Omegle 2009-2023

https://www.omegle.com/

by liamcottle • 3 years ago

2454 956 3 years ago

omegle.com

Laaas• 3 years ago

What "attacks" is he referring to?

veeti2• 3 years ago

"Omegle: Suing the website that matched me with my abuser"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

willk• 3 years ago

What happened to her is tragic. However, I don’t think warnings or age verification would change anything. Kids are going to do things regardless if there is a warning or age verification system.

I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to them, and to start talking to them early.

echelon4• 3 years ago

As a young girl, Alice (not her real name) logged on to the popular live video chat website, Omegle, and was randomly paired with a paedophile, who coerced her into becoming a digital sex slave. Nearly 10 years later the young American is suing Omegle in a landmark case that could pave the way for a wave of lawsuits against other social platforms.

This is fucked. We shouldn't have to put safety padding on everything as a stand-in for something parents are supposed to do, ie. being responsible for their brood.

Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?

Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?

Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?

silenced_trope2• 3 years ago

Let the legal process play out.

I'm not a fan of this journalist "ambushing" the founder at his property and staying outside of it until he gets some answers. "He has all the blinds closed" - right.

Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and needs to provide answers.

Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.

nomel• 3 years ago

Is it this one instance, or is it the fact that it can connect children to adults? Or general moderation problems that include that? Or maybe attacks as in lawyers?

Prezident_Zappa• 3 years ago

Absolutely ridiculous in every way.

Tao33005• 3 years ago

Waiting outside someone's house for 7 hours, running after them, and spouting accusations through the door doesn't sound like my idea of "trying to have a civilized conversation". The BBC should be deeply embarrassed.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

Thank you. Such a huge wall of text posted, yet the only thing that remotely explains "why" is a vague reference to "attacks." What attacks??

m4jor2• 3 years ago

The A.M. vs Omgele case if I had to guess.

woleium• 3 years ago

Back to Chatroulette then? Having not used either platform, what’s the difference?

sandworm1013• 3 years ago

Back to whatsapp and other encrypted services whereby the corporate overlord can plead ignorance of how thier systems are used. Omegle didnt evolve to meet the new standard: dont connect people. Let them do that themselves. Then you cannot be blamed when the wrong two people meet via your system.

wolverine8769• 3 years ago

Can you meet people randomly on any of those services? That would be an interesting feature.

Izkata2• 3 years ago

What I got from a quick search, the order was:

* Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats

* Chatroulette launched ~half a year later

* Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after that

I've not used either one so I don't know if there was more to it. Does explain how I knew about Chatroulette but not this one, even though people up above were talking about how it was an original idea.

unlog• 3 years ago

We built a website over a year ago https://ehmeh.com/ In there you can video chat with multiple people, similar to Omegle. The difference may be that the video chat is in ASCII and the connection is done in WebRTC, fun alternative.

RagnarD2• 3 years ago

It's unfortunate that I only now found about this site, now that it's shut down.

Tao33005• 3 years ago

I'd never heard of it either. And the comments make it sound like there was a big difference between what it started as and what it turned into.

xwdv2• 3 years ago

To the founder of Omegle, I would say: do not lose heart. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. In the end, we will prevail over those who destroy the good works of others under the guise of false victimhood and social justice, and build a very special place in hell for them, where we will condemn them for all eternity.

jachee• 3 years ago

Alas, the universe can stay unjust longer than we can stay conscious.

xwdv2• 3 years ago

Still, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in.

Mechanical9• 3 years ago

I don't really see what aspect of this situation involves a false sense of victimhood, unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.

gruez• 3 years ago

unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.

Mandated ID checks are fine as long as we're using it to bludgeon the privileged in the process?

tyg13• 3 years ago

How is age verification supposed to work? I don't suppose users of the site are going to provide legal documents just to use it. It's tantamount to shutting it down.

I ask because there was a similar moral outrage around age verification for access to porn sites that I recall being a big issue a while ago. I don't recall exactly how it played out in court, but it appeared to amount to nothing, which I can't help but to feel was due to the fact that mechanisms to verify someone's age online are either trivial to circumvent or present such a high barrier to entry that no reasonable user would surmount it.

deciduously• 3 years ago

bends toward justice

[citation needed]

wins32767• 3 years ago

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/21/arc-mor....

injeolmi_love• 3 years ago

What makes you think the universe bends towards justice? For the last 10 years, every metric of personal and economic freedom has declined. Most countries peaked in 2007. Its starting to look like personal freedom was an anomaly and we’re now retiring to the historic norm.

Tao33005• 3 years ago

Turns out Thrasymachus was right after all.

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

I truly admire your optimism.

PessimalDecimal2• 3 years ago

It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without batting an eye. Apparently Omegle doesn't have an army of lawyers.

echelon4• 3 years ago

This used to be exactly what the EFF and ACLU were for.

TaylorAlexander• 3 years ago

Regardless of any arguments about legitimacy, the optics of the EFF and ACLU defending Omegle against a child sex abuse victim are horrible. They need to raise funds from donors and having to explain that they fought against an individual abuse victim seems like the kind of position they would want to avoid. What I imagine they would do is fight against any overzealous legislation some politician tries to throw together in some ham-fisted response to this kind of situation.

EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences here.

boomboomsubban• 3 years ago

The article mentions supporting the EFF if you are opposed to this kind of thing. It's possible they offered to help but the owner was sick of it all. That's the impression I got from reading the piece.

dragonwriter16• 3 years ago

It seems the real reason this lawsuit found traction while similar ones against much larger platforms is precisely because Omegle sounds like a fairly shoestring operation. Platforms with an army of lawyers can surely fend lawsuits like this off without batting an eye.

Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight Omegle's basic behavior, to start with.

wavemode2• 3 years ago

What "basic behavior" is that? Anonymously video chatting strangers on the internet? Can't you already do that in many Discord servers? Or on dozens of other apps and websites (e.g. Chatroulette)? There clearly isn't anything fundamentally illegal about the practice, or these would all be shut down.

noirbot3• 3 years ago

What do you think Facebook Groups are if not a poorly age-verified way to talk to strangers on the internet?

3np• 3 years ago

OP doesn't mention anything about a lawsuit - got more information on that?

EDIT: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

I find it hard to be polite to people who try to blame the world around them for their poor luck and poor parenting.

dehrmann• 3 years ago

The BBC went to his house, he clearly didn't want to talk, so they stayed there for hours, waiting for him to come out?

That's is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below the BBC.

nektro• 3 years ago

article is from february

PessimalDecimal2• 3 years ago

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211807851/omegle-shut-down-l...

"The young woman, identified only as A.M., sought $22 million in damages in her lawsuit. Omegle was shut down days after the two sides agreed to settle the lawsuit."

SamPatt3• 3 years ago

I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the magic of the early internet we witnessed during our coming of age feels threatened.

I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.

cortesoft• 3 years ago

I find it interesting that the "magical period" seems to be determined by your age.

For me, the internet has already lost its magic by the time the mid 2000s came around, well before Omegle came out in 2009.

For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.

In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?

It seems more about the magic of childhood itself than anything to do with the technology.

johntiger13• 3 years ago

Yep, each generation thinks they're special. But I think the early internet was different since it had literally just went from 0->1

SamPatt3• 3 years ago

You may be right. The author mentioned being in their 30s, and so am I, but I'm at the tail end and they're probably at the start.

Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.

AddLightness• 3 years ago

I agree and I think this era absolutely will be remembered fondly by kids who grew up with it. The streamer/YouTuber culture is massive and to many young people now that makes up a big part of their life. Many people are already waxing poetic about the "golden eras" of sites like Twitch.

ethanbond6• 3 years ago

Also would comport with the explanation that the Internet just gets worse and worse.

Will be interesting to see if kids who grew up with TikTok et al. will, as adults, view it as affectionately as we view our childhood form of the Internet. I do think there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.

FullstakBlogger• 3 years ago

I think this is essentially a false dichotomy. It's possible to experience the loss of both of those eras, as well as the current one whenever it passes. There's no inherent conflict in wanting them all back.

mightybyte• 3 years ago

This is an interesting idea. For me the magical period of the internet was also the nineties to mid-naughts. But I'm not sure. It doesn't seem entirely age-relative to me. It seems like something changed. I really have no way to say for sure. In fact, I was recently talking to someone a couple decades or so younger about similar topics and he indeed seemed to have more of the age-relative view. I plan on talking to him more at some point to get a better understanding of his view. But I don't think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I'm sure many people have a magical period of wonder where their world is expanding. To be perfectly honest, in some ways I've continued to have that even in recent years. There's a really cool corner of YouTube that has tons of incredible content that IMO is revolutionizing education. But I also feel that as a species we humans haven't figured out how to handle the powers of communication that the internet has made available to us. In an age of unprecedented access to the world's information, misinformation still abounds (no matter which side of the political aisle you happen to be on). I don't know that anyone has any really compelling ideas about how to deal with this, but I think it's a significant issue that we all collectively need to work on. The question is, will we be able to come together and do so or have we already been irrevocably torn too far apart?

paulcole2• 3 years ago

Yeah it’s like how my dad says SNL peaked when he was 18 and I say it peaked when I was 18.

rexpop• 3 years ago

This is a common sentiment echoed regarding many different topics across the human experience, so I want to, for the sake of discussion, try and articulate exactly what are the two sides of this scale that might be worth debating. David Putnam defined "intra-" and "intercohort" like this in Bowling Alone.

Because generational change will be an important theme in our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how social change and generational change are interrelated. As a matter of simple accounting, any social change—from the rise of rap music to the decline of newspapers—is always produced by some combination of two very different processes. The first is for many individuals to change their tastes and habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed, and it can be transformed in a different direction just as quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change “intracohort,” because the change is detectable within each age cohort.
The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle, and harder to reverse. If different generations have different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth and death will eventually transform society, even if no individual ever changes. Much of the change in sexual mores over the last several decades has been of this sort. Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and most of those who did actually became more conservative. In the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the last several decades, because a generation with stricter beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change “intercohort,” because the change is detectable only across different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly inexorable.

I almost want to say that you're arguing internet disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one's life and not, conversely, an intercohort phenomenon through which generational attitudes remain constant, and the world changes around us.

On second thought, I don't think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist.

Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis)," which I know nothing about.

iopq7• 3 years ago

Back then you could post to Craigslist for an anonymous hookup and play poker online for money.

Now the Match Group owns all the dating websites and successfully shittified them. Social media in general has been basically a big loss, with Reddit charging for API access since they don't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda

hanzmanner• 3 years ago

You are right, people have the same sentiment in regards to many other things. A great example is music. The golden age is often the music you and your generation grew up with.

Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it already trends in that direction, I wouldn't be surprised. Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet's magical period.

lettergram2• 3 years ago

Tbf on a downward decline, 2009 might still be the highlight, just because someone didn’t experience 1995.

For what it’s worth, I always point out that my parents fondest pre-30s memories we’re drinking, smoking and blasting music while riding in the back of a pickup when they were 16-20. All of which is illegal now and will get you years in prison…

amerkhalid• 3 years ago

For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.
In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?

