So, I was looking for a forum, an article, or just anything about this subject but discovered there were none. I wondered how this could be:
surely I'm not the only one noticing this, surely I'm not the only sane person that still chats! Am I a weirdo?When I was younger, we had a family friend/aunt who we would often visit in the holidays with our mom. She was the sweetest person ever, and when time came to go home, we would beg our mom to let us sleep over. The strange thing however is that as soon as we had waved goodbye to our mom and the car would reach the corner and disappear, the atmosphere would change drastically!
Long story short; we would lie in bed at night and promise to NEVER come over again! But I don't know whether it was our naive hearts or the fact that she was so good at this pretend game that we could never follow or whatever it was, but a few months would go by and then there we were again! Faked into spending another night of at Hotel Misery...
My relationship to chat rooms is like that; A few months, years go by and then BAM! there I am; typing in a nickname and pressing the enter- button while whistling a jolly tune only to be welcomed by the same faithful junk and disappointment I had conveniently forgotten all about.
What went wrong? Am I the only one who didn't get the memo? Or did I get it and kindly regard it as spam because surely there had to be decent people out there somewhere who's vocabulary went beyond 'asl,msn, pic and cam' and who had other motives of entering a chat room other than 'cyber-fun'- there had to be other people... like me?
The weird thing is though that I started blaming myself, that maybe I was making it too easy, maybe my name was the one provoking all these random perversions.
However, I discovered that no name passed by these perverted minds' radar! Not even NormalChatterHere! And yeah you could change chat rooms but babe there is no 'free-zone' non what so ever.
It's like as soon as these guys sign into a chat room, they throw away any dignity and self-respect they ever possessed and every girl is an avatar created to fulfill their wildest dreams no questions asked. Seriously, it's as if they sit down, rip off the burden of decency demanded by society to reveal the capital letters 'S.D' in glowing red (aka their SuperDouche superhero costume) taking them into a new world where everything and anything goes!
Right there, I had a scary thought (that I really hope is just silly) that maybe this is how guys actually wished the real world was: to be able skip all the hardship and pretentiousness of the 'mating-rules/games' and just head straight to the so-called 'goodies/fun'?
Could this really be?I remember once making the HUGE mistake of checking out chatroulette.com for the first time with my baby sister, and just two milli-seconds later, she was traumatized for life and I felt SO bad! It's like all is fair in the land of cyber and any one too naive or uninformed is unfortunately fair game. When did these people take over the internet? Did the internet create them or were they always there but didn't yet know how to effectively exploit the flexibility and possibilities of anonymity? And could we ever claim it back without violating their so-called right of self-expression as we've seen it in all its nauseating glory?!
I mean, surely there are some decent ones out there and I can only speak from a female perspective of chat rooms but maybe there's a guy out there, just as puzzled and frustrated and that could somehow help clarify the reason for this astonishing trend which could safely be named, Generation-No-Shame.Help me understand or just share your own perspective on this subject and how it has gone so out of control.And guys; Please share your view on the roles females play in all of this as well....Could I please get the memo again?
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Comments (38)
I've heard of chatroulette.com. I've never tried it. I'm not really keen on chatrooms.
I haven't been in chatrooms for awhile..
chatroulette.com is a place for guys to show their man parts...don't go.
When I was 14-16 yrs old I went into chat rooms quite a bit. You will meet the creepiest people there, no lie. I met people that were clearly pedos, people that said some of the most racist, sexist, abusive shit maybe not to me but clearly they wanted to "impress me" with their terrible personality. I don't know if a lot of them were lying but I didn't care eventually, I just stopped doing it when I realized who fucked these people are and I didn't need that negativity in my life.
I learned at a young age that just about any site that involves talking or making "friends" online is bullshit. It's truly about the sex, how many people you can get to meet you in real life and not caring how old they are. I mean I've also met some cool, friendly people online and eventually become good friends with even offline. But that was like..3 or 4 people out of the millions of weirdos. But overall the internet has taught me that even if the people are lying about their lives or who they are...clearly people have a lot more dark secrets then they're letting on. I refuse to believe that there is anyone on this planet that doesn't have dark thoughts about others sometimes. Whether those people would deserves it or not. Humans are truly selfish, weird creatures.
chatroulette is epic. it's internet culture
chatrooms in general are no good. you have to find specific communities and forums. chatrooms are dead.
