Chat roulette is a terrific idea for a web-site. Spin the wheel, meet a stranger. Instant intimacy, like an interesting seat-mate on a train or plane. Only the most curmudgeonly wouldn't occasionally want such chats with strangers from someplace else.
But "ChatRoulette," the current web-fad grabbing headlines, as well as Jon Stewart's satiric attention? Well, sad to say,the site is really dumb. It's only saving grace, besides serving as fodder for Stewart's hilarious bit, is that the site is dumb in psychologically interesting ways.
My colleague Kashmir Hill from over at True/Slant spent a weekend on ChatRoulette "so you don't have to." While she's now a "big fan" I found it pretty flat and disappointing. Sure, my time there was briefly amusing, but only briefly; I must say the site as it is now is an awful way to express a great idea.
So, what't the problem? Simple. There is nothing at stake, the site is not roulette-y enough, there is no way to lose anything you bet. By taking out the risk, by ignoring the psychology of those of us who might use it, the site flattens experience. The design takes people with interests and values and converts us into 2-D screen images in which neither participant has any investment. No one actually cares what's on the screen because there is nothing at stake. Unlike the hysteria already emanating from Fox News who have called it a "predator's paradise," the real problem is that ChatRoulette is not dangerous enough to be at all meaningful. What could have been really great has been made into a sometimes smutty curiosity.
Let's look at what the site does offer. First, you can win by having an interesting exchange, by getting something you want. Second, you can not-win by seeing something or someone you'd rather not see. But, and this is the point, you can't lose. Nothing is ventured. And losing is not not-wining; if one can't lose, if there's nothing at risk, all one can have is a diminished experience that ends up diminishing the players. If you don't lose when a bet goes wrong games get pretty boring pretty quickly. Like ChatRoulette
(strikethrough of Jared) Jaron Lanier, in his "must read drop what you are doing and read it now" book/manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, talks about how the accidents and compromises of software design can get "locked-in" which then put limits on the experience the software can provide.
For example, the MIDI interface for digital music has gotten "locked-in" as the standard for digital music, despite it having been made by "a music synthesizer designer named Dave Smith [who] casually made up a way to represent musical notes." It was a hack for keyboards and as such MIDI "could describe the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin" (Lanier, p. 7). Nevertheless, it is now the standard for digital music. Works well enough, but the lock-in of an accidental software standard is giving us a digital music world made of tile mosaics absent watercolors.
Similarly, social networks have categories (single, in a relationship, etc.) that increasingly define frameworks for social life. When relationships get organized via a database that has been locked-in, they will necessarily be limited by software requiring rigid categories. How many people now have their daily social life organized by the categories and processes imagined by a college kid named Mark hacking around in his dorm room?
Which brings us back to ChatRoulette. Even more innocent and adolescent than Facebook's creation in a Harvard dorm room, Chatroulette came from a 17 year old Moscow high school student who built the site for fun, based on a "certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet." Bravo to him! But it is now bigger than "a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people." And we should ask do we really want to get "locked-in" to risk-free games of social roulette? Do we want to experience other people as disposable as an unwanted show encountered while channel surfing? Shouldn't there be something at risk so we all try, at least a little, to make it work even when it will be nothing more than a few moments of contact.
Here's the fix, nothing big, nothing too risky. Just imagine one small change to the interface design that would add some manageable risk and make the site interesting again.
Imagine that before you first hit Play and encountered your first stranger you were required to bet a minimum amount of time you would spend together before the Next button was enabled. You would only be matched with people who had bet at least that same amount of time. Of course you could continue to bet zero. But imagine if you could also choose a 1 minute minimum, or 5, or anything you wanted and then only get matched with someone who made a bet that was at least as large. My bet is that as people are more accountable, as they put more of their time on the line, there would be fewer penises and many, many more interesting chats.
Here's hoping the designer of the site listens to me, it'll be awesome.
