Those are the rules – Welcome to Chatroulette.com
With all the hype and infamy about this site, I decide I should check it out for myself. I went to the page. It asked me to allow Chatroulette access to my camera and microphone. I read the rules listed above and gave it a second thought.
I got nervous. I couldn’t do it. I clicked ‘deny’ instead of ‘allow’ and the screen remained blank. Staring into the web vortex waiting for a random stranger brought back all the fears and nerves of several bombed high school speech contests – not to mention the fact the site has a reputation for chatters appearing naked.
A 17-year-old Russian high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy, created the site. He said he got the name and idea based on the dare-devil game, Russian Roulette, which involves a handgun, six chambers, six players, and one bullet.
The site has garnered over 1.5 million unique users since 2009 and at any given moment is thought to have 35,000 users on-line chatting randomly using their web cams and on board microphones. One of Chatroulette’s greatest appeals is the option to switch instantly to another person, an action called ‘nexting,‘ with the click of a button. Nexting a person keeps the chat ball rolling. The site was an instant web phenomena and international press coverage has made the founder a web celeb.
The overwhelming majority of chatters are male, and a recent system of flagging graphic content has been added to limit an abundance of offensive and restricted material demonstrated by chatters.
If you have had any unique encounters on Chatroulette, please tell us in the comment section below.
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