-old company shouldn't be existential.
> 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.
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 host to charge an appropriate amount warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do this.
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.
> If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service.
A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn’t free in a way that makes that really true, and even if the service was free, if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
> if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
You didn't directly address my bench scenario, but this sounds like it fits the bench scenario. I don't see anything you've said that would make it an exception. But I think the logical outcome of that is ridiculous.
Sometimes there are bad things that can happen in a place, and that place should not have to pay damages.
And providing value, as an argument to keep existing, should not mean you have to monetize that value. (or drastically increase monetization)
I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The numbers are pretty wild.
> There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451
I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities.
IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.
it's the nazi bar story. If you are lax in moderation at the beginning the problems compound because word spreads that you are lax. If you are strict from the beginning word spreads that you are strict and corruption finds a better niche.
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.
Right, if that is really true as a blanket statement, then it's an idiotic and short sighted law.
I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye.
According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury?
Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
A store attracts people with money (adults) interested in the products the store sells and the bench out front is in public. But the catastrophic events in question are somewhere that attracts easily amused people with time on their hands (often children) and predators (among others, but specifically predators in a way a shop bench doesn't), and the catastrophe is deliberate targeted harm and not natural disaster or innocent accident. The two aren’t comparable.
A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
>to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on
Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups.
So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
Not at all contradicted by evidence in this thread. Look at the linked musicians videos in this thread, the strangers they are playing for are mostly (not entirely) 20, +/- 5 years. Like video games are mostly played by young people, even though they are popular with many age groups. Most adults who have work and families and homes and chores and hobbies don't have the time for internet hangouts which sink a lot of time for a low reward, and if they do they're likely to spend their time and money on things like NetFlix because they can afford content, compared to younger people who can't afford much. Lots of technical people hang on IRC/Slack/StackOverflow/HN/Reddit/Discord during work hours in a way they wouldn't hang on Omegle or Chatroulette during work hours - because text is easy and non-realtime, wheras Omegle requires the people hanging out on it to pay full attention if they're going to make good contacts.
No the mall isn't a good analogy, it has lights, mall cops, CCTV cameras, crowds of people wandering around, it's a well known public place and it's generally not known as a place to approach strangers unless you're selling something. Omegle happened one-to-one, private, and encouraged chatting directly to strangers.
There is a concept, I forget the name of it (not the bystander effect) where if you are in a strange place in public and need help then you can call out to the bystanders for help, or you can point to one specific bystander and ask for help. Say you are a tipsy woman lost her bag, and you call out to anyone for help then the self-interested predator can step forwards, but if you point to one person and ask them to call you a cab then you are unlikely to randomly pick the self-interested predator. So even though most people who try to help a stranger in need are good people, calling out to the void leaves a big opportunity for any bad people to take advantage of. Both can be true - that most people are good and that one arrangement leaves more room for any predators who are present than another arrangement does. Omegle had a reputation for being risqué - like DickRoulette (ChatRoulette), so that means people wouldn't tend to use it in a library, or on a family PC in the living room with other people around.
So people going on Omegle would be more likely younger because they have more free time and less money to spend on things and less ability / money to go out instead, are more likely to go on behind closed doors to avoid people seeing anything rude on their screens, then they'd get matched with a stranger, encouraged to chat with the stranger, and of course the reasonable adults matched with a young child who shouldn't be there would move on, leaving the effect above and the predators room be the ones who pretended to be friendly, and none of the protections of a crowd at a mall - well-meaning strangers ("it takes a village") could see something odd happening and interrupt or check-in.
It's not that everyone on the site was in that situation, it's that the site design and social status left that to happen way way more often than a mall or a shop bench would.
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 actively trying to help crime, but this doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
> 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 which are directed to roads (making even the indirect use of roads by ordering goods, etc., not really free.)
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.
> Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers.
Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the road, true.
They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a general legal requirement for using public roads, though you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage.
Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free with the idea that “well, a bunch of people will be damaged, but there is no need to assure that those damages are reasonably covered because other people will benefit”, it has lots of costs associated with use, and a number of them (both the licensing regime and the insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the expense of potential beneficial use and assuring compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes, its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary for a service that has benefits for most users and acute harms for some.
I think that mandatory insurance for roads was already acknowledged by the parent poster. They invoked it directly by suggesting internet users should have to carry liability insurance if the central concern is victim restitution or compensation (like roads). You are making the same point you objected to.
The fundamental question is what is the legal objective here, and what do we want it to be?
1) Is the goal to make sure that victims are compensated?
2) Do we think companies like omegle are negligent, and are we trying to hold them accountable?
3) Do we actually think neither?
If the answer is 1 but not 2, then making Omegles pay is clearly an injustice, and we should be looking into some sort of mandatory user insurance.
Putting my cards on the table, I am in camp 3. Just because bad things happen, doesnt mean can or should find a way to compensate the injured party.
> In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet
Yet EV's still have to pass insane standards because 1/10th, 1/100th of deaths would be too much... it's all about our monkey brain's perception, negativity bias (i.e. 100x good thing equals 1x bad thing) and emotions. We are tied to these things until we leave our carbon meat suits.
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)
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.
The big issue here is that us monkeys really can't comprehend scale (insert classic links to studies on scope insensitivity here). Heuristics that work well for groups of up to a few thousand people stop working when there are hundreds of millions.
There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
This is one of the root causes of many of the issues in modern society. The creeping safety is taking the fun out of everything, especially kids. Kids nowadays rarely have any play time anymore, which has an immense cost to their later growth and well being. If you want to read a book about this with some related topics, I recommend "The Coddling of the American Mind"
I'm honestly surprised that I'm still allowed to put myself on two wheels with an engine in between, and ride down the autobahn at an insane amount of speed.
> But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no"
I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year -- I knew someone who was killed, and I've had a couple close shaves. In fact, today I was kiting and witnessed a kiter get rescued by the Coast Guard. It's understandable that society would want to have some say due to the externalities (loss of productive members of society, cost of rescues, risk to bystanders, etc).
IMO it's not the case that 'no risk is acceptable' -- it's just that the risk tolerance for various things seems really arbitrary & out of proportion to reward. For instance, if we didn't accept any risks as a society, we'd ban alcohol & tobacco along with kitesurfing, skydiving and motorcycles, but we don't.
> 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.
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.
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 consistently implicated in all sorts of nefarious child trafficking operations.
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.
> Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
To me this sounds like the problem isn't the malicious users, so much as people using the malicious users as an argument to shut down Omegle.
You can moderate people showing their dicks, you can't moderate people suing you because you didn't do enough to stop little 16 year old Timmy seeing a dick.
I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks. I'm amazed they haven'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.
Don't you have to sign a waver for that type of accident. Maybe that's what we are missing from the internet. But that would likely require a real proof of age to work
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't help with the policing work or the protests of pearl clutchers who don't care about precautions, effort and resources for victim support, and just can't handle any failure of any kind.
No, the catastrophic risks are borne by society - the are limits to liability insurance and there is a limit at which limited liability companies can pay or individuals behind companies can pay.
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
For all the conventional reasons: the victim of the abuse deserves sympathy, and that abuse shouldn't happen.
But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on the service, not the abuser. And that's sad because instead of being able to just make interesting stuff and put them online, we are being forced to consider "what's the worst possible thing that some evil bastard could use this for?" 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'll go the same route as Omegle; it'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's what we want. It's so sad.
That's a pointed question as the infrastructure to support individual cars continues to eat the cities in the US and the climate continues to change from the CO2 released into the air, actually.
Had we known what the challenges would be, would we have made them so easy to own and operate? You need a license to fly a plane solo, and it takes years to get one.
They aren’t nearly as safe as they could be, and manufacturers have had to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement even basic safety features like seatbelts: some manufacturers even refused on the basis that adding safety features implied their products were unsafe!
Airplanes are probably the example you want - heavily regulated and very focused on safety. Not motor vehicles. After all, if they really were focused on safety, they’d have banned giant trucks and SUVs for personal use a long, long time ago.
i think it holds up, but I get your point. Still, if 18-year-old me designed and built a new car in my parent's garage, I'm not going to be able to send it out into the world and make millions of copies of it for everyone in the world who wants one.
So car manufacturers need to stop making cars because someone might drive drunk? Kitchen knife manufacturers need to somehow prevent their products being used as weapons? This line of thinking is appropriate to a degree, but not really all that useful. Many products can be abused, and there's no feasible way to prevent that abuse.
Seems to me there is an obvious qualitative difference between a company that manufacturers cars or kitchen knives and a company that creates a service that uses random matchmaking to repeatedly introduce a serial pedophile to unsuspecting underage victims.
Sure, people _can_ abuse any service, this seems like a service that wasn’t just ripe for abuse, it was essentially perfectly designed to enable it. Moreover in this case there absolutely appears to be numerous feasible ways to have headed off that particular avenue of abuse.
