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You paint a wonderful vision, but it'd also include Americans telling you how great Trump is and how they can't wait for him to get rid of Mexicans, Arabic men telling you about how it's totally fine to marry a 12 year old and for her to bear their children, French people going on about how muslims should all be imprisoned, etc ...

Of course if you're black, a woman, gay, or any other minority they'll be happy to insult and harass you for their entertainment.

And not to forget all the very mundane people who don't have much to tell you about except for their mind numbing day labor job and how they can't take care of their sick children.

The world is much less poetic and open minded than many techno utopians would like to think.

Well, the reason is simple.

A lot of middle- and upper class people expect to talk to middle- and upper class people in other countries.

And in that case, you’d likely get people living by the Knigge, and you’d get awesome results.

Sadly, our society has thrown out etiquette in the recent times.

One interesting long term experiment along the same lines provides the data point that if you have a couple million participants over a century or so, skew a bit older on average, eliminate anonymity, and erect a rather high IQ/financial barrier to entry, amateur radio is both much better behaved than most expect yet what little misbehavior exists is incessantly gossiped about.

It's an interesting data point for sure, but I'd argue the prerequisites you listed make the experiment quite different.

Better behaved in the sense that most everyone follows etiquette. But I wouldn't expect deep conversation there, unless it's about antenna design.

"The world is much less poetic and open minded than many techno utopians would like to think".

A short read on news stories or youtube videos reminds me of that. I'm nearly always disappointed. I'm one of those techno utopians. I had great hope for the internet 20 years ago. You know, folks broadening their minds, learning things, not being so racist, finding similarities between places, and so on. And while they have, to an extent, I'm still sorely disappointed.

It's more that these technologies have just widened the gulf between people who already cared about those techno utopian ideals, and the ones who never will under any circumstances.

I know what you're getting at, but the generalisations in your comment are astounding.

Wait, which part is bothering you?

The one third of girls in the Arab region who marry before their 18th birthday? [0]

Or the 36% (currently) of Americans who support Trump's policies? [1]

Or the roughly 30% of French people who support a presidential candidate [2] whose father and previous party leader was fined for asserting that gassing chambers in world war 2 were just a small historical detail? [3]

Not sure the right thing is astounding you here.

[0]: http://www.prb.org/pdf13/child-marriage-arab-region.pdf

[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/clinton-leads-trump-5-points-reute...

[2]: http://www.sudradio.fr/Politique/Sondage-Marine-Le-Pen-au-2n...

[3]: http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2016/04/06/jean-mari...

> but it'd also include Americans telling you how great Trump is and how they can't wait for him to get rid of Mexicans,

> Or the 36% (currently) of Americans who support Trump's policies? [1]

You are making a shortcut. There are probably various reasons why people favor a candidate, and you should not underestimate the "I hate the other one even more" factor.

> French people going on about how muslims should all be imprisoned

This is a preposterous statement. Even the FN's proposed policies is not about putting folks in prison, but to make them leave the country if they had the power to do so. Plus, French prisons are already over-capacity and most prison sentences are not applied because of that. Do you know what you are talking about or do you read tabloids?

Just a French guy who's lived 10 years in the US here. Yeah, they don't want to send the arabic kids to prison, they want to send them back to where they come from. Oh wait, they were born in France. Well, they want to send them somewhere, that's for sure.

I believe we may have gotten drunk together after a HN Kansai meetup last year, but my memory of the night's hazy.

> Just a French guy who's lived 10 years in the US here

Yeah, you're probably the best person to talk about France then.

Just remember about 10% of citizens have been voting for FN for the past 30 years with little evolution one way or another (it has been getting a little more votes since the leader isn't the openly racist founder anymore, which is actually a good sign isn't it?). Also, judging someone on one of their parents is very bad form, would you also criticise people for voting for a candidate whose mother was a playmate?

The real difference, the reason why they are getting better scores than they used to, is that most moderate people are stopping voting altogether because the moderate parties are disappointing everyone is every way.

10% of citizens is too little IMO to generalise as "the French", especially if you're not even living in France.

> Also, judging someone on one of their parents is very bad form

Come on, she took over her dad's party very happily, you know very well that this argument doesn't apply here.

As far as popularity goes, we'll see what happens next year.

It seems that in your eagerness to comment, you missed on the fact that my original post never said that all French people supported FN - just that the French population includes a non trivial subset who do.

> Yeah, you're probably the best person to talk about France then.

I'm glad there are people on this forum who are the best person to talk about anything!

>Yeah, they don't want to send the arabic kids to prison, they want to send them back to where they come from. Oh wait, they were born in France. //

That makes them French, not Arabic then.

The problem is somewhere in that distinction I imagine.

That the French wouldn't be so bothered if people came to France to be French and adopt the local manners and attitudes; instead people seemingly are coming to the liberal and liberated countries with a distant goal of making them as backward and oppressive as the countries they left/fled.

> That makes them French, not Arabic then. The problem is somewhere in that distinction I imagine.

Yes, precisely. To recap very roughly: France brought in a lot of cheap labor from North Africa (a lot of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria) to rebuild and develop at low cost after World War 2. These immigrants were housed together, at the periphery of large cities (what are now known as "banlieues"). These neighborhoods still exist, and a lot of the children and grandchildren of these immigrants still live there. These areas are typically poorer than the cities they're next to, have poor education, higher crime rates, etc.

