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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.
> 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%).
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.
And they said we're not evolved from monkeys ...
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
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
It is also related to The "Greater Internet F$#%wad Theory"
Normal Person + anonymity + audience = Total F$#%wad
"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.
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.
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.
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.
I had the same reaction to this story. It seems a bit below Salon's normal class.
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.
He seems sincere--maybe he'll be another Grigori Perelman.
Check out his nudity policy: Naked twice, in the clear; naked thrice, outta here!
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
When will FaceTime Roulette be coming out, so you can randomly connect to a stranger's iPhone?
I know two separate groups of people who are both already working on such a project.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I don't care if it's gone or not, but those Piano Improv videos were fucking money!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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."
What AI algorithms vs what image recognition algorithms?
You know, there _is_ penis-detection technology.
link bait!
which, the original Headline, or me keeping the original headline?
video (flash-based) 4chan? It should be expected.