Omegle is dead.  While it turned into an unfortunate outcome of exploitation, I find the story quite unique.  It was started by an unassuming kid, who was like 18 living with his parents.  I can't blame him for not having the foresight to see what it would become.  And frankly, I don't blame him for being unable to police what it became.  I listened to a couple podcasts about the length that facebook has tried to go to try to navigate it's global impact.  It's pretty overwhelming.

Here is the message from the old owner
www.omegle.com/

It is wonderful that many people used the medium to practice speaking English.  Amazing to think how many people fell in love.  There are likely kids conceived off of omegle.  Life conceived by this kid's online invention.  There was a youtube channel I watched of a guy who would play any song people requested by ear on piano.  I imagine this guy has lost that whole revenue stream.  He brought joy to others.  Made people romantically cy over hearing his music.  Such a human connection is now lost.

One thing I oddly enjoyed that spawned from Omegle was a youtuber who had a fake image on his camera of Joseph Kony. He would do a wonderfully horrible impression of Joseph Kony and call out kids for being racist.

While I didn't spend much time on omegle, I found some of the content created from it interesting.  It was an invention no one asked for but one I feel will be missed.  In essence, it was a social experiment like a biosphere 2 but virtually.

Did you enjoy Omegle?  The content created from it? 

What specifically happened to Omegle to cause the owner to take it down? Or was it a a more general case of the people using it for evil deeds becoming too much to handle?

As a teenager who was, to put it mildly, devoid of social skills, I sought human connection through the internet, but I did not have the tech savvy to build my own website. Hence I spent a lot of time on Omegle. Even in the early days, 90% of chats were a waste of time. "ASL" was the most common greeting. Fortunately that acronym has left common parlance. In cae you don't know, it is a request for age, sex, location. More a demand than a request. What happens is simple: if you respond that you are male, they disconnect immediately. Sometimes I typed 18/F/USA to see what would happen. Banal attempts at conversation would happen. "hey whats up".

I did have some pleasant converastions and even made some friends whom I spoke to beyond Omegle. One of them remains a close friend to this day. I stopped using it many years ago, when I went to university and developed in-person social skills, but I occasionally came across fun YouTube compilations.

I miss the internet being a lawless cesspool...
It was almost worth the oceans of depravity for the occasional real gem:





I think the internet is over regulated, people who are too fragile shouldn't be on the internet.
Only a moron would give children unsupervised access to the internet.