Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by nazgulnarsil on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:31PM
(#1170245)
"we're slipping guys. we're bleeding viewers. people just don't care about the news anymore. we need something that grabs people. steve, who's our main demographic these days?"
"uh...well according to nielsen it looks like...scared old people."
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by icco on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:15PM
(#1170198)
What amazes me about this short is not that they satirically covered the news, but the amount of clips and actual people they were able to put together to make the segment really work.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by ugh on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:39PM
(#1170262)
Geo-locked? That’s strange. Where? I can watch here in Germany. Despite having to endure ads which are in no way relevant for me.
I thought only Hulu was geo-locked. People might simply not know that something is geo-locked if it’s only unavailable in a few places. The sites (regrettably) don’t come with a warning.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by halo on Friday March 05, 2010 @04:44PM
(#1170569)
Indeed. It's shown on the digital terrestrial channel More4 the day after broadcast, as well as available online via 4OD. Sadly, The Colbert Report is also blocked and that's not shown in the UK.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by petercooper on Friday March 05, 2010 @10:02PM
(#1171059)
None. For people who don't know any better, they just hit "Back" and a visitor is lost. For people who know better, they connect to a VPN quickly, watch the video, then hop back off again :-)
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by StrawberryFrog on Friday March 05, 2010 @03:28PM
(#1170402)
I'm seeing it fine in the UK. There's a bit of firefox configuration to do first, but I got around to that a few months ago, then forgot about it - it just works now. You can probably find it if you google.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by naqeeb on Friday March 05, 2010 @05:27PM
(#1170657)
Sadly, you think the Mainstream Media would realize that viewers are not as afraid of the internets as they were back in the 90s. There is a reason why more people watch the Daily Show for their news these days.
On a side note, I would have loved a cameo appearance from Chris Hansen and the To Catch A Predator crew.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by morphir on Friday March 05, 2010 @08:38PM
(#1170975)
Linus Torvalds called the bsd-people for a bunch 'masturbating monkeys' and the digg-crowd for a bunch of 'wanking walruses'. I wonder if there was a more appropriate term for chatroulettes users..
But lets be honest guys - we all thought "err.. why did I not think of that".
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by cookiecaper on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:25PM
(#1170230)
I don't know wtf is wrong with these newspeople. Not that many people know about ChatRoulette -- for instance, no one in my family knows about it, and with all the time I spend online on sites like this, I've only heard it mentioned a few times.
But when you get on TV to "warn parents" about this "frightening new trend" of seeing penises, you tell a lot of "normal" people about it and only make things worse.
The mainstream media is desperate to look like they know what's happening with kids and the internet, but they really just constantly misreport and their own reporting skews numbers. See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by henrikschroder on Friday March 05, 2010 @04:15PM
(#1170507)
I thought some more about this, and I think the biggest problem is that they have no sense of proportions, they are completely unable to figure out how popular something on the internet is, they don't know the difference between stuff noone cares about, and stuff that is actually widespread. Everything gets painted with the same "Newest craze on the internet" brush.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by qjz on Friday March 05, 2010 @04:21PM
(#1170517)
No, they're not. They have staff reading reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, etc. in order to find interesting news leads to sensationalize. It's THEIR JOB.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by cookiecaper on Friday March 05, 2010 @05:26PM
(#1170656)
Right, but you can't accurately gauge things just by its appearance on reddit et al. Reddit caters to a specific niche and only a very small percentage of internet users use reddit (or slashdot, or HN, or...).
Most reddit users know what ChatRoulette is because there have been some funny submissions about it, but that doesn't most other people know about ChatRoulette.
However these people are finding these things, they are clearly not performing due diligence; ChatRoulette is not a "craze". Only a small segment even knew it existed until CNN and everyone else started running stories about it.
For example, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chatroulette.com shows an almost 600% 1-month increase in reach for chatroulette. Stories about ChatRoulette started showing up on CNN.com in February. Also, it's traffic is up 83,300% over the last three months. Alexa only grabs data from a small fraction of Internet Explorer users. Heh.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by groaner on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:16PM
(#1170206)
On the contrary, I think they understand exactly what this site is about and are happy to demonize it, possibly to the extent that they can get the powers that be to introduce restrictions on online video so that we can all go back to getting our spoon-fed media.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by SamAtt on Friday March 05, 2010 @04:08PM
(#1170493)
I don't think ChatRoulette needs anyone's help in regards to demonizing it. It's pretty much as it was portrayed. If anything the Daily Show made it look better (The one time I tried it I saw double the cock and not a single mainstream news personality)
Then use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS proxy from a spare Web browser (Firefox is particularly easy for this).
Or get a cheap VPN account. Lots of providers. I pay $5 a month for this (mostly because my ISP frequently blocks access to Google). Hit connect, watch video, hit disconnect.. bob's your uncle, etc.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by petercooper on Saturday March 06, 2010 @02:51PM
(#1172007)
I signed up with Pipex (a good business ISP), but they became Tiscali, then they became TalkTalk (a trashy - IMHO - consumer ISP). They seem to not-so-transparently proxy HTTP so badly that large swathes of the Web wobble in and out of working.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by abstractbill on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:17PM
(#1170209)
Interesting, looks like whatever you typed after the "5" tickled a HN bug - there's an unclosed <i> tag that causes the reply link on your comment to be rendered in italics.
Re:Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette
by sutro on Friday March 05, 2010 @02:48PM
(#1170292)
You're not allowed to submit links like this to HN, because HN is too serious and important for humor. Cue the censorious "we're becoming just like reddit" comments...
Strangely profound statement. As always, he does a magnificent job of making the mainstream media look like morons.
Regular roulette doesn't involve a gun and chambers... unless you run up gambling debts to shady people, I guess.
"uh...well according to nielsen it looks like...scared old people."
"I have an idea."
It's the same reason that most of my news comes from the Daily Show and news.bbc.co.uk
I thought only Hulu was geo-locked. People might simply not know that something is geo-locked if it’s only unavailable in a few places. The sites (regrettably) don’t come with a warning.
What possible gain could there be from excluding the UK and (seemingly) allowing access in continental Europe?
Needs Firefox in order to install the Modify Headers extension.
Nah, ok lets get a thread going on proxy mechanisms to help handelaar open up this website.
On a side note, I would have loved a cameo appearance from Chris Hansen and the To Catch A Predator crew.
"Sit down. Have a seat, Jon. So what are you doing here?"
But lets be honest guys - we all thought "err.. why did I not think of that".
But when you get on TV to "warn parents" about this "frightening new trend" of seeing penises, you tell a lot of "normal" people about it and only make things worse.
The mainstream media is desperate to look like they know what's happening with kids and the internet, but they really just constantly misreport and their own reporting skews numbers. See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter.
This is just what it needs.
"See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter."
<sigh>
Most reddit users know what ChatRoulette is because there have been some funny submissions about it, but that doesn't most other people know about ChatRoulette.
However these people are finding these things, they are clearly not performing due diligence; ChatRoulette is not a "craze". Only a small segment even knew it existed until CNN and everyone else started running stories about it.
For example, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chatroulette.com shows an almost 600% 1-month increase in reach for chatroulette. Stories about ChatRoulette started showing up on CNN.com in February. Also, it's traffic is up 83,300% over the last three months. Alexa only grabs data from a small fraction of Internet Explorer users. Heh.
Well, that gets you the full shows, rather than this particular clip. Still it's a start.
Or get a cheap VPN account. Lots of providers. I pay $5 a month for this (mostly because my ISP frequently blocks access to Google). Hit connect, watch video, hit disconnect.. bob's your uncle, etc.