The entire social concept of chat rooms where you could meet people from around the world and have meaningful conversations pretty much went out the window when the internet became available en masse beyond 56k connections. Nowadays I won't go into any chat room besides a decently mod'd IRC channel
chat roulette, never tried and never will... it's just a bunch of penises... don't believe me, watch the video below:
south park chat roulette
Oh good god. Chat rooms are scary... Just one time was enough for me.
But then again, I text more than anything else, so maybe that's just the new chat room.I stopped going to chat rooms a few years ago because random people from overseas are majorly creepy. it seems like getting to know people from around the world is neat, but from my experiences, they are hackers or I can't communicate with them effectively due to a language barrier because they don't understand sarcastic jokes enough to have funny convos or they are the flasher types. what I used to do was connect with people on social network sites, then exchange sns if you think they aren't weirdos, and this guy sent a group invite to me and his other friends that he knows in real life, males and females, to chat together in a non-threatening way. I've never found a decent person in chatrooms but I have encountered a rare few from myspace, who I enjoyed talking to and seemed sane lol
I went to a chatroom once, and within the first 5 minutes I had three guys calling my baby and asking how old I was. It was sick! I agree. Chatrooms are dead. I wouldn't go to one unless it was on a specialized site like xanga, and even then, I'd be super careful and run at the first sign of creepiness.
@lilblucherrygrl@xanga - I couldn't agree with you more!
I hit the video chat room just for that, conversations. Every session ended with an internet fight over the guys behavior to the girl hosting the chat. I stop going there, now I am here. I want to do a blog about the bad experiences of video chats but one of my friends is still using it and she reads my blogs.
I suppose either they are just socially awkward (more so than me) or just look to get to the nitty gritty, no matter where they get it from. I bet none of them had enough blood to their brains to figure whether someone underage is behind those screen names. I should know. Some girl wrote me saying they were wet, and asked me to come over and screw them. I wasn't even in middle school then.
I quit chatting years ago.... wouldn't know but I take your word on it. lol
Amen
well said :) i completely agree with what you said...and it is true that guy's best wish is to skip all the hard work and get straight to action hahaha its true that we think with our dick first and then brain :).
and hey im a guy and even i was creeped on at those chatrooms...some old pervs looking for boys to mess around with...sick...half of the messages i got were "are u bi?? u wanna su*k my c**k?" stuff like that...
i say there is nothing good on those chat rooms, filled with perverted guys and half of the girls on it are fake, guys pretending to be them...the unfortunate joy of anonymity that internet gives :)
@looking_inside_me@xanga - Yeah, I also threw up my hands on those--it's a neat idea, but so many people are trolls and ruin it for those just trying to have a polite conversation. It's a shame, right?
@GreekPhysique@xanga - exactly, I used to have fun on there but all the jerks just ruin it all the time.
I remember my sister and I used to frequent some Harry Potter chat room thing. It was the exact opposite of repulsive. I met some really cool people on there and I was too young (I was like 11 or 12) to keep in touch with them, but it was an all around good experience. I know my sister kept in touch with some of them for a little while. I used AOL chats before that and people were disgusting and I went to one when I was like 15 or 16 and I remember I was repulsed. I think people act like that because they can get away with it and they're kind of experimenting.
ugh i ranted at my friend about this last week. i was on omegle and the first thing almost EVERYONE asked was "asl?" and then "horny girl?" NO. JUST BORED. god.
@dude_this_world_sux@xanga - haha i have ranted that plenty of times before from omegle...though i must say i did meet my current boyfriend on that site. He was one of the few that didn't say "asl" though...and he ended up living within close driving distance (:
I used to be in chatrooms all the time years ago but stopped because, as you said, it's so perverted.
most "good" guys assume that there would never be a decent girl in those chatrooms.. because why would they go somewhere like that? they know what's there. guys that do.. that sort of thing. so we look for you in other places, like xanga or somewhere more decent which hasn't been corrupted by that plague, yet.
But how do you know they're guys? (Chatroulette is kind of different, since you videocam with them...) And how do you know they're adult men? For all we know, they're probably little horny 15-year-olds trying to get off on something like that.
The internet is a scary, scary place.
I think general walk-in chatrooms stopped being places of meaningful exchanges around 2002. Elaboration: They pretty dropped off once ways of social networking that didn't give total antinomy took over, and have pretty much become the backalleys of the internet.