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Omegle is shutting down 14 years after its creation. Here’s how the anonymous video chat site changed cybersex and sexual communication, for better or worse.
Picture this. It’s 2009. You’ve just finished school and you’re headed to your friend’s house because they have their own computer in their room which their parents don’t see. You sign on to a new website everyone’s been talking about: a chat site unlike anything made before, where you can video chat with total strangers, called Omegle. It’s exciting. You get to speak to people from countries you may not have ever been aware of. You fall about laughing with your friends as random people assign you dares through the computer screen and watch you act them out. You even make new friends from afar.
Started by a teenager in his bedroom at his parent’s house in Vermont, America, Omegle’s premise was simple: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a video chat with another person anywhere in the world so you could chat. You could easily skip to the next person, but you wouldn’t be able to go back. And it was super popular, with Omegle claiming it had millions of daily active users at its peak.
But today, 14 years on from its creation, Omegle has been shut down. In a public statement shared on the site, founder Leif K-Brooks says the site is no longer sustainable and he “doesn’t want to have a heart attack in his 30s.” Fair enough.
K-Brooks also shared in the statement that he created Omegle for people to make friends spontaneously, but the site soon became synonymous with anonymous digital sex instead. And if social media is anything to go by, that’s certainly what the public remembers the site for today. He added that Omegle’s anonymity was supposed to be a safety feature, but that soon paved an opportunity to shag around with strangers online and never have to talk to them ever again.
This side of Omegle, even if it wasn’t the creator’s initial vision for it, was a lot of fun. As a closeted queer teenager, Omegle was in my rotation of websites that allowed me to talk to women, and sometimes sexually connect with them, completely anonymously. It was hot to strip off with other women without exchanging names (kind of like a cyber one night stand) and because it was private, it felt safe.
“It was like a digital glory hole.”
27-year-old copywriter Hannah, who wishes to use her first name only, tells me she also has positive sexual experiences from using Omegle for sex. “When I first realised I was into kink, I was single and didn’t have the confidence to bring it up to casual partners in person. But I could talk about it on Omegle,” she tells Mashable.
Hannah was able to explore this side of herself and found that the anonymity involved with Omegle was part of the fun itself. “Knowing I could end up doing something with anybody at all was really fun. It was like a digital glory hole.”
Sex Educator Dee Whitnell tells Mashable that there’s a “hotness” to anonymous sex on the internet that comes from “this idea that you are being dangerous, that you’re doing something that is ‘naughty’ or ‘taboo’ and that you ‘shouldn’t be doing it’ and that’s completely valid.” They add that LGBTQ individuals are particularly drawn to the sexual side of Omegle and other sites where you can be intimate with strangers because “a lot of LGBTQ+ people they don’t have anywhere else in their life where they can do that.”
“For some people, it’s the first time that they can explore that side of themselves with some sort of ambiguity. People can’t see their face or identity and only see what they’ve allowed people to see. That’s why a lot of queer people say they had their first sexual experiences on Omegle.”
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This comes with dangers though. Whitenell explains that “you don’t necessarily know who the other person is, but also you don’t know how safe you are. You don’t know if you’re going to be recognised. You don’t know if somebody’s recording you and then they’re going to share that content. This is especially dangerous for LGBTQ+ people who are closeted, and risk being outed too.” Of course, you also never know how old the person on the other side of the video call is.
“You don’t necessarily know who the other person is, but also you don’t know how safe you are.”
Not everyone on Omegle was consenting to Omegle’s sexual side, either. It wasn’t exactly something you could opt in or out of. Because Omegle was created in 2009 and the internet was still pretty much the Wild West back then, there was a lack of age verification or reporting processes. Instead, just about anything was acceptable on the website.
Despite people making friends and even finding romantic connections just as the founder had hoped, the site soon became known for grooming, creepy older men preying on young people, cyberflashing, and general violations.
As the website is being memorialised on social media today, many Omegle users are recalling how often cyberflashing and sexual harassment would take place on the site, with tweets like “rip omegle, thoughts and prayers to all the 35 year old men i talked to when i was 14” and “seeing dong on omegle still a rite of passage for tweens” and “seeing unwarranted d*** on Omegle on a random Wednesday is a rite of passage.”
