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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could understand the mentality behind this. "Wait, there's a site where you can go video chat with random strangers? I've gotta go on there and show off my johnson!"

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.

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> A research team asked a sample of 185 exhibitionists, “How would you have preferred a person to react if you were to expose your privates to him or her?” The most common response was “Would want to have sexual intercourse” (35.1%), followed by “No reaction necessary at all” (19.5%), “To show their privates also” (15.1%), “Admiration” (14.1%), and “Any reaction” (11.9%). Only very few exhibitionists chose “Anger and disgust” (3.8%) or “Fear” (0.5%).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhibitionism

You're assuming that every penis on chat roulette is actually the user's. I know there's a program that lets you use an arbitrary loop of video instead of a webcam feed. I suspect there are a lot of trolling 4channers with videos of someone else's penis, perhaps open on multiple tabs, skewing the percentages.

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!).

I can't shed much light on this, but my younger brother hangs around the 4chan-type crowd on the net and those guys are always on Vent coupled with video chat of some kind. More than once have I glanced at his monitor and have seen some guy jerking it. I can't figure out what it is about these people that compels them to do this.

Adultfriendfinder is one of the largest sites on the net. People love to get off and be watched and vice versa. Also male bonding of circle jerks has been around forever, which is taboo, but obviously millions share this desire.

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

World of Warcraft (WoW) is now what respectable people do online, eh?

cam4.com is very NSFW for those of you like me who type in urls before their first coffee.

AFF is a site where people go to get laid. I don't know if it works well or not (I almost can't imagine it does) but at least I understand the impulse.

And they said we're not evolved from monkeys ...

My guess is it's massively taboo, so people want to try it. The total anonymity cancels out the taboo, so people feel they are free to do so.

Some of them just wanna gross you out- see goatse, 2 girls 1 cup

There's probably also some Freudian stuff going on.

"Some of them just wanna gross you out- see goatse, 2 girls 1 cup"

No, don't. Please, just don't. Let them die a quiet, unremarked death.

I wish I could understand the mentality behind this.

The formula is simple:

    User-produced visual content + Internet + Social 
      = Penises

This is true for every single example I can think of. That Flash-based multiplayer platformer where users could edit the level? Spore. Forums where people can post images. Image sharing sites. Either you have male genitalia running rampant, or the site wages a never-ending active program of preventing it.

It is also related to The "Greater Internet F$#%wad Theory"

Normal Person + anonymity + audience = Total F$#%wad

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

I was thinking of Gabe's persona and that equation as well when I formulated this one. Gabe's distribution of photographs of his own genitalia through the social infrastructure of online games is a recurring comic theme on Penny Arcade.

"Flash-based multiplayer platformer where users could edit the level"

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)

You can add Wikipedia to that list as a site waging a "never-ending active program of preventing it."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that while I, too, often feel a burning need to understand my fellow man, this is one mentality I'm just not feeling too curious about.

They likely hope to find a hot girl (or guy) who is turned on so they can fantasize with her.

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