Gay Roulette Sites Monitored
If you’ve been wary about using Gay Roulette in recent years because of wariness due to lewd and inappropriate content, now may be the time to jump in again. The Russian video chat site, which claims to be the largest in the world with over twenty million users monthly, recently announced that it was taking steps to clean up its site, using both human and electronic methods. These steps included hiring 32 full-time reviewing agents and utilizing optical recognition techniques that are capable of recognizing genitalia to weed out users who were chatting in the nude.
Gay Roulette | History
For those of you who are not familiar with Gay Roulette, here is a brief history of the new phenomenon. The first site for heterosexual was created by Andrey Ternovsky, a 17-year old student from Moscow and launched in late 2009 to great success, with the number of users jumping from an initial 500 to 50,000 in the space of just one month. The name chat roulette was inspired by the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, in which some of the characters infamously played Russian Roulette. The intention of the site is to allow users to connect with other users randomly in a non-threatening and casual fashion.
What Is Gay Roulette?
The way Gay Roulette works is that when a user logs in, the site initially displays two video boxes. The user is then randomly connected with another online user, with their live images appearing in the video boxes; there is also a sidebar for optional text chat. If they want to terminate the conversation and chat with another user, they can click on the next option. Because of the random nature of the chatting, an online conversation can last for only a few seconds before a user can move on to another chat partner.
Gay Roulette | Lack Of Regulations
One of the most controversial elements of Gay Roulette was the initial lack of regulation as well as user accountability. Some users would broadcast pornographic images to their chat partners or even perform inappropriate sexual acts while chatting with them. This was particularly problematic due to the presence of underage users; although the site requires users to be at least sixteen years old, it is hard to enforce this prohibition in practice. In order to address this problem, the site administrators implemented a system which allowed users to report offensive behavior; when a user has been reported by three different chatters within five minutes, they are blocked from using the site for a maximum of 40 minutes. In 2011, however, bans last 24 hours but without the necessity of user complaints since the user reporting button has been removed. Despite this, unregulated behavior continued on the site, which led the site’s owners to implement the measures recently announced.
Meanwhile, Gay Roulette chat continues to try to make itself relevant in the wake of increased competition from sites such as Tiny Chat. It recently announced a contest for a new logo and site design, with a $1,000 prize for each. There are also new projects in the pipeline that the site’s owners are keeping under wraps for now but which they are confident will reignite interest in Gay Roulette again.
