R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010
salon.com
salon.com
Followed by 10x as many people who thought "I heard on the Daily Show there's a site where a bunch of people go show off their cocks to random strangers. I've gotta go do that too!"
On second thought, perhaps ignorance is bliss.
I was curious about the wankers' motivations and I have a strong stomach, so I tried to talk to them. I was largely unsuccessful at getting any response, and, in fact, they tended to next me after I attempted to talk to them for long enough (and I didn't see them reaching for a mouse either!).
For another site that may shock or thrill you check out cam4.com . People showing their face all ... don't these people have a career/job/friends/family? WoW
Some of them just wanna gross you out- see goatse, 2 girls 1 cup
There's probably also some Freudian stuff going on.
No, don't. Please, just don't. Let them die a quiet, unremarked death.
The formula is simple:
User-produced visual content + Internet + Social
= Penises
Normal Person + anonymity + audience = Total F$#%wad
http://everybodyedits.com - it's got a lot better recently now there are private rooms (although yes, that does mean it's a different concept now)
While the title is link bait, I do believe it's probably dead or at most very niche.
Check out his nudity policy: Naked twice, in the clear; naked thrice, outta here!
Chatroulette suffers from the exact same problem that ww.com suffers from, which is that it takes only a very small percentage of 'jerks' (how appropriate) to spoil it for the rest. On ww.com I've managed to somewhat mitigate the problem by making labeling of your content mandatory.
I've spent an awful lot of time on trying to automate the detection of inappropriate content but there are many reasons why that is a lot harder than it seems.
A chatroulette based on a 'real-names' log-in procedure that would then connect users anonymously would be one possible way to combat the problem.
Please share some other hard type problems from such sites if you feel like it. Then we can talk through/theorize about what might work in practice.
However, someone who uses chatroulette may have good reasons to flag every person they see as a pervert.
I'll work up a list of stuff, over the years I've spent many hours analyzing the abuse angle of webcam sites and while I haven't found a completely automated way to do it we have it worked out to the point where with relatively simple tools a single person can easily monitor a few thousand cams. Chatroulette is one-to-one, which has a bunch of unique problems in terms of the speed with which you can gather statistics on cams in order to determine the kind of content.
Ironically the best indicator for mis-labeled adult content is the number of viewers...
I hate to bring business into this, but Chatroulette never really scored that high on a net promoter score — even if people recommended that I play with Chatroulette, it was under the guise of something illicit and/or taboo. Most reports of Chatroulette were negative, and it was only taboo feeding the fire of people looking at it. Once. And then fading away.
Once you're there, Alexey's Law kicks in: your probability of seeing a penis is almost 100% after three or so "Next"s.
As much as I loved the concept, Chatroulette was ruined by the typical scourge of the Internet: male sexual frustration.
I think a dating service built on top of Facetime (again, with karma) would be pretty neat. Sort of like virtual speed-dating. Meet random people that meet your "requirements" and get to know them. Upsell: Give out the app for free, but limit connection times and all connections are anonymous (but reporting is not). Paid app lets you maintain an address book and unrestricted connection times.
Alternatively, those with the "free" version of the app are branded as such (i.e., your connecting partner is told that you are a cheapskate), providing social pressure to show that you're willing to spend money to meet interesting people.
Policing the system is probably the hardest part - setting up the social conditions such that fraudulent claims are kept to a minimum (and require little to no input from the service owner) is a challenging task.
You could even monetize by interspersing ads into the video stream.
In fact that could be a better solution - that way you could avoid building an application and locking yourself to iPhone 4 users, opening your web service to other FaceTime clients.
However, I assumed lots and lots of others would think the same, and I was VERY wary of Apple pulling some kind of censorship rejection BS with it.... So I abandoned the idea within seconds.
I think it's the same answer to the question, "Why hasn't anyone built a Craigslist competitor yet?" The answer is that they have. However, nobody cares.
If the excess of penis is its "death", then I'm pretty sure that isn't something recent.
The article concurs quite well with my own attempt to use Chatroulette. Some of it was quite funny - people staring with bemused expressions - but at least half of it was porn, and it was the porn element which put me off.
However, like the Monty Python sketch this genre may not be dead yet. If they could separate out the porn into its own category, so that it's not appearing unexpectedly on screen, then this kind of random chat via webcam might actually be a fun experience. Social networking sites might want to consider including some similar component, as a way of making new friends.
Granted, we're a long ways away, but we're getting there.
End completely unrelated tangent relevant to only one sentence.
(edit) Sorry, that can't be right. Of course the Yankees did win the World Series, so that factual portion of it needs to be taken literally :)
Can you imagine having something on your resume like: "Awarded patent for the 1st algorithm to reliably detect penis."