[reverse_no]

wow. i remember using omegle in 2010. the whole chat roulette craze. this guy dresses up the issue in some pretty overly dramatic and sentimental clothing… in reality this is the failure of yet another company that uses the old model. the model of the early internet where everything is free and everyone is anonymous. its just unviable and becomes less viable as the internet grows. captcha is broken… the old model is dead.

when you have a free service and broken captcha then you will be a magnet for crime, spam and you will hemorrhage money. maybe youll get advertisers if you sanitize the platform and now youve defeated the point anyway. or you can sell user data. at the end of the day people have to pay.

[Ridj48dhsnsh]

That's a depressing viewpoint.

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.

[reverse_no]

depressing that people have to pay for the services and goods that they use? well i do agree that its pretty depressing that captcha is broken. AI seems ever closer to displacing humans… in the mean time we have to pay for internet services

[system2]

Monthly users reaching 70 million. I doubt a basic server could handle that.

[codersfocus]

You’d be surprised what a well optimized server can do. Moores law hasn’t stopped. 70 million is a pretty low number, when modern $40 servers can easily do 10-100k requests per second.

[owenpalmer]

the site you are currently leaving a comment on operates on the old model. so far it's working pretty well.

[xelia]

Ironically it is technically VC backed

[ilc]

I wonder what it'll have to do to get to an IPO ;)

[seydor]

most significant internet growth was in the 2000s. It's not like some magical growth threshold crossed in 2010s, More and more of this audience was born internet-native too. It seems to be a cultural shift instead