This is the same ludicrously weak argument that is constantly and erroneously applied to guns… neither a car nor a kitchen knife are primarily (much less exclusively) instruments of harm, guns are. Well, turns out, so are random matchmaking services that link adult users with children and let them view each other, and that appears kind of obvious in hindsight.
Ford might manufacture a car driven by a serial drunk driver. Perhaps they need to install breathalyzers in all their cars, by default.
I'm not really sure how much more ripe for abuse Omegle was compared to, say, Discord. Pretty much any video chat service can be abused to send or receive illegal content, and to abuse and manipulate other people. These are risks inherent to anything enabling communication. Short of a panopticon where all communications are manually approved by a human moderator, there's no sure way to prevent abuse (and even then human moderators are fallible).
There ought to be some reasonable attempts to mitigate abuse, like a reporting functionality. But beyond that I don't see much more Omegle could have reasonably done.
Again the pointless and frankly silly comparison to cars… they’re categorically unrelated product classes: Ford‘s cars didn’t intentionally, as a feature of the vehicle, randomly put you into head on collision situations with others, which is essentially what Omegle did by design, while also NOT (in any sense) being fruitfully comparable to a manufacturer of vehicles.
Same with the equally pointless comparison to Discord… Omegle wasn’t merely a video chat service, it made random matches that the user could narrow by identifying their own interests; an adult male user identifying as being deeply interested in things only children would be interested in could readily and easily (and obviously) weaponize the platform, and Omegle absolutely could have (and should have) used the many and obvious means available for profiling and identifying such incongruous users, which (sure) would include human moderators.
There’s an enormous ethical difference between not doing anything whatsoever to prevent abuse and perfectly preventing abuse, and you seem to think they had no obligation to prevent any because they couldn’t prevent all… they don’t exist any more (thankfully) because lawyers started to (correctly) point out that that isn’t how either ethics or tort law work.
Omegle didn't intentionally put people on a collision course with abusers either. If Omegle was intentionally facilitating abuse as you put it, then so is IRC and effectively any other public communications mechanism: because anyone could be an abuser.
Even just preventing 1% of abuse would probably have been beyond the capabilities of this site. You write that they should flag adult men listing interest in topics associated with children. How are they supposed to identify the gender and age of users? People under 18 are prohibited from the site, yet that clearly failed. Human moderation can't even monitor a fraction of one percent The "many obvious" ways of preventing abuse were in fact attempted [1]:
> Omegle implemented a "monitored" video chat, to monitor misbehavior and protect people under the age of 18 from potentially harmful content, including nudity or sexual content. However, the monitoring is not very effective, and users can often skirt around bans.
Sure, Omegle "randomly put you into head on collision situations with others", but so is every other public communications: IRC, discord, Xbox Live, pretty much anywhere you can meet random people on the Internet fits into this category.
Age verifying every user and not allowing children on the service at all, or only matching children with children, as an obvious first. Alternatively, maybe just randomly sampling video feeds and running them through an ML classifier to see if, I dunno, “adult male penis” was a high probability on one side and “extremely uncomfortable looking child” was a high probability on the other?
In hindsight the entire purpose of the service was a bad idea, absent minimal efforts to avoid its trivial weaponization by users with an obvious motive for using the means and opportunity the service was providing by design.
So one of your solutions to a service aimed at randomly match anonymous people is to get rid of anonymity?
I asked you how do you solve the problem without defeating the purpose of Omegle. Your solution is the equivalent to someone asking how to solve world hunger and you responding with "Just feed them. Duh."
> So car manufacturers need to stop making cars because someone might drive drunk?
In the US, at least, bars can be found liable for patrons drunk driving. That's probably a closer analogy to Omegle than a car manufacturer, since its patrons hang out at the "establishment," engaging in potentially risky behavior. That's not a comment on the validity of the lawsuit, but the situation isn't as simple as you make out.
> The drunk driver can sue the bar or bartender for allowing them to become intoxicated to a dangerous level. Individuals may file a lawsuit, but this does not always mean it will hold up in court. Dram shop laws in most states make clear definitions to avoid false liability. Washington is one of those states.
It looks like it's more the case that the drunk driver tries to sue the bar, not that the government is pursuing the bar. Furthermore, some States specifically forbid attempts to hold the bar liable for drunk drivers.
And even if it were, it's vastly easier for a bar to monitor the conduct of patrons than a web service. The scale of the latter is too great to make non-automated moderation feasible.
By that standard I cannot see how any reasonable person could justify building anything at all; most of us, not being evil bastards, have imaginations which will simply fail to suggest such uses.
He's not saying don't build anything. He's saying think about the potential for misuse (and implying, take reasonable steps to prevent it). This seems completely sensible to me.
I am aware I cannot think of every bad way a service could be misused . I also am aware that there is always a way to misuse a service. Therefore, in order to prevent a service I use from being misused, I must not build anything.
Obviously that conclusion is wrong, so one of the premises must be wrong. Specifically, liability should be on the abuser not on the service.
Won’t your new operating system have security issues that other operating systems don’t? How do you propose accounting for the additional harm you’re bringing into the world?
I think the people that created smartphones and social media had the best of intentions, but the resulting effects on mental health are profound.
At the same time, it is hard to imagine someone letting go of implementing an idea because of vague negative future effects that are not real in the present. And there is a lot of money incentivizing betting on lots of new ideas to see what takes off.
So it's like, if we uncover the next transformative technology that we know little about the future effects of, we just have to eat the cost of proliferating it everywhere before countermeasures can be figured out, if they can be created at all?
Sometimes I think the ease of virality in software could be a Great Filter. If not something farfetched like human extinction, then the Great Filter of human isolation, or of lasting intergenerational conflict, or something else that's profound but not totally catastrophic. Not only is new tech too tempting to spontaneously put down, but it's nearly impossible to know when to put it down. I think maybe if information overload and the like was hypothesized about like AI is starting to be today, we would still not be able to leave social media uninvented, because nobody had tried it and witnessed it fail yet. But the Great Filter comes in when maybe you can only witness certain failures once.
I'll be right back - I need to tell my local pub and parks authority that they didn't think through the basic consequences of their actions when they made a place people could meet random strangers. I'm sure they just haven't thought through what a moral failing offering public spaces are.
Edit to respond to OP's Edit: Your quote you're replying to includes "And prevent it". Which made us assume you were directly implying that prevention of bad consequences was your point. Yes, people should clearly think through consequences. OP wasn't implying otherwise and specifically structured their statement to include "the worst possible thing" and "prevent it".
Many of them do around me. Does that matter to the point I was making? I'm not claiming there's literally no rules or laws around public spaces that have to be abided by.
Won’t these pedophiles just move to Roblox or start trading kids’ phone numbers or something? Cut off one head and three more emerge. Can’t the answer to people breaking the laws be law enforcement?
... and Roblox has a financial vested interest in finding them, outing them to authorities, and keeping them off the site, so it'll be worth it to them to do so and to keep the site humming.
Omegle's owner decided to shut it down because it wasn't worth it to them to do that work. That's all. Price not worth paying.
No, they were finding them, outing them and reporting them. As he says in the post. There were doing that work.
They're being sued by a victim for not preventing the victim from being manipulated by an abuser. The fact that the abuser was caught and convicted with Omegle's help is apparently irrelevant.
It's hard to see how Omegle could have done this differently; no crime occurred until the victim was abused, and once the abuse happened any subsequent action is irrelevant because the victim was still abused.
Roblox will have more ability to hire lawyers to win the victim's court case. That's the only difference.
I'm not an evil bastard. I have no idea what evil bastards will want to do with anything I create. I literally don't think like this and can't predict their behaviour.
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
> 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'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't placed on the service as well.)
When there'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're going to sue Walmart and probably not me.
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!
You must have misunderstood. Being kidnapped and tortured with <item> does not mean that <item> should be banned just because <item>, while widely used responsibly for its intended purpose, could possibly be used maliciously.
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, "[any successful social innovation can be] pushed to the point of absurdity".
when a tool goes viral i suppose it should be "taken over" (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.
While I totally understand there's the potential for abuse, I don't think Omegle should be penalized for stuff like this. From my understanding, there's no addictive, profit-maximizing matchmaking or anything going on - it'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.
> 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 shield
Omegle, as one of the last places that didn'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's sad that this free, no-harm site has to shut down while Snap/Insta routinely ignore legitimate criticism of their ability to encourage abuse and have enough lawyers to ensure they'll never have to face any consequences for enabling abuse.
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'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.
> Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm.
I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO
IP alone makes it fairly tricky for non-state actors to identify someone, just roughly geolocate them. Good for freaking out people that don't know how the web works, but not useful for much more.
The flip side is that p2p means that nobody is snooping in on those video conversations. Omegle couldn't spy on it's users once they had entered a video chat. It was also fairly easy to see how they implemented the monitoring they did if you have a webdev background: periodically in between chats the omegle client requested an image from your cam.
I believe the whole video chat component, while initially using flash, was ultimately implemented using WebRTC, which is pretty cool and as shame more places don't make use of this.