Those experiences have serious consequences. Over the years, Omegle has been heavily criticised for its associations with online sex abuse. In fact, the BBC reported that Omegle has been cited in over 50 cases against paedophiles who misused the site in the last couple of years. K-Brooks acknowledges this in his statement, claiming that Omegle “tipped off” police about some users who were paedophiles, and that they had thought the anonymity of the site to be an innate safety feature when the site was first created. Instead, that feature was exploited for nefarious purposes.
24-year-old rights assistant Katy* tells Mashable she was cyberflashed on Omegle as a teenager. “It always stuck with me. I was only 13 and the first penis I ever saw was on Omegle. He was so old. I just don’t think it should have happened,” she says.
“I was only 13 and the first penis I ever saw was on Omegle. He was so old. I just don’t think it should have happened,”
“It didn’t matter that Omegle was anonymous either. The interaction still scared me. I felt dirty like I’d actually had sex with him or something. And my friends at school weren’t sympathetic. They said I should have expected it because that’s what happens [on sites like Omegle].”
Being sexually harassed online, whether it’s on Omegle, or the more modern platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, is a prevalent issue. A report by the University of Leicester recorded 33 percent of women had been cyber flashed and a UN Women report found that 86 percent among 18-24-year-olds had experienced sexual harassment online, including over a third who had been sent unsolicited explicit images.
Yet, despite its very serious problems, people clearly love anonymous sex on the internet.
Sex on Omegle became such a staple of online sex culture that there’s an entire pornography category for it on Pornhub and xHamster, where porn performers literally act out the process of signing onto an Omegle-like website only to find a naked person on the other side, before mutual masturbation ensues. This category rakes in millions of views, showing how hot this “digital glory hole” can be for a lot of people.
Now, in 2023, websites are using AI to replicate the excitement of anonymous sex once captured on Omegle. It’s clear that it had a profound influence on sexual communication online. AI chatbot provider Bloom, tells Mashable that since its chatbot was launched at the end of September, users have exchanged more than 2.8 million erotic messages on the platform and 1,600 hours of audio messages have also been exchanged with users.
Meanwhile Chatroulette — which is based on the same model as Omegle — stands strong as their users doubled between 2019 and 2020 and they’re also using AI to expand their services.
If there’s anything we can take from this, it’s that people have a desire to talk dirty (and more) with strangers on the internet, whether you like it or not.
With so much abuse running rife on the site, Omegle shutting down was obviously the right call, but online sexual harassment did not start nor end with Omegle, and neither will anonymous cybersex.
Now that we’re more internet literate and safety conscious as a society, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have an unregulated social-spontaneity platform turned anonymous sex site made by an 18-year-old in his parent’s house ever again, and that’s certainly a good thing. But people’s natural talent for turning any internet service into a sexual one will always exist, Omegle or no Omegle.
If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.
Here’s how to contact Amazon Customer Service to answer all of your Black Friday questions.
UPDATE: Nov. 7, 2023, 8:32 a.m. EST This article has been updated to include details of how to contact Amazon customer service during Black Friday 2023.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the Black Friday chaos. You see a good deal and you immediately jump on it, without considering whether or not you actually need it. Don’t worry; we’re all guilty of impulse buys at this time of year — especially at Amazon. With 11 full days of holiday savings (and most likely some all-time low pricing) from Nov. 17 through Nov. 27, there are plenty of purchases to be had. So it’s no surprise that we often feel the need to get in touch with the online retailer to make changes to an order or return it to the seller.
Since contacting Amazon can be tricky at times, here are all the ways you can get in touch with their customer service for a smoother online shopping experience this holiday season:
This is probably the most common, and easiest, way to look for answers to common queries, such as those about Amazon’s return policies or information about international shipping. The page contains a whole library of questions that users can get answers to, including how to track packages or cancel orders. Your most recent purchases will pop up at the top of the page for easy navigation.
To access Amazon’s Customer Service Help Page, go to the website landing page and click on “Customer Service” in the top left of the screen.
