Apparently, some people were still taking Chatroulette seriously.
But they should do so now less than ever – the site relaunched on Monday, after being down for a week while improvements were made, but appears now not to work at all.
For the uninitiated, the site launched in November to pair random strangers with webcams for a video chat, and gained notoriety for most commonly being used by strangers for sexual self-gratification sessions.
The service went offline on August 23, with some reports speculating developer Andrey Ternovskiy was aiming to clean up its image with new features. But most reviews report big bugs with the updated version and, as I overcame my own reticence to test it on Tuesday, it didn’t work at all.
If Chatroulette ever had potential as a genuine service offering, it was probably as a premium video-chat service hosted on sex sites themselves. Indeed, perhaps the only good that’s ever come of Chatroulette has been the Ben Folds/Merton videos on YouTube.
Right now, it looks like the site may even have overstayed its welcome as a fleeting internet meme.