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 still remembers after 16 years: "forced_anon chat" (with the quotes) finds the very origin, if you want to go down that dark and probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole.
God, they're complaining about newposters all the way back in 2007. Is the problem really Eternal September or is it just "kids these days"?
Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into his posts
I don'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'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's only one person passing judgment, it doesn't have nearly the same negative impact, and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.
It’s been 14 hours so there definitely no auto filter. It’s kind of a testament to the moderating here that I’ve been on hacker news for 6+ years and never once have I tried to use a slur.
My recollection is that newposters was coined around 2007 for everyone who joined after the Habbo raids that had made /b/ much more popular. These newposters from Habbo were "ruining" the site.
One night, visiting a friend, I overheard his kid complaining about the first big Habbo raid and how these people were everywhere. I slid into one of his schoolbook's a block-printed note reading POOL'S CLOSED. He never knew it was me.
Eternal September is an observable phenomenon whenever a new demographic in a community outstrips the old guard. This is fundamentally different than "kids these days", though you may find some overlap.
> and what'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/discussion board.
I find people who love edginess to feel some sort of moral or intellectual superiority to the commons or people they often communicate (example, in high school where you really have a random mixture of all kinds of personalities). Definitely a phase kind of thing
100%. Adults who still enjoy that "edgy" style of communication and entertainment always come off as super immature.
There's something in there about human development and pushing boundaries in your youth, I'm certain.
Also, it did feel great as a teen from a very backwards rural area, to be on the very bleeding edge of internet culture. Knowing the memes before anyone else was secretly satisfying.
Our generation grew up on offensive / edginess, things like late 90's shock rock, South Park, Jackass, Saw, etc. Nobody cares anymore, and it feels like nobody's tried to out-edge series like South Park. It feels like we've reached rock bottom so the only way is up. Which is a good thing btw.
With the exception of the "break glass to reboot/one more time the IP" moments
It has felt like a natural end to the long term cultural battled for acceptance of such basic expressions of working class language and humor, in a kind of "needing to break it down so we can build it back up" sort of way.
I'd dread to think of a cultural landscape where the previous puritanical average continued letting air out of the balloon at an excruciatingly slow rate, as opposed to the admittedly immature fart sound we reveled in for a few moments.
People who aren'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.
That Google search you suggested appears (barring some UI thing I'm missing because I'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.
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 "M or F?" and if you said M they'd instantly leave
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 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.
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.
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
most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It'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
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... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is (Harry Mack freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+ episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)
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's better than anyone else in the world (maybe half way through the series) he then starts surpassing himself faster and faster.
I’m so glad to see Harry Mack getting love on here. It’s wild that he just shared his last episode on Friday and now the site is shutting down. Glad he already took off and found success.
Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.
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.
Man, i stayed up way past bedtime watching the Frank Tedesco youtubes. I was completely blown away, his ability to listen to 20 seconds of a song on his phone and then get it mostly right on the piano is incredible. What an amazing individual. hah, the reactions were golden too, very funny and endearing.
edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to cross it.
Tbh the sad thing isn't any youtuber losing a platform, it'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's another platform like it, but I don't know it.
For that one it may be a combination of two things.
1. He starts out by asking if he can show them a magic trick. They say yes or nod yes. He then exits stage right. He then returns either through the back door or some the side stage left. Where he enters from is too far away from where he left for him to have walked or even ran there in the time between entrance and exit.
The part up to where he exists stage left could be pre-recorded. His wording and gestures change slightly with different people but he could have several different pre-recorded segments for this.
As Teller once observed:
> Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect
Penn has said something similar:
> The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth
It could then switch to live for his return, where he then actually converses with them to prove that he's live.
2. If he encounters someone whose responses to the pre-recorded segment don't fit in, he skips them. Remember, we don't see how many people he had to try this with to get enough good ones for a video, and recall Teller's quote from above.
The one he's done that has me baffled is the one where he does this:
1. He asks them what city they live in.
2. He then tells them he used to live in that city and gives the address of where he lived. It is their address or an address of a close neighbor.
He also does this except instead of asking the city he tells them he has a talent for guessing people's names, and then tells them their name.
I can see in general how to do these, by using fake disconnects. He uses fake disconnects in one of his most common routines where he asks someone if he can show them a magic trick, starts a "pick a card" type routine, and then disconnects just has he's revealing their card. Then later when the person is connected to someone else either that someone else says "is this your card?" and holds up the correct card or he walks into that someone else's room and shows the card.
The key here is that he doesn't really disconnect. He just shows the disconnect screen, and then switches to feeding them video of the other person. They think that they have connected to someone new on Omegle but it is him the whole time.
With fake disconnects he could have his subjects in the "tell them their name" bit first talk to an accomplice who gets their name, fake disconnect and fake connect with him, and then he can do his name guess.
That should be fairly easy because people often exchange names on Omegle. But full addresses? I'd hope that would be rare, rare enough that even a Penn/Teller level of time would not be enough to get many people.
Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn'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'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't know how to connect like he does. Creators, work to make that kind of connection happen.
So happy you'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's saved a few lives (at least).
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's worth the excursion every time, no one can amaze and impress like him every time. I've seen some Omegle videos with him before, but this one was really special. Super appreciate this.
It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.
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.
With websites, you can have one person serving ten million people, and support that on a single income. With bars, you can only fit about a hundred people in, and enough of them have to be paying customers that you can afford to keep the bar running – but that also means you can physically look at everyone's identification papers.
The anything goes / mass surveillance dichotomy is false. It is possible to have small-scale, individually-moderated websites, if the software to host them is available and easy to run, without sacrificing privacy (or even accountability). Pseudonymity is usually good enough, especially for things like Omegle.
Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when most people's primary computing device was capable of acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard enough I'm sure we can get there.
> How do you propose verifying a users age without sacrificing privacy?
It's usually obvious if you can have a short conversation with the person in question. Throughout my childhood escapades, I'm certain that most, if not all, the responsible adults I interacted with knew pretty much exactly how old I was. (I'd managed to navigate a legal loophole that, I believe, still exists in GDPR today, so they weren't required to kick me off – but while I was treated as an equal, I wasn't treated the same way I'm treated now.)
> If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
That's quite illegal, and quite easy to detect (just give slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks). Most people don't commit crimes: individuals just don't have the kinds of incentive to buy and sell people's personal data that organisations like Facebook, Taboola and Oracle have. (And what would they get for betraying these people's trust? $30? Sure… I'd totally go for that.)
How do you propose to give slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks when you have to have a short conversation with the person in question?
Because you can't police who is using the device at the other end. You're authenticating a client device, not a person, and that doesn't keep children any safer from abuse - if anything it means they have an incentive to keep their use of a thing secret for fear of punishment, which makes them more vulnerable.
This bar had a complex tunnel system leading up to it that was completely unlit. In the beginning you could run right through, but eventually they made you yell "I'm over 18" and took your word on it.
This bar also had special partitions in each room that were practically indestructible, allowing sound and light through but protecting from physical harm.
[EDIT: I don't mean to imply that the check is easy! The reality of Omegle's difficulties is understood. I'm just riffing on the metaphor]
Depends on the park. Some are known for it. Parents know to keep their kids away from those parks. For that reason, it’s better to have one really cruisy park that everyone knows about and can easily avoid but which also acts to contain the pervs. Maybe Omegle closing will just make the predators harder to spot and keep away from?
You've got an axe to grind don't you? Does it really not seem obvious to you that the damage of a single sexual harassment in a park outweighs any number of online interactions?
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'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.
There'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 "Wait. I've seen you on Youtube/TikTok". Love his journey.
I'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's seen, and had followed his career closely for years. A magical moment :-)
I've never used Omegle myself, but I've watched all of Harry Mack's Omegle Bars videos (freestyle rapping) and they are golden. Always fun to see him matched with some random kids and brighten their day:
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'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'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't deny that there have also been cases where people'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.
So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn'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'm aware of at least one other site[0] that has met the same fate. It would be interesting to see an exhaustive list.
> So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn'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.
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:
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't the usual kind of "CSAM intermediary liablility" 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.
Yes, 90% of cafes would, because just like Omegle, it's not their job or ability to monitor every single interaction between every single person and identify whether a conversation is appropriate.
Crimes happen on all technologies and in all venues, and they likely always will.
By their own case the explicit activity didn't even take place on omegle. The perv met the kid and went elsewhere. Of course that wouldn't be prevented in a cafe.
1,109 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadhttps://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to them, and to start talking to them early.
"There is a cost" or "I don't want to" are not reasonable excuses, depending on use case and regulatory regime you're operating under. It sucks, but there are many terrible people out there. Hopefully the EFF and ACLU can work to balance out regulation from government in this space.
(what sites access is gated by age is a distinct conversation)
https://www.theverge.com/23721306/online-age-verification-pr...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23494175/facebook-dating-...
https://www.yoti.com/wp-content/uploads/Yoti-Age-Estimation-...
