A day on Chatroulette, the web's weirdest new outpost | Hacker News Reader

A day on Chatroulette, the web's weirdest new outpost

guardian.co.uk

43 pointsbensummers28 comments

My experience with Chatroulette:

  Naked guy
  Naked guy
  Guy singing
  Bored guy
  Bored guy
  Bored guy
  Girl clicking "next"
  Two guys laughing
  Bored guy
  Three girls, one saying "is that a boy or a girl?"
  Naked guy
  Goatse picture
  Naked guy

I think that if you "Next" for hours, something interesting happens, especially if you try to be more active chatting, talking, or trying to look attractive, or something like this.

Is it worth it? Not in the long run I bet, but it is one of this stuff that can give you an interesting short term experience.

ChatRoulette should start each connection with a vastly downsampled image which you can then advance to native resolution if you actually care to see what the rest of the pixels look like.

This should also be disableable, of course, as I imagine the risk that you will see something you didn't want to is part of the draw for a lot of users.

best idea ever. and the inevitable downfall of the service altogether.

I tried ChatRoulette for the first time by myself and experienced rejection at a rate faster than could possibly be had at any bar. As a chubby, unshaven 35 year-old, this did not surprise me. It's amusing to see the looks on people's faces as they're evaluating you.

Next time, at my wife's suggestion, I held our 11 month-old in full view of the camera. Pretty soon, one of the naked guys came up. The look of horror on his face as he quickly hit "next" was priceless. I don't think he had considered the idea that he would be showing himself off to a kid who just got his first teeth.

worth it for your kid?

What is your concern?

"Everybody wants to be entertained," he told me. With a look of disdain, he explained how most users simply want to consume - while far fewer are prepared to do something worth watching. "

As this thing gets more press and more people try it out, it will be severely diluted by people unwilling to produce. Folks who have traditionally spent their time on YouTube watching videos have nothing to contribute here, and decrease the overall quality of the service.

Perhaps adding categories would weed out the noise a bit. I'd love to randomly chat with someone on HN.

In that case, put some sort of contact info in your profile. I went to go send you an email, just to see what would happen, but the lack of contact didn't help anything.

touché

What I don't get is why he doesn't block the guys jerking off? If +5 people report the feed as offensive then blacklist the IP for a couple of hours or something like that. That would instantly improve the site's appeal a lot.

Apparently we need the reality to bark at us every so often, so that we could continue to enjoy our safe caves more

If the author thinks this is the "web's weirdest outpost", he obviously have never heard of /b/ (for which he should be thankful, by the way).

Startup idea: a combination of the best (worst?) bits of /b/ and chatroulette.

You can thank me when you've made your millions.

what do you think can haz cheezburgers is?

Mercifully free of pornography.

Weirdest NEW outpost.

I'm guessing most of the people on CR are also on /b/.

As for me, I really can't be bothered on both instances.

You should really read the linked article with an email from the founder, age 17. This kid has built a pretty impressive site, although I wouldn't really call it a business yet. He does host it on 7 servers and uses 7 gigabits of bandwidth to handle all of the video streams. The code optimizations he must have done to handle this are pretty impressive:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-found...

I bet Chris Hansen is already working on "To Catch a Predator: Chatroullette Edition".

I spent a very fun fifteen minutes on Chatroulette the other day. Every time a new chat started, I'd type "Hey! Haven't I seen on you To Catch a Predator?"

http://s.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/terminal01/2010/2/2/12/...

So do you figure combining that concept with recommendations a la StumbleUpon would work, or just be boring?

I suspect "everybody just wants to consume" could be it's downfall, that is, there would not be an even enough match between "consumers" and "producers" to provide suitable recommendations for everyone. Producers to be taken in general, for example perhaps more men would like to see women for cybersex than women would like to see men.

Introducing some kind of 'how interesting was that chat' rating would give users an incentive to liven things up; maybe the more interesting you are, the more you get connected to other interesting people.

['course, definitions of interestingness vary plenty. Maybe you leave that in as part of the fun; maybe you introduce some kind of categories -- e.g. slashdot-style +5 funny, -2 offensive]

"perhaps more men would like to see women for cybersex than women would like to see men"

So pitch it at a gay audience:)

The site appears to be down btw, no way to figure myself how odd it is...

Edit: it's down just form Italy. I hope it's a routing problem and not italian providers censoring this ASAP.

Edit #2: finally it worked, was just a routing problem.

Props to the author for a well written article.

should it be surprising to us that a place which offers anonymous voyeuristic nudity with basically no consequences appeals to a world in which pleasing ourselves and awkward desires is our driving goal in life?

i submit it should not.

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