[Deleted User 30863]

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Omegle is a chat website that connects you to a random person. By entering 'tags' prior to starting a chat, you can hope to get connected to people with shared interests. There are several tags that people in the cg/l community have used and most times I've tried it's been possible to get matched with someone else in the community.

But I've heard of many bad experiences with Omegle, and had some myself, so I wanted to make a post just advising caution about diving in to that chat site. Please note that I've only ever done text chat there, never video chat, but I imagine several of the points will still be valid.

So first off, there's no registration of any kind. Anyone can just access the site and start chatting. That means there's not even a basic barrier between you and the hordes on the internet. I'm not saying registration would solve all the issues, but it's worth keeping in mind that there's zero accountability there.

The lack of registration creates a totally anonymous chat between you and one other person. This makes it incredibly easy for people to misrepresent themselves. What do I mean by that? Well, it could be something as basic as their gender. I've met littles who claimed to be female but who turned out to be male. Not that there's anything wrong with boy littles, you guys rock. But I think we'd all agree that someone misrepresenting themselves isn't really cool. Obviously it wouldn't be horribly difficult to create a fake profile on most websites or groups, but something about the drop in-drop out chat on Omegle seems to make it much more common there.

The second way people misrepresent themselves is by lying about their age. And this brings me to my next point which is particularly important: Omegle, like some of the cg/l groups on kik messenger, has a lot of people under the age of 18. This throws up all kinds of legal issues for us adults.

To me, those are the two biggest points. But for a little or caregiver looking to have a quick chat and possibly make a new friend it might still sound appealing. The rest of the issues are a tad more subjective; that is, some people may prefer to chat in a particular way. It's just not for me, but I'll add them in here because I'm having a good old rant anyway.

A good percentage of the people you encounter there will want to talk about one thing only. It's basically an adult chat site for those people, so in most cases, your chance of a decent conversation is slim. If you want something 'quick and dirty', maybe you'll enjoy meeting some of the surely charming men (and it is mostly men I think, there's a definite gender imbalance) on there. But as someone who's ace and not interested in any of that stuff, it puts me off.

There are also many people whose first message is something along the lines of "hey baby, add my kik its: (kik username)". Honestly, I can't say enough that I do not recommend that, especially if you're using your real name or picture on your IM app. Remember, as above you have no idea who this person is. If the person won't agree to chat on the site for even a few lines, it makes you wonder why they bothered to go there in the first place really. Even worse, many of these are automated messages sent out by bots, so there's not even a real person sitting at the other end.

I know this was a really longwinded way to say what you already knew - be careful online - but I hope there was something you got out of it. I've given up trying to meet people on Omegle, although I do have one friend I met there some time ago that I'm still close with. If you do decide to dive in, just keep your wits about you. Take care everyone