Chatting with random strangers without having to create an account: it was possible with Omegle until recently.
Omegle was a free online platform for video calling strangers. Other applications, such as Snapchat, mainly focus on the people you already know. By navigating to the Omegle site, you could quickly connect to one-on-one chats, where you could see each other’s webcam images and send messages at the same time. Leif K-Brooks, the founder of the online service, has now announced that the service will be permanently discontinued.
There are a number of reasons for this. For starters, Brooks started the online service from his bedroom in 2019, when he was 18 years old. The idea was to allow people with diverse backgrounds to meet each other on the internet. Brooks says that he himself was not exactly the social type during his school days. Omegle had to help others overcome that hurdle.
As a free service, for which you did not have to create an account, Omegle quickly gained popularity. At one point, the application was seeing 3 million users passing every day. The platform, which linked you to a random conversation partner, was extremely popular for years, especially among children.
Pedophilia
For a certain audience, Omegle was popular because of those children. As the platform became more popular, it also increasingly faced cyber attacks by bots and users with bad intentions. On Omegle it was also forbidden to talk about anything 18+. To enforce this, the service introduced a monitored chat option and various features to limit abuse. The founder of the chat service also says that several people ended up in prison because of Omegle.
Despite those efforts to keep the chat service child-friendly, the idea persisted that Omegle was a place where abuse was rife. The platform therefore received a lot of criticism, especially during the corona crisis, when the service became more popular. Parents in particular called for a complete stop to the chat service, which pedophiles would eagerly use. The founder talks about “attacks” on his platform.
Central Park op slot
Brooks believes the call to stop the platform is unfair. “It would be like closing Central Park because crime occurs,” the man says. The fact is that even Central Park is closed at night, when it is at its most dangerous.
Who to today Omegle.com surfs, you can read the founder’s story there. The chat service is no longer available.