I remember seeing stats/meme that you will hear the best music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our teen years, things make big impact on us.

So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current internet when they are 30+ or so.

ajmurmann3• 3 years ago

It's the eternal September and regular nostalgia

dotnet002• 3 years ago

While you have a point there since certain aspects of the internet experienced by each generation were different, I think a shared part of it is just the sheer sanitization of the 'open' internet that has happened since the mid/late-2000s. That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you.

This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the 'old internet' between both me and decade older friends when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.

So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.

generationP2• 3 years ago

How much was there to find on the internet in the 90s?

I arrived ca. 2001 and found enough high-quality content (folk songs, math puzzles, some books already digitized) to feel like I had discovered a giant library. And it kept growing: Wikipedia arrived, various forums and magazines appeared (most were crap, of course, but there was no shortage of good ones).

As far as I can tell, things started getting worse around 2008, with places such as geocities closing down and social networks rising; then the deprecation of Java and Flash kicked the floor out of some of the good old parts. Other things were still improving, though, up to 2015 or so. It's only recently that I see most "culture production" locked in perennial closed gardens with unaccountable moderation. I wish I could point to some places still on the rise other than arXiv and LibGen...

What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s?

bawolff• 3 years ago

And before that people were pointing to 1993 as the date the old internet died https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying "kids these days"

baby• 3 years ago

I don’t think it has been determined by your age. Internet freedom and its wild wild west aspect has been vanishing gradually since its creation. Everybody has witnessed it.

yashasolutions• 3 years ago

It's also a question of what we call "magical"

The 90s were special in a certain way that is very different from how the Internet was in 2010.

I enjoyed both. I could call both of them "magical periods". Just different.

One could look at the current AI innovation as a different magical period.

taneq• 3 years ago

Anything before you were ~10 is "old", things between ~15 and ~20 are natural and right, things between ~20 and ~35 are modern and exciting, and anything that occurs after that is proportionately unnecessary and annoying. :P

/shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure

nandhinianand• 3 years ago

I think it comes down the exploration vs maximization/exploitation instincts that grows and changes as a human being grows. For ex: teens/early adults has more exploration instinct.(it's a hypothesis that's true for at least some sections of human society, not sure how far it generalizes).

For me it was yahoo chat rooms that filled the need, this omegle founder had created to solve.(at least till it got filled with bots) The real question is what will a teenager/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives??

I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool anymore.

MiddleEndian4• 3 years ago

I'm sure that's partially the case, but not entirely here (IMO).

I used Omegle when it first came out and I was in college. I thought it was amazing, and lost interest in it for awhile as one is wont to do.

But I decided to check out the site again and I tried out "Spy Mode" some years ago (my late 20s or early 30s) where someone could choose a topic or ask a question and then two other random people would talk about it. It was fun and chaotic and had the energy that 2009 Omegle had again. I enjoyed it quite a bit. People would sometimes answer the topics and sometimes have their own openings and such. It was chaotic without the negative vibes of many other websites that used to be more fun.

The random matching combined with the private one-on-one conversation structure had an advantage of not having a popularity algorithm OR the ability for one person in a bad mood to derail your conversation. So aside from the moderation attempts to stop spam on the back-end, the two participants could choose what they felt was acceptable in their conversation.

Sadly, about a quarter of the topics on Spy Mode were spambots linking to questionable sites (likely related to the law enforcement quotes in the article), and when they took down Spy Mode and reverted everything just to plain chat, the spambots were almost all you could talk to with regular Omegle. (I've never used the video chat so I have no insight there)

Definitely downhill in a distinct way, and now with stricter liability for site owners that larger sites can tank with lawyers, I think it was inevitable that the whole thing was going to collapse soon anyway.

I made a few friends from there, most temporary, but one remains who I am very close to. We never would have met in real life, and honestly I don't think we would get along in person, but we talk almost every day and both our lives are better for it.

But I think that this truly is a material loss for the internet.

pxoe2• 3 years ago

they might, either about pre-ai internet, or the early ai / early widespread ai, when it was widely available and accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn't yet destroyed entire industries

shusaku• 3 years ago

This is kind of revisionist history though. The early 2010s were not so long ago. Nobody talked about Omegle as some magical safe place of real human connection. It was always viral because of the edginess and danger. There were genuinely good stories you would see about it, but the impact was strong precisely because everyone knew the dark side.

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

I had that same feeling with the AOL chatrooms of the early 00s and to a lesser extent forums around that time and after.

So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.

bloaf• 3 years ago

I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time.

People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.

For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity.

My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible.

It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.

TerrifiedMouse4• 3 years ago

It’s possible to have multiple periods of “magic” as the internet improves in capability over time and people find new ways to use it.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 3 years ago

That’s a good point. I remember when Facebook genuinely allowed people to connect with others whom they hadn’t seen for years. MySpace before it is the source of nostalgia for a lot of my peers. Twitter had many genuine interactions between popular celebrities and their fans. Any of these things are likely to be magical to someone.

(Not sure what it means that these examples are all approximately dead to a lot of their previously most active users. That’s actually distinct from Omegle, unfortunately; most of their active users had remained perfectly happy with the platform.)

eddiewithzato• 3 years ago

The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.

dragonwriter16• 3 years ago

The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.

...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

lwhi• 3 years ago

It was when people learnt how to make money from the internet.

The corporatisation of net ruined it.

Not much can survive the incentive of profit.

duxup• 3 years ago

Just today I was dreaming of how awesome it would be if you could just somehow filter "good sports" and just open a game up for online play without having to think about all the bad behavior. How amazing would that be?

In my eyes during the golden age of the internet that I think of, you could still do that... bad actors now and then but not a huge % and we were all excited just to play together and enjoy how cool everything was.

bendbro• 3 years ago

Try skiing or hiking. Basically anything with high enough effort bar or cost bar is a sufficient proxy for this filter.

fortran77• 3 years ago

I remember the magic of USENET! I'd posted a question about how do do some basic piano repair, and got an answer from Marvin Minsky! Who knew he played the piano?!

wolverine8769• 3 years ago

Despair is trendy, which makes doing it easier; it makes it normalized. Perhaps previously a 'I'm not going to give up; I'm going to keep fighting for what I care about!' message would be normalized, and because of that the Omegle founder would feel strong and supported instead of alone.

(I don't know the person or much about their situation; I'm just using what I read to make a general observation.)

SamPatt3• 3 years ago

Sounds like he's been fighting for a long time and eventually tired.

It's a bit presumptuous to say that his actions / statement are due to despair being trendy. Everyone has their own "It's not worth it anymore" moment.

wolverine8769• 3 years ago

See my second paragraph; I'm not really talking about this person.

ge96• 3 years ago

Damn I spent time on Omegle, haha minefield but sometimes you find good people.

bastawhiz2• 3 years ago

Omegle has fewer than 30 employees, according to some sites online. I can't help but wonder whether having a more robust ops and legal team would have prevented this outcome. Founders shouldn't feel like they're going to have a heart attack at 30 if they've hired the right size of team. One (probably frivolous) lawsuit for a nearly 15-year-old company shouldn't be existential.

RagnarD2• 3 years ago

One is fewer than 30. Did he have any? How was he making money at all?

bastawhiz2• 3 years ago

Job review sites suggest he's had many employees over the years. Potentially over 200.

melvinmelih• 3 years ago

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.

adamomada7• 3 years 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

dragonwriter16• 3 years 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.

terryf4• 3 years 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.

varispeed• 3 years 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.

lazide16• 3 years ago

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

hypeatei2• 3 years 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.

plasticchris• 3 years ago

No, but if you operate enough golf courses you better be ready for the eventuality.

egorfine• 3 years ago

Playing golf, no. Providing a golf field service in the US - yes, absolutely.

talldatethrow• 3 years 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.

ajmurmann3• 3 years 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

dragonwriter16• 3 years 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-roy...

Nevermark• 3 years 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.

sanroot99• 3 years 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

marcus_holmes2• 3 years ago

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.

adamomada7• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

dragonwriter16• 3 years 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_holmes2• 3 years ago

This is true. Maybe I should have said "also placing blame on the service as well as the abuser"

ryandrake2• 3 years 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.

4star3star3• 3 years 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!

op00to7• 3 years ago

You're comparing paper cuts to sexual abuse. Don't do that.

keithnz• 3 years ago

Only thing I know about Omegle is all the pranking videos and people playing music for others on youtube. Like https://www.youtube.com/@SomethingAboutChickens or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKbLGu4xsPE

uwagar2• 3 years ago

its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and amplify the evil forces that harms other people including children?

+ the tool creator shouldnt be at the helm when it goes super viral. cos once everyone shows up, it will as the microbiologist and ecologist rene dubois observed, "[any successful social innovation can be] pushed to the point of absurdity".

when a tool goes viral i suppose it should be "taken over" (reeks of totalitarianism no?) by the community but it clashes with the ethos of proprietary, capitalist and indivdualist culture, the need for the culture to spotlight one person, they want them to become very famous and become very rich which leads to hate directed at them. where is the compassion for a mark zuckerberg say?

its not that evil shut this person and their service down, its more like a hammer finally whacking a nail down thats been sticking out too long.

better to be anonymous and not so successful. nothing fails like success. u could meet random people on IRC too, because its not so sticking out, its still operating.

krasin• 3 years ago

its ironic the tool he created probably help organised and amplify the evil forces that harms other people including children?

Care to elaborate on your accusation? In my world, Omegle was about things like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOYM8HEae4Q

uwagar2• 3 years ago

sure that is very cool. thanks for sharing. shows the possibility of this medium. i didnt mean that the author did a bad thing.

willsmith722• 3 years ago

well yeah, that's why it's shut down

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

This is like suing Google because a scammer used Gmail

johntiger13• 3 years ago

While I totally understand there's the potential for abuse, I don't think Omegle should be penalized for stuff like this. From my understanding, there's no addictive, profit-maximizing matchmaking or anything going on - it's just a service which lets two strangers talk to one another. Of course you will have bad actors target any platform, but for a lowkey site, it seems sad that they would need to shut down because of something like this.

PheonixPharts2• 3 years ago

I found this passage particularly relevant:

Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield

Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm. Obviously there were creeps on there, but not interacting with them was easy and the only way for anyone to seriously harm you was to give them information about who you were outside of omegle.

A while back I was curious about what sorts of awful things could happen from omegle chats and when you look into it, every single case ultimately involves people continuing conversations via Snap or Instagram.

It's sad that this free, no-harm site has to shut down while Snap/Insta routinely ignore legitimate criticism of their ability to encourage abuse and have enough lawyers to ensure they'll never have to face any consequences for enabling abuse.

noirbot3• 3 years ago

This really summed up my feelings about it. Were there creeps and people trying to get up to illegal stuff on the site? Absolutely. I ran into plenty over the years, but two hits of ESC later and I was on to someone else.

It some ways, it was kinda like Craigslist Missed Connections or something like that. Just people looking for... something into the void of the internet. And sometimes you met something you didn't want at all, and sometimes you met someone you really connected with, either for just a moment or for long enough that you wanted to keep up with them.

yellow_lead• 3 years ago

Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm.