And talking about "age verification" as if it's some straightforward addition is an utterly dishonest framing. The core idea of the distributed Internet is the barest of communication which further complexity/policy can be layered on top of. "Age verification" actually implies the much more draconian and chilling meatspace identity verification.
Nobody has a problem with a DigitalKidsPlayLand which performs identity verification, strictly curates/moderates content, and escrows all activity for later review. It's this push to legally require such things for everyone, based on some idea that everything needs to be made kid-safe, that is horribly authoritarian and needs to be soundly rejected.
Eight states as of this comment have legislation that has passed requiring age verification. Ten other states have introduced legislation that has not yet passed. (US centric)
> In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring the use of age verification on websites that contain a “substantial portion” (33.33%) of adult content. Websites must utilize commercial age verification systems that check a user’s government identification or “public or private transactional data” to confirm that a user is at least 18 years old. Louisiana’s law has sparked a flurry of copycat legislation to be introduced in state houses around the country.
https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bill...
Is this a real question?
If someone showed up at a bar, would a bouncer accept that?
In this case, they have no obligation to ensure everyone has ID on their person.
Can you sue a bar you used fake ID to get into?
My real question wasn’t if there are kids on the system or not, but why are they allowed to sue when they themselves and nobody else have lied about the age verification question?
And establishments get shut down all the time for it.
[https://ftxidentity.com/blog/abc-laws-if-minor-is-served/]
Next question?
Anyway, it’s really twisted my original point your leaning into alcohol laws that do not apply.
If I make a service that says nobody named Bob can use it, have a checkbox Not Bob? - how can I get sued by someone named Bob?
In your new example:
- is there a regulatory reason that it is illegal for them to serve someone named Bob? Or is there a real risk/harm that people named Bob would suffer that they know about and is predictable?
- did they do any of the checks they are legally required to do to prevent someone named Bob from accessing the service and therefore suffering that injury? Or make a good faith effort to not just injure any Bob’s, at a minimum?
If they didn’t, then yet a Bob could sue if he managed to get through and get injured.
Pretty weird example though.
It was after the suit was filed (prior to the suit, AIUI, Omegle had an over-18 warning (with no confirmation) on the Unmoderated chat option, and a stated policy that users had to be 18+ or 13+ with parents permission.
Also, it may not have been because of this suit, there is at least one other suit that was found not to be barred by Section 230 (this one avoided S230 immunity because it is a product liability suit, not one contingent on their role as a publisher; the other one I've seen, IIRC, was found to raise a triable question of fact regarding whether Omegle's behavior was within the category of knowing involvement in trafficking that brought it out of S230 protection.)
Pick one.
This is fucked. We shouldn'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're sharp?
Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?
The question, as usual, isn't all or nothing. It's what can we do that will meet all the criteria as best possible: not infringe on freedoms, reduce harm, be affordable, etc.
Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don’t think it will ever come back. So where do we go from here?
A bit extreme? It will come back if you choose it, if you do it. The despair, as I posted, is trendy but it's absurd - the most ridiculous, counterproductive philosophical trend I can imagine. Stop philosophizing and just start doing!
What should I do? I have no one I want to vote for and honestly I don’t care enough to do it myself. At this point it’s just figuring out how you can profit off this and get your own piece of land to check out on.
I don’t find this to be depressing it’s just what I see as facts.
We'd have to redefine depressing to exclude that post. Look at all the ways it advocates quitting; it's impressive in a way.
> That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
Do you think that makes it true? That seems to support my claim that it's trendy, and people repeating these things because others say it are by definition following a trend.
I've seen many trends come and go, but this one - despair as a trend - is the dumbest.
Also, who is going to get anything done? We aren't children; our parents won't fix things if we don't do it. We'd better get to work, like prior generations who sacrificed and built so much. What will you tell your grandkids - 'well, I just quit; it was the fashionable thing to do.'
Have you considered this trend is encouraged by people who don't want you getting in their way? You are handing all your power to them.
You’re talking in hyperbole but… yeah, we do a ton of work to make roads safer than they might otherwise be. What purpose do you think pedestrian crossings serve?
... and if the owner of Omegle doesn't want to take the years it'd take (and tens of thousands in legal fees) to find out whether or not they're liable for a silly project they put together for fun, I can't fault 'em.
Yeah no this is a terrible take. She was coerced by being an 11 year old talking to a grown adult. How do you think she was coerced?
> coerce - persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats.
What was the threat? Why did she oblige? Why didn't she just block him?
If the guy was in another country, it's hard for me to imagine how she became a "digital sex slave" (how the article refers it) instead of just blocking the guy. Naturally I'd imagine there was some kind of blackmail for her to comply, but the article doesn't mention anything like that.
I've been the parent of a ten year old girl, and can say with confidence that it's within the realm of possibility that an adult could manipulate a child in ways that ultimately would make that child afraid, if not utterly terrified, to be disobedient.
You scraping and digging through the comments here imploring to know about how she was coerced suggests to me that what you're really looking for is a justification to blame the ten year old girl. "coercion implies a threat" implies that with no evidence of a threat, the girl must have played along. She must have liked it. That's the vibe you give as you dig in and keep demanding people prove there was a threat. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that vibe.
I am just logging a protest, I have absolutely no interest in discussing it.
I apologize that you felt that it was an accusation. I could have been more tactful in expressing what my impressions were of your probing. I'm happy to be wrong.
How was she coerced? Who knows. I'll take a guess and say she was probably tricked at first into thinking he was someone else. Threatened after that.
(EDIT: and for chrissakes get identifiable information out of your user profile if you're going to argue this hard about something like this! Internet 101, man!)
And it is a pretty credible threat: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/maryland-sk-court-case-... https://www.wnyc.org/story/9114-sexting-teens-legal-straits-...
Curiously enough, no one even thinks of holding the government/legal system responsible.
So if I'm reading an article about a crime case and the article lacks details, that means I'm "looking for a playbook to commit that crime?" Give me a break.
Maybe you're a pedophile trying to hide your playbook for sexual exploitation of children? See how easy it is to make insulting, baseless accusations?
If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?
Weird people, pedos, criminals are everywhere.... parents somehow teach about "stranger-danger" offline but not online, and then blame platforms their kids use, even though they are too young to use them in the first place.
Well, yes! A different example: with few exceptions (gun manufacturers), when people die everybody even remotely involved gets sued. Examples: Station Nightclub fire, Surfside condominium collapse..
In the case of a pedo at Walmart I could imagine: "Didn't the staff notice the guy dragging the girl out of the store? Why didn't they get involved?" Walmart has much more money than the pedo.
If you want a proper Walmart analogy then you should stick the child in a remote part of a vast parking lot, so that there's no reason to expect the staff to notice.
And at that point the case seems too weak to try.
And if Walmart had a thousand anonymous meeting rooms it wouldn't be Walmart anymore, so the analogy falls apart at that point.
Yes, meatspace public venues used by traffickers are frequently sued for enabling the trafficking [0], its not something unique to cyberspace venues.
[0] e.g., https://guestban.com/2023/07/12/the-unseen-side-of-luxury-ho...
Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated, somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right, because how could it not be? It's used by so many people, and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be held to some standard, and, right or wrong, put trust in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.
The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the private room scenario I described above. I left out the part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But persuasive people can persuade other people, especially children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only happened to some of the 74 million people using the site, it happened to people. And for those it happened to, those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without Omegle's help.
If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting here about how unique and special Omegle was for people who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot of those comments.
But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle was operating. With 74 million people using it, the smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.
The parents blame the platforms because the platforms enabled the harm.
How about spoons? https://nypost.com/2019/05/16/police-station-mocked-for-phot...
We do in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives "It’s illegal to: use any knife or weapon in a threatening way, carry most knives or any weapons in public without a ‘good reason’, sell most knives or any weapons to anyone under the age of 18." - And yes that includes kitchen knives because there's a callout - "In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen knives."
> "Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?"
We regulate them or have standards around them[3]: "The Toy Safety Directive, BS EN 71-1, raises attention to plastic bags and plastic sheets. It specifies bags larger than 380mm opening circumference and having a drawstring closure must be made of a material which is permeable to air. Except where application requires airtight sealing, all bags are to be perforated with holes of 4mm diameter minimum, spaced on 30mm grid. Bags for child appealing products and toys must have a minimum of four holes; other bags to have a minimum of two holes".
Your stance "we shouldn't have to do things about dangers" is silly, we do a lot of things to reduce risks in a lot of areas. Learning from other people's tragedies and trying to safeguard others from having to go through them is one of the long-running threads of civilised society.
Should we restrict electric wiring options in houses because electrocution and fires are a thing? Yes. Should we restrict food production options because salmonella is a thing? Yes. Should we have building codes because shoddy buildings fall down and kill people? Yes. Should we have laws about lead and carcinogens and things in products? Yes. Should cars have to meet crash test safety conditions? Yes. etc. etc.
> "Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?"
