Omegle, One of the Last Remnants of the Internet’s Wild-West Era, Has Shut Down

Omegle, a video chatting service that matched strangers with one another, has closed its virtual doors. For 14 years, the website served as a rite of passage for young people at sleepovers to connect with “randos,” but the anonymity that made it so novel also opened the door to bad actors.

The closure comes in the wake of a lawsuit that alleged the service matched a woman with a predator that sexually abused her for years. She originally sought $22 million in damages, and the two parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. The site shuttered two days after the settlement. The abuser in question is now behind bars in Canada.

According to the BBC, Omegle was mentioned in dozens of cases against alleged pedophiles. When the website was in operation, it claimed it was for people 18 or older — 13 or older with a parent’s permission — but there was no age verification in place on the website.

In a farewell message, Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks said that there was moderation “behind the scenes,” performed by both human and AI actors. If there were moderators, they must’ve been volunteers, though, since court documents showed that K-Brooks had been the site’s only employee since it started.

K-Brooks also said that he and the moderators supposedly collected information that they then used to tip-off law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in cases involving the site. He claimed that some of those “evildoers” are now “rotting behind bars” because of evidence Omegle gathered.

Though K-Brooks is shutting down the site voluntarily (“Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.”), he clearly seemed to be feeling sorrow and even anger about doing so.

He opined about the internet that inspired Omegle, one that “opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and vibrant world” than he’d ever experienced. K-Brooks said the platform was supposed to create a place where strangers could connect with each other and explore different cultures, ease loneliness, and receive impartial advice. He warned against the commodification of the web, writing, “the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption.”

Omegle had some major unaddressed safety concerns that contributed to its demise, but K-Brooks was right about one thing: the internet of the ’90s and ’00s — the one of web rings and guest books, of pixel art and chat rooms — is byte-by-byte falling into memory. Gone are the days of GeoCities and Angelfire, when the point was finding like-minded individuals to share your passions without algorithms and advertising. As of last year, six websites alone generated more than 50% of all internet traffic, making it a less interesting, lively, mysterious, and yes, treacherous place than ever before.

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Omegle’s closure follows widespread conversations concerning personal and national safety on social media platforms. Researchers said that hate speech on X, formerly known as Twitter, has worsened; Utah is suing TikTok over its deleterious effect on teen’s mental health; and the EU slapped Meta and other tech “gatekeepers” with data privacy regulations.