I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO

userbinator2• 3 years ago

This brings back some amazing memories. If I remember correctly, the original inspiration for Omegle came from 4chan; or more precisely, a user thought of stretching the limits of "anonymous free speech" to realtime communications, and came up with the idea in late 2007. The PoC server for it was nothing more than "telnet to this IP" and it was sporadically advertised on 4chan for a short while.

Astonishingly, Google still remembers after 16 years: "forced_anon chat" (with the quotes) finds the very origin, if you want to go down that dark and probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole.

kr0bat• 3 years ago

God, they're complaining about newposters all the way back in 2007. Is the problem really Eternal September or is it just "kids these days"?

Also Leif K-Brooks is a thoughtful person, and it bleeds into his posts

    I don't know why exactly I think a one on one chat system would be different from an imageboard. When one makes a post on an image or discussion board, I think one does take into account that his words are going to be judged by the whole community. Even he isn't worried about preserving some identity, he still identifies with those words and responds to the reactions they get, and I think that ultimately leads to self-censorship and conformity. When there's only one person passing judgment, it doesn't have nearly the same negative impact, and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.

mardifoufs2• 3 years ago

Complaining about newposters is just something you do. It would be weird otherwise.

nemothekid• 3 years ago

newposters all the way back in 2007

My recollection is that newposters was coined around 2007 for everyone who joined after the Habbo raids that had made /b/ much more popular. These newposters from Habbo were "ruining" the site.

soulofmischief2• 3 years ago

Eternal September is an observable phenomenon whenever a new demographic in a community outstrips the old guard. This is fundamentally different than "kids these days", though you may find some overlap.

GaryNumanVevo2• 3 years ago

On an anonymous website, that's the only differentiator

vasco4• 3 years ago

Lurk more

waffleiron• 3 years ago

and what's more you can hit F5 and dismiss the entire thing, whereas a post still remains.

Which was no longer a thing, with many people using Omegle to create content and upload it to youtube. It became far less anonymous in some cases than an image/discussion board.

permo-w• 3 years ago

probably-too-offensive-to-the-current-generation rabbithole

4chan offensiveness isn't so much a generational thing as it is a personality thing

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

I will forever respect and cherish 4chan because it's pure, undiluted humanity in all its goodness and badness.

midasz• 3 years ago

Teenage me loved the edginess. Adult me just finds it boring. More like a phase thing to me.

cultureswitch5• 3 years ago

A community is defined by the selection process.

People who aren't sensitive to the general offensiveness of these communities come from all backgrounds and are effectively tolerant of each other in ways that are meaningful to them.

_shantaram• 3 years ago

That Google search you suggested appears (barring some UI thing I'm missing because I'm on Mobile) to only have two results, your comment and the 4chan archive. Is there a name for a google search with exactly two results? I know one with one single result is called a Googlewhack.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

It's cheating if you use quotes.

userbinator2• 3 years ago

A Twooglewhack.

ryzvonusef• 3 years ago

https://archive.tinychan.net/read/img/1196772434

archive link for those who don't want to google

sltkr• 3 years ago

Very prophetic:

is this meant as a new scheme to pick up underage children by getting them one-on-one with no one else to monitor the two-way conversation?

ratg13• 3 years ago

FYI, ICQ had popularized this type of random chat long before 4chan existed.

Aicy2• 3 years ago

Any time I used it in the last five years I had to wade through about ten obvious bots advertising some pornsite or scam before I got to a real person.

Then when you do get to a real person, 90% of the time they said "M or F?" and if you said M they'd instantly leave

reverse_no2• 3 years ago

wow. i remember using omegle in 2010. the whole chat roulette craze. this guy dresses up the issue in some pretty overly dramatic and sentimental clothing… in reality this is the failure of yet another company that uses the old model. the model of the early internet where everything is free and everyone is anonymous. its just unviable and becomes less viable as the internet grows. captcha is broken… the old model is dead.

when you have a free service and broken captcha then you will be a magnet for crime, spam and you will hemorrhage money. maybe youll get advertisers if you sanitize the platform and now youve defeated the point anyway. or you can sell user data. at the end of the day people have to pay.

Ridj48dhsnsh• 3 years ago

That's a depressing viewpoint.

The text chat version of Omegle could have easily been hosted on a single server with some kind of automated spam protection. Donations could have more than covered the costs to run it. The positive value it added to millions of lives far outweighs the negative.

system23• 3 years ago

Monthly users reaching 70 million. I doubt a basic server could handle that.

reverse_no2• 3 years ago

depressing that people have to pay for the services and goods that they use? well i do agree that its pretty depressing that captcha is broken. AI seems ever closer to displacing humans… in the mean time we have to pay for internet services

owenpalmer• 3 years ago

the site you are currently leaving a comment on operates on the old model. so far it's working pretty well.

xelia• 3 years ago

Ironically it is technically VC backed

seydor• 3 years ago

most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It's not like some magical growth threshold crossed in 2010s, More and more of this audience was born internet-native too. It seems to be a cultural shift instead

Blahah5• 3 years ago

Gives me chills, that was so heartfelt and raw. Hurt on all sides, but this is a bit like losing access to a public space because someone committed crimes there.

One of the greatest things Omegle enabled is this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is (Harry Mack freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+ episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)

amanzi• 3 years ago

He just did the 100th episode the other day and announced he wouldn't be doing any more.

Blahah5• 3 years ago

The journey of those episodes is really inspiring. Practising in that environment he pushes the boundaries of so many areas of human achievement in one, and once he's better than anyone else in the world (maybe half way through the series) he then starts surpassing himself faster and faster.

jodrellblank4• 3 years ago

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5poLSRa3cpHBfiJ6wQdT...

Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.

tzs3• 3 years ago

Also see these musicians with many "play for strangers on Omegle" videos:

Marcus Veltri, piano, https://www.youtube.com/@MarcusVeltri

Rob Landis, violin, https://www.youtube.com/@RobLandes

Billy Wilkins, guitar and vocals, https://www.youtube.com/@BillyWilkins

The Doo, guitar and piana and otamatone, https://www.youtube.com/@TheDooo

Both Frank Tedesco and Marcus Veltri frequently did joint Omegle videos with Rob Landis. Tedesco and Veltri also have some joint videos. I seem to also recall some Wilkins, Landis, and Tedesco collaborations.

0xbadcafebee• 3 years ago

Is there a word for whatever the human thing is that makes people want to watch reaction videos?

chasd00• 3 years ago

Man, i stayed up way past bedtime watching the Frank Tedesco youtubes. I was completely blown away, his ability to listen to 20 seconds of a song on his phone and then get it mostly right on the piano is incredible. What an amazing individual. hah, the reactions were golden too, very funny and endearing.

edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to cross it.

bpicolo• 3 years ago

This definitely may have destroyed the career of a large number of widely popular youtubers... It certainly destroyed their format anyway.

Imagine they'll hop to a different platform.

Blahah5• 3 years ago

Tbh the sad thing isn't any youtuber losing a platform, it's that Omegle was really a place people went when they were having a hard time and other people went there to cheer them up. I really hope there's another platform like it, but I don't know it.

Tijdreiziger4• 3 years ago

Some of them were already on OmeTV, so I imagine that’s where most will move.

simlevesque• 3 years ago

While.we are on the subject of Omegle youtubers, I also love Something About Chickens

fragmede8• 3 years ago

https://youtu.be/-4e3hi9AWVs

rnk• 3 years ago

Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn't ever come across Harry Mack. That guy is fantastic. And he gave so much happiness to those people he was rapping for! Just seeing all the delight on their faces gave me a tear in my eye. There's a lot of lonely people in the world, and for a moment, he improved their lives. We need better ways to connect; today I can VC with anyone in the world in a second, but we don't know how to connect like he does. Creators, work to make that kind of connection happen.

Blahah5• 3 years ago

So happy you've discovered it! In every single video in the series he lifts up a bunch of people who are struggling in a really personal, memorable, inspiring way. I reckon he's saved a few lives (at least).

amplex1337• 3 years ago

Great analogy. And.. thank you so much for posting this. HMack is a legend. Every time I listen to him I get stuck for hours. He is mindblowing constantly, pure love. It's worth the excursion every time, no one can amaze and impress like him every time. I've seen some Omegle videos with him before, but this one was really special. Super appreciate this.

soulofmischief2• 3 years ago

My first thought was, what is Harry Mack going to do now??

ConorSheehan1• 3 years ago

The Doo and Marcus Veltri too. So many world class musicians show up randomly on omegle

donkeyd3• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing Harry Mack, never heard of him, but this took me down an emotional rabbit hole. Amazing what music can do.

op00to7• 3 years ago

a bit like losing access to a public space

It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.

joenot4432• 3 years ago

And so now they’ll have to choose one of the other, even seedier bars. The kids aren’t any better off.

You’ve made a poor analogy, though, since obviously it’s very trivial for a bar to validate age at the door. If such a thing were easy for Omegle to do, I’m sure they would.

ferfumarma2• 3 years ago

Why? Anything on Omegle could happen in a park. Or a library. Omegle can't keep kids off their platform: their parents need to.

uconnectlol3• 3 years ago

the worst thing that could happen on omegle is that a child shows herself naked. this in fact, is not the end of the world, and certainly doesn't justify some bullshit where we have to ask for permission before making a website or internet service plus photo ID for this and that party or whatever the hell you consider part of your solution.

hnrodey• 3 years ago

Harry Mack has a very active channel on TikTok where he posts recordings from Omegle. 12/10 highly recommend. Never seen anyone like him.

FrustratedMonky• 3 years ago

I'm not getting the economics here.

With so many big names using it, and it is so popular.

Why was it a financial drain? Why can't it keep going?

Surely if was making enough money. .

_eric2• 3 years ago

His Omegle 100[0] video is one of the best one yet, Harry is a legend. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk

DoingSomeThings• 3 years ago

There's an interesting progression watching him over time. While his technical ability has dramatically improved, so too has the engagement. Now you start to get more clips of people saying "Wait. I've seen you on Youtube/TikTok". Love his journey.

comprev• 3 years ago

I've been following Harry Mack for years now and he still never ceases to amaze me.

Someone who has worked incredibly hard at their craft in a very public manner.

The positive vibe he brings makes the internet a little bit better on every encounter.

I almost shed a tear when H.Mack got the opportunity to perform in front of his idols, Ice Cube, who said he was one of the best freestyle rappers he's seen, and had followed his career closely for years. A magical moment :-)

Lolaccount• 3 years ago

Yup, Harry Mack is my boy ... I don't even use Omegle but am full aware of due to HMack ... RIP Omegle

cristoperb2• 3 years ago

I've never used Omegle myself, but I've watched all of Harry Mack's Omegle Bars videos (freestyle rapping) and they are golden. Always fun to see him matched with some random kids and brighten their day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVGIcVRIbk

wycy• 3 years ago

The loss of Harry Mack’s Omegle Bars was the first thing that came to mind for me.

lukeholder• 3 years ago

He was retiring the series at 100 episodes anyway, but yeah a sad day.

romanhn2• 3 years ago

I just discovered him yesterday and ended up watching something like 20 videos last night. This was also the first thought that came to my mind when I was reading the announcement.