We do; drivers are surrounded by inflatable airbags. [rant] Look at the social messaging around bike helmets. You never see people telling runners to wear a helmet in case they suddenly come upon a head injury. But take say YouTuber Tom Stanton who makes unusual engineering projects, including a flywheel bike[1] which he rode at walking pace down an empty country lane, and in his next bike video, a homemade supercapacitor bike[2] he's wearing a a helmet because of all the flack he got in the comments on the earlier one.
The point is not whether helmets prevent against brain damage in certain situations, the point is what situations are casual everyday recreational cyclists getting into where they risk brain damage? And the answer is cars. And the social messaging for helmet wearing is to shift blame from car drivers hitting cyclists to cyclists "not taking safety precautions".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gahKxbwUcYw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_f8Q2_Q_J0
[3] https://qualityinspired.co.uk/2020/03/suffocation-warning-re...
I'm not a fan of this journalist "ambushing" the founder at his property and staying outside of it until he gets some answers. "He has all the blinds closed" - right.
Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and needs to provide answers.
Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.
Personally, I think this is an entirely reasonable balance between competing rights. Publicly identifying suspects can cause immense harm to innocent people and prejudice the right to a fair trial based on the presumption of innocence. I cannot see any public interest argument for the general right to publicly identify criminal suspects, beyond mere prurient interest. If there would be substantial investigative benefits to publicly naming a suspect, for example to encourage witnesses or other victims to come forward, that should be a decision for the courts (or at least the police) and that decision should be made based on the individual circumstances of the case.
Until convicted, I presume?
Are the identites of those arrested (and possibly prosecuted but acquitted) protected forever?
Multi million Euro fraud, perpetrated for 10+ years in an organized fashion by husband and wife and some helpers from Saxony. Victims were (and are) senior citizens.
The German public broadcast MDR had several stories on them. Yet they don’t even dare to show the office building on which the perpetrators work. Much less their private house, or faces or names.
The press is more afraid of being sued by the perpetrators than the perpetrators are afraid of being prosecuted.
It’s the other extreme.
I'm starting to feel this is the thing we should have laws against.
Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for actual centuries now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
Showing up and getting actual answers, sure, but if you chased me around yelling questions about why I'm not protecting the children I would 100% run away rather than give you an in-depth interview. It looks bad until you think about it for five seconds and realise how confronting the situation is to even an innocent man, just like the Reid technique etc.
Asking loaded questions and trying to aggressively ambush you is definitely not "getting the other side of the story".
In terms of ethics, I’ll side with the journalist’s here over the guy running a service that randomly matches adults with children for video chat when he didn’t immediately shut down the service for a top-to-bottom rethink the moment he found out it’d been used by a serial pedophile.
You can't shut down everything once a bad actor does heinous things. There would be nothing left around. No more streets, no more cafes, no more trash bins, no more cars. Nothing.
As it has been pointed out, omegle did arguably provide more protection against bad actors that lots of other services around today. If you're in a situation you don't like, just press next and it's over. Nobody can contact you or recognise you in any way.
The crimes happen when you're not anonymous anymore, after exchanging snapchat or instagram accounts for example. They don't happen in a months long omegle conversation.
The root of the problem is being careless and providing identifying information. Obviously kids are too young to understand all the dangers, that's what parents are for. You wouldn't let your kids alone in the middle of the city and then sue it when a pedophile gets access to them. You can't let your kids use the Internet without keeping an eye on what is going on and warning them of the perils.
I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would need legal and competent representation if I were accused of something.
We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay with.
If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an investigation, carried out by the designated representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.
Your actions as the officer of a company are generally considered to be "public".
You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you certainly don't have to answer questions from a journalist either, but they're not generally invading your privacy by merely asking them).
As for the reputational risk you’re pointing to, nothing here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc… the journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him into changing his business’s product to prevent the very real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he wasn’t doing more to prevent his platform’s weaponization when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for exactly that use case.
The legal process playing out rarely ever means that a judge or jury makes a decision, rather it usually plays out as an economic problem, one of "does everyone involved have 10s of thousands of dollars to burn".
Usually the answer is "no", so usually it settles out of court.
They don't seem to go after the communication channels, they go after the discovery mechanisms.
* Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats
* Chatroulette launched ~half a year later
* Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after that
I've not used either one so I don'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.
Mandated ID checks are fine as long as we're using it to bludgeon the privileged in the process?
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't recall exactly how it played out in court, but it appeared to amount to nothing, which I can't help but to feel was due to the fact that mechanisms to verify someone's age online are either trivial to circumvent or present such a high barrier to entry that no reasonable user would surmount it.
But in all seriousness, age verification will soon be a legal reality. It's only "hard" because it's optional. When the government makes it required, they'll also have to make it possible - or those laws won't stand up in court. It'll probably require government issued digital IDs and MFA hardware.
No anonymity on social media sites. Not saying that's desirable - but it's the logical conclusion. You can run your own site anonymously.
> how do you do this in a framework that works globally
Lots of things work globally but are subject to local laws.
[citation needed]
EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences here.
On the other hand, I do wonder if "talk to strangers" is indeed a reasonable model. Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers. Clearly that model works there. But then again the neurons are simple (relatively) cells with much more cohesive goals and behavior, while humans are complex entities with behavior ranging from the cooperative to the ghastly predatorial.
Ultimately it seems any such service can't be anonymous. Talk to strangers... fine. But you need to register first, with your name, face, age, and meet consequences for what you're doing on the service, if your intent is less than noble. Alas this takes people and money which Omegle apparently didn't have.
This is nonsense. Our neurons don’t talk to strangers. They talk with other neurons from the same individual. There is more in common between any two connected neurons than between two family members.
And besides there is no reason to think that what happens between cells is a good model to base human behaviour on whatsoever.
Socialization is important (we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement), and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life. If only because we biologically have urges to reproduce and are aware enough of biology to know that family reproduction is a horrible idea.
I just point it out that it is a bad one.
> Socialization is important.
Yes.
> we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement
Yes.
> and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life
Yes.
see how easy it was to write it without asserting falsehoods about neurons, and without drawing unsupported conclusions from said falsehood?
A metaphor can be faulty even if the conclusion it purports to end up with is true. And if we can do away without the obscuring metaphor (as you did in this very comment I'm responding to) then we should.
Thank you.
> Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.
No. Please read my comment again. I claim no such thing.
Didn’t they used to specifically and notably not care about this? See ACLU defense of neo nazi march.
I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature of freedoms. Or the public that funds it has and it realized that it can't do any good if donors pull support because it keeps supporting Nazis. Maybe distinction without a difference.
Of all the targets of ire for "woke culture" etc., I'm really surprised that ACLU, SPLC and similar aren't getting more heat. They're actually highly consequential in people's daily lives and can clearly be ideologically captured by a rather small group of people, given that the orgs themselves are so small.
Much better targets of critique than random Twitter mobs.
Not anymore. The Charlottesville incident was the straw that broke the camel's back [0][1][2].
There was a revolt from donors and plenty of lawyers against their stance during Charlottesville.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendm...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-speec...
But that's the rub, PEACEABLY. Clearly what happened in Charlottesville violated that and is no longer protected under the constitution. But we can't ever truly predict the actions of an individual in a large group.
I'm very torn. I feel like we veer into Minority Report if we start having to predict what assemblies are prone to violation or not.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnn...
I think the ACLU is still a good organization, but it's no longer the ACLU. It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
> It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
Never thought I’d get whiplash just from reading a comment on Hacker News.
Can we sit down and define it, or are we to forever just throw it around as a convenient "bad people"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
This is their plea for donations: "Abortion care, trans people’s right to live freely, people’s right to vote – our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and nationwide."
Now I am not saying these are bad causes but it seems their priorities have shifted. They don't seem to be defending deeply unpopular people anymore
But they’re mostly irrelevant anymore - the causes they’ve started going after have a thousand other non-profits doing as much for, or better now.
The ACLU war chest has been over $400M the last few years, with many thousands of people in pretty much every state working with the organization in some capacity.
There's absolutely no evidence to support your claims that either the ACLU is irrelevant, nor that it has somehow shifted its momentum considerably since 2016 in what class of cases it handles (especially given the age of the organization and number of shifts vs. overall societal/cultural changes).
On the contrary, I can find many recent examples of legal actions spread headed by the ACLU across dozens of issues all over the country. If you can't find any it's because you're not looking, though you can start with their Annual Reports.
I got my impression from following the actual court cases and related news. Weird eh?
But go ahead and project all you want.
Hard to square this assessment with the last news item I caught about the ACLU: fighting a gag order against Donald Trump on free speech grounds.
The NY Times has covered the internal friction in the ACLU to take on more progressive causes as well. I was wrong to say they have completely strayed from defending speech absolutely but they do seem to have moved focus away. [1]
1.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
Really, I’d like to flip the script here and dare anyone against EFF protecting Omegle to post their real life resume/linkedin/etc.
I’ll do my part to make sure you’re unhirable, because the “optics” of destroying something as simple and innocent as this are terrible, and what’s actually happening is pseudo-anonymous pressure.
Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight Omegle's basic behavior, to start with.
We shouldn't just take zealous well-paid lawyers as a fact of nature. If those "defense against lawsuits"-actions actually don't make a difference in terms of reducing child abuse, then we should not let them make a difference in the legal system either.
That's assuming the evidence I would like to actually see.
Age limits can have a perverse effect on kids, or even young adults, eager to prove to themselves and their peers how "mature" they are. Retail stores and clubs where I live have exploited this for a long time.
For instance, there is no government-imposed limits on the age you need to be to buy energy drinks, but the grocery stores have coordinated to institute a 15 year limit. I'm pretty sure they do this simply to increase sales, not over concern for overcaffeinated kids.
They also used to have big signs saying "Over 18? PROVE IT!" with a big foaming glass of beer. I'm sure that flew over the head of most adults, but there was nothing about showing ID there.
Here's Chatroulette's login screen:
https://imgur.com/a/PV3sT0r
And from Archive.org, here's how Omegle's looked when the girl who is now suing them joined the site. "Tiny text" isn't an exaggeration. The call to action to start a text chat is a 200x50 button -- the 'don't use if you're under 13' text is 0.75em font:
https://imgur.com/a/QpFBJ15
It should be obvious to everyone, not just 'some lawyer' that the former is more of a barrier than the latter. There's also the concept of overt acts in many statutes - lying to a website by clicking a button that says "I'm over 18" when you're not demonstrates that you read the disclaimer and disregarded it, where you can plausibly claim you never saw the copy when it's just legalese on the bottom of the page.
The BBC article above states that Omegle is being mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13", that would be 10 cases fewer.
Chatroulette, the one most similar to Omegle, like Omegle, was started by a teenager alone (at about the same time), with the additional advantage (from the point of vulnerability to civil liability) of being in Russia.
But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and adults-only very early on, had an easier way to report inappropriate content, automatic temporary bans for too many reports too close together, and adopted other mitigations beyond what Omegle has.
Over the years, the handful of times I’ve gone on CR, I’ve never seen any form of required registration or age verification beyond maybe an “I’m 18+” checkbox or something.
EDIT: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
On balance I still think Omegle should win the case, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.
After all, no grooming happened on omegle, that's just where they shared contact details. Grooming apparently happened on other platforms, and the common denominator seems to be the internet and everything that makes it work, not omegle.
That's is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below the BBC.
> Yells at the man's house "Why aren't you protecting children?"
> Turns to camera "I just wanted to have a civil conversation. He doesn't want to talk... ever"
Sure man, civil conversation.
"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."
I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.
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.
That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter than the average user today
TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 and commercial ISPs didn't exist until 1989
But, separately, my own experience is that there is a particular quality to those places where people need to pass a barrier of entry to get in and those are still happening all over the place. I played against highly-skilled players on day 1 of the PS4 launch, had intelligent conversations on Clubhouse when it was invite-only, and regularly find people with clear minds inside certain pay-only doors.
I think the early internet was just that effect on a scale that was more impactful to the public where now everything is so siloed and fragmented.
Media conglomerates and tech oligopolies make it seem like people are “idiots now” but humans are humans and I don’t think that’s changed in the last few decades.
Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.
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's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.
Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was personally offended.
I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.
In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.
That's the opposite of better. Better is made with soul, and often for free.
Google has come full circle. Early Google succeeded in part because of nonintrusive ad words, scamming over banner ads. Now, Youtube.
I think this couldn't be further from the truth. You could argue that the production has been heavily centralized, but I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but it's still production nonetheless.
Note: All of this based on impressions/vibes, would be keen to hear any stats if people around have ‘em on hand!
I'm not knocking people liking it -- its like people liking SuperBowl ads; just because something is the very much marketing content doesn't mean its not fun and entertaining. But, the idea that becoming "quite commercialized" is a potential way it might go downhill in the future seems to miss that it is very much already there.
I’m not treating anyone’s experience as gospel in any case. There are no important decisions I’ll be making off this information.
You are correct, but there is a disappointing shift in the nature of said content.
GeoCities sites and the like were at least labors of love. Your site looked like shit but that's ok, nobody's going to see it anyway.
Tumblr was performative garbage that bridged LiveJournal/Myspace and Instagram. Your site looked like shit but if you say something controversial enough, you'll get a lot of views.
The YouTube/Instagram/TikTok crowd only optimize for engagement, to get as many views as possible. Everything is so over-the-top. You're not making anything out of love, you're making what gets you attention. Your content is professionally-polished and staged to attract eyeballs even if you have nothing to say. (No wonder everybody has an identity crisis; everyone's a child star that's been living for the camera since they got their first iPhone.)
Nowadays, I’m sure that 95% of all content I see is made by a media company for hire, mega corporation, or, most recently, word soup from an LLM where, in a strange twist of fate, I’m just a lab mouse in a giant, AI created A/B test trying to determine which option gets 0.2% more clicks. The age of casual creator is mostly over. Everything you do must be to build or enhance “your brand” and its a full time job to keep up with huge teams that automate the churn of information regurgitation, otherwise you’ll never be able to get enough of a following to qualify for perks that actual content creators make - and we’ve not even gotten to compensation yet. The gold rush of making money selling your brand online is over and it has been enshitified much like everything else novel and interesting in the world and on the internet.
A lot of monumentally good things have come from the last ~20 years of technological change, but the Internet breaking out into something mediocre people could exploit has done damage. And that’s a range that encompasses everything from minimally qualified marketing consultants to people drifting by on MBAs to (sorry) serial entrepreneurs who focus more on the launch than the idea.
> 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.
> 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're arguing internet disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one'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't think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist.
Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis)," which I know nothing about.
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't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
The Iraq war had a decent amount of opposition before it happened, there were like 100K people in San Francisco for the protest I went to.
there's evidence to suggest that there were two separate events from different strains at the start of the pandemic
this doesn't disprove the lab leak theory, but then they would have to be studying two separate very related strains and it would be strange if they just kept leaking different strains
You could, of course, take it as proof that the lab leak happened at around the same time as lineage B, while lineage A is from bats
Propaganda goes both ways in war. In case you were not aware.
Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it already trends in that direction, I wouldn't be surprised. Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet's magical period.
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…
> 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/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.
This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the 'old internet' 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/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.
So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.
Is this true? Maybe you just don't know the right places anymore. Im sure there's all kinds of crazy, basically unmoderated shit going down in discord or roblox or vrchat.
Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a lot of resources and guides out there, and if you want to, you can most likely find them.
But at least with the former we still have to be a bit reserved since discord can also be pretty heavy handed with moderation. It effectively suppresses less sanitized content in the sense that if your discord grows past a certain size, it's much more likely to catch their attention. So the old internet type content we have there is mostly a handful of private discords from friends with a handful of their friends there. At that point we just ended up setting up a matrix server for stuff we'd rather not leave to the whims of discord.
VRchat has the benefit that if you aren't in public, you're free to do anything. But that does still sort of mean that you need to know the right people to get into those circles, since public is generally unenjoyable, being filled with screaming "Quest kids" (and even if they weren't screaming, it's obviously awkward to be hanging out with children as adults).
This is a sentiment repeated by almost everyone who finds their niche in the fediverse. Once you settle in, you get that early internet magic of simply connecting with people. The fediverse is all about talking to or showing things to other people.
It's pretty interesting what happens when you talk to people instead of just posting into the void. Interactions become purposeful and meaningful because it's clear there's a real person on the other side.
It really does feel like the earlier internet when we all posted anonymously on small forums with a few thousand users total. There's a sense of community.
There's also a really strong selection bias right now. People who use the fediverse are much more likely to be people sick of modern social media and want to return to the old days. So they went out and they goddamn made their own social media and made it feel like the old days.
I think it's a great place to hang out right now. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve over time. There's a push to bring back small websites, blogs and forums and I really hope that takes off.
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's only recently that I see most "culture production" 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't make it into the 00s?
IRC was a big one. Back when you hopped on a server, typed in #cityname, and joined a lively realtime conversation with folks in your area. That was cool.
I’m too young for usenet, but I’ve been hearing about how cool and amazing it was for like 25 years now. Apparently the web never quite managed to capture that magic.
Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying "kids these days"
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 "magical periods". Just different.
One could look at the current AI innovation as a different magical period.
/shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure
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/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives??
I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool anymore.
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 "Spy Mode" 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'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'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.
So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.
People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.
For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity.
My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible.
It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.
(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.)
...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The corporatisation of net ruined it.
Not much can survive the incentive of profit.
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 don't know the person or much about their situation; I'm just using what I read to make a general observation.)
It's a bit presumptuous to say that his actions / statement are due to despair being trendy. Everyone has their own "It's not worth it anymore" moment.
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.
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.
Imagine a store owner downtown adding a flowerbed and a couple benches at the front of their property. If someone gets hurt via rare catastrophic event, it seems bad to make the owner pay, and even worse to suggest they're supposed to be charging bench users 20 cents each to fund payouts like this.