Sometimes customer queries need to be worked through on a case-by-case basis, and the answers on the official website need to be more specific to offer any help to shoppers. In these cases, users can email [email protected] and explain their issues. Remember that contacting Amazon’s customer service via email might not be the best solution if you have an urgent question regarding Black Friday purchases, since customers are unlikely to get a prompt response.
Need a quicker replay? Call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331. When customers call this number, a bot picks up the phone and eventually connects them to Amazon staff, depending on the type of query that needs to be answered. It’s important to note that customers should have a cell phone number connected to their Amazon account. Customers must enter verification codes that will be messaged to their linked contact information before using this service. In other words, things can get a bit tricky if you’re sharing an account with someone else.
Real-time chatting with Amazon representatives is the most convenient way to get all your questions answered. To use the live chat feature, return to the Customer service help page and click on “Something else.” Another page opens with a list of more help options. Select “I need more help.”
Now the user has officially entered the chat. Type “Talk to associate” in the chat box, and out of all the available options, choose if you’d prefer to talk via chat or call. If you’re looking for immediate help with a Black Friday purchase — be it due to buyer’s remorse, a damaged package, an address change, etc. — this is your best bet to get your needs met.
If your questions aren’t that urgent, you can contact Amazon Customer Service at @amazonhelp on X, @amazon on Instagram, and www.facebook.com/Amazon on Facebook.
Elon Musk wants X to be an “everything app,” including a place for dating. He doesn’t understand that it was already that without him.
Twitter/X owner Elon Musk loves to announce lofty promises — and now he has one related to love itself: that X will soon be a dating app, as well as a replacement for LinkedIn, YouTube, and banks, among other things. In a recently leaked all-hands call, Musk said he wants X to be an “everything app.”
What Musk appears to not know is that Twitter is — or at least, was, before he took over and traffic and revenue crashed — already a fine place to meet people. I should know, because I met my partner on Twitter back in 2021:
And we’re not the only ones; check out Mashable’s culture reporter Tim Marcin on people who found love on Twitter. Musk is also ignoring the crowded dating app market, and the few that edge out above the main players like Tinder and Bumble.
Maybe Musk doesn’t care about these examples because he has nothing to do with them. He seems to only (in my opinion) appreciate ideas that exit his brain like a muffled fart.
What’s more is that the changes Musk has made to Twitter in the past year have made the platform worse. As Mashable’s Chris Taylor wrote in a story about Musk tanking Twitter in the last 12 months, Musk attempted to silence his critics while elevating conspiracy theorists; mass laid off employees, leading to a class-action lawsuit; and made users pay for verification, spurring confusion and even more disinformation.
If anything, dating is now harder to do on Twitter. Musk altered the DM settings so those who don’t pay can’t message you (though you can change it back). Daily sign-ups and active minutes have both dropped, meaning fewer people are making accounts and users are spending less time on the app. And, personally, I’ve seen an influx of spam and bot accounts following and DMing me and replying to others; they’re not exactly great dating candidates.
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Meanwhile, Musk appears to care more about people calling him “cis” than the fact that Twitter’s valuation is nosediving. Turning Twitter — sorry, “X” — into a dating app or “everything app” doesn’t make sense and doesn’t even seem feasible at this current moment.
I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if this goal of an everything app never comes to pass. Musk has made false promises in the past, and this could be just another one. Over the years, for example, he has claimed that Tesla would soon produce fully autonomous vehicles; that has yet to happen. This year, Musk also claimed that his brain implant device company Neuralink was preparing for human trials after testing on monkeys, and that no monkey died as a result of the trial. This isn’t true. Wired reported that some monkeys did die in Neuralink trials, after experiencing torturous conditions due to the implant.
Twitter was far from perfect before Musk took over, but it was the “digital town square” where folks would meet and chat. It’s only degraded in the past year, and if Musk thinks he can revive it with dating app functions, he’s mistaken. Honestly, just download Tinder.
This week Europe was treated to another show of the mutability of tech after Meta, the microtargeting ad empire formerly known as Facebook, announced it would be launching […]
The dating site feels outdated, spammy, and confusing to navigate. Zoosk’s prices are competitive, but the features are not.
Dating sites and apps are a great way to meet people, but with so many out there these days, finding the site with the right features for you is pretty important if you’re not keen on wasting your time. There’s Tinder‘s famous easy swiping, Match‘s longer profiles for the more serious daters, Hinge’s prompts that help the conversation going — the list goes on.
