Came here to say this. Chatroulette added unnecessary 'features' that just introduced more friction into the experience (as it were). Which seems to have meant users gravitating to Omegle's bare bones (no pun intended) approach.
One thing that always bothered me is how much wasted potential there is in tools like Omegle or chatRoulette. On paper they sound amazing, and a few years ago back when they started and not everyone was aware, I remember having two or three amazing (and entirely SFW) interactions with some random people from around the world. It was genuinely exciting in a super legit way. And then, yeah. It turned into what it is today. I wonder if there is any way to ever do it right.
* 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.
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.
>ChatRoulette and Omegle require you to actively participate.
Absolutely -- they're not direct replacements. The problem is that a lot of what made Stickam fun is the size of its audience, and the demand for a Stickam-like site is much lower now that ChatRoulette and Omegle exist. So there probably won't be a Stickam-like site that's as fun as Stickam was.
The thing I don't get is why they thought Chatroulette was more than just a fad. Anyone could see that Chatroulette was a flavor of the month kind of thing that faded out right away.
Did they really think that taking Chatroulette and making it a super invasive fb app to minimize the amount of penises was the next big idea?
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.
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