Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

Omoggle enables one stranger to “dominate” another in a contest of looks, which in online slang, is called mogging. It uses facial recognition to analyse and score the faces of competitors between one and 10. Omoggle’s ecosystem is based on Omegle, a now defunct site that randomly matched strangers for video-based online chats.

“It’s not [scored] by looks, but it’s like, how your head is shaped, how your face is shaped,” said Amz.

A week later, Amz had already competed in hundreds of mog-offs, along with some of the biggest UK streamers, emulating a trend that began in the US. On Tuesday, the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform Twitch got onboard, changing their rules to allow for “participation in current trends”, such as Omoggle. Previously, its community guidelines had prohibited the use of websites that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed, because of the risks of accidentally exposing its users to harmful content.

To decide on a mog-off winner, Omoggle uses something called the PSL scale. The letters stand for “Perceived Sexual Market Value,” but originally, they represented three incel sites: PUAhate.com, Sluthate.com and Lookism.net. These online forums encouraged young men to develop an obsession with their physical appearance. For some it was nihilistic, and seemed to promote resentment against women who were perceived to only value physical attractiveness in men. For others, the goal was to maximise their potential attractiveness, known as “looksmaxxing”.

On Omoggle, which has thousands of concurrent players at any given moment, you get points for winning or losing each match. You are then assigned a status level on the mogging scale in a chess-style Elo ranking system. This scale is an adaptation of the usual manosphere rankings that have “subhumans” at the bottom, different tiers of “normie” in the middle, and “chads” on top. Omoggle is mostly similar, except subhuman has become “sub3”, and a new category of “molecule” has been added beneath that.

Dr Paul Marsden, a chartered psychologist with the British Psychology Society, specialises in how emerging technologies affect people’s wellbeing, young people in particular. He is quick to point out that the PSL system is “nonsense”, and thinks it is part of a wider shift in society towards quantification.

“The world is changing, so what do I stand for?” is the question on people’s minds, said Marsden. “Some people move to numbers, some people move to religion.”

He said older generations should avoid a moral panic and try to be aware of the ironic approach young people can take towards things that might seem outlandish to others. “Gen Z meme-ify everything. I think it’s fabulous that they’re treating contemporary life with humour,” he said.

Earlier this week, as Omoggle went viral, Twitch began warning streamers that their guidelines prohibited “randomised video chat services”. Their issue wasn’t with mogging per se, but the difficulty in moderating content on streams when they are used as a platform for a less strictly moderated app.

In their announcement on Tuesday, Twitch encouraged caution around the use of such sites, but said they would continue to be allowed on the platform, “to give you more choice around the content you stream and allow for participation in current trends”.

Addressing the potential for explicit content to appear as random users of the third party app are matched, Twitch recommended that its users “quickly remove” themselves if that situation arises by “switching scenes and not engaging further”.

A Twitch spokesperson said its aim was to empower creators while protecting them from harm. “We’ll continue to enforce against content from randomised video chat sites if the content itself violates our guidelines by featuring sensitive or otherwise prohibited content.”

Amz, who gloats about being on a “200-win streak”, said he didn’t think Omoggle was harmful. “I don’t think anyone takes it seriously.”

While mog-offs are mostly done for entertainment online, many take the underlying philosophy of looksmaxxing seriously.

“I would say the culture is honestly a good thing,” said Nicholas Graff, a 16-year-old from Iowa whose Omoggle video went viral. “Like maximising your looks. It might be degrading to some people but overall, I don’t mind it.”

Some influencers have spoken out against the trend as it develops in the UK. “Every generation has their own version of looksmaxxing,” said a TikToker called Thoka in a recent video. “But this is too far.

“I don’t tell men how to be men, but this ain’t it. How can people get so jobless that their version of entertainment is going on websites to do mog-offs,” he continued. “Go touch grass.”