A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn’t free in a way that makes that really true, and even if the service was free, if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
You didn't directly address my bench scenario, but this sounds like it fits the bench scenario. I don't see anything you've said that would make it an exception. But I think the logical outcome of that is ridiculous.
Sometimes there are bad things that can happen in a place, and that place should not have to pay damages.
And providing value, as an argument to keep existing, should not mean you have to monetize that value. (or drastically increase monetization)
> There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451
I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities.
IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.
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.
Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye. According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury?
Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
That's not generally true, nor should it be.
A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups.
So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
No the mall isn't a good analogy, it has lights, mall cops, CCTV cameras, crowds of people wandering around, it's a well known public place and it's generally not known as a place to approach strangers unless you're selling something. Omegle happened one-to-one, private, and encouraged chatting directly to strangers.
There is a concept, I forget the name of it (not the bystander effect) where if you are in a strange place in public and need help then you can call out to the bystanders for help, or you can point to one specific bystander and ask for help. Say you are a tipsy woman lost her bag, and you call out to anyone for help then the self-interested predator can step forwards, but if you point to one person and ask them to call you a cab then you are unlikely to randomly pick the self-interested predator. So even though most people who try to help a stranger in need are good people, calling out to the void leaves a big opportunity for any bad people to take advantage of. Both can be true - that most people are good and that one arrangement leaves more room for any predators who are present than another arrangement does. Omegle had a reputation for being risqué - like DickRoulette (ChatRoulette), so that means people wouldn't tend to use it in a library, or on a family PC in the living room with other people around.
So people going on Omegle would be more likely younger because they have more free time and less money to spend on things and less ability / money to go out instead, are more likely to go on behind closed doors to avoid people seeing anything rude on their screens, then they'd get matched with a stranger, encouraged to chat with the stranger, and of course the reasonable adults matched with a young child who shouldn't be there would move on, leaving the effect above and the predators room be the ones who pretended to be friendly, and none of the protections of a crowd at a mall - well-meaning strangers ("it takes a village") could see something odd happening and interrupt or check-in.
It's not that everyone on the site was in that situation, it's that the site design and social status left that to happen way way more often than a mall or a shop bench would.
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 actively trying to help crime, but this doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
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 which are directed to roads (making even the indirect use of roads by ordering goods, etc., not really free.)
Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.
Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the road, true.
They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a general legal requirement for using public roads, though you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage.
Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free with the idea that “well, a bunch of people will be damaged, but there is no need to assure that those damages are reasonably covered because other people will benefit”, it has lots of costs associated with use, and a number of them (both the licensing regime and the insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the expense of potential beneficial use and assuring compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes, its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary for a service that has benefits for most users and acute harms for some.
The fundamental question is what is the legal objective here, and what do we want it to be?
1) Is the goal to make sure that victims are compensated?
2) Do we think companies like omegle are negligent, and are we trying to hold them accountable?
3) Do we actually think neither?
If the answer is 1 but not 2, then making Omegles pay is clearly an injustice, and we should be looking into some sort of mandatory user insurance.
Putting my cards on the table, I am in camp 3. Just because bad things happen, doesnt mean can or should find a way to compensate the injured party.
Yet EV's still have to pass insane standards because 1/10th, 1/100th of deaths would be too much... it's all about our monkey brain's perception, negativity bias (i.e. 100x good thing equals 1x bad thing) and emotions. We are tied to these things until we leave our carbon meat suits.
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)
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.
There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year -- I knew someone who was killed, and I've had a couple close shaves. In fact, today I was kiting and witnessed a kiter get rescued by the Coast Guard. It's understandable that society would want to have some say due to the externalities (loss of productive members of society, cost of rescues, risk to bystanders, etc).
IMO it's not the case that 'no risk is acceptable' -- it's just that the risk tolerance for various things seems really arbitrary & out of proportion to reward. For instance, if we didn't accept any risks as a society, we'd ban alcohol & tobacco along with kitesurfing, skydiving and motorcycles, but we don't.
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.
No one is ‘accidentally’ using Omeagle, anymore than they would ‘accidentally’ go golfing.
An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a golf membership.
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 consistently implicated in all sorts of nefarious child trafficking operations.
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.
> Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
To me this sounds like the problem isn't the malicious users, so much as people using the malicious users as an argument to shut down Omegle.
You can moderate people showing their dicks, you can't moderate people suing you because you didn't do enough to stop little 16 year old Timmy seeing a dick.
So it seems like we do have SOME semblance of understanding risk vs reward.
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:
https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-roy...
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't help with the policing work or the protests of pearl clutchers who don't care about precautions, effort and resources for victim support, and just can't handle any failure of any kind.
For all the conventional reasons: the victim of the abuse deserves sympathy, and that abuse shouldn't happen.
But also because we seem to be placing the blame for the abuse on the service, not the abuser. And that's sad because instead of being able to just make interesting stuff and put them online, we are being forced to consider "what's the worst possible thing that some evil bastard could use this for?" 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'll go the same route as Omegle; it'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's what we want. It's so sad.
Had we known what the challenges would be, would we have made them so easy to own and operate? You need a license to fly a plane solo, and it takes years to get one.
Airplanes are probably the example you want - heavily regulated and very focused on safety. Not motor vehicles. After all, if they really were focused on safety, they’d have banned giant trucks and SUVs for personal use a long, long time ago.
... or rather, perhaps the era of being chained to a rock for a bird to peck at our livers has begun.
Sure, people _can_ abuse any service, this seems like a service that wasn’t just ripe for abuse, it was essentially perfectly designed to enable it. Moreover in this case there absolutely appears to be numerous feasible ways to have headed off that particular avenue of abuse.
This is the same ludicrously weak argument that is constantly and erroneously applied to guns… neither a car nor a kitchen knife are primarily (much less exclusively) instruments of harm, guns are. Well, turns out, so are random matchmaking services that link adult users with children and let them view each other, and that appears kind of obvious in hindsight.
I'm not really sure how much more ripe for abuse Omegle was compared to, say, Discord. Pretty much any video chat service can be abused to send or receive illegal content, and to abuse and manipulate other people. These are risks inherent to anything enabling communication. Short of a panopticon where all communications are manually approved by a human moderator, there's no sure way to prevent abuse (and even then human moderators are fallible).
There ought to be some reasonable attempts to mitigate abuse, like a reporting functionality. But beyond that I don't see much more Omegle could have reasonably done.
Same with the equally pointless comparison to Discord… Omegle wasn’t merely a video chat service, it made random matches that the user could narrow by identifying their own interests; an adult male user identifying as being deeply interested in things only children would be interested in could readily and easily (and obviously) weaponize the platform, and Omegle absolutely could have (and should have) used the many and obvious means available for profiling and identifying such incongruous users, which (sure) would include human moderators.
There’s an enormous ethical difference between not doing anything whatsoever to prevent abuse and perfectly preventing abuse, and you seem to think they had no obligation to prevent any because they couldn’t prevent all… they don’t exist any more (thankfully) because lawyers started to (correctly) point out that that isn’t how either ethics or tort law work.
Even just preventing 1% of abuse would probably have been beyond the capabilities of this site. You write that they should flag adult men listing interest in topics associated with children. How are they supposed to identify the gender and age of users? People under 18 are prohibited from the site, yet that clearly failed. Human moderation can't even monitor a fraction of one percent The "many obvious" ways of preventing abuse were in fact attempted [1]:
> Omegle implemented a "monitored" video chat, to monitor misbehavior and protect people under the age of 18 from potentially harmful content, including nudity or sexual content. However, the monitoring is not very effective, and users can often skirt around bans.
Sure, Omegle "randomly put you into head on collision situations with others", but so is every other public communications: IRC, discord, Xbox Live, pretty much anywhere you can meet random people on the Internet fits into this category.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle
In hindsight the entire purpose of the service was a bad idea, absent minimal efforts to avoid its trivial weaponization by users with an obvious motive for using the means and opportunity the service was providing by design.
I asked you how do you solve the problem without defeating the purpose of Omegle. Your solution is the equivalent to someone asking how to solve world hunger and you responding with "Just feed them. Duh."
In the US, at least, bars can be found liable for patrons drunk driving. That's probably a closer analogy to Omegle than a car manufacturer, since its patrons hang out at the "establishment," engaging in potentially risky behavior. That's not a comment on the validity of the lawsuit, but the situation isn't as simple as you make out.
> The drunk driver can sue the bar or bartender for allowing them to become intoxicated to a dangerous level. Individuals may file a lawsuit, but this does not always mean it will hold up in court. Dram shop laws in most states make clear definitions to avoid false liability. Washington is one of those states.
It looks like it's more the case that the drunk driver tries to sue the bar, not that the government is pursuing the bar. Furthermore, some States specifically forbid attempts to hold the bar liable for drunk drivers.
