Is there a chance for chat instead of video call? I like the idea but I'm not exposing myself in video. I know it "ruins" the experience but each one to its own.
I met a German girl on this app. We had a great time and right when we were exchanging numbers the server restarted. Please give a lengthier grace period. :(
Don’t want to sully the conversation here, but I want to raise an important point - so @feross, please stick with it.
I gave my daughter (6) my iPad for ten minutes this morning and put her on a site to draw minecraft skins. I took a call and took my eyes off the device (but not daughter) for about five minutes while I paced around the room. When I sat back next to her, she somehow ended up on virus Café and was in a video chat with someone. This scared the absolute hell out of me as I knew nothing about the site, I wondered how on Earth she’d managed to stumble on it so quickly, how she’d been able to allow access to device cameras so easily and, ya know, “Virus Café”.
To get around it, I’ve default denied mic and camera access and had to have a serious conversation about stranger danger.
I accept my own lapse in this, but to mitigate it happening to other kids who don’t have helicopter parents, can you please put some form of test before you ask for camera settings? Some form of multiplication or division, or asking for the year you were born would be a massive boost to safeguarding young kids.
As this is HN, could you elaborate on the technologies you used to build this platform?
> - What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have? ...
Hm, the type of some of these questions resemble the type of the personal questions used for password recovery by some companies. As a paranoid person, I am reluctant to disclose this information to unknown people.
The name does not inspire enough confidence for me to click on the link.
I had some very interesting conversations here. I don't remember the exact questions and dailogue but I'll note some here for users to know what they can expect. It was addictive. I got to a couple participants that covered their camera and decided to disconnect after seeing me (Internet strangers do that).
#1 What is the social and economics structure (theoritical or fictious) that you tend to agree with. We spent a minute or so discussing how we are new to the platform and it is our first session. The participant was from Europe and immediately opted for Capitalism. I sort of agreed and waved good bye at end of 2 mins.
#2 Do you believe in after life? The participant was a cheerful African women. I disclosed that would prefer not to have a after life and belong the void. That is the only way to achieve peace for me. She immediately exclaimed that she prefers to have an after life as she believes that there is more to experience than the chaos we experience in life.
#3 What is it that you would change in your past? It was a North American man. We shared some personal experiences. We ended up extending the time multiple times and it was fun talking. I think we both took something away from the chat.
#4 You use a public toilet and notice there is no toilet paper. You are inside the stall. What do you do? An Indian origin participant from Africa shared some witty advice here. We ended up in small talk, and realized he has visited places in my city in India. We had an interesting conversation about how intellectuals can study spirituality and ignore the illogical and derive value.
I had some very interesting conversations here. And I might use this platform again. Good job!
Just to say I love the background animation when one refuse to allow the camera. Attention to details is everything.
My comments after trying it for a while:
- First off all, I like the idea! Thanks for making this! HN will often hold a hobby-project to the