LarsAlereon• 3 years ago

I'm really sad about this. I know that a lot of really desperate people used the text chat feature when they needed someone to listen, and there's certainly a lot of people who are alive and happy today because they found someone to talk to there when they needed it. I can't deny that there have also been cases where people's lives have been made worse or ruined because of something that happened to them, but I think on the balance the site made the world a better place.

blastersyndrome• 3 years ago

So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn't want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?

Is there a list of websites that have been shut down due to this type of attrition? I'm aware of at least one other site[0] that has met the same fate. It would be interesting to see an exhaustive list.

[0] freeimage.us

dragonwriter16• 3 years ago

So let me get this straight: The site is being shut down because the owner didn't want to deal with the constant spam of CSAM?

No, not spam of CSAM (in the sense of distribution of material where the abuse occurred elsewhere), but actual grooming and abuse happening through the site.

e.g., https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/virginia/virginia-m...

the more specific proximate cause, I believe, is one of the current suits that has gotten past S230 immunity, possibly the ongoing product liability lawsuit:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

The owner is currently being sued by a woman who used the site as a minor and was matched with a pedophile who convinced her to make and send CSAM. This isn't the usual kind of "CSAM intermediary liablility" lawsuit; the plaintiff is actually making an ordinary product liability claim. i.e. Omegle has no safety bars to keep kids from using the service ergo they are liable for me being abused by an adult.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

zug_zug2• 3 years ago

That seems nuts to me. It's just a generic venue for people meeting people, like a cafe that happens to be online.

To me that makes as much sense as suing a cafe because you met somebody there who talked you into illegal activities.

goydefense• 3 years ago

The decentralized cryptonet can't come fast enough!

oynqr• 3 years ago

So they sue the platform that got them to meet, but not the one that allowed CSAM to be exchanged?

thot_experiment• 3 years ago

Wow fuck, I was on there sketching portraits of people just yesterday. This really sucks. RIP

sugarpile• 3 years ago

Elsewhere in the thread this article with an embedded video was linked: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

The video, showing a BBC “journalist” attempting to ambush Leif, is one of the most… existentially disgusting? videos I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It’s so utterly performative. Such a transparent attempt by the “journalist” at painting himself as a certain sort of person. Not a single genuine emotion, action, expression, or word. Absolutely soulless and desperate attempt to virtue signal in the even more desperate hope of furthering his career. This “man” is no better than someone selling themselves on onlyfans. Actually, I’d posit he’s worse: the entire schtick requires disingenuous postering.

I don’t know what to do when seeing stuff like this. It’s depressing. I hope one day there’s a return to a much smaller internet and these people deign to just leave us alone. He’s a sad man and the fact his doing this will may well advantage him is even sadder. I guess I’ll go take a walk.

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

Even more disconcerting is the possibility they believe they're pursuing righteousness genuinely rather than just for the reward.

_cs2017_• 3 years ago

The reporter, Joe Tidy, isn't virtue signaling. He is an honest zealot full of righteous fury. He is 100% confident he's right, just like those who killed heretics during crusades a couple thousand years ago, burned witches a few hundred years ago, or exterminated capitalists as part of Cambodian Khmer Rouge a few decades ago.

WesolyKubeczek2• 3 years ago

He must be stopped at all cost.

falsenapkin• 3 years ago

In that video he asserts through the closed door that Omegle hasn't done anything "for the children" and then in the article they have one measly line about how Omegle actually has been productive on that front. The text now on the Omegle site seems to support that they did what they could as well. Of course they're not going to get a good conversation with him when that's how they're going to frame it compared to reality. Whether Omegle was doing enough or should exist to begin with are different arguments but the premise of "Omegle is doing nothing" appears very wrong and I imagine offensive to creator/employees.

phendrenad23• 3 years ago

"He was definitely home, all the blinds were drawn" 5 minutes later, Leif is seen going from his car to his house

You can't make this stuff up.

Every time I see a BBC clip it's something ridiculous. There's probably a good business opportunity doing a mystery science theater 3000 version of BBC news at this point.

shmde• 3 years ago

The guy can file a stalking and harassment case on BBC can't he ?

la64710• 3 years ago

Touching

alphanullmeric• 3 years ago

Redistribution of consequences strikes again.

neilv• 3 years ago

From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.

This was a not-unusual story for people active online in the '80s.

I wonder how the world-expanding has changed, now that everyone's online. I feel like I only have a partial and rough high-level understanding.

Nowadays, for example, every gay kid in every small town knows they're not alone, which is a great advance for humanity.

But everyone is also being bombarded, conditioned, tracked, manipulated, and exploited pervasively online.

What things can we contemporary techbros do, to keep all the goodness of making online accessible to everyone, but remove much of the current badness?

(I mean, after we spend 5 minutes removing various kinds of third-party trackers from sites we control, what's the next thing we can do?)

hu3• 3 years ago

Amazing. This post is 1 hour old and Wikipedia is already updated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle

"Omegle (/oʊˈmɛɡəl/[1]) was a free online chat website that allowed users to socialize with others without the need to register. The service randomly paired users in one-on-one chat sessions where they would chat anonymously using the names "You" and "Stranger". It operated from 2009 to 2023."

...

"On November 8, 2023, K-Brooks posted an announcement describing the challenges of running the site, and the ultimate decision to suspend the service. Challenges listed was online exploitation of children and attacks on communication services. K-Brooks concluded that his decision revolved around internet misuse and asked users to consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to combat misuse."

paulpauper• 3 years ago

Wikipedia is so fast, soon they will predict the news

tapland• 3 years ago

Didn't know Leif founded Omegle but he's struck me as one of the most sincere and well intensioned people I've encountered.

ijustlovemath• 3 years ago

This is devastating. I have so many fond memories of meeting fellow weirdos over text. The days where StumbleUpon always took you somewhere exciting, cool, beautiful, interesting, funny, or novel. Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s.

I even used it during pandemic times as a way to dance with strangers over video; putting on ridiculous outfits and playing disco were some of the moments from those dark times that I still cherish.

RIP Omegle! You will be missed, by me and many others.

eru9• 3 years ago

Where you looked at what people did with The Web 2.0 and only marveled at the possibilities of what could come. Truly feels like the death of one of the old guard, a Usenet-of-the-2010s.

This is funny to me, because I am old enough to remember when web 2.0 was new, and people were nostalgic for 'web 1.0'. (And, of course, it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.)

cplusplusfellow• 3 years ago

I was growing up when the first people got BBS' and CompuServe. I don't miss the days of dial-up.

I miss the days just as you learned Google could answer questions you asked in free-form, without the censorship and advertisement preferences they give today. Those were better days on gonewild also.

civilitty• 3 years ago

I miss the good ol’ days of Minitel. Imagine an internet made up almost exclusively of French people.

jchw• 3 years ago

Even though I did miss older stuff in the web 2.0 days, I had a positive outlook (and good reason to have it) for the things that would come next.

Not anymore.

maegul• 3 years ago

it's turtles all the way down with nostalgia.

And yet golden eras do occur, or so it would seem.

I’m sure it’s hard to tell when you’re in or near one, which is an interesting topic in its own right, but it doesn’t mean we should dismiss outright the possibility that a passing era might just be taking something truly valuable with it.

ehnto• 3 years ago

Flat Design had barely begun, jQuery had a bright future. CSS compilation? That's a step too far don't you think?

theclansman2• 3 years ago

I'm still nostalgic about the pre-facebook internet.

JohnBooty• 3 years ago

My experience begins with BBSs in the late 1980s and runs through some of those eras.

I thought the Web 2.0 era was something special! Web 1.0 was fun but looking back, it was mostly about the promise of what the web/internet would eventually be able to do.

Web 2.0 was where it really came together for me. The interwebs started to actually attract more diversity and specifically, it started to no longer be overwhelmingly male, which started to make the social aspect a lot more fun to me.

Web 2.0 was the era when Javascript started to be semi-useful, and there was a lot of cool "remix" type stuff happening via open API's and RSS before everybody locked all that stuff away, and video on the internet started to be kind of practical. And the web hadn't been completely choked by naked commercialization. Felt like there were still some cool alternative corners of the web that hadn't yet been paved over so they could build a parking lot for a mall.

I also thought that a lot of cool Web 2.0 stuff happened because of the post-Web1 "dot com" era layoffs. You had a lot of underemployed but talented developers making things.

(but obviously everybody will have their own personal favorite eras!)

justsid3• 3 years ago

I didn’t use Omegle much, but I actually met my now wife on there. We used the text only thing where a third person suggests a topic. Must’ve talked for a good 2 hours on there before exchanging informations, I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically.

We met 11 years ago on the platform, a completely random fluke. And while I haven’t really used Omegle in a long time, it’s always had a soft spot in my heart due to how much it changed the trajectory of my life. It’s a sad day.

admissionsguy• 3 years ago

What was the suggested topic?

amatecha• 3 years ago

No way! That's awesome. You should reach out to the creator of the site and let him know about this (if you haven't already). He'd probably be super happy to hear this story :)

reliablereason• 3 years ago

The chance of a small glitch or anything that did not happen in the past is as likely as a ghost dinosaur coming up to you and scamming you out of all your money.

Looking at the past through a probabilistic lens is irrational, unless you are doing it to predict the future through information collection.

Sort of, of topic but anyway….

huseyinkeles• 3 years ago

Think about all the infinite numbers of glitches that happened in the past and prevented you to meet other possible wives :)

0xDEAFBEAD9• 3 years ago

For people who are looking for this -- It's a common refrain on Twitter that Twitter can be a better dating app than actual dating apps. I think the mechanism here is similar -- both Twitter and Omegle encourage a sort of stream-of-consciousness, semi-anonymous communication style that facilitates soul entwinement.

safeandsound• 3 years ago

Sliding Doors the movie comes to mind

jeffwask• 3 years ago

I shudder thinking that even the smallest glitch could have changed my life so drastically.

Met mine in an MMO and I think about how many ways there are that it could have never happened.

eafkuor• 3 years ago

Are you English, and your wife American, by any chance?

xjewer• 3 years ago

I happened to realize today that many if not all results we observe today is outcome of one or the other probable event in the past.

How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car accidents that did happen and change lives.

History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent that they covered in books or passed through generations as tales.

Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change entire history of humankind, especially in wars.

SnooSux• 3 years ago

Stumble Upon used to be so addicting

Kovah• 3 years ago

Maybe https://Cloudhiker.net will bring back this experience.

patates• 3 years ago

Not exactly the same experience but close enough for me: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

dheera2• 3 years ago

Maybe we should create a DeFi version of this that doesn't have an owner and can't be sued. Things like Omegle should be likened to an empty grass field in the middle of town, with nobody responsible for what actually happens on it except the people who choose to be there.

andrepd• 3 years ago

This is a bad take on several levels. First the de-fi angle. You want a distributed application, no need to shoehorn crypto into there. But second and most important: the ultralibertarian angle of "you chose to be there so you take respinsabolity for whatever happens to you" is also not good. For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law enforcement is a good thing. Whatever replaces omegle will almost certainly have worse moderation, a less benevolent manager, and less eagerness to cooperate with authorities to, for example, hand over evidence of child predation. Free speech is not incompatible with the attempt to enforce laws.

