Chat Roulette
It's weird and kind of surreal. Has anyone tried Chat Roulette? It's a trending chat website that connects you to a random person around the globe. You see each other via webcam and can decide whether to start chatting or click "next" to be connected to another random person. Of course, the "next"-clicking goes both way, so even if you see someone you find vaguely interesting, that person might just click you away.
It's an interesting social phenomenon. I tried to monitor my own reactions towards what I was seeing, to make sense of why sometimes I'd linger or why I'd click next to be reconnected to another user. Well, truth be told, if the webcam shows nothing but a shot of a hand lazily stroking an erection, I know full well why I click next immediately. But other than that, it's kind of hard to keep track of yourself. Why do you click next, why do you not click next? I talked to a tired-looking girl in Singapore, a young man with stunningly blue eyes somewhere in England, a guy from New York wearing a plushie on his head. Those were three interesting connections that stood out among a mass of people who either clicked me away or whom I clicked away.
And may I be honest?
It's boring as hell.
Yes, for a while there is some excitement because you are being connected to a complete stranger across the globe. And at first, the weirdness you see is vaguely amusing. And then you start noticing that in between the dicks (literally) and weirdness what you see is almost nothing but bored faces. What has been described as an interesting social experience throughout the internet turns out to be much of a bore, to be honest. Some people are crushed by the fact that the other person clicks "next", when it truth I guess in 9/10 times, at the very least, it's nothing remotely to do with your looks but with the fact that hundreds, thousands of people around the globe are looking for something more interesting than another vaguely bored face, something unusual to be worth their time, and clicking "next" becomes an automatic routine without much thought required.
Clicking yourself through a mass of bored faces and dicks, rejecting and being rejected, you can easily spend hours on the website without ever encountering... something. Chat Roulette was, I guess, supposed to be an exciting new way to meet people from all over the world.... but unfortunately, the next-system makes it way too easy to just move on and not even bother. It took me less than ten minutes to get bored as hell with the website, and theratio between the time I spent browsing for a chat partner and the time I spent having interesting conversations with random strangers was... disappointing, to say the least.
Then again, I also don't really get Facebook and Twitter aisde from their PR values.
It's an interesting social phenomenon. I tried to monitor my own reactions towards what I was seeing, to make sense of why sometimes I'd linger or why I'd click next to be reconnected to another user. Well, truth be told, if the webcam shows nothing but a shot of a hand lazily stroking an erection, I know full well why I click next immediately. But other than that, it's kind of hard to keep track of yourself. Why do you click next, why do you not click next? I talked to a tired-looking girl in Singapore, a young man with stunningly blue eyes somewhere in England, a guy from New York wearing a plushie on his head. Those were three interesting connections that stood out among a mass of people who either clicked me away or whom I clicked away.
And may I be honest?
It's boring as hell.
Yes, for a while there is some excitement because you are being connected to a complete stranger across the globe. And at first, the weirdness you see is vaguely amusing. And then you start noticing that in between the dicks (literally) and weirdness what you see is almost nothing but bored faces. What has been described as an interesting social experience throughout the internet turns out to be much of a bore, to be honest. Some people are crushed by the fact that the other person clicks "next", when it truth I guess in 9/10 times, at the very least, it's nothing remotely to do with your looks but with the fact that hundreds, thousands of people around the globe are looking for something more interesting than another vaguely bored face, something unusual to be worth their time, and clicking "next" becomes an automatic routine without much thought required.
Clicking yourself through a mass of bored faces and dicks, rejecting and being rejected, you can easily spend hours on the website without ever encountering... something. Chat Roulette was, I guess, supposed to be an exciting new way to meet people from all over the world.... but unfortunately, the next-system makes it way too easy to just move on and not even bother. It took me less than ten minutes to get bored as hell with the website, and theratio between the time I spent browsing for a chat partner and the time I spent having interesting conversations with random strangers was... disappointing, to say the least.
Then again, I also don't really get Facebook and Twitter aisde from their PR values.