Why Chatroulette Failed

Chatroulette was a clever idea for a website. If you have a webcam, Chatroulette will pair you randomly with another Chatroulette user.

Chatroulette has a penis problem. Many Chatroulette users just display a picture of their erect weiner.

Does that actually work? Do you know any woman who said "From the moment he E-Mailed me a picture of his erect phallus, I immediately fell in love with him!"

The problem is that Chatroulette pairs you "randomly with uniform distribution". If two "normal" people get paired, they might chat awhile. Any naked guy will be immediately "next"ed, going back into the pool of possible pairs. Naked men are a disproportionately large number of potential pairings.

Chatroulette needs a "rate this person" feature. Then, abusive users will be downvoted and only matched with other abusive users.

Chatroulette is an excellent example of a bad website moderation system. The key for good user-generated content is a moderation system. Abusive people should be filtered out. People with common interests should be matched. That is tricky, because one person's trolling is another person's good content.