Which leads us back to rule number 1 of the Internet. Anything anonymous will be dominated by pervs and *******s. Of course, this renders anything good intended by said service null and void.
I thought you were a programmer? Counting starts at 0 bro so we're forgetting rule #0 of the Internet and any kind of technology that requires critical mass to succeed: put money on they pervs and the *******s. They will lead the way until everyone else finds their inner perv/*******... or they begin to realize that maybe the stuff built on sales to pervs and *******s actually has some legitmate use.
I haven't tried Chat Roulette yet. It's something I'd love to try because in concept it's taking us back to the days of the early Internet when the technology seemed so invigorating and ground breaking. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have spent more hours than intended typing away to someone or a couple of other people they ran into in an AOL chatroom, IRC, ICQ, or any of the other early chats.
On a good night, it was a learning experience. Sometimes it was just a good story and sometimes, it was just a way to kill time.
There's a huge
BUUUUT in here. I don't remember being frustrated by running into pervs and *******s when I used to use ICQ to chat with random people. I made a few friends that way over time including one that now lives nearby and I've come to know well.
Most of our onlline socializing now just takes us to digital morphine. So much of it is numbing and predictable. The concept of Chatroulette reminds me of a very interesting period of Internet history when the technology seemed like we could have been on a profound paradigm change in the way we could approach society.
I'm probably seeing this through the film of nostalgia and removing that filter for a moment, it's likely that Chatroulette will not ever become the portal into a parallel world that the early chat systems and the early Internet were bouyed by a sense of scarcity. We no longer have that problem and perhaps the unintended side effect of being able to achieve critical mass in such a sudden period of time is that the more people you have access to, the less remarkable they each seem.
To this end, I think the reason why I find GeekHack appealing is because it's small enough, random enough, and interesting enough... and that's before I unhide Webwit's posts.
