socialising chatroulette · 2010-02-21 23:20
The ChatRoulette phenomenon is fascinating (seriously NSFW and not for the gentle, if you don’t know what it is) partly because it’s dragged niche and less salubrious corners of the Internet into the glare and use of the mass-market. I personally don’t understand the appeal, either exhibitionism or talking to complete strangers, but it’s struck a chord.
Quite a lot of comments on ChatRoulette mention wanting to rub the sharp edges off the service. A standard approach would be user accounts, or a reputation system – but these both seem to go against the ethos and genius of ChatRoulette.
I’m interested in what’s the smallest interaction tweak you could do to (partly) civilise and socialise the service.
Two methods come to mind straight away:
The first is subdivide it, if informally. Allow <anything>.chatroulette.com, and only get connected to others using the same subdomain. Much like IRC channels, publicity and organisation through other means would create convention and standards of use. It doesn’t stop other people being dicks (or showing dicks in this case), but it would be slightly more consensual.
The second is to make it slower in some way. It’d be interesting to remove the instant visual decision and the brutality of the Next button. Let the picture rez in slowly – maybe over an hour. Initially just a flickering pixel, gradually movement, maybe a shadow or an outline of a face appears. Half an hour later, everything’s visible but out of focus, frustrating or intriguing. Only after investing an hour of time, do you get reality.
