SALON

Tuesday, Jun 29, 2010 5:20 PM UTC

R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010

A few months ago, it was the Web's hottest trend. Then users took their self-exposure way too far

By

Topics: Internet Culture,

R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010

It always seems the stars that burn the brightest are the ones to flame out the fastest. So it was as unsurprising as it was sad when the news broke early Tuesday that Chatroulette’s cultural relevance had expired overnight. Cause of death: penises.

The world was a different place when the site launched in November of 2009. A simpler one. Conan O’Brien was the host of “The Tonight Show.” The kids were listening to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” A bunch of scrappy underdogs known as the New York Yankees had just taken the World Series. And we had not yet tapped the wondrous power of the Web to connect us with random strangers for conversation, music and genital flaunting. Oh, wait; actually, we’d been doing that for years. That’s pretty much what this thing was invented for. But we’d never done it in quite the way that a 17-year-old Moscow student named Andrey Ternovskiy configured it, combining our love affair with webcams with the Cracker Jack element of surprise. Who will you find there today? European royalty? Guy in a trailer? Just log on, click “next” and find out!

Those were heady days that followed. The number of users skyrocketed into the millions. “South Park” parodied it, Jon Stewart spun the virtual wheel on “The Daily Show,” even Kelly Osbourne had an opinion. By March, it had become a cultural touchstone, its significance definitively proven the moment Ben Folds stopped one on his own shows to pay homage to his Chatroulette doppelganger Merton. And just as surely as we believed back in those halcyon days that the Gores would stay together forever and the Gulf of Mexico wouldn’t become an oil slick, it seemed like the good times would never end.

But the warning signs were all there, grim indications that such great heights were unsustainable. Sure, the social media aspect was initially intriguing, but the mystery of what one might discover quickly became no mystery at all. SPOILER ALERT: It’s trouser meat. And while it’s true that from the beginning of civilization, men have endeavored to build monuments to their phalluses, Chatroulette’s status as an online obelisk was a shaky proposition at best. An RJ Metrics survey last spring revealed that 89 percent of Chatroulette users were male, that one in eight spins yielded “R-rated or worse” content and that “You are twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity.”

The world is full of big fans of the penis — God knows I’m one of the most devoted. But when you’ve got a community almost entirely composed of men, most of whom don’t enjoy looking at wangs as much as they do showing off their own, something’s gotta give. April came, and newspapers were printing fewer concerned stories about the dangers of Chatroulette to our children. Then it was May, and we realized nobody’d talked about it in days. By June, its hits were dipping, and the world had turned its attention to other, more pressing matters, like Dina Lohan’s feud with Carvel. Alone and virtually friendless, Chatroulette spent its days in a tailspin of desperate, lonely wanking, until the inevitable decline.

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I went on Chatroulette this morning to verify its obsolescence. Time it took for someone to show me his unit: 10 seconds. I clicked the “next” button. There, in extreme close-up, was a penis. I clicked “next” again. And there was no one there at all. Just vast, empty nothingness. All that’s left of a once great civilization is dead air and a bunch of guys sitting around with their pants off. It was a wild ride, a magical, you had to be there time in human history, when it seemed everyone in the world was as close as a mouse click. We’ll remember you as you once were, Chatroulette, young and full of song. But the party is over. And you can’t build an empire on dicks.

Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 33 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
210 points211 points | 9 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
185 points186 points | 29 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
169 points170 points | 98 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
73 points74 points | 16 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
45 points46 points | 5 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations