7 ms·
R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010
- iamdave 16y agoTangentially 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 16y agoThat 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 :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- dkuchar 16y agolink bait!
- donohoe 16y agowhich, the original Headline, or me keeping the original headline?
- rortian 16y agoSince you gave the link, I presume he meant the original was the bait.
- donohoe 16y agoI can edit it if you have suggestions...
- rortian 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI meant the original article. Chatroulette hasn't been dead-pooled. The title was inaccurate and sensationalist.
- GFischer 16y agoWhen I read an article about him not wanting to sell out (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/one-on-one-andrey-ternovskiy-creator-of-chatroulette/ 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 16y agoHe seems sincere--maybe he'll be another Grigori Perelman. Check out his nudity policy: Naked twice, in the clear; naked thrice, outta here!
- klous 16y agoWhen will FaceTime Roulette be coming out, so you can randomly connect to a stranger's iPhone?
- catch23 16y agoI know two separate groups of people who are both already working on such a project.
- brk 16y agoOnly 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 16y agoI'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 16y agoThe 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).
- moolave 16y agoIt 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 16y agoThe 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.
- mattmaroon 16y agoI 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 16y agoYeah, 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoAdultfriendfinder 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
- stcredzero 16y agoWorld of Warcraft (WoW) is now what respectable people do online, eh?
- roel_v 16y agocam4.com is very NSFW for those of you like me who type in urls before their first coffee.
- motters 16y agoDead 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 16y agoChatroulette 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 16y agoRelevant http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/chatroulette-enlists-shawn-fanning-in-the-fight-against-the-masturbators/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/chatroulette-enlists-shawn-...
- jacquesm 16y agoChatroulette 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 16y agoChatroulette 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 16y agoIt'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 16y agoFlagging 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.
- elbrodeur 16y agoMy 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.
- WilliamLP 16y agoWould 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 16y agoWhat AI algorithms vs what image recognition algorithms?
- WilliamLP 16y agoDog 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.
- mkramlich 16y agoI 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 16y agoTestdata: Lady Gaga.
- theBobMcCormick 16y agoWhy 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 16y agoI'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 16y agoInteresting. 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 16y agoI'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.
- petercooper 16y agoDear 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI had the same reaction to this story. It seems a bit below Salon's normal class.
- bosch 16y agoI don't care if it's gone or not, but those Piano Improv videos were fucking money!
- sabj 16y agoYou know, there _is_ penis-detection technology.
- imagii 16y agoI 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 16y agovideo (flash-based) 4chan? It should be expected.