On a related note: Chat Roulette Piano Improv is fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vpgNiAH60

I feel like the real story isn't twitter/chatroulette/whatever, but these awesome things artists do with them. Shitmydadsays comes to mind.

Pervert seems a bit judgemental. The more interesting fact is that something like 13% of the population (assuming I can extrapolate) would like to show others their genitals. I wonder what the true stat is for the population.

But you can't extrapolate. A lot of people heard about chatroulette and heard that it's filled with perverts. The average person is a mixture of intrigued and scared by this, but an exhibitionist will definitely want to give it a try. So there's a huge selection bias.

So, 89% male gives us 11% female. If the perverts are equally distributed between male and female, you get about 2% female perverts.

It's easier to go to a bar.

The article addresses this:

Of the perverts that were identified, only 8% were female. Combined with the overall female rate, that means less than 1% of chats feature a female pervert.

The stats that Techcrunch cites don't actually match up with its conclusion. If 13% of ChatRoulette users are perverts, and of the perverts, 8% are female, then 0.13 * 0.08 = 0.0104 (or slightly, barely, more than 1%) are female perverts. If it had been "of the females, 8% are perverts", then it would be under 1%.

13%? That's all!? I figured it would be much higher, especially since 89% of the users are male.

13% is not enough for you?

you, pervert!

Hey, you don't know how many normal-looking people are perverts. It could actually be way more than 13%!

:-)

We published similar findings on March 1 with the Web Ecology Project http://www.webecologyproject.org/2010/03/chatroulette/

When we were doing the research the geo-ip information wasn't factored in, but overall we saw quite similar. Good to see that the results are reproducable (almost like science)!

"less than 1% of chats feature a female pervert."

This is really disappointing news for most hackers.

Looking at random pictures on the chat roulette map is pretty disturbing lol.

I wonder if these people knew a) they were being tracked and b) they picture was being saved would they have still done what they did?

And 13% is just the average! I was on the other night during what must have been a perv peak (20%). It was slightly terrifying.

I wonder what the stats would have been if it hadn't been plastered all over the media as the 'new cool thing'.

UK. . . what's up with the high percentage of perverts? Too much BBC?

The data firstly pointed out that UK usage was extremely low.

I'm skeptical if there was enough UK usage for the other UK statistics to be valid. Can't see any absolute numbers there though, so hard to tell.

The 95% CI is going to be roughly 15-31%.