This is a beautiful blog post and I recommend reading it. I never used Omegle, but I now understand what we’ve lost.
Can’t deny this website’s impact on the Internet. You will be missed.
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”.
Seriously. I thought the BBC was better than this. They spent thousands of dollars to fly “journalists” (more like paparazzi, in this case) to his home to harass him, and shout incredibly biased and judgmental questions at him through his closed front door. “Why won’t you protect children?” (or something similar; I wasn’t taking notes.)
Ridiculous.
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.
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.
