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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
IP alone makes it fairly tricky for non-state actors to identify someone, just roughly geolocate them. Good for freaking out people that don't know how the web works, but not useful for much more.
The flip side is that p2p means that nobody is snooping in on those video conversations. Omegle couldn't spy on it's users once they had entered a video chat. It was also fairly easy to see how they implemented the monitoring they did if you have a webdev background: periodically in between chats the omegle client requested an image from your cam.
I believe the whole video chat component, while initially using flash, was ultimately implemented using WebRTC, which is pretty cool and as shame more places don't make use of this.
