What were you thinking about during the first time you beat yourself off on chatroulette?
aRiotJosh: Looking at the links in the above tweet, it turned out to be a really bad idea. It was literally like watching a porno set to No Wave.
You know, I don't know if it was the chatroulette or the link itself, but the fact that I got addicted to that sensation of being watched brought back so many memories of high school and what society had taught me about sex. I remember thinking, If you can just show someone a video of sex, they'll fall in love with it. And that's what happened. And it turned out to be a bad link.
JP: So in the interest of full disclosure, my first experience with chatroulette was probably when I was probably about 13 or 14 years old. I was walking to school with some friends, and on the way we'd see a squirrel running toward an opening in the fence. And so we went running through the gate, and as we were running through the gate, a large bald eagle flew by me, sat next to me, and opened his mouth to allow the squirrel into his mouth. And so that was my introduction to the idea of chatroulette.
aRiotJosh: So you were probably just wandering around aimlessly in search of squirrel sex. Imagine my delight when, two years later, I would be randomly chosen to be invited on camera to do just that.
JP: (Sings) Oh, I'm going to have squirrel sex with this guy. Now that is a great feeling, isn't it?
aRiotJosh: So chatroulette invited you to be a sexual stranger. You were to unwittingly help make the internet a little bit better. What better way to do that than to just have an audience of strangers? Talk to strangers about your faults and virtues, offer to help them fix them, and watch as they become more and more drawn to you as a person? JP: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's such a great service for society. I mean, we could just license this all around the world. I mean, it would be such a fucking blessing. I mean, it's such a wonderful business opportunity. I mean, it would be such a fucking game changer.
I mean, I'm just the most august individual that has been invited onto this stage on this stage to speak on this stage about chatroulette.
aRiotJosh: So in your talk, you talked about the fact that the chats themselves are anonymous, but the site itself is extremely powerful when it comes to machine learning. JP: Yeah, exactly. So the idea of this service, the idea of this random video chat, is so incredibly powerful and so fundamentally wrong. A service that you give to the world and watch it use that power, in this case, to help you find serendipitous strangers, is so