And even if it were, it's vastly easier for a bar to monitor the conduct of patrons than a web service. The scale of the latter is too great to make non-automated moderation feasible.
I am aware I cannot think of every bad way a service could be misused . I also am aware that there is always a way to misuse a service. Therefore, in order to prevent a service I use from being misused, I must not build anything.
Obviously that conclusion is wrong, so one of the premises must be wrong. Specifically, liability should be on the abuser not on the service.
> By that standard I cannot see how any reasonable person could justify building anything at all;
This is hyperbolic, don't you think? If I were to write a new, let's say, operating system - why would this thinking block me?
There's a ton of things you can create that really won't pose a moral question. Especially when we have prior art to look at.
Did I ever state that everything we do has to be harm free?
At the same time, it is hard to imagine someone letting go of implementing an idea because of vague negative future effects that are not real in the present. And there is a lot of money incentivizing betting on lots of new ideas to see what takes off.
So it's like, if we uncover the next transformative technology that we know little about the future effects of, we just have to eat the cost of proliferating it everywhere before countermeasures can be figured out, if they can be created at all?
Sometimes I think the ease of virality in software could be a Great Filter. If not something farfetched like human extinction, then the Great Filter of human isolation, or of lasting intergenerational conflict, or something else that's profound but not totally catastrophic. Not only is new tech too tempting to spontaneously put down, but it's nearly impossible to know when to put it down. I think maybe if information overload and the like was hypothesized about like AI is starting to be today, we would still not be able to leave social media uninvented, because nobody had tried it and witnessed it fail yet. But the Great Filter comes in when maybe you can only witness certain failures once.
Edit to respond to OP's Edit: Your quote you're replying to includes "And prevent it". Which made us assume you were directly implying that prevention of bad consequences was your point. Yes, people should clearly think through consequences. OP wasn't implying otherwise and specifically structured their statement to include "the worst possible thing" and "prevent it".
... and Roblox has a financial vested interest in finding them, outing them to authorities, and keeping them off the site, so it'll be worth it to them to do so and to keep the site humming.
Omegle's owner decided to shut it down because it wasn't worth it to them to do that work. That's all. Price not worth paying.
They're being sued by a victim for not preventing the victim from being manipulated by an abuser. The fact that the abuser was caught and convicted with Omegle's help is apparently irrelevant.
It's hard to see how Omegle could have done this differently; no crime occurred until the victim was abused, and once the abuse happened any subsequent action is irrelevant because the victim was still abused.
Roblox will have more ability to hire lawyers to win the victim's court case. That's the only difference.
If it's not worth it to him it's not worth it. I too remember the feeling of "this startup is going to kill me and I'm only 30."
Many there already, unfortunate to report.
Why is it my responsibility to do this?
Blame is not exclusive or zero-sum, and while there is obviously blame being placed on the service, I don'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't placed on the service as well.)
The individual abuser was located, arrested, criminally convicted, and sentenced to 8.5 years of prison and 20 years of restricted supervised release.
Many would consider that a significant form of blame.
+ 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, "[any successful social innovation can be] pushed to the point of absurdity".
when a tool goes viral i suppose it should be "taken over" (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.
Care to elaborate on your accusation? In my world, Omegle was about things like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q
> 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 shield
Omegle, as one of the last places that didn'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's sad that this free, no-harm site has to shut down while Snap/Insta routinely ignore legitimate criticism of their ability to encourage abuse and have enough lawyers to ensure they'll never have to face any consequences for enabling abuse.
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'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.
I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO
The flip side is that p2p means that nobody is snooping in on those video conversations. Omegle couldn't spy on it's users once they had entered a video chat. It was also fairly easy to see how they implemented the monitoring they did if you have a webdev background: periodically in between chats the omegle client requested an image from your cam.
I believe the whole video chat component, while initially using flash, was ultimately implemented using WebRTC, which is pretty cool and as shame more places don't make use of this.
Astonishingly, Google still remembers after 16 years: "forced_anon chat" (with the quotes) finds the very origin, if you want to go down that dark and probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole.
Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into his posts
Aren't they just neewbs or something? N33wbs?
N00bs?
My recollection is that newposters was coined around 2007 for everyone who joined after the Habbo raids that had made /b/ much more popular. These newposters from Habbo were "ruining" the site.
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/discussion board.
4chan offensiveness isn't so much a generational thing as it is a personality thing
There's something in there about human development and pushing boundaries in your youth, I'm certain.
Also, it did feel great as a teen from a very backwards rural area, to be on the very bleeding edge of internet culture. Knowing the memes before anyone else was secretly satisfying.
It has felt like a natural end to the long term cultural battled for acceptance of such basic expressions of working class language and humor, in a kind of "needing to break it down so we can build it back up" sort of way.
I'd dread to think of a cultural landscape where the previous puritanical average continued letting air out of the balloon at an excruciatingly slow rate, as opposed to the admittedly immature fart sound we reveled in for a few moments.
maybe you haven't been looking or looking with a different perspective, but it was definitely tried and accomplished, imho.
People who aren'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.
archive link for those who don't want to google
> 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?
Then when you do get to a real person, 90% of the time they said "M or F?" and if you said M they'd instantly leave
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 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.
One of the greatest things Omegle enabled is this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is (Harry Mack freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+ episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)
Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.
Marcus Veltri, piano, https://www.youtube.com/@MarcusVeltri
Rob Landis, violin, https://www.youtube.com/@RobLandes
Billy Wilkins, guitar and vocals, https://www.youtube.com/@BillyWilkins
The Doo, guitar and piana and otamatone, https://www.youtube.com/@TheDooo
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXKJ3uv_XIk
edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to cross it.
Imagine they'll hop to a different platform.
https://www.getmoonbounce.com/
1. He starts out by asking if he can show them a magic trick. They say yes or nod yes. He then exits stage right. He then returns either through the back door or some the side stage left. Where he enters from is too far away from where he left for him to have walked or even ran there in the time between entrance and exit.
The part up to where he exists stage left could be pre-recorded. His wording and gestures change slightly with different people but he could have several different pre-recorded segments for this.
As Teller once observed:
> Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect
Penn has said something similar:
> The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth
It could then switch to live for his return, where he then actually converses with them to prove that he's live.
2. If he encounters someone whose responses to the pre-recorded segment don't fit in, he skips them. Remember, we don't see how many people he had to try this with to get enough good ones for a video, and recall Teller's quote from above.
The one he's done that has me baffled is the one where he does this:
1. He asks them what city they live in.
2. He then tells them he used to live in that city and gives the address of where he lived. It is their address or an address of a close neighbor.
He also does this except instead of asking the city he tells them he has a talent for guessing people's names, and then tells them their name.
I can see in general how to do these, by using fake disconnects. He uses fake disconnects in one of his most common routines where he asks someone if he can show them a magic trick, starts a "pick a card" type routine, and then disconnects just has he's revealing their card. Then later when the person is connected to someone else either that someone else says "is this your card?" and holds up the correct card or he walks into that someone else's room and shows the card.
The key here is that he doesn't really disconnect. He just shows the disconnect screen, and then switches to feeding them video of the other person. They think that they have connected to someone new on Omegle but it is him the whole time.
With fake disconnects he could have his subjects in the "tell them their name" bit first talk to an accomplice who gets their name, fake disconnect and fake connect with him, and then he can do his name guess.
That should be fairly easy because people often exchange names on Omegle. But full addresses? I'd hope that would be rare, rare enough that even a Penn/Teller level of time would not be enough to get many people.
It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.
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.
Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when most people's primary computing device was capable of acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard enough I'm sure we can get there.
Even knowing their age at all is giving up some privacy.
If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
It's usually obvious if you can have a short conversation with the person in question. Throughout my childhood escapades, I'm certain that most, if not all, the responsible adults I interacted with knew pretty much exactly how old I was. (I'd managed to navigate a legal loophole that, I believe, still exists in GDPR today, so they weren't required to kick me off – but while I was treated as an equal, I wasn't treated the same way I'm treated now.)
> If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
That's quite illegal, and quite easy to detect (just give slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks). Most people don't commit crimes: individuals just don't have the kinds of incentive to buy and sell people's personal data that organisations like Facebook, Taboola and Oracle have. (And what would they get for betraying these people's trust? $30? Sure… I'd totally go for that.)
This bar also had special partitions in each room that were practically indestructible, allowing sound and light through but protecting from physical harm.
[EDIT: I don't mean to imply that the check is easy! The reality of Omegle's difficulties is understood. I'm just riffing on the metaphor]
A library is in public view.
Omegle was in private, away from public view.
No one needs to keep anyone off Omegle now, it is gone.
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.
With so many big names using it, and it is so popular.
Why was it a financial drain? Why can't it keep going?
Surely if was making enough money. .
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's seen, and had followed his career closely for years. A magical moment :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk
Is there a list of websites that have been shut down due to this type of attrition? I'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
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., https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/virginia-m...
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:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.
Crimes happen on all technologies and in all venues, and they likely always will.