So what about a dating site that can take you back in time?
To be clear, we’re not talking about actual time travel, so much as the immediate burst of Facebook-circa-2010 energy that Zoosk offers upon loading up its website or app. That’s courtesy of an interface and features that make it clear this dating site was one of the first Facebook apps back in December 2007.
While the other longstanding online dating players like Match, eharmony, and OkCupid have managed to (mostly) update to stay current and somewhat fresh, Zoosk’s initial draw of making international dating simple and a matching users with a unique algorithm feels more and more gimmicky and unrealistic as the years go by.
Allegedly, there are 40 million users on Zoosk across 80 different countries. If you’re not trying to see the same 10 profiles within a 20 mile radius, these are pretty appealing numbers.
The age range of users seems to vary widely, too — from my two weeks on the app, I saw profiles from 21 year olds to 51 year olds. Users as young as 18 can sign up, and my age filter maxed out at 51, though users up to age 98 can also make accounts — I’m unsure why I wasn’t able to adjust my age filters any higher. With that said, I’m not sure this app is great for older crowds. I’m in my mid-20s and I found Zoosk’s interface to be kind of confusing. There are definitely better dating apps for seniors out there.
When it comes to diversity of options for LGBTQ+ users, Zoosk could be doing a whole lot better. For starters, if you’re interested in more than one gender, you’ll have to take it up with Zoosk customer service, as there’s no built-in option to select that preference on your profile. They’ll then have to set you up with an additional profile. If you don’t want to go through that process, you’ll only get these four choices upon sign up:
I’d just like to take a moment to speak directly to Zoosk — baby, it’s 2022. I should not have to email your customer service team to a) change my preferences to switch my profile from seeing men to seeing women or b) ask you to pretty please allow me to see both — gasp — men and women at the same time. That should just be an integrated feature on your site, and there’s no reason to have a needless hoop for any bi- or pan-sexual users to jump through. Speaking of, might be cool to recognize nonbinary people exist, too!
Forty million users is an impressive user base. But that impressive user base needs to be taken with a grain of salt: Dead or fake profiles seem to make up a decent portion of that 40 million. Now, Zoosk does have a huge collection of success stories on its social media and blog (though the latter hasn’t been updated since 2020). If the person of your dreams doesn’t message you back, you can tell yourself it’s probably because they haven’t logged on in two years.
If you’re looking for more accurate numbers on how many users are actually using Zoosk, there aren’t many out there. However, on The Date Mix, a blog owned by Zoosk, an article updated in 2021 mentioned that Zoosk has 3 million active users. During my two weeks, I saw a couple of repeat profiles pop up, leading me to believe the lower number is likely the more truthful one.
If you are wary of accidentally flirting with a bot, Zoosk does offer several profile verifications, including photo, Facebook, Twitter, and phone number verification. It’s not uncommon to come across profiles that have none of these, but I would say about half of the users I came across were at least photo verified. Still, the chances that you’ll get messages from clearly fake profiles aren’t slim. Before I’d put in any pictures or my name on my profile, I had 34 people who were into me. While I’d like to believe my charm is just that potent, likely, it was bots.
It makes sense that there are a lot of fake profiles because making an account on Zoosk is easy and takes at most five minutes.
Here’s how it works: When you first log on, you can decide if you want to create an account from an email, Google, or Facebook account. Unlike more involved websites like eharmony or EliteSingles, you won’t have to slog through a long questionnaire. Instead, you’ll be prompted to fill out information that’s pretty standard dating app fare: your location, preferences, education, ethnicity, religion, and so on. You’ll also be prompted to pick a username, and if you can’t think of any, Zoosk provides some creative options.
You also have the option to fill out a short bio (“My Story”), and some ice breakers about your ideal first date, and who you imagine your perfect match to be. Those prompts were a bit too on the nose for my taste — I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to glean about potential compatibility from someone who imagines our first date to be “enjoying a meal together” or whose perfect match is “happy.” Other apps like Bumble, Hinge, and OkCupid have mastered the art of the more specific prompts that actually might reveal something about someone’s personality, but I guess Zoosk’s are good jumping off points for someone very new to the online dating game.
