Technology

tl;dr - a small number of bad actors are causing too much trouble, so the owner is pulling the plug on Omegle rather than continuing to fight uphill against it. The post is also a sad farewell letter where Leif reminisces a bit about the old internet and how people used to actually use it to not be total assholes to strangers all the time

Relevant bits:

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.

The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. 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. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.

Here is a copy of the text on the website because I believe it does a very good job at pointing out the issues in current society:

Dear strangers,

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.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.

In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.

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 – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.

The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.

The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. 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. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.

If you are reading this, take 10 minutes to read the post. It’s worth it.

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

This is kind of sad. I've been using the site a fair amount recently to help get through some depressive episodes and the social withdrawal/isolation that come with them. Granted, about 50% of conversations were bots, and 40% were guys just looking for girls to send them nudes, but the other 10% or so was pretty interesting conversations.

I guess this will be the impetus to get back out and socialize IRL again. Or to find a new chat-with-randos service. Or to keep spiraling deeper into depression. We'll see.

Edit: It was also kinda nice to be treated like a woman without being treated differently for being trans.

Omegle was a big website that millions of people uses that was created by just one guy. I think that part of the Internet is gone. Nowadays everyone wants something that already established and with how much it takes to run a website. The only people who can afford to run a website are big corporations. It's a sad state of affairs.

thats out of left field.

I used it only once and actually had a bit of small talk with someone from the Philippines. It was very exciting that I could just talk to someone from the other end of the world just like this.

I went on omegle not too long ago actually and the thing I remember was that the text version of the website was inundated with bots.

You had to skip through maybe 10-15 bots before you would find that one real person, and even then it was hit or miss whether they would actually want to stay and have a conversation.

Another thing: the constant "asl" as the top of every conversation; it's like people were trying to use it as a hook-up / dating / sexting app rather than it's actual purpose of connecting with people from around the world. I think that mission got lost somewhere.

I checked it out a few times over the years, but was put off by the behavior of some of the people. The concept is fascinating because, as the founder mentions in his letter, there IS some safety in anonymity and expressing yourself more authentically without the physical risk is possible.

Humans mostly have "acceptable behavior" filters in public, but this system also stripped many of those away. Which led to a lot of people incorrectly assuming they could do bad stuff on this platform without consequences.

I think it's too bad this is the way it's got to go. Despite not really being a user, Omegle feels like part of Internet 1.5.

This is sad! I have so many great memories on Omegle.

I have a logitech g920 race wheel. I used to set up my phone as a Webcam and use OBS studio to make it look like I was a YouTuber and I'd go on there and stream BeamNG.

I met people from all over the world, and had some super deep conversations with people. It was like free therapy.

I used Omegle a lot when it was still text-only chat more that a decade ago. Overall I had a positive experience, It was fun talking to strangers from all over the world. I never tried their video chat though, so I can't say if it's actually that horrible. Back then when it was text-only, so at least I don't have to worry about seeing some dicks. But if child predators favor the site now, even if Omegle went back to text-only, they'll still find a way to trick kids just like in other chat platforms.

I read the whole thing

I don’t think people are capable of engaging in genuine discourse about human sexuality.

The people who are always crying about pedos and such every time anything related to the internet and sexuality is brought up in the news creep me out.

But both reddit and lemmy also have some fucked up shit posted in them as well.

It’s not black and white…. You could almost say it is 50 shardes of gray……..

I really liked the idea. Didn't like all the dicks though. Shame they couldn't solve that.

That was actually a super interesting, and somber, read.

It's gets to, in part, the heart of free speech and government oversight. Even the opening C.S. Lewis quote is something worth applying to today's (US) political parties. It's difficult, for me, to consider the need to impose restrictions on the liberties of free people for the sake of a minor group of wrong doers.

Some topical issues I'm applying this perspective to are gun restrictions, Twitter, abortion, masks. I think we're all quick to scream about what should be done to resolve the issue at the surface without taking a moment to consider the ramifications or the deeper causes driving the issue. Although, isn't the deeper issue simply human nature? How do you solve that problem if not by imposing restrictions on the liberties of free people? Doesn't a civil society require some level of restriction in order to foster trust and respect? Isn't this why ancient civilizations created religion to begin with?

I mean, you have to admit that "free society" is an oxymoron.

Dang, that's a bummer. I never really used it because the novelty of it ran out pretty quick for me, but it's always disappointing seeing such a staple of the internet disappear like that.

You can't make a web2.0 internet omelette without breaking Omegle.

I'd never used it either, but what a truly sad event to see it shutting down for the reasons it is. Big ups to the folks that kept it going for as long as they did. ❤️❤️

That's really sad and disappointing. I was never really into Omegle; I knew it was around for a long time, but it was too sketchy for me to want to browse it myself. However, during the COVID lockdown I discovered a new genre of YouTube videos that I gained a fascination with: VRChat Omegle. The YouTuber(s) (sometimes multiple) would get together in vrchat and setup a virtual camera that would interface with Omegle like a normal webcam. The result was entertaining, especially when it came to furry YouTubers.

In some ways it'd get kinda stale because 90% of the reactions would be, "whoa, how are you doing that bro???" but it was still entertaining nevertheless. Even people the people who hate furries had to stop and ask questions like, "bro, is that an instagram filter bro?" or "wait... Is that... REAL???" It was particularly interesting when they'd occasionally get someone who knew how to execute man-in-the-middle attacks to fuck with the people on both ends (it seemed to be innocent trolling most of the time, though I'm sure there were bad actors doing it as well).

It's sad that it's gone now.