
R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010 - donohoe
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/06/29/requiem_for_chatroulette
======
mattmaroon
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.

~~~
stcredzero
_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
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/>

~~~
stcredzero
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.

------
petercooper
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
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.

~~~
petercooper
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.

------
GFischer
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...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/one-on-one-andrey-
ternovskiy-creator-of-chatroulette/)), 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
He seems sincere--maybe he'll be another Grigori Perelman.

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

------
jacquesm
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
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
cb18
_Flagging also opens the door to 'pranksters' that will false-flag everybody
just to clog the system._ Seems to me this could be mostly avoided by having
the flagging mechanism repsond to some # > 1 of flags from unique users.
Issues could still come up if there were > 1 people engaged in this practice
simultaneously, though it doesn't seem like an activity holding much long term
appeal. So, this solution seems while perhaps not optimal at least functional.

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.

~~~
megablast
Also, is someone keeps flagging people, then there flags don't count. This has
been solved before.

However, someone who uses chatroulette may have good reasons to flag every
person they see as a pervert.

~~~
jacquesm
That's exactly the key, abuse patterns and real use patterns are so similar
that it is very hard to automate the analysis.

------
eston
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.

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

~~~
catch23
I know two separate groups of people who are both already working on such a
project.

~~~
brk
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.

~~~
Splines
I'd imagine that one with more karma built into the system would have more
<ahem> staying power.

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.

~~~
ary
The anonymity feature (assuming you want to connect people together with
FaceTime) will be difficult as your phone number is shared with the person you
FaceTime call. I suppose it's possible that a proxy could be used, but I have
yet to take a look at the protocol specs (if they're even available).

~~~
Splines
Yeah, having never used an iPhone 4 or FaceTime I was unsure of how it all
worked. Given that it's going to be a standardized protocol, a FaceTime server
would be necessary even if phone numbers weren't exposed, as you'd want to
manage who can connect to who (and possibly for how long).

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.

------
moolave
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
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.

------
theBobMcCormick
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
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.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
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.

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

------
imagii
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.

------
motters
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.

------
elbrodeur
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.

------
iamdave
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
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 :)

------
WilliamLP
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?

~~~
mkramlich
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
Testdata: Lady Gaga.

------
pixelcloud
Relevant

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/chatroulette-enlists-
shawn-...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/chatroulette-enlists-shawn-
fanning-in-the-fight-against-the-masturbators/)

------
sabj
You know, there _is_ penis-detection technology.

------
dkuchar
link bait!

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

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

~~~
donohoe
I can edit it if you have suggestions...

~~~
rortian
I personally don't have any. Imo, the article doesn't add very much to
anything and its title is misleading. If I would suggest a change it would be
not submitting in the first place. This is hardly an article that I would flag
though.

~~~
donohoe
I don't like the Headline either, but I feel it is a good read and does
overall make a good point (as the Comment activity indicates). Could have been
said in one paragraph though

~~~
dkuchar
I meant the original article. Chatroulette hasn't been dead-pooled. The title
was inaccurate and sensationalist.

------
c00p3r
video (flash-based) 4chan? It should be expected.