Finally, you have the option to fill out your interests when signing up, which was maybe the most early-Facebook the app ever felt, mostly due to the fact you chose your interests from the classic Facebook group pages. Again, knowing that you and a potential partner both have an interest in basketball, Rihanna, or FarmVille (the Facebook JUMPED out here), might be nice, but something about this feature doesn’t give the sense it’s inspiring a ton of robust conversation. If anything, it seems like Zoosk is holding on to the remnants of what used to be a winning formula, and aging itself in the process.
At this point, you can also choose to verify your profile and let other users know you’re a real person. As mentioned above, you have a few choices about how to do this, with the most extensive being the photo verification. First, you need to have a picture uploaded onto your page.
Then, you have to hold your smartphone at arm’s length and press record when prompted. It’s not as effortless as taking a selfie, but Zoosk wants to know if you’re an actual person holding a phone and not just placing a photo in front of its camera. The site will then ask you to turn your head to the right and then left, as if you’re taking a mugshot. Your photo is then sent to administrators, who will make sure that your “video” lines up with the one on your profile. Although it takes some time, you can now rest easy knowing your matches are real (or at least verified) when you see that green check mark on their photo.
For all the issues I’ve had with Zoosk feeling out of touch, I will say that the website does better than the app. You know when you open an old app you downloaded in like 2013, and the font is huge and doesn’t fill out your whole phone screen? The Zoosk app doesn’t do that, but it somehow still captures that energy. I don’t know if it’s the overly simple color-blocked header on pages or the basic font that looks like it was pulled straight from Microsoft Word, but this app feels old.
And despite the simplicity, it’s difficult to navigate — I say this as a person who has never found a single other dating app that difficult to get around after a day or two of using it. Between the Connections, Online Now, Carousel, Views, Smart Pick, and (inexplicably) the Live stream pages, I felt overwhelmed and confused every time I wanted to look at people’s profiles.
The website, though in some need of an update, looks much cleaner and more of this time. Something about the way buttons are highlighted, the spaces between page titles, and the way user profiles look makes it feel like this website has actually been updated post-2012.
There were moments when I saw clearly the how the site was superior. When clicking on the app message page, I would be hit with the words, “283 people are into you!” and there is actually no world where that’s not overwhelming.
On the desktop message page, however, I was notified that I had “69 messages and 176 greetings,” which was still a lot, but felt much more manageable (though the math didn’t add up between the app and the site, which was interesting). Still, if I wanted to, on the site I could decide to only pay attention to the people that had bothered to write something out instead of those who sent just a heart or smiley face. The specificity helped, and made the entire experience feel less spammy.
So if it’s confusing and outdated, why would anyone use Zoosk? Well, its “Behavioral Matchmaking” algorithm is supposed to be great. Basically, the more people you like and pass on, the more Zoosk learns about what kind of profiles you’re looking for. This used to be a novel idea, but these days, it seems that’s how most dating app algorithms work.
One place you can teach the app is the Carousel feature. It functions similarly to Tinder with swiping to send a like, pass, or say maybe, but you don’t get to see beyond one picture on the person’s profile when making your choice. I get this is supposed to be the more “rapid fire” section, but it felt restrictive for no real reason. If I wanted a barebones Tinder experience, I’d go on Tinder to swipe on people who didn’t bother to fill out their profile. I also had to sit through short video ads every few swipes, which again, made it feel less like a serious dating app and more like a cheap, old mobile game downloaded on an iPod Touch.
You can also inform the app through your daily “SmartPick” choices, which is where the algorithm is really supposed to kick in to high gear, combining profile preferences and how you interact with other user accounts to find your perfect matches. Limiting to 10 daily picks made this one of the most simple and effective ways to look for other users on the app. If I were a regular Zoosk user, I imagine I’d just bother checking this page to avoid sinking hours of my time.
With that said, I didn’t see any verification checks on the profiles presented to me through the SmartPicks. I don’t think it’s because they were all on unverified, but because the profiles themselves were laid out differently in this section, and the verification checks didn’t make it over, which is a huge oversight when a website has its share of fake profiles.
