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This is so sad. 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 p

This is so sad. 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.

aaomidi 3y ago
[flagged]
- blairbeckwith 3y ago
  how far do we take this? would we have motor vehicles if we knew how many people would be killed by/with them every year?
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    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.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    And removing the option for unsupervised outdoor play for kids.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    Motor vehicles are a great example. They are HEAVILY regulated and have a gigantic focus on safety.
    - nneonneo 3y ago
      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.
      - willsmith72 3y 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.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  The era of tech people thinking of themselves as Prometheus bringing fire, without a care as to how the mortals use it, is over. ... or rather, perhaps the era of being chained to a rock for a bird to peck at our livers has begun.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  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.
  - yawpitch 3y ago
    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.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      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.
      - yawpitch 3y ago
- marssaxman 3y ago
  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.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    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.
    - Gabf74phcJ2bJpr 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - injeolmi_love 3y ago
      He is saying don’t build anything. 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.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    No one is expecting anyone to be an oracle to be honest. > 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.
    - junofan 3y ago
      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?
- noirbot 3y ago
  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".
  - zht 3y ago
    Does the local pub allow minors? I’m confused
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      And beyond that, pubs (or, well, bars) in the US can be held accountable if they let someone get _too drunk_.
    - noirbot 3y ago
      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.
- junofan 3y ago
  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?
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    They will. ... 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.
    - marcus_holmes 3y ago
      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.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        Fending off legal challenges is also part of the work. 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."
  - DANmode 3y ago
    > Won’t these pedophiles just move to Roblox Many there already, unfortunate to report.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  And, perhaps, for people to think through the basic implications of their comments.
- Gabf74phcJ2bJpr 3y ago
  [flagged]
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  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. Why is it my responsibility to do this?
adamomada 3y ago
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
- charptr 3y ago
  This is a remarkably bad take that indicates a severe lack of understanding about how abusers operate. Do better.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> 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.)
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  This is true. Maybe I should have said "also placing blame on the service as well as the abuser"
- ryandrake 3y ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > When there's money involved, blame always gets placed on the deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost never an individual person. 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
4star3star 3y ago
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!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- op00to 3y ago
  You're comparing paper cuts to sexual abuse. Don't do that.
  - 4star3star 3y ago
    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.

aaomidi 3y ago

[flagged]

blairbeckwith 3y ago
how far do we take this? would we have motor vehicles if we knew how many people would be killed by/with them every year?
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  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.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  And removing the option for unsupervised outdoor play for kids.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  Motor vehicles are a great example. They are HEAVILY regulated and have a gigantic focus on safety.
  - nneonneo 3y ago
    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.
    - willsmith72 3y 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.
shadowgovt 3y ago
The era of tech people thinking of themselves as Prometheus bringing fire, without a care as to how the mortals use it, is over. ... or rather, perhaps the era of being chained to a rock for a bird to peck at our livers has begun.
Manuel_D 3y ago
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.
- yawpitch 3y ago
  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.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    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.
    - yawpitch 3y ago
marssaxman 3y ago
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.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  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.
  - Gabf74phcJ2bJpr 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - injeolmi_love 3y ago
    He is saying don’t build anything. 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.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  No one is expecting anyone to be an oracle to be honest. > 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.
  - junofan 3y ago
    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?
noirbot 3y ago
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".
- zht 3y ago
  Does the local pub allow minors? I’m confused
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    And beyond that, pubs (or, well, bars) in the US can be held accountable if they let someone get _too drunk_.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    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.
junofan 3y ago
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?
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  They will. ... 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.
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    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.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Fending off legal challenges is also part of the work. 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."
- DANmode 3y ago
  > Won’t these pedophiles just move to Roblox Many there already, unfortunate to report.
marcus0x62 3y ago
And, perhaps, for people to think through the basic implications of their comments.
Gabf74phcJ2bJpr 3y ago
[flagged]
marcus_holmes 3y ago
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. Why is it my responsibility to do this?

adamomada 3y ago

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

charptr 3y ago
This is a remarkably bad take that indicates a severe lack of understanding about how abusers operate. Do better.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> 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.)

marcus_holmes 3y ago
This is true. Maybe I should have said "also placing blame on the service as well as the abuser"
ryandrake 3y ago
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.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > When there's money involved, blame always gets placed on the deepest pockets that can be found, which is almost never an individual person. 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

4star3star 3y ago

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!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
op00to 3y ago
You're comparing paper cuts to sexual abuse. Don't do that.
- 4star3star 3y ago
  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.