Of course, they're French citizens, but they don't feel particularly French because the rest of French society tends to look down on them and segregate them. And they might speak a bit of Arabic at home (or not), but they don't really feel Arabic because, well, they've spent their whole life in France, and even if they go to Tunisia/Morocco/Algeria/etc. a few weeks in the summer to visit extended family, people there don't see them as belonging there anymore.

It's a thorny situation.

You are not telling the whole story though. Immigrant workers in the first place were not supposed to stay forever but the whole situation changed when Mitterand introduced the Regroupement Familial to make it OK for their families to come and live in France. That accelerated the movement of people and that certainly did not help for them to integrate.

Yup, that's a good thing to point out. Certainly not the smartest move.

> That the French wouldn't be so bothered if people came to France to be French and adopt the local manners and attitudes;

Maybe the non-assimilators wouldn't come to France if the French had not gone to North Africa and convinced them that France is awesome[1] in the first place.

1. Majority of France's Muslim population comes from it's ex-colonies.

Holy shit, can't believe you're getting downvoted (comment is grey atm) just for pointing out France's colonial past. I don't know what's up with HN today.

I guess he doesn't get downvoted for stating that France had a colonial past, but for implying that the colonial past is an excuse for not integrating into the society you live in.

Not an excuse; rather, a contributing cause. Failed cultural integration is a global symptom, not a collective of individuals who consciously refuse to integrate.

what do you mean by not integrating?

part of the colonisers spiel to the colonised is aboyut human rights, freedom and liberty.

>> instead people seemingly are coming to the liberal and liberated countries with a distant goal of making them as backward and oppressive as the countries they left/fled.

I see this line in "liberal" countries and find it hypocritical.

Part of being liberal is the freedom to adopt any legal practices that makes you happy. If "liberal" countries think XYZ practices are backward or oppressive, make it illegal and file cases against people violating it.

Asking others to follow unwritten rules isn't fair.

Many liberals are unhappy that immigrants haven't integrated and by this, they want immigrants to adopt language, dress, food and religion(mainly Atheism) of the majority. It is hard to make these things illegal and still call yourself as a liberal.

>Part of being liberal is the freedom to adopt any legal practices that makes you happy. //

Yes, sort of.

Let's take a slightly extreme example - liberal societies outlaw slavery. Suppose I come to France and want to keep slaves; how hypocritical of the French to talk about liberté and not allow me to keep the slaves that I wish to keep.

I'm not sure it's true hypocrisy; it's just a innate part of liberalism that there are limits to the liberties allowed.

well it is outlawed, which mean illegal.. its illegal because it violates some aspect of freedom, liberalism or human rights..

so it is not hypocritical.

It is hypocritical to claim liberalism but outlaw a person right to wear clothing of their choice in public areas...

> The world is much less poetic and open minded than many techno utopians would like to think.

The problem isn't the world, it's that you're assuming the rest of the world (including the western one) shares your values and aspirations of what should and should not be down to minute details.

I've talked to plenty of perfectly nice individuals on Omegle in text mode. But it's not like people want to talk about deep topics right of the bat or at all. Perverts aren't to blame for that not happening. Given random people most won't even know as much as you do about their country's situation and whatnot. A 1 to 1 chat with a stranger is a really bad format for that kind of conversations too.

What you can do is, say, talk to a Syrian refugee about cats or pizza.

I'm curious if this issue could be resolved by moderation and reviews so that people that want to talk about similar things are paired up and trolls are blocked/isolated.

Or a rating system like how Uber works. I mean the idea of getting into a car with a random stranger isn't that awesome of an idea and yet it works. Maybe like "Perv: 3 stars. Politics: 2 Stars." So that people who want to talk to perverts could find highly rated perverts easily. Otherwise, you just talk to people who want to chat about general things.

The interesting part that I never knew about is that Uber drivers have access to a client score and (I believe) can also rate their clients after each ride.

Although they can't reject too many rides or risk being flagged in the system, at least this gives them the ability to pass on riders who have a bad score, which last time I found out about the rider rating score was anything less than 4.5 out of 5 stars[1].

Fortunately, for something that the French Number is offering, it doesn't seem that this would be a problem. Hopefully the offering remains uncorrupted in this sense.

[1] Anecdata warning: Based on a discussion I had with an Uber driver over several months ago.

'chat roulette' as it is now referred, actually worked reasonably well back in around 1997 when Mirabilis built the feature into their ICQ messenger

I used the feature quite a bit. I'm sure it eventually got taken over by predators and scammers, but it lasted quite some time.

Years before that there was microsoft netmeeting, which was built into windows.. and for some crazy reason it had a phone book listing of all of everyone using the app. You could open the phone book and call anyone anywhere in the world.

really it's just all about the balance of well-minded people, and perhaps as the internet grows and the barrier becomes lower for people getting online, the odds end up not working in favor of these sorts of things..

I view the idea of chat roulette much in the same light. I think it is cool in the purer sense of the service. Too bad those haven't really worked out in that sort of sense. And I have the same hopes, honestly.

Addressing the edit: That isn't the same sort of thing. Siri gives weird access to information. The idealized version of Chat Roulette (with actual conversation as the norm) gives human interaction, experience, and viewpoint that the digital assistants just can't seem to match yet.

U just wrote comment on international site. You are interactinwith people from all over the world all the time on international websites, idk what borders u tryingto break? Other than censorship and lack of iernet access.