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.
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.