The main difference between Omegle and other chat services was that they invited people to socialize in exchange for people not being able to choose who they would chat with. This was chosen by the worthy service itself, and when the conversation partner did not like you, you simply moved on. You could have fun both through a video call and with the sound and video turned off, just a handful of texts at first.
The service was created in 2009, founded by 18-year-old programmer Leif K-Brooks. Originally, the service only had a text chat function, video calls arrived a year later. During the years of its existence, it came to the attention of many Internet users, you could come across a whole series of records of the most various funny interactions between lazy people. Sometimes Omegle was visited by millions of users, after which the service did not even require registration.
The original rules of the server allowed people aged 13 to enter under parental supervision, and in 2022 the administrators raised the limit to 18 years of age. However, it was too late, or during the covid pandemic and lockdown (or even two), various cases of abusive youth and child pornography, which first came from Omegle, began to leak to the public.
This year, for example, the service was started by a 21-year-old woman from the United States who connected with a pedophile on Omegle ten years ago. He exchanged intimate information and photos with a then-young woman from Canada, with which he then abused and blackmailed her for many years. I was finally caught by the police, only a woman today blames the main service Omegle, which failed to reveal the age and identity of users, how about pedophiles and sexual predators.
An example of the fact that Omegle took a user with humor, but often with a sexual subtext:
November 9, 2023 at 8:49 pspvek archived: November 9, 2023 at 2:59 pm
The Omegle service itself recorded over 600,000 cases of sudden sexual abuse of children in the last year alone. Omegle was thus associated with this behavior for a long time, and alobs on it multiplied. First, because of them and the overall effort of the administrative team, the pages are now closed. In their place, you can now find only a long psg file from the server’s founder Leif K-Brooks and a grave log with the dates of the meeting and terminated services.
I wish it could all be different, but the stress and costs associated with the first struggles, along with the ongoing stress and costs of running Omegle, are simply too great. Omegle is not a sustainable project either financially or psychologically. I don’t want to get a heart attack from this in my twenties, wrote K-Brooks.
However, there are a number of similar services on the Internet, the most famous of which is Chatroulette, which has had many controversies and users accused of sexual misconduct. In 2020, the nicmna teba service deployed artificial intelligence to help search for content and report inappropriate behavior.