GaryNumanVevo2• 3 years ago

The DeFI element, of course, would enable someone to pay so MORE people could see their penis unsolicited

Cthulhu_7• 3 years ago

Your analogy is skewed though; if you just show up on a field and get flashed, you aren't responsible for that, the other person is. For example.

wslh• 3 years ago

What was the relationship between StumbleUpon and Omegle. I haven't used Omegle but used StumbleUpon and was one unique place where you could discover hidden gems in the longtail.

gentoo2• 3 years ago

I think it's that both were websites that catapulted you into truly random, non-targeted interactions -- Omegle with a random person, StumbleUpon with a random site.

simian1983• 3 years ago

Ahh the first days of Web 2.0. Reminds me of http://ytmnd.com You’re the man now, dog!

all27• 3 years ago

This place. So bizarre. I loved it so much back in the day. Especially showing friends the latest weird thing I found.

rfwhyte• 3 years ago

I miss the web where there were services actively trying to help you find new, interesting and weird things, not just the stuff that makes them the most money from ads. Feels like even the things that are supposed to be about "Discovery" are increasingly only showing you things from an ever shrinking walled garden. Despite there being exponentially more stuff and content on the web than say 20 years ago, it actually feels like a much smaller these days.

lettergram2• 3 years ago

The author was right on point, the government and the people moralizing want exactly what they described —- an internet fed to users, with minimal interaction.

This gives more power and stability to government and those moralizing (who are currently in power). Notice the constant censorship, it comes directly from the politicians who argue “we have to remove encryption - for the children!” Arguments. Those same individuals in government, censor opposition where they can and promote imo very authoritarian views.

I also agree, everyone has a breaking point. It’s been amazing to watch the increasing attacks since 2016, it’s been unrelenting.

Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

empathy_m• 3 years ago

Wonder how Chris Poole is doing. I loved using his site in the 2000s and have been amazed to see the creativity it has unleashed, some for good and some not so much.

fullspectrumdev2• 3 years ago

moot sold 4chan long ago

glandium• 3 years ago

to the founder of 2chan.

mardifoufs2• 3 years ago

He worked at Google for a pretty long time after selling 4chan, then moved to Japan semi recently iirc.

THENATHE• 3 years ago

Can't say I didn't see this coming... Omegle today is very different than historically. I remember when I was much younger I would find a bot or a person just looking for sexting maybe once in 5. Now it seems that the genuine "wanna make a friend" people are 1-100. It is wild how it turned into just a horny site, and it makes me sad that it never had the opportunity for a resurgence.

smt88• 3 years ago

Maybe it's because of my age, but this is the first I'm learning that it wasn't always just a horny site. I never visited it for that reason.

MiddleEndian4• 3 years ago

Even until a few years ago, Spy Mode was mostly devoid of the "M?" hookup posters, and the bots were somehow relegated to the "questioner" rather than the chatters.

clnq• 3 years ago

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services

I’ve been feeling this very acutely as well, but most people I spoke to say nothing has changed. Good to know it’s not just me, although it’s unfortunate things are changing this way.

jawns• 3 years ago

Yes, this message from the founder sounds very heartfelt and earnest. But if he truly could not anticipate the many ways that this service would be abused, and in fact the ways it is especially attractive to people with bad intentions, then he is profoundly naive.

It reminds me of Craigslist. Similarly well-intentioned, but eventually the company has gotta face the facts about how the service you're offering is conducive to bad conduct, even if unintentionally so. And if you can't build in sufficient safeguards, yes, it's practically inevitable that you'll face legal pressure.

DoItToMe81• 3 years ago

He implemented algorithms to automatically time out people who were mentioning a variety of rapey terms and paid moderators and built AI algorithms to (mostly successfully) wipe out the rampant sex pest behavior in video chats.

He did about the best job you can do without a team that costs tens of millions of dollars, and the result was being sued and accused of being a pedophile.

tempestn• 3 years ago

It's a shame. Even before Omegle, I remember when ICQ had a random match text chat feature. I had some great conversations on there. Briefly used Omegle for the same, but even years back when I tried it the signal to noise was a lot lower. I'd love it if someone found a way to do it sustainably.

system23• 3 years ago

I met so many people from ICQ random friend searches. Met them in real life, still talking to some. Skype had voice channels too, admins of channels similar to IRC. They shut it down for the same reasons.

jackcosgrove• 3 years ago

The original HN discussion of Omegle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=539753

The site has only been featured here twice, for its birth and death.

m4jor2• 3 years ago

The yin and yang of tech

phendrenad23• 3 years ago

The Alphle and Omegle, if you will

romanhn2• 3 years ago

Omegles come and go, but "how is it hacker news?" is here forever.

MiddleEndian4• 3 years ago

I first used Omegle in 2009 in college. I did not realize Hacker News had been around that long lol.

dnissley• 3 years ago

Such classic hn comments:

"Not very interesting."

"This is a lot of fun actually - but how is it hacker news?"

phendrenad23• 3 years ago

This makes me so mad, and it should make you mad too. Omegle isn't substantively different from Reddit or Discord or an MMORPG chat channel, but it's currently being dragged through the legal system while presumably the others are not.

The truth is, Omegle's real sin is being midsized. There's a real risk in being a certain-sized company. Large enough that suing you is likely to result in a payout, but small enough that you can't just absorb the lawsuit cost.

ActorNightly• 3 years ago

Shouldn't make you mad. Thats just how the nature of things go.

Basically, the hipster viewpoint is ironically correct - anything that gets popular turns to shit. Once you start making something that appeals to a broad reach of people, you start optimizing for the lowest common denominator of society.

Imagine if Omegle was structured in a way where you had to download an app, for linux specifically, and instead of a central website, you had to set up STUN servers to do direct peer to peer chat. This is far to complex for "normal" people, but it would be still around today, as well as much higher quality.

This is even true of software development. Think about this next time you hear someone say how they don't want to have to tweak settings to get Linux to work, and instead buy a Mac for some bullshit reason like battery life, not realizing they are buying into a system that is opposite in spirit of software development (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...).

fullarr3• 3 years ago

If I could unmake the Internet I would in a second, without hesitation.

The lack of local community as everyone moves to a global gray sameness is the grossest thing to happen to this world.

Using it as a crutch to fool yourself into what you think is normal is not healthy and it's not a solution to real problems.

Omegle disappearing is neither surprising nor sad, and it's nothing personal against them specifically.

I expect to get down voted to oblivion because no one likes to hear harsh truths, but the internet has been a net negative for us all

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

I’m not sure if I’d call the internet itself a net negative. Somewhere around the time it was incepted it was fine. Exchanging emails and whatnot.

But what it has become now… I dunno, I regularly have calls with my family on the other side of the world. That’s definitely a positive. Everything attendant to the internet I do not like. The way it’s become nearly a requirement of life.

will5421• 3 years ago

But would you have moved so far away from your family if you couldn’t have kept in touch with them over the Internet?

poisonborz• 3 years ago

Except for potentially most of the population, the internet provided a more vibrant, welcoming, supportive and rich community than their local community ever could. The "gray sameness" is a recent phenomena and commanded by legal and state abuse, that a lot of the commenters above here lament about.

fullarr3• 3 years ago

I would say that the online community has always been superficial

It feels good but you are still alone

It's never been a good thing, it's been a time sync and it's why birth rates are down, depression is up, loneliness is rampant, and everyone is addicted to narcissism machines

SixDouble53214• 3 years ago

We must refuse the Khala to maintain our individuality. Like the Nerazim.

rubicon33• 3 years ago

Omegle is the direct target of these attacks

Does anyone here have any more details about exactly what types of attacks Omegle was being targeted?

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.

cloudwalk9• 3 years ago

My guess would be activists and strong regulatory/legislative pressure, moral panic. Kinda resonates with the recent legislative attacks on E2EE.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

warrant canary perhaps?

fwungy• 3 years ago

Part of a larger move to kill off the free corners of the internet. The UN and G7 governments freely talk and plan their means to reestablish the narrative dominance they had before the internet.

Just about anyone or anything can be taken down with the pairing of q woman willing to publicly claim abuse, with no proof required beyond her word, and a lawyer willing to take the case.

didibus2• 3 years ago

Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no parental controls.

And at the same time I do think computer providers, Windows, Mac OS and all that don't offer good enough parental control.

Age verification is a problem as well, but it's foolish to think every website and app will implement proper safeguards. I mean, Omegle could simply be replaced by some darker Russian clone with even less effort put towards fighting crime.

Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in to Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And only apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be included.

And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child accounts.

The idea that some KYC would be forced on all online website and apps just doesn't make sense otherwise.

And now it would be fair to sue websites that claim to be child safe and have opted in, if they turn out not to be.

Cloudef• 3 years ago

I still remember the times we were educated to be anonymous in internet and never reveal personal details. How times have changed...

serf• 3 years ago

Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no parental controls.

for those of us who were kids when the internet was basically a social unknown, it's not something that 'became normal', the internet didn't come about censored from the get-go -- these moderation/censorship tools were added in after-the-fact to cope with parental and (more importantly) government worries that children were being victimized via exposure.

and, for the most part, we grew up OK even without the heavy-handed censorship.

Instead there should be opt in. When a child user is logged in to Windows et all, an allow list should always be in place. And only apps and websites that claim to be child safe should be included.

i'm not necessarily anti-censorship, and i'm never having kids -- my opinion on this is worthless for all practical sake -- but i'll say this : If I didn't have the freedom to tinker and explore with the systems that took up my free-time as a child there is no way I would have grown up to have such expertise now.

Take that however you will. I know nothing of child care but I do recognize the opportunities in my own life that made me grow as an individual; having 'cyber-space' as my 'home' from an early age offered a lot of opportunities that were unique and self-improving.

didibus2• 3 years ago

I feel there's plenty of space for children to tinker, even in an accept list scenario. In fact, it's more so the spaces that empower you to create that would be on it, since they involve no "dangerous" social interaction. Programming environments, drawing and writing applications, game makers, etc.

That said, parents could decide to let their kids use adult user accounts, maybe supervised, or if they trust their child, or depending on their exact age. And if they do, they'd be taking the liability, not the platform whose EULA specifies otherwise.

At least this all seems a much better approach to balance safety of children on the internet, while leaving adults to have whatever free and wild spaces they want for themselves.

The alternative seems to block it for everyone. Or to have some ridiculous requirements like full blown KYC that either mean complete loss of anonymity for everyone, or unsustainable rules that indirectly mean it's not tenable to offer such spaces even to adults.

devbent• 3 years ago

Somewhere along the way I feel it became normal to just let your children do whatever they want online with no supervision and no parental controls.

I got handed a modem at age 9 and I started dialing into local BBSs.

I learned how to use paragraphs because I got made fun of for posting giant blocks of text.

The reason I wasn't using paragraphs initially is that they hadn't been taught to me yet in school.

