What was your best experience on random chat sites like chatroulette and omegle?
It's hard to pick one. There was something really magical about the early days of Omegle. That was the first time I felt a real connection to the people using the sites. They were like family. They were so friendly, you want to keep them forever? Sure, we can't keep them forever, but we can help them find each other. And once we find them, we can help them keep each other connected. When someone was feeling down and alone, they would just upload a video chat log of themselves, so that another person could follow their steps to recovery. That was the magic of it, that you never knew who your next donor might be. But it's hard to argue that it wasn't a great experience for the people who made it, because now they're long dead, and they had nothing.
Can you name five random video chat sites that have made a huge difference in human rights work? Three of them, in fact, are in the last sentence of this email. I've just started one, and it's called Chatroulette, and it had some really really great things -- they were really groundbreaking. But as far as I can tell, four of the sites that you mentioned, Omegle, Omegle and Friendster, made huge investments in their communities, and so their technology and their communities are really similar. And so for me, the thing that really struck me about all of them was, really sophisticated communities of people could come together and come up with something really cool, but the thing that really mattered was just tens of millions of users. Tens of millions of people could hit that button and send tens of thousands of emails a day, every day, documenting what medical treatments people have had at the site. And I wanted to know, have you ever visited a medical website and clicked through to get a diagnosis? Have you ever visited a dating website and clicked through to get a medical diagnosis? And if you have, you will know that a medical dating service is really powerful. And the other site that I was looking at was called, Onedate.com. And onedate.com is a no-log, log-free dating service. So there was nothing there, so they took it and they automated it, and it is still available to them to roll out to the rest of the sites. And so my basic thesis is that we should have an extraordinarily powerful, highly targeted medical dating service.
And so my first attempt was just to go to methoedate.com and just document myself and document what I needed, and then a few days later I would email that information to you. And so far I have been very helpful. But the problem is that I need your help. And so I need your help to appreciate the enormity of the problem, because it is enormous. And so I need to document everything that has helped me, so here
