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> 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 i

> 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.

adamomada 3y ago
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
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > 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.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    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.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > 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.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        > 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)
        dotandgtfo 3y ago
        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 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.
  - mrighele 3y ago
    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)
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > 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.)
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        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.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > 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.
  - terryf 3y ago
    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)
  - concordDance 3y ago
    The issue here is that the host is capturing only a very small fraction of the value here, which may not be enough to cover liability.
- terryf 3y ago
  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.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    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.
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    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"
  - MrGilbert 3y ago
    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.
  - lambdatronics 3y ago
    > 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- varispeed 3y ago
  > 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.
lazide 3y ago
Just because someone got struck by lightning while playing golf, doesn’t make golf dangerous to play.
- hypeatei 3y ago
  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.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Which requires a computer, internet connection (subscription based!), and actually going to the website and interacting with it on an ongoing basis. No one is ‘accidentally’ using Omeagle, anymore than they would ‘accidentally’ go golfing.
    - hypeatei 3y ago
      Yeah, but this is from the site operators perspective. How are you not bound to have abuse everyday on a platform with such low barrier to entry? An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a golf membership.
      - lazide 3y ago
        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.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        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.
talldatethrow 3y ago
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.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  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
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks. And they are regularly sued for injuries (even short of death), and sometimes lose. Picking one case out of many because it was a ice rink on a cruise ship: https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-royal-caribbean-liable-for-cruise-ship-ice-skating-injury/ https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-roy...
- Nevermark 3y ago
  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.
  - wildzzz 3y ago
    It's all baked into the premiums.
    - 3y ago
sanroot99 3y ago
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

adamomada 3y ago

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

dragonwriter 3y ago
> 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.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > 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.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > 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)
      - dotandgtfo 3y ago
        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 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.
- mrighele 3y ago
  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)
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > 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.)
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      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.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > 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.
- terryf 3y ago
  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)
- concordDance 3y ago
  The issue here is that the host is capturing only a very small fraction of the value here, which may not be enough to cover liability.
terryf 3y ago
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.
- concordDance 3y ago
  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.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  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"
- MrGilbert 3y ago
  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.
- lambdatronics 3y ago
  > 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
varispeed 3y ago
> 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.

lazide 3y ago

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

hypeatei 3y ago
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.
- lazide 3y ago
  Which requires a computer, internet connection (subscription based!), and actually going to the website and interacting with it on an ongoing basis. No one is ‘accidentally’ using Omeagle, anymore than they would ‘accidentally’ go golfing.
  - hypeatei 3y ago
    Yeah, but this is from the site operators perspective. How are you not bound to have abuse everyday on a platform with such low barrier to entry? An internet connection is a lot more ubiquitous than a golf membership.
    - lazide 3y ago
      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.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        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.

talldatethrow 3y ago

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.

ajmurmann 3y ago
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
dragonwriter 3y ago
> I am absolutely certain people die hitting their head while at paid ice skating rinks. And they are regularly sued for injuries (even short of death), and sometimes lose. Picking one case out of many because it was a ice rink on a cruise ship: https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-royal-caribbean-liable-for-cruise-ship-ice-skating-injury/ https://www.mariettainjurylawyer.com/federal-court-holds-roy...
Nevermark 3y ago
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.
- wildzzz 3y ago
  It's all baked into the premiums.
  - 3y ago

sanroot99 3y ago

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