A couple of years later I got on to the Internet proper.

In many ways it was wonderful. The optimism, the feeling that something amazing was happening. The hope that once everyone could talk to each other that a new era of global understanding could be reached.

At the age of 13 I was able to go on technical forums and if I put enough thought into what I said, my ideas were considered to be of no lesser or greater worth than the ideas put forth by others.

Although, back then the Internet was a bit more mature on average so I felt that I needed to at least try and put thought into what I said. (Not saying I always succeeded...)

And parents must make sure to only let their kids use child accounts.

Or how about, when someone under 18 is using a computer, every hour a giant message appears on the screen "DON'T SEND NUDES TO ANYONE. NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY. PS: ALSO DON'T BUY GIFT CARDS FOR ANYONE ONLINE."

That'd probably solve 60% of problems that underage users get into.

Jokes aside, I get it. The Internet is a worse place than when I first joined. But I'm more scared of kids running into curated video feeds that lead them down paths of extremism (e.g. red pill, gamergate) than I am of pedophiles.

codezero• 3 years ago

What a powerful sign off.

beckingz• 3 years ago

Good for them!

Knowing when to call it quits is very wise. I mourn the end of a characteristic internet site, but I respect the founder.

MiddleEndian4• 3 years ago

Yeah given the prevalence of bots in its final years, I can see how eventually the effort:reward ratio dropped, especially with legal issues on top of that.

But Omegle will be missed for sure.

0xDEADFED5• 3 years ago

would direct connections instead really impact the nature of the communication that much? i'm not sure that it would. a much less centralized/controlled version of omegle could exist on a quite small budget, perhaps much to the dismay of those who seek it's closure.

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery

Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are lazy") or is it measurably true?

I feel like it's obviously true.

_factor• 3 years ago

In developing countries, living conditions improve and reduce the perceived value of work.

tpetry• 3 years ago

We had some years of kind-of stability in the world with no significant big wars. But with recent events the world is feeling like "it is burning". Just because we got accustomed to the more peacefull live.

So, I wouldn't say its like "we always thought that". Its more like we had a good short phase and now its back to normal. Or maybe the good phase is the normal and the pendulum swings back?

password543212• 3 years ago

The world would be much better if people learnt that wars even in places far from them such as between the middle east and the US, would have a network affect and bring instability to other parts of the world and soon near them. The world started "burning" again with the war on Iraq / Afghanistan.

johnnyanmac7• 3 years ago

It's measurable, but not in an agreeable fashion. I'm sure if you tracked curse words, or simply looked at the number or reports an admin has managed, you can track a change.

But you then argue with the metric. Maybe curse words aren't a good measure of hostility. Maybe the admin was overzealous, or underzealous and then corrected. That's what makes it hard to come to a consensus.

Anectodally, on the internet, I would agree. I feel post 2016 saw an uptick in hostility, and then the pandemic years of 2021/2022 saw another uptick.

panki27• 3 years ago

Have people always thought this [...]?

Yes. https://history.stackexchange.com/q/28169

trabant00• 3 years ago

That does not support that they "_always_ thought this", it only means that this happened in the past. Another interpretation is that periods of hardship are followed by ones of stability and the generation that lived through the hardship notices differences in their young.

arrowsmith• 3 years ago

Even if people have "always" thought this, that doesn't mean they're wrong to think it today or that the complaint has always been invalid.

It's entirely possible that people have always been complaining about X and also that X is more prevalent today than it used to be.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

Yes; moaning about both the youth of today and old people goes back, at least, millennia (though there are sometimes cultural taboos against moaning about old people which dampens that down).

My pet half-serious theory is that we currently talk a lot about the dastardly millennials and boomers because senior media staff are largely genX; note that we don't hear much about genX these days. This will start to change in a few years as genX starts to age out, and suddenly everyone will be complaining about genX and genZ. Whole new stereotypes will have to be forged (the old genX stereotypes from the 80s are very youth-of-today oriented and won't work for moaning about old people), and no-one will ever mention avocados again.

gosub1008• 3 years ago

the whole generation-labelling thing is fabricated, likely because it gives the media something else to divide us with. the only officially labelled generation was the baby boomers.

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

The culture of any generation is defined by the generation before it, that's why Gen Xers are the most depressingly suburban and forgotten about generation, not the boomers, because while boomers love themselves more than anyone loves themselves, nobody glamorized boomerism more than Gen Xers, who grew up with more direct exposure than younger generations; they just didn't have the same numbers.

Likewise, most of our prominent entrepreneurs are all Gen X try-hards who found fortune because of the consumption patterns that millennials adopted and were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on it. Millennial consumption patterns of course having been heavily influenced by gen xers and boomers by proxy, the few that got that good job and kept it forever are quite happy to upgrade their iPhone every year, buy TVs and cars for no reason, and move to the boonies not realizing that Gen Xers mistakenly gave up their sense of community to follow in the boomers' footsteps; they'll borrow and pay anything possible for the privilege.

Anyway, I'm already working on my Gen X material.

gosub1008• 3 years ago

Our mouthpiece to complain and share outrage is what changed. In Desert Storm or Bosnia, you'd get a 5 minute update on the war, tucked inside a 30m national news cast (not speaking for everyone but the majority of Americans). Now you get nonstop almost-live combat footage, citizen journalists (a good thing), along with disinformation from bad actors trying to manipulate the narrative.

sizzle2• 3 years ago

Anyone know the tech stack this awesome 18 yr old used to create this service back in the day that was able to support so many concurrent users?

orly01• 3 years ago

p2p?

lubutu• 3 years ago

I looked around and found an AMA [1].

Python, using the Twisted framework for networking.
Omegle runs on just one server: a Linode 2880. It used to be on a 720, which was very close to sufficient. No database at the moment, but if it never needs one, I'll most likely use PostgreSQL.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9vbd7/i_made_omegleco...

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

The link to the proof is dead :(

buffalobuffalo2• 3 years ago

It used webRTC, at least in the early days. Same as Chat Roulette. That was why it was able to scale the way it did.

JellyYelly• 3 years ago

How? WebRTC came out in 2011 and wasn't even widely supported in web browsers until years later. Omegle came out in 2009, and launched video in 2010.

spaer• 3 years ago

Redis is/was part of the stack

https://x.com/leifkb/status/241079586144800769

sizzle2• 3 years ago

Why didn’t he sell to Facebook or something?

surfsvammel• 3 years ago

I’m a huge fan of rap freestyler Harry Mack. He has used Omegle to do incredible freestyle raps for random people. I guess that is now over :(

golol• 3 years ago

I met my SO on Omegle...

sMarsIntruder• 3 years ago

I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

You’re not alone my friend. The “old good times” internet is long gone and the situation is evolving very fast.

tommek4077• 3 years ago

It's still there, the old internet. You just uave a hard time finding it with corporate tools like the modern google.

johnnyanmac7• 3 years ago

It also just feels much smaller. Outside of maybe 4chan, none of those classic style forums feel anywhere close to as acitve as their heyday. Like, we're talking maybe 2-3 comments per day.

It definitely doesn't need to be Twitter/Reddit active, but a cozy but empty forum isn't a community so much as a small gathering.

southwesterly• 3 years ago

The old internet is still definitely knocking around. Head out past the walled-gardens into the hinterlands and it’s there. You’re gonna need your own map though.

system23• 3 years ago

The Internet we grew up with is dying. I wish we could go back to dial-up days.

SixDouble53214• 3 years ago

The internet some of us grew up with has been gone a long time. Even back in the early days of AOL/Yahoo chat rooms, people were inappropriate with children though.

mise_en_place• 3 years ago

Omegle will be sorely missed. It was one of the last censorship-free (or perhaps more charitably, uncurated) places you could still go to. I remember the very early days of text-only mode and was using it up until very recently. Unfortunately bad actors will always try to muck up censorship-free zones, maliciously and deliberately.

psyclobe• 3 years ago

I feel sad cause I just now heard of this haha

jbk• 3 years ago

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity.

I feel a bit the same, but why?

martyfmelb• 3 years ago

wly_cdgr• 3 years ago

RIP and a hearty fuck you to every bastard who helped kill it

NKosmatos2• 3 years ago

“ All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won.”

This is something that most people don’t understand and fail to accept. The human species for millennia has been fighting, stealing, rapping, killing and kept doing bad things to each other. This is in our nature and will never change. No matter how much moderation, AI checks, safety measures and good “players” exist, there will always be bad actors with new ways to abuse/misuse your service.

This is a sad fact we all need to accept :-(

Eisenstein2• 3 years ago

We can't stop genuinely sick people from committing crimes because they want to, but it is entirely possible to reduce the motivation for many crimes.

Removing motivation is usually about economics, policy, removing access or ability, and whatever the word is for making it hard via structures (example: a company with a culture of 'look the other way' will make it easy to commit white collar crimes).

Combine that with a rule of law which treats all people equally and ensures that even small offenders get caught will make most people not consider it. The 'punishment' need not be harsh as long as the perpetrator is found. There is good evidence that it is the likelyhood of being being caught that deters crime much more than the sentence.

The first thing we could do is remove laws which make people criminals for doing things that are not viewed as criminal. One of the reasons prohibition was so terrible for American culture was that it make most adults into de facto criminals for doing something they viewed as normal. Once everyone is a criminal then many people are acclimated to it and see all laws as 'if I don't get caught, then who cares?'.

That said, if someone really wants to rape someone no law in the world is going to stop them from doing it, and someone who is in a jealous rage will not be pacified by laws either.

anhner• 3 years ago

Have you read the article? It feels like you are defending the very idea the author is fighting against. Yes, we must accept that fact, and no, we must not let it affect our freedoms and our lives.

NKosmatos2• 3 years ago

Yes, I did read it (in fact I always first read the HN posts and then comment).

I fully agree with the author, the introduction of moderation/censorship is not in the right direction and we shouldn't introduce mandatory measures to monitor and restrict activities based on what might happen and how something can be misused.

On the other hand we have to acknowledge that some things/situations are not so easy to judge and human nature plays a very important role in this. I'm sad about this realization of how our society is behaving and on how our lives are affected, but there is no easy way out.

tremere4• 3 years ago

The site was rife with perverts, Neo-Nazi propaganda, CSAM distribution, and honeypot operations. I think people are idealizing what it was in recent years, believing it was the same fun as in the early 2010s. It was an absolute shitshow.

The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common encounter is a pervert who quickly ends the chat. I probably would have needed to sink 300+ hours on the platform in order to meet one. And by the time I would have met this professor, I would most likely have gained nothing from the exchange. Therefore, in my experience, I have found such innocent encounters to be the exception. By far. There is no corner on the internet where that happens organically. Even on HN, where comments are verbose and technical, it's only because of the perceived clout and proximity to VC money. The open connectedness of the internet has little to do with it.

If you access Tor, which is considered the peak of anonymous interconnectedness, you will also find a draught of intellectual activity. I would love to find intellectual discussions occurring on Tor, if anyone knows one please let me know the onion address. (Pro-tip: it's an impossible quest.) Instead all you will find are CSAM, scams, and honeypots.

