Chatroulette may be about to make a very big mistake | Hacker News Reader

Chatroulette may be about to make a very big mistake

howwl.com

28 pointsSteveP28 comments

I feel like hotornot solved this problem a lot time ago.

Just let users rate other users, and let them set their thresholds.

You could even have the software automatically calculate a score based on how quickly/often a user is skipped. Vulgar users are usually skipped often, and within a few seconds of a connection. Stop connecting those users with newbies, and start connecting them with each other.

hotornot solved the problem by moderating all photos before they were pushed to the general public. this approach obviously wouldn't work for CR.

your suggestions are pretty good- i'd be somewhat surprised if these sorts of things weren't in place already.

Setting aside the business model issues for a moment: I'm really intrigued by the idea of penis-recognition software. Now, that's a branch of AI I never even considered before, and already my mind is racing through the algorithmic approaches...

If they get the penis-recognition AI working, they can split the site in two, chattroulette and penisroulette, and automatically route videos to the correct site. I'm honestly not sure which site would become the more popular though.

I think the penis showing men would just disguise their penises. So we would see penises with little wigs and glasses on. I would like to see the penis AI cope with that!

Would you really?

"The Berkeley-Iowa Naked People Finder" describes one approach, which seems to first classify pixels as skin/not skin by color, then identifying "limbs" from the pixel regions.

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html

Some other people have worked on better skin classifiers:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/CVPR.199...

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240564

Looks like a hot topic. :)

I know some people who worked on a 'porn detector' project at a University. Their main job was to tag the training and test sets by labelling breasts and other naughty bits. Fun job! ;)

They will find away around it. Thousands of pervs translate into hundred of thousands of man hours to find away around the filter. A handful of developers/mathematicians can't keep up with that.

Web filtering software and even Google Images employ techniques that find porn on images and videos. While I'm not sure about its details, it has been done for a long time and I think it's fairly accurate (even if its false positives are a issue in some cases).

It's not like Chatroulette was going to be a long-term thing. It's million-dollar-homepage 2.0.

http://www.quantcast.com/chatroulette.com

<insert your supreme being here> help us if you're wrong. shudder

Chatroulette is not going to be a viable long term business.

It does, however, tell us two things:

1) A lot of men seem to like to show there penis to people (especially girls) 2) Girls dont like to see random men's penises

Square that circle (e.g. make the men pay and pay the girls to watch) and you will be on a million dollar idea.

If the men know that the girls are willingly being paid to watch, I think that takes some of the fun out of it for them.

Sure, they probably like showing their penis to girls in general, but a lot of the thrill probably comes from showing it to unwilling/unsuspecting girls.

I think it's interesting how almost everyone assumes the naked guys on chatroulette are straight.

No I dont think that at all... I just think gay guys will do it for free, so there is (maybe) as much money to be made!

That circle has been squared since the 90s when webcams first showed up. VIDEO CHAT WITH LIVE GIRLS has been an Internet porn mainstay for a long time now. But the media didn't let that fact get in the way of playing up a new fad when they could.

tl;dr: converting the darker parts of the web into a viable business model is hard.

Mind you, I'd say chatroulette's problem is not obscene content, but the fact that it's a fad for bored teenagers.

I disagree. It's at least theoretically possible to find advertisers that want to reach bored teenagers. Very few people would risk having their logo appear on chatroulette.

The problem is that chatrouletter was a novelty. The bored teenagers are already moving on to the next thing. I don't even want to imagine what you'd try and sell to an audience of a few dozen exhibitionists.

'"If he doesn’t make a dramatic move soon to clean up the service, the brand will be permanently tarnished," says another interested investor.'

Is Chatroulette not already synonymous with anonymous penises? I'd say the brand's already tarnished in that regard. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- anonymous penises may be exactly what some users are looking for.

He should just sell out to Youporn or whatever. Pretty sure CR isn't the next the Facebook, worth turning down billion dollar offers for.

It depends what you call success, really. If you want anarchy, ChatRoulette's got it. If you want genuine mass appeal, then you need to meet the mainstream halfway. Look at the career trajectory of most bands.

If you insist, you can call that a sell-out, because it is. But what it really is is optimizing for a different pay-off.

It looks like they are also about to launch chat roulette by city. Just go to sanfrancisco.chatroulette.com and you can see that it's already set up, they just haven't announced it yet.

I believe any chatrouletter subdomain creates a "channel" for that specific subdomain.

With P2P the image recognition would have to be done on the client anyways. So those who don't enjoy watching phalli would be able to change their preferences covertly.

He could even provide a simple form like

  [ ] block nudity
  [x] censor nudity

Those baring themselves to the peer wouldn't even know whether it was worth it or not. That's what I'd do anyways.

Just make the filter optional and default, like Google's image SafeSearch. Next?

They should name the filter "Cockblock".

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