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This makes me so mad, and it should make you mad too. Omegle isn't substantively different from Reddit or Discord or an MMORPG chat channel, but it's currently being dragged through the legal system while presumably the others are not.

The truth is, Omegle's real sin is being midsized. There's a real risk in being a certain-sized company. Large enough that suing you is likely to result in a payout, but small enough that you can't just absorb the lawsuit cost.



Shouldn't make you mad. Thats just how the nature of things go.

Basically, the hipster viewpoint is ironically correct - anything that gets popular turns to shit. Once you start making something that appeals to a broad reach of people, you start optimizing for the lowest common denominator of society.

Imagine if Omegle was structured in a way where you had to download an app, for linux specifically, and instead of a central website, you had to set up STUN servers to do direct peer to peer chat. This is far to complex for "normal" people, but it would be still around today, as well as much higher quality.

This is even true of software development. Think about this next time you hear someone say how they don't want to have to tweak settings to get Linux to work, and instead buy a Mac for some bullshit reason like battery life, not realizing they are buying into a system that is opposite in spirit of software development (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...).




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