I have found that my life has gotten immeasurably better since I generally stopped using the internet. The reddit API lockdown woke me up and I realized pretty much everything on the internet is garbage. Even HN is of lower quality than before, with the average post being a flex of one's social status rather than a helpful tip from one hacker to another.

Fuck all this noise. The internet is so full of low quality social content that it is overall not worth using for social connection.

okasaki• 3 years ago

The internet's not great, but unless you live in an elite city with a well-paying job, you're not going to find better interactions outside.

fragmede8• 3 years ago

even if you are, quality interactions don't just fall in your lap.

tremere4• 3 years ago

I have taken out the word "outside" from my post, because you seem to be addressing a very minor component of my overall message. Please note: My main point is that pure, intellectual connection is almost nowhere to be found. It is drowned out in a sea of shit.

While I did criticize HN in my post, I will note that it is sort of a last bastion of intellectual conversation. I believe the motives are not as pure as before, and I lament that. There simply is not a space for intellectual conversation for intellectual conversation's sake on the internet anymore. It is all twisted.

jhatemyjob3• 3 years ago

The public internet has always been garbage dude. Ever since eternal september in 93. The trick is a good filter. It seems like you lucked into some good filters in the past, but forgot to rotate them when they stopped working

tremere4• 3 years ago

Humor me. Recommend a filter for me to get me started. It doesn't even have to be that good and if I'm disappointed I won't be able to reply anyway.

carabiner• 3 years ago

It's specifically FOSTA that has harmed Omegle, killed craigslist personals and affected other sites with social networking features: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-fosta-u...

guerrilla• 3 years ago

This is pretty sad. Are there any alternatives to Omegle?

Synaesthesia• 3 years ago

Chatroulette

tyiz2• 3 years ago

This is so sad to read. He hits the point about where our society is going.

yafbum2• 3 years ago

Every social app is a party, and every party peters out one way or another. Too few people? It's dead. Too many people? Chilling effects. No budget to police the place? It becomes a magnet for abuse / spam / porn / scams / human trafficking / you name it. This party lasted more than most, they should be proud to have had such a long run.

Aicy2• 3 years ago

Not sure what parties you are going to but mine have never had human trafficking

linkdd• 3 years ago

Can you even call it a party then?

/jk

yafbum2• 3 years ago

Neither do mine, but it happens in some night clubs for example.

geraldhh3• 3 years ago

with your head up ur ass, you just didn't notice

HaZeust2• 3 years ago

This hits me particularly hard. I met relationships, mentors, peers, pupils, friends of philosophy, fellow software developers, builders, dreamers, businessmen - and everything in between - from Omegle, all in different stages of my life.

I've messaged each and every one of them, just now, about the news - on the many platforms I added friends from Omegle with.

Conversations on Omegle changed my politics, it changed my beliefs, it changed my belief on systems of structure, changed my thoughts on strangers and humanity at large (as built by 8 billion of them).

Tragic. Thank you, Leif.

low_tech_love3• 3 years ago

Is it something from a long time ago or did you manage to do that in recent years too? Just curious.

HaZeust2• 3 years ago

In the last 3 months, I managed to meet at least one example for all nine types of people I gave.

Used tags: politics, constitution, trump, reddit, liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, philosophy, music, compsci, computers, socialmedia, debate, ama, business, america

(I found that these tags made for the best conversations over the years. None of them stand as an endorsement)

ThrowawayTestr2• 3 years ago

The beauty of the internet. Thanks for sharing.

low_tech_love3• 3 years ago

Maybe I’m wrong, but my impression is that it has been a living-dead service for many years already. I’m old enough to remember when it was actually exciting to use Omegle and chat roulette, but I’ve tried on and off for many years now and my impression is that, even at the slight chance that you got someone other than a naked horny weirdo, nobody was really paying attention to the conversation or interested in anything other than 15-second meaningless interaction. We certainly lost something nice here at some point but I’m not sure it happened today.

sublimefire• 3 years ago

Multiple years ago it was something to us - something new. There are too many people who do not care about it (similar services) these days, people are born with the internet and just take it for granted.

Another analogy could be the gas car industry. We just look at it differently nowadays, we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the world in any of these gas guzzlers. You could not do it in a Tesla or any other electric car, yet many want to just kill it off.

ulrikrasmussen• 3 years ago

I think that's a very important and true argument, and something I have thought about for a while.

The thing is that these places only have value if people put in an effort, which is more likely to be the case when the platform and/or technology is new and only known by people who a priori have put in an effort to access it at all. When you mostly accessed web sites from desktop computers, you would be limited to use online platforms in the relatively small time window where you had free time at home, so the personal cost of using the platform was higher because you had to choose to take that time from other tasks that also required your computer.

Now everyone have a smartphone in their pockets and can access any online service at any time of the day, so the required effort to use them is a small fraction of what it used to be. As a result, the average user is not motivated to actually put in any effort, and because of this the quality suffers tremendously.

Maybe we should raise that lower bound on effort by requiring users to solve CAPTPTYCs - Completely Automated Programs To Prove That You Care - before you were allowed to interact with anyone online. A sort of proof-of-work for people to ensure that they have spent at least as much time on the content as they have on solving the puzzle that allowed them to publicize it.

usrbinbash4• 3 years ago

yet many want to just kill it off.

That's not because we take what cars can do for granted, it's because individual traffic is a major contributor to the mechanism that is actively killing our habitat. That isn't an opinion, it's a proven, peer reviewed, often-challenged-never-falsified fact.

And no, EVs will not make that better. They are just a different instance of the same problem.

So yes, we do want to "kill off" cars. Not because we take them for granted, but because they suck as an idea, have always sucked as an idea, and will always suck as an idea, no matter how they are powered.

Tijdreiziger4• 3 years ago

we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the world in any of these gas guzzlers

This example supports your point, but not in the way you think.

Back when Bertha Benz (wife of Karl Benz, the founder of Mercedes-Benz) took the first ‘road trip’ to another part of Germany, she had to fill up the tank at a local chemist, had to cool the engine with water from ditches and streams, and had to have her brakes repaired by a local cobbler. [1]

Nowadays, people take it for granted that cars are reliable and that there are gas stations everywhere.

[1] https://www.hotcars.com/the-story-of-bertha-benz-and-the-fir...

slikrick• 3 years ago

when the planet is dead we can't go anywhere

menzoic• 3 years ago

I wonder if using GPT-4 vision api would make moderating Omegle significantly cheaper and automated. AI could save the company.

halflings• 3 years ago

That's like killing a mosquito with a bazooka.

Using GPT-4 vision on all users would be extremely expensive. Way simpler models can detect nudity. (and they do mention they had great success using those) And if the idea was to detect child abuse from text, it would also be quite expensive to use the language capabilities on every discussion.

thrawn0r• 3 years ago

More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors. press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

buf2• 3 years ago

Couldn't this have been any website with a messaging system on it? Twitter, facebook, even email.

I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.

Edit: was it because of the video component of Omegle?

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom and all those companies with UGC have this, responsible ones report it (Meta does lots, not sure Twitter does anymore, Telegram never did).

I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.

Take it as a sign that if tech community doesn't wake up and own up to this and try to solve the issue somehow then not just individual services but the entire idea of e2ee messaging is going to become illegal...

miki123211• 3 years ago

Maybe this needs to start over somewhere in a civil law country (most of Europe) where suing you for something like this is almost impossible.

fullarr3• 3 years ago

No one in Europe made an Omegle like website since 2009?

master-lincoln6• 3 years ago

An 11 year old alone on the internet...their parents should be prosecuted, not the messaging platform

sergioisidoro• 3 years ago

In that article she was 11 when using Omegle. She was using internet without appropriate supervision. That's almost like allowing a kid to drive a car, leading to an accident, and then trying to ban cars because they are dangerous to kids.

The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.

The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.

loxdalen• 3 years ago

Realistically, kids are on the Internet.

I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.

I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.

hombre_fatal• 3 years ago

Focusing on nothing but parental neglect doesn't do much for the victims, though.

Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids to adults?

For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would expect some sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have been better than what Omegle had (nothing).

Aurornis• 3 years ago

The legal situation is more complicated than blaming the parents. To extend your analogy: If someone had a business that rented cars and somehow 11 year olds were renting the cars and driving them, the rental car company couldn’t shrug it off and blame the parents.

That’s why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform, there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to address the situation. The expectation isn’t perfect enforcement because it’s not reasonable to shut every large business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a platform for bored kids, it’s not surprising that the lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization options it’s not surprising that they choose to close rather than deal with legal battles.

Fatnino• 3 years ago

How is this possibly omegles fault or problem?

She met him once on omegle and gave him her contact info. She could have met him on the train or in the street and it would have ended the same way.

Parents are supposed to teach kids about stranger danger. She should be suing her folks.

subjectsigma• 3 years ago

That video would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

The reporters literally camped outside this guys house, ran across his lawn shouting at him, chased him to his door, and immediately accused him of harming children. Then the scene cuts to the reporter describing that as a “civil conversation”.

cryptoegorophy• 3 years ago

Ah, “for the children”. The best argument there is to deprive you of all the rights possible.

JoeAltmaier2• 3 years ago

Really? We want to protect the rights of pedophiles? Where could this argument be going.

falit94• 3 years ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/09/omegle-...

fyokdrigd• 3 years ago

so when are they going after google for providing free email and such?

internet watch foundation is about censorship. they only "protect the children" so you can't contradict them without looking like a criminal. they actually give criminals a legal defense as their content hash system is easy to prove a false positive.

also they are going after the only service which contributed to arrests. lol. you think criminals don't use facebook/Instagram/telegram/tiktok/email/googlemeet/msteams/etc just because you haven't heard about arests?!

sp0ck• 3 years ago

Read the article. I don't understand the logic of this. It's like leaving loaded gun on the desk and its gun fault (tool) when your kid shoot someone with it. IMO this is bad parenting. Any tool that provide anonimity and privacy can be abused. It is not like anyone was forced to use it. You have to go there explicitly. Adding random video chat to i.e Signal app makes it another Omegle "problem" ?

bertil• 3 years ago

Did they ever resolve the question about how it’s supposed to be pronounced? O-mee-GLE, O-mI-gl’, Om-hi-GLE?

badrabbit• 3 years ago

For others like me who don't use this service: apparently there were a lot of people "shaking hands with the milkman", hoping their work would be celebrated by rando matches. I wonder why it is difficult to moderate this, one of the first few matches should have been a moderator but maybe they just didn't make enough money to justify such costs.

larodi• 3 years ago

Good opportunity to go out and remember how it is to meet random people live in parks, theatre, sporting centres, libraries, coworking spaces, and of course - bars.

Madmallard• 3 years ago

What attacks were happening to this site?

If he is well within his right and the law to host it can't he just... ignore them entirely?

