Chatroulette is more than just an Internet meme. Or its 17-year-old founder Andrey Ternovskiy would like it to be. Maybe he could build it into a profitable business? Sure, but to attract venture funding, he’s going to have to tone down on all the exposed wee wees and hoo hahs. But how to do it?
Censorship. Rather than simply being able to mark your live stream as X-rated, Chatroulette might get into the business of blocking all exposed genitalia.
The problem is the site is quickly losing its appeal as more and more people are turned off by the sheer number of people exposing themselves or worse on the site. The brand is becoming permanently associated (with help from those Daily Show and South Park features) with the more disgusting parts of humanity.
Can Chatroulette become something more? Look for feature changes soon that will try to send all those penises to the background. The service may add software that can quickly scan video to determine if a penis is being shown. And users that are consistently quickly skipped over (presumably because they are exposing themselves or otherwise being disgusting) can be flagged as well. With those and other changes Chatroulette may be able to put people who actually want to talk to each other in touch much more often.
Fortunately for your perverts, there’s still Manroulette and its army of clones.
7
HIRE AN EDITOR.