As I mentioned, there’s a million (seven) main pages to interact with on Zoosk, which means it’s beyond easy to rack up notifications. I am the type of person who can’t stand when I’m unable to make the little red bubble go away from any app I use, whether it be iMessage or my email. As a result, Zoosk became my personal hell.
Let’s start with the “Views” page. What I have learned is I have no interest in knowing who has viewed my profile, especially if they’ve not interacted with it, because it leads to so many unnecessary notifications. Some apps have the (usually paid) feature of showing you who has liked you, which feels like a much better version of seeing your views. Ultimately, I am not a YouTube video, I don’t care about my view count.
Next, the push notifications. I got a notification that someone was “curious” about me, and I still don’t know what the hell that means. I got notifications about profile views, when I had a connection, when my SmartPicks were ready, when people who I’d never exchanged a single message with wanted to meet me, and so on. There are two kinds of push notifications I want with a dating app: when someone matches with me, and when someone sends me a message. Simply put, it was way too much and made the entire process feel less engaging.
You don’t have to match with people on Zoosk to send and receive messages. Zoosk even offers some pre-written messages to help you get the ball rolling. However, you do have to have a subscription, and thus pay money, to message most users. You can respond to any premium messages you receive for free, but for most messages you’ll receive, you have to pay to see what was said and respond.
Obviously, that presents a problem for ever clearing out your notifications if you want to continue using this app for free.
One part of messaging that didn’t cost money (at least for the first and only time I tried it) was Super Send, which allows you to send a mass message to a bunch of users to get some conversations going. If you don’t think about too hard, this sounds like it could be nice for making a connection, and if you think about it a little more, it sounds awfully similar to a spam message.
Yes, it can take a lot of patience and effort to start talking to someone you really hit it off with. But that patience and effort is kind of essential for making an authentic connection. Sending a pre-written “Want to chat sometime?” selected from a bulleted list doesn’t go a long way when you’re trying to intentionally date and get to know people.
For most parts of the app, such as liking people that have viewed your profile, matching with your SmartPicks, and messaging users (as mentioned above), or use the integrated “Great Dates” video chatting, you have to be a paying member of Zoosk. So what exactly does that cost you?
One month membership: $14.99
Three month membership: $24.99
Six month membership: $74.99
Compared to other apps, Zoosk’s prices aren’t outrageous — in fact, they’re cheaper in many cases. One month of OkCupid will cost you $14.99 too, one month of Hinge $34.99, and one month of Match can run you close to $50. What’s more is Zoosk’s prices have gone down in the past couple of years. However, its subscription fees would be way more competitive, if it had the features and user base these other apps and sites have, to back up what it’s trying to sell.
OkCupid and Hinge both have fully functional free versions, and Match has a user base that knows it’s looking for something serious. Zoosk feels confused in comparison, with its swiping feature and quick sign up that make it seem casual, along with its space for a full profile and marketing about finding love that make it seem serious. Having users pay to experience most of the app also lends an air that this is not the place for hookups or uncommitted dating.
But it’s not clear if that is 100 percent the case, and there are way more bot profiles than on the other websites. When there’s no straightforward messaging as to what you’re even supposed to be paying for, it makes you wonder why you would pay in the first place.
It used to be that much of the app was free, and you could use Zoosk coins to pay and access special features. Now, you have to subscribe to use many features, and you can pay extra for coins.
With coins, you can “buy” matches virtual gifts, browse anonymously, and see read receipts (though you do need a subscription on top of using coins to do this last item.)
You can also use coins if you’re feeling impatient — the “Boost” feature puts your profile front and center for all users in your area to spike your views (and hopefully your matches), but each boost costs 100 Zoosk Coins.
Here’s what that means in real money:
180 coins = $19.95
480 coins = $39.95
1800 coins = $99.95
To Zoosk’s credit, coin prices haven’t gone up in the past few years, and the same can’t be said for other sites and apps prices in the same time frame. However, the very existence of coins to access features on top of a paid subscription does feel like a rip off in and of itself.
