Omegle shuts down--founder cites "stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse"
Omegle
This is a beautiful blog post and I recommend reading it. I never used Omegle, but I now understand what we've lost.
I just made a premature comment and deleted after starting to read the blog post. I did not expect that.
Can't deny this website's impact on the Internet. You will be missed.
IMO there should be something like Omegle offered in public school to students for free around the world. You'd have a student account that's tied to a verified school account, and you could be randomly paired with other students your age around the world. Omegle, when users are responsible, and moderation is manageable, seems like it has a very high value-for-society to complexity ratio.
This idea is ripe for exploitation. If even one creep gets a hold of the creds for a verified student account, congrats now a bunch of minors are being shown a grown man's penis
It would be trivial to roll it out in a way that it can only be accessed from school grounds or while an adult is supervising. The adult could even be in charge of "clicking next" if we really didn't trust the integrity of our system. I agree that it would be difficult to control access from home on a child's own device given that children are notoriously terrible at creating passwords and maintaining a secure system, and I'm not sure that something like a yubikey would fare any better since it could be lost or stolen.
But I feel like you're not taking a moment to argue with yourself, because we already have systems in place that only students are allowed access to, so that's not the part that needs solving, nor would it be a novel attack surface.
Imagine for a moment, the magical ability for students at a school to walk onto a playground where they find students from all over the world also playing. The potential for learning and understanding would be incredible. Learning about new languages, customs, locations, current events, everything, could be done just by walking over and talking to them. If such a room existed, it shouldn't just be an option, it should be something we make time for our kids to do, just like recess.
The point is, if the barrier to communication with your peers all over the world is as low as possible, then we open the door for international relations on a scale the world has never seen before. We don't need to have kids isolated to small towns for their entire lives, growing up to vote for border walls because they're scared of the "terrorists". Instead we would have a world full of people who are able to see people in other countries as people, if not actual friends. And I don't think it's enough for this to be a private service that some schools dabble in, I think it should be publicly funded and encouraged internationally.
Yeah, there are challenges in the implementation, but compared to other things we spend money on, I think the value proposition is easily justified.
This is such a bad idea I don't even know where to start
That first sentence scared the shit out of me.
Didn't Omegle have this as a feature?
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.
To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.
Who are "these people"?
The website's reclusive creator, Leif Brooks, did not want to talk about Alice's case via email so I travelled to his home in Orlando, Florida, in the hope of speaking to him there. But once again he remained silent.
Wow. Even a video of the aforementioned harassment, and the article overall repeatedly focuses on his name and a large picture of his face while strongly implying that having run a website makes him to blame for the sexual abuse of a child, an event the article spends a lot of time describing. Zero respect for this kind of "journalism".
Sounds like regulators or lawmakers, potentially the people who are communicating with Omegle about child safety on the platform are also saying Omegle needs to change to fit the needs of new legal systems. EU and the UK come to mind, but also the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act” in the US, which is an absolute joke when there are so many other protections lawmakers should be codifying. Instead, they hijack a supposed child safety act to prevent significant and vital knowledge from being shared online. More details in this Verge article.
Internet edgelords
Wow. I wonder what Frank Tedesco will say. Many of his popular videos on YouTube were of surprising random Omegle people with his relative pitch ability to play anything on the piano.
I know he works on multiple platforms (YouTube, twitch, TikTok), so he’s at least covered with those, but his use of Omegle was fun and interesting.
Upvote for Frank, he's such an amazing person!
Could they put it on GitHub. Let someone else resurrect it.
I mean the concept of the site is exceedingly simple (hence its popularity), so it wouldn’t take much to create something that mimics its features. But, it would come with everything Leif posted about. And it would take years to gain any traction all the while having to try to combat all the reasons Omegle was shut down.
May not be worth it.
Today shall be remembered as the day the rogue penises finally won.