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Comment by woleium | Hacker News Reader

Back to Chatroulette then? Having not used either platform, what’s the difference?

Back to whatsapp and other encrypted services whereby the corporate overlord can plead ignorance of how thier systems are used. Omegle didnt evolve to meet the new standard: dont connect people. Let them do that themselves. Then you cannot be blamed when the wrong two people meet via your system.

Can you meet people randomly on any of those services? That would be an interesting feature.

No, but you can join massive "private" groups and find rando people yourself.

Is it anonymous?

Is HN? What degree of anonymity qualifies?

We were talking about substitutes for Omegle, so that degree of anonymity.

ome tv, and monkey app both require sign up

WeChat has a shake feature, also a people near me feature. I think telegram also has a location based feature.

At least in the country where I live the "people near me" features have been removed/blocked from WeChat/Zalo/Telegram because they are overwhelmingly (like 99% of the time) used for prostitution.

Prostitution happens over WA, SMS, plain old phone calls and everything under the sun.

They don't seem to go after the communication channels, they go after the discovery mechanisms.

"People near me" is sort of the opposite of Omegle.

What I got from a quick search, the order was:

* Omegle started with anonymous one-on-one text chats

* Chatroulette launched ~half a year later

* Omegle copied Chatroulette ~half a year after that

I've not used either one so I don't know if there was more to it. Does explain how I knew about Chatroulette but not this one, even though people up above were talking about how it was an original idea.

We built a website over a year ago https://ehmeh.com/ In there you can video chat with multiple people, similar to Omegle. The difference may be that the video chat is in ASCII and the connection is done in WebRTC, fun alternative.

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