The Surreal World of Chatroulette

Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that Chatroulette, the social Web site created by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click 'start' you're suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they're staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click 'next,' instantly calling up someone else. Entering Chatroulette is akin to speed-dating tens of thousands of perfect strangers — some clothed, some not. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. 'It's very strange, and not just because you are parachuting into someone else's life (and they yours), a kind of invited crasher,' writes Nick Bilton. 'It is also the eerie thrill of true randomness — who, or what, will show up next?' The Web has long allowed anonymous conversations among strangers. Text-based chat rooms are rife with deceit — people pretending they are someone else. Video makes this harder — even if you're wearing a mask. 'From my experience on the site, echoed by those I've spoken to, it seems as if 90 percent of users are genuinely looking for novel and unexpected conversation,' add Bilton. 'The rest — well, let's just say they have debauchery in mind.'"

99% Debauched

[sofayam]

... is what I saw. Had a short chat with a guy from Brazil - short because we did not share a language - other than that just a flashing sequence of monkey spanking exhíbitionists.

Experience Chatroulette w/o "exposing" yourself!

[wisebabo]

If you want to get a feeling of Chatroulette without "exposing" yourself (or getting exposed to some pretty shocking imagery) you might want to check out this blog:

http://chatroulette.tumblr.com/ [tumblr.com]

He's been collecting dozens (hundreds) of screencaptures that people have been e-mailing him. While you'll still see some disturbing things at least you'll know this isn't happening to YOU, LIVE and hopefully the lack of immediacy will dull the shock a bit. If you can take that, then by all means take the plunge!

(I'm too chicken and have not). By the way, I got this link from TechCrunch, so just wanted to give them credit.

Re:4Chan Members

[Anonymous Coward]

They're already bored of it.

No joke. Plenty of rickrolling, disturbing pornography and "gore" spammed over the visual feed with the use of a virtual webcam application. The flood of threads where 4chan showed the reactions of the other person has seemed to wane and the fad is.... over just before the rest of the internet can realize what has happened.

Re:WTF!

[bmo]

>Not at all, but don't you think it's my place to protect my kids?

1. You cannot "protect" them.
2. You can only teach them to use their heads. This is a teaching moment.
3. They know more about what's going on than you think.
4. The Internet is not a baby sitter.
5. I'll say that again....
6. The Internet is not a baby sitter.

--
BMO

Re:Hum.

[DurendalMac]

I wouldn't say so. An application like Manycam lets you put anything you want into that video feed. Let's just say that the folks over at 4chan have found Chatroulette to be one of the best kinds of trolling as they can not only rape the eyes of their victims, but actually see the reaction for themselves.

90%? No way

[VShael]

I read an article about chatroulette and decided to try it out for myself.
I'd say 75% of people were not interested in conversation of any kind. And maybe 10% were interested in trying to shock you in some way.
The system is open for scamming from people who will beam your webcams output back at you, or pics of goatse.cx or shock pages from encyclopedia dramatica. It might have been a fun conversing tool when there was less than 5000 people on it. But once the crowd from 4chan heard of it, it's too polluted to be fun. (Think Usenet before and after AOL came online)

Tried it, wasn't too disappointing

[NiteMair]

I tried it... after seeing a lot of naked "boy" chests (clearly a lot of high school or college kids showing off their "six pack") it finally stopped on a guy that looked reasonable to chat with.

Chatted with him for about 10-15 mins, just exchanging some random questions and info. Wasn't too bad, except he was from China and his english wasn't so great :)

Overall, definitely has potential for some random social interaction if you have nothing better to do.