R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/06/29/requiem_for_chatroulette

by donohoe • 16 years ago

102 72 16 years ago

iamdave• 16 years ago

Tangentially related: Despite the 2009 season being a bit of a rough one (what with a new ball park and all), I don't know if calling the New York Yankees of any team in the game of baseball 'scrappy underdogs' is accurate. It's not at all the Yankees (or any sports team, for that matter) have started their season off uncharacteristically poor, and ended up winning it all.

End completely unrelated tangent relevant to only one sentence.

jat850• 16 years ago

That particular comment was as tongue-in-cheek as the rest of the article - I don't think it was meant to be taken even slightly literally.

(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 :)

dkuchar2• 16 years ago

link bait!

donohoe3• 16 years ago

which, the original Headline, or me keeping the original headline?

rortian2• 16 years ago

Since you gave the link, I presume he meant the original was the bait.

GFischer• 16 years ago

When I read an article about him not wanting to sell out (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/one-on-one-andrey-t...), I was inwardly sad because I believed this to be a fad and that he should have cashed out - fast.

While the title is link bait, I do believe it's probably dead or at most very niche.

percept• 16 years ago

He seems sincere--maybe he'll be another Grigori Perelman.

Check out his nudity policy: Naked twice, in the clear; naked thrice, outta here!

klous• 16 years ago

When will FaceTime Roulette be coming out, so you can randomly connect to a stranger's iPhone?

catch23• 16 years ago

I know two separate groups of people who are both already working on such a project.

brk2• 16 years ago

Only two? I can only imagine that there must literally be at least 100 of these in development, and it will likely meet the same outcome as CR.

kevinelliott• 16 years ago

Facetimepartner.com --- it's here. They reached out to me on Twitter. I tried to use it, but I couldn't find someone to chat with.

moolave• 16 years ago

It could have been a huge potential, but what the founder lacked IMHO was he did not heed the advice of experienced pundits who'd like to further develop this space.

cj• 16 years ago

The founder lacked experience. It was purely luck that brought this about. He has no clue what he's doing, or he would have already done something to make the site better. He's done virtually nothing.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

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.

Vivtek• 16 years ago

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.

coderdude• 16 years ago

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.

rpsfan• 16 years ago

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

rwmj• 16 years ago

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

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

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.

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

"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.

jules• 16 years ago

> 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

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

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.

Pengwin• 16 years ago

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/

user24• 16 years ago

"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)

Natsu• 16 years ago

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

neutronicus• 16 years ago

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!).

psyklic• 16 years ago

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

motters• 16 years ago

Dead so soon?

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.

eston• 16 years ago

Chatroulette is fun. Chatroulette is silly. Chatroulette as a cultural mainstay? Nah.

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.

pixelcloud• 16 years ago

Relevant

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/chatroulette-enlists-shawn-...

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

Chatroulette is far from dead, it's still a top 3000 website (or thereabouts), which makes it larger than 99.99% of all the websites in the world. Not too shabby, and many people calling themselves 'entrepreneurs' and 'start-up' people would give an arm and a leg to be in that position.

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.

marilyn• 16 years ago

Chatroulette could allow users to flag the perverts, and also give users the ability to request "Please don't show me perverts". I don't see this as a difficult problem for them to solve if they wanted to.

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

It's harder than it seems. Flagging also opens the door to 'pranksters' that will false-flag everybody just to clog the system. Most of these things seem to be 'obvious' until you actually start to implement them in real life and then it seems that old saw about 'theory and practice' holds very true.

axod• 16 years ago

If they did that surely there'd be hardly anyone left on the site.

swilliams• 16 years ago

How does YouTube handle nudity? I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on there before. Is it automated or does it have an approval process? Or do they just rely on dmca-like takedown requests?

yread• 16 years ago

I have seen some videos with nudity on youtube - I guess they stayed there because they had like 200 views. I guess that as soon as the video gets big a human checks it and removes it if it is with nudity

elbrodeur• 16 years ago

My feeling is that the increased prevalence of single-sign-on services like facebook connect, OpenID, google connect, etc. will help to mitigate baddies and pervs -- if you're putting your reputation on the line, anonymity is decreased. People will still make dummy accounts, but if single-sign-on is coupled with a karmic or whuffie type system it will be another tool to identify and discourage trolls.

Granted, we're a long ways away, but we're getting there.

WilliamLP2• 16 years ago

Would AI algorithms to detect and flag a penis in an image be any easier or less error-prone than other similar image recognition problems?

chollida1• 16 years ago

What AI algorithms vs what image recognition algorithms?

WilliamLP2• 16 years ago

Dog vs cat is the famous one. Nudity is another famous one that is extremely hard. A penis might be more distinctive though, similar to how I understand cameras are now pretty good at detecting faces. Just cutting off most of the trouser snake content other than well disguised ones might vastly improve a site like this.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

I think there's sort of a sub-field within image recognition which just focuses on the techniques to automatically detect nudity.

Can you imagine having something on your resume like: "Awarded patent for the 1st algorithm to reliably detect penis."

nostrademons• 16 years ago

Testdata: Lady Gaga.

theBobMcCormick2• 16 years ago

Why hasn't anyone built a Chatroulette competitor yet? Every post about chatroulette on HN has at least a dozen plausible sounding suggestions for fixing chatroulette (and probably twice as many implausible ones). Why hasn't anyone implemented any of them?

gkoberger• 16 years ago

I've seen a ton of them- one that comes to mind is Chatville (ChatVille.com, made by the Digsby team).

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.

theBobMcCormick2• 16 years ago

Interesting. I can see why Craigslists competitors haven't caught on. The incentive for both buyers and sellers is to go to the site with the most users. But I wouldn't have thought the network effect would be nearly as strong for a ChatRoulette competitor.

nitrogen• 16 years ago

I've found that, as a general rule, if you're tempted to ask, "Why hasn't anybody thought of this yet?" you're too late. I was frustrated the other day as I was reading in the newspaper about yet another non-tech-origins group filing for patents on old ideas with new technology (in this case, using a Wiimote to control the playback of a MIDI score). Naturally, the "inventors" were wondering why nobody'd ever done that before, and yet solo performers and Arduino-type digital artists have been using various types of sensors to do the same thing for quite a while.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Dear Salon, welcome to the gutter press! Not only does your site have a stupid interstital ad (which I can't see as I have Flash disabled) but you write insipid and, frankly, untrue BS like this. News has not "broken" about anything and ChatRoulette is not "dead." I was interested to read it as I thought the site had actually shut down and was wondering what the backstory was.. instead, I get a 1000 word whine about penises.

microcentury• 16 years ago

I read the tone as not literally meaning news has broken, but rather an attempt at summoning the spirit of the 1920s newscasts. The rest of the article seems to support that interpretation, with the references to more innocent times and so on.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

I guess it is Salon. They're very opinion/editorial that you love or hate rather than actual, interesting news, like most of the sources of HN links.

wmeredith• 16 years ago

I had the same reaction to this story. It seems a bit below Salon's normal class.

bosch• 16 years ago

I don't care if it's gone or not, but those Piano Improv videos were fucking money!

sabj• 16 years ago

You know, there _is_ penis-detection technology.

imagii• 16 years ago

I don't think I saw any part that indicated some sort of death, death of a site usually being when nobody uses it anymore or the site shuts down.

If the excess of penis is its "death", then I'm pretty sure that isn't something recent.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

video (flash-based) 4chan? It should be expected.

R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010

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