Best of the Internet for really bored people

Dwill's Break now gives you Best of the Internet for really bored people series

(applause)

Best Of Chatroulette

Chatrouletting on the air.
A visit to Chatroulette usually begins with a few rushed clicks of the “Next” button, either out of a sense of danger—do you really want to engage with that empty-eyed guy lounging in bed?—or out of curiosity about what’s around the corner. The site can be especially hard on men. The majority of Chatroulette users are male and under thirty-five, and many of them are trolling for girls, so they “next” each other at barbaric rates. When you do decide to stop and engage, things can get a little awkward. On one of my first Chatrouletting attempts, I found myself talking to a man from Lyons, who had muted the sound. We watched each other typing and reacting to the words that scrolled next to our images, co-stars in a postmodern silent film.
There are some unsavory things on Chatroulette: copulating couples, masturbators, a man who has hanged himself (it’s fake). When the actor Ashton Kutcher was in Moscow in February, as part of a U.S. State Department technology delegation, he berated Ternovskiy for what his stepdaughter had seen on the site. “You’ve got to clean this up!” he said. (Within twenty-four hours, Ternovskiy made it vastly easier for the site to cut off offensive users.) But the YouTube videos that people have recorded of their trips through the Chatroulette vortex also show a lot of joy. There is, for example, the video of the dancing banana, crudely drawn on lined paper, exhorting people to “Dance or gtfo!” (Dance or get the fuck out.) The banana’s partners usually respond with wiggling delight. There’s also something liberating in the protection that the “Next” button provides. Striking up a conversation with the person next to you on the subway is risky, and potentially time-consuming. On Chatroulette you can always just disappear.
“People are, from a gut, instinctual level, so interested in finding each other. You see the lonely in people,” says Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup, a site that facilitates in-person meetings for people with common interests. His site is the antithesis of Chatroulette, yet he finds something deeply compelling in the idea of a blank screen, behind which lies a crowd of strangers waiting to talk to you. “It’s really strange,” Heiferman says. “I have employees I’ve never had a conversation with, but there I am sitting in my office, dicking around with Chatroulette.”