I'm really sad about this. I know that a lot of really desperate people used the text chat feature when they needed someone to listen, and there's certainly a lot of people who are alive and happy today because they found someone to talk to there when they needed it. I can't deny that there have also been cases where people's lives have been made worse or ruined because of something that happened to them, but I think on the balance the site made the world a better place.
The text chat version of Omegle could have easily been hosted on a single server with some kind of automated spam protection. Donations could have more than covered the costs to run it. The positive value it added to millions of lives far outweighs the negative.
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.
I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a mess, no real attempt had been made against the spambots, the property was poorly managed during that phase where Yahoo was attempting to date anyone, everyone, in order to fix their lives.
First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo improving the service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog.
You see, they had done one thing really right in the beginning with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and also that there were just metric tons of business people businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough alone.
It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something or another.
Chat is NOT dead. See campfire for example which even is a quite new chat tool. In fact, entire companies (including my own) are using chat for all their internal communication and were doing this for years. Maybe the anonym chatroom for teenager in the 90s is dead, but that is for good reason. The Chat as a tool itself is still really powerful and effective. (and widely used)
The implementation of rabblr also is really cool. But i think the part with the anonymous users might be a problem. I just logged in for a few minutes and it was full of trolling. Also that you can't carry the chat over multiple pages is anoying, but there might be a way around that.
Plus i really don't want to talk to random people on webpages. I probably want to talk to someone who can give me an information that i want, which would be a site adminstrator or company staff or whatever. Like olark.
Or i want to talk to my friends or people i know, but i can do that on any IM that i got open anyway.
So to sum it up. Nicely done, but i also doubt the usefulness of this tool.
People are so weird: it used to be that using the Internet a lot was seen as anti-social, now everyone's addicted to phones and if your message bubbles aren't the right color you're the weird one. It's just a stupid chat app.
It's completely awful we're strong-armed into having 6 different chat clients that send text messages because of gate-keeping. Chat has been fully commoditized since about 2000 or so.
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.
Can't say I didn't see this coming... Omegle today is very different than historically. I remember when I was much younger I would find a bot or a person just looking for sexting maybe once in 5. Now it seems that the genuine "wanna make a friend" people are 1-100. It is wild how it turned into just a horny site, and it makes me sad that it never had the opportunity for a resurgence.
Chat is a slightly more dynamic market than email for user acquisition, but it's still damn hard to get new users. Who but a bunch of rubes would use a previously nonprofit service that was publicly obliterated?
Or is the end goal a new, commercial brand strategy? No one in tech with any sense will use them.
Several trading sites (years ago now) had chat features on the side. They started out great and had mild spam and vulgar conduct. Over a few months they became so bad I could only look at it for a few laughs.
They hired more moderators to no avail and ultimately shut them down.
But a low effort scam, back then chat gpt was not a thing. They could at least connect the user among each other, censor/cutting conversations as soon as they reveal ones gender .. basically grindr, but with a scam on top.
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