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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 ques

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.

2devnull 3y ago
>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.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  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.

2devnull 3y ago

>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.

jodrellblank 3y ago
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.