I don't understand.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

Once upon a time, I was aimless and ended up on omegle after someone suggested it to me. For 8+ months I kinda lived on it, and watching countries come and go depending on timezones was quite funny, you could recognize speech/writing patterns in different cultures. You'd know in a minute if someone was chinese or colombian. A fun anthropological experiment.

heroiccocoa• 3 years ago

It was the purest form of social media before social media was even a thing. In an age where it's increasingly more difficult for people to meet a lot of others accessibly, it's a shame.

theonlybutlet• 3 years ago

Powerful statement, I hope everyone reads it.

crossroadsguy3• 3 years ago

Omegle was always a horny and abusive place and a place that was so very skin colour sensitive (as usual this skipped the discourse). Pretty much nothing else. I am amused by the mentions of magical place people are lamenting. Besides it was a direct copy of Chatroulette.

But I understand. It’s always the case - one’s revolutionary is another’s terrorist.

backspace_• 3 years ago

What do you mean by skin colour sensitive? Did the service favour a person with specific skin colour or did it purposely exclude people with a specific skin colour?

gosub1008• 3 years ago

Omegle was always a horny and abusive place and a place that was so very skin colour sensitive

So they had php or python code that did skin detection and altered the code branches according to the melanin level? That's interesting, can you elaborate on why they did such a thing?

crossroadsguy3• 3 years ago

Why the fuck would you and the other commentor assume I am talking about the tech stack! Can you please read the comment again and the see the part that points to the tech stack?

0xDEAFBEAD9• 3 years ago

It's times like this that I become sad that the world of cryptocurrency and DAOs is so overrun with scams. So often that stuff is a solution in search of a problem. Finally we have a case where there's an actual problem to be solved wrt operating in a legal grey area, but is crypto even up to the job here if there's no obvious profit to be made?

To be fair, if Omegle was operating anonymously on some sort of real-time blockchain, that would make it harder to prevent abuse. But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in any app store, which would filter out the sort of vulnerable/naive users who are at the greatest risk.

z3dd• 3 years ago

But presumably you wouldn't be able to get an app for it in any app store

Which would also filter out all non tech savvy people, for better or worse.

burtekd• 3 years ago

I love how the only two omegle.com links on hackernews are one from opening in 2009 and one from closing in 2023

poszlem• 3 years ago

After reading his statement go and watch the psychopathic BBC reporter going to his house shouting "why don't you want to protect children". Then his decision will be easy to understand. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

LauraMedia• 3 years ago

Omegle was a horrible place that was not moderated enough and enabled groomers. It was also a place that felt very "old school internet" due to the "wild west style".

doublerabbit2• 3 years ago

It was also a place that felt very "old school internet" due to the "wild west style".

And what's wrong with that. The current internet feels like a playground where we are forced to fall in order to the wall garden owner.

When you use the internet you should have the sense that the domain your going to access requires yourself to need to apply self caution.

Letting a 11 year old online without supervision is just lazy neglected parenting.

btbuildem• 3 years ago

A playground where every surface is foam-lined, and the whole place is relentlessly patrolled by fascists in mickey-mouse costumes.

gosub1008• 3 years ago

Microsoft and Apple enable groomers. they are platforms where abuse images are shown (despite telemetry being able to detect and stop it), they could easily detect someone using their OS to groom a minor but yet their hands are clean? come on.

PokestarFan• 3 years ago

Didn't Apple try to implement client-side CSAM scanning and then everyone threw a huge hissy fit over it? I mean the idea was flawed for privacy reasons but you cannot stop everyone without stripping all privacy from everyone.

SixDouble53214• 3 years ago

Parents allowing children to have limitless, unmonitored access to the internet is more to blame than any given platform.

doubloon• 3 years ago

The Verge:

“Omegle gained a reputation as a breeding ground for sexual abuse of minors, leading to a prominent lawsuit “

Take any physical space that developed this reputation, it would also have been shut down by lawsuits.

phatskat2• 3 years ago

Like the Catholic Church?

jkgatt• 3 years ago

Some good memories were made over there thats for sure!

hsuduebc2• 3 years ago

Is he referring to some specific event or it was generally just too difficult to run?

mbix77• 3 years ago

Internet is becoming sadder and sadder. Mega corporations being mega corporations, ads, dark patterns, community-focused websites becoming mega corporations...

huggingmouth• 3 years ago

Whenever a giant tree falls, many saplings get a chance to grow. Hope we see even better omegles take its place.

To op: please consider open sourcing your abuse detection tech if it doesn't give the bad guys an edge. I'd hate for bad people to abuse these new services.

timnetworks• 3 years ago

Wow I'm glad Harry Mack (https://youtube.com/harrymack) got his time in on there. What a collection of memories he racked up.

Sad to hear that the platform is shutting down due to lawsuits. It doesn't make much sense to change the speed limit of a street where kids run around unattended in the middle of the night. Sad to hear the instances of abuse even more though.

TCPIP Omegle

frozenwind2• 3 years ago

I didn't want to spend time reading that wall of text, so I wanted a summarized version of it. Asked ChatGPT (4) to do it for me and it told me that Omegle is not going to close. My intuition told me otherwise, so the irony is that I spent more time than needed on this.

https://sharegpt.com/c/yhV8Hjh

Is this a sign of falling GPT quality? I think this was extremely easy to infer.

lionkor• 3 years ago

PEBCAK, I went to omegle.com and was able to infer exactly what the author meant. It took me approx. 2 minutes to do so. Using ChatGPT to read short things like this is akin to only reading the headline of an article -- you tell me if the latter makes much sense usually.

frozenwind2• 3 years ago

2 minutes is quite fast, congrats.

I inferred this information by seeing the number of comments on HN (a relevant parameter in estimating the importance of an event imo), the time period 2009-2023 and then immediately after clicking seeing a tombstone. This took me under 2-3 seconds.

The rest of the info I wasn't going time to spend on was the motives etc. It's not the first postmortem I see, I was just curious to why by skipping all of the boilerplate. Omegle is not important to me, but I know it was quite a phenomenon .

My point was that GPT failed blatantly at inferring this same easy task.

dkarras• 3 years ago

Claude nails it without a sweat.

neontomo• 3 years ago

I don't have much to add except that this was very thoughtfully written, and I appreciate the sentiment very much.

I'll leave a quote spoken by Keanu Reeves in To the Bone:

"This idea you have, that there's a way to be safe, it's childish and cowardly. It stops you from experiencing anything, including anything good."

cyrillite• 3 years ago

A blow to serendipity. What a shame. RIP.

whymauri• 3 years ago

The Internet is dying.

Pigalowda• 3 years ago

I’m not sure why Omegle isn’t being propped up by big tech players for this case. If Omegle loses it sets a tremendously bad precedent.

My patience and understanding for the woman suing is completely dried up. She’s trying to make the entire world of communication a worse place.

What’s next, the ISP is sued for carrying the traffic? It’s absurd. She must go down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

howmayiannoyyou• 3 years ago

Good riddance and here's why: Jon Minadeo II ( https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/neo-nazi-jon-mina...) had been using Omegle for sometime to spread racist and antisemitic ideas to young kids. With no way to police this activity and no law against doing so, he appeared to be increasing his following. I used to be a "free internet" advocate, but the older I get and as a parent, my thinking has changed. We have to stand for something that protects our children, and an anything goes internet isn't that. I know this may be an unpopular viewpoint.

cosmojg3• 3 years ago

You could also just, y'know, be a better parent. Put some effort into raising your kids, and you'll reap the rewards. Ideally, build a relationship with them where they aren't afraid to discuss what they watch or who they talk to online. If you've already screwed that up, you can always intervene with technological or physical parental controls, whether that's using a Pi Hole to block certain websites, confiscating a device, or simply shutting off the router after a certain hour.

Don't make your problem into everybody's problem.

gptforall• 3 years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953620/omegle-anonymous...

darajava• 3 years ago

I have no sympathy for this, he should have moderated it far, far better. He let it become what it was before he shut it down. He should have shut it down 10 years ago.

pmarreck8• 3 years ago

Omegle was something I always intended to try but was too chicken to.

Oh well :/

dcow• 3 years ago

Is there a specific political action group or organization behind the pressure Omegle received that isn’t being called out? Or is it just that the general social context has enabled people across the board to attack more freedoms more successfully. If anything I think the pendulum is slowly starting to swing back but maybe not on the “for the children” front.

yckaraoke• 3 years ago

Reading through the comments, I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned the Yahoo Chat era. YC was huge!

neonsunset• 3 years ago

A reminder that the kind of public that got Omegle shutdown will likely never face consequences for the actions they have done throughout their lives.

water9• 3 years ago

The app is full of pedophiles. It will not be missed.

SixDouble53214• 3 years ago

Only because the platform also has kids on it. Both groups still exist. My guess is both groups will just spend more time on other platforms like Roblox.

i-use-nixos-btw• 3 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn’t the Omegle brand and domain name be worth a considerable amount - with the caveat that it be sold to a responsible buyer?

It seems like the creator is in a rough patch and faced rising social and financial problems from Omegle, and it has seen a BIT of a decline, but it’s a name we all know, and the image/use/etc can be turned around and the creator could even still be involved in whatever capacity he wishes.

Just seems kind of a waste to replace it with a goodbye page.

chefandy• 3 years ago

This is one things on my long list of things to try that I never got around to, and now, never will.

kortilla3• 3 years ago

Is there a central registry of these parties that attack anonymity? We should name and shame them. Document their strategies and what to watch out for.

uconnectlol3• 3 years ago

what is the tl;dr of the giant text wall? is it "internet bad because some kid shared a naked pic of herself" (which is the "unspeakable heinous crime" he alludes to) or is it saying people who believe in such idiocy are bad? i don't care about some php webdev from 2006's philosophy on the subject, the internet should just not be regulated, period. it doesn't even begin to make sense.

gitowiec• 3 years ago

Never used it, never knew it existed and I'm using Internet from the 1997. Seeing all the warm comments here I suppose it's like IRC for me.

cosmojg3• 3 years ago

A decade and a half ago, most of Omegle's traffic flowed from Orkut[1] which now sports an epitaph of its own. It's like we're growing old and watching our friends die. :(

[1] https://orkut.com/

harhargange• 3 years ago

I used it a recently as 2021 to practice stand-up sessions, get some confidence to show my face to strangers and be connected with the world at the absolutely worst point in my life. Even since a decade before that I frequented Omegle and saved a few conversations for eternity which I shared on Twitter long time back

gardenhedge• 3 years ago

Omegle was a site nearly purely for weirdos and perverts. There could have been better controls put in place.. but the owners decided not to do that.

extraduder_ire• 3 years ago

Is there any public webrtc discovery servers online? That's the only thing I think you need to actually run a server for to have an omegle clone. Everything else can be static and go on ipfs, github pages, or something like it.

Maybe abusing webtorrent trackers to do discovery might work, but would likely be trickier.

Of course, it's probably a bad idea to stand up a clone of the site that's impossible to properly moderate.

ly376• 3 years ago

It's truly the end of an era. It feels like that generation of sites is ending, and a lot of how the internet "felt" at that time is ending too. Nowadays, it's all about clout and getting famous - back then, the internet just felt like a fun (and sometimes dangerous) place to be.

Hafty2• 3 years ago

ffss12037@gmail.com

Hafty2• 3 years ago

ffss12037@gmail.com QR

jovan2010• 3 years ago

Bro

Omegle 2009-2023

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