Outside of the app experience, it’s important to note that Zoosk has run into some legal trouble. In 2020, they faced a negligence suit after a leak of 30 million users’ private data. Spark Networks, the company that owns Zoosk, had sent emails to those affected by the leak, but some users feel it was not within a reasonable time frame. It’s been reported that the original notice sent to affected users stated that Zoosk was unaware of the breach until it was publicly reported.
Zoosk’s pricing structure is on par with other dating sites, but not competitive enough considering all of its flaws, especially when it comes to its subscriptions and coins system. While paying for upgrades makes sense for “freemium” games like Clash Royale, Pocket Frogs, and The Simpsons: Tapped Out, it just doesn’t always make sense for a dating site — especially one that’s essentially making users pay to weed through tons of seemingly dubious profiles.
To add insult to injury, this app doesn’t have the active user bases of other options out there. To be fair, every dating app has its share of problems with bogus and inactive users — it just seems like they’re more prevalent here.
It also never felt entirely clear who this app was for, which seems to make it a subpar time for everyone. In my experience, the best apps are the ones that know they’re for casual dating or serious dating or even something in between, and fully lean in to that identity with features that cater to those experiences.
Zoosk, on the other hand, wants to be the best of all worlds, but ended up feeling like the mediocre option for most. Sure, there seem to be some people who’ve genuinely found love on the app, but it’s still hard to name it a top choice for anyone. All I can really imagine is if you’re opposed to the idea of being on a Match Group-owned app, Zoosk is technically there. Just don’t expect it to wow you.
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Author Stephen King is once again heckling Elon Musk. This time it is over the Twitter name change to “X.”
Stephen King is once again publicly calling out Elon Musk and how he’s running X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
What is King blasting Musk for this time? The “X” name itself.
“This X shit’s got to go,” posted King on Thursday. “#ChangeItBack”
And by “change it back,” King is referring to the social media platforms former name, Twitter.
King has been a frequent critic of Musk since his takeover of the platform last year. In fact, this isn’t even the first time he mocked Musk’s name change. However, this time King is specifically calling on Musk to change the name back.
Unlike Musk’s many other critics, however, the X owner has previously signaled that he’s a fan of King and his work. This has previously led to back-and-forth exchanges between the two on the platform.
King’s words appear to have some weight with Musk, as he previously haggled with King publicly on the platform as what a fair price would be for X Premium, the paid subscription service then-known as Twitter Blue. Musk offered an $8 per month price to King as a counteroffer after proposing a higher number. King scoffed at the idea of paying for a blue verification badge at all, which led to Musk gifting the author with an entirely free Twitter Blue subscription.
Musk is obviously not going to change his mind on the “X” name because of this call-out from King. However, perhaps Musk will reply and provide King with some sort of counter offer like he did the last time. Maybe King, and only King, will be able to keep his twitter.com profile URL if and when Musk ever gets around to finally moving the site to the X.com domain name entirely?
Sony’s new PS5 model is, indeed, slightly smaller than the original, as some new photos confirm.
Sony appears to have fulfilled its promise of making a smaller PlayStation 5.
In photos posted to X by user @phantompainss, what appears to be the new PS5 Slim can be seen next to the original 2020 model of the console. Sadly, the X post has been deleted, but reposted screenshots of it can be seen at The Verge and across the social media landscape.
To no one’s surprise, the new PS5 does appear to have a smaller form factor than the famously large OG model.
To be more specific, the PS5 Slim looks to be about an inch or two shorter than the original while also being slightly slimmer. It’s not a huge difference, but its tinier footprint may be beneficial for folks who don’t have a lot of space. The detachable disc drive that can be slapped onto the digital-only PS5 Slim does add a bit of awkward bulk at the bottom of the console (when positioned vertically), but that’s to be expected.
Interestingly, according to The Verge, it looks like you need to connect your PS5 Slim to the internet for a (hopefully) one-time verification when attaching the disc drive to the console. We don’t have confirmation of this yet, but it shouldn’t require an internet connection to use every time you boot it. It’s most likely just for initial authorization, but hey, weirder things have happened.
The PS5 Slim launches in November. The version with a disc drive costs $499 while the version without one costs $449.
When X (formerly Twitter) launched paid subscription verification, Mistress Rouge, a professional dominatrix, hoped that it would help her advertise to new clients. But paying for the service […]
