Chatroulette

I'd like to preface what I'm about to write with the fact that Melissa and I mistakenly went on Chatroulette at 11:00 at night when I'm assuming most of the perverts were out and about on the website. We basically set ourselves up for the amount of penises we were going to see and I take full responsibility.

While the main goal of Chatroulette is to connect users worldwide through friendly textual, audio and video conversations, many male users have turned this into a pornographic website in which they expose their penises to strangers. I noticed that the website has reacted to this by asking users to be 16 or older and has provided an opportunity for users to report other users who are using the site to offend others. A certain amount of complaints in a short period of time can lead to the offending user being banned from the website for a set amount of time. The only issue that I see with this is that I feel that most of the time when people see penises on their screen they either quickly switch the user or slam their computer shut, like I did with Melissa. I would be interested to know how often these offenders actually get reported and how often they do not.

On the other hand, I know that Chatroulette can be a really interesting and creative website. For example, I love the YouTube video of the guy singing piano improv to everyone who he interacts with. This later lead to Ben Folds imitating this at one of his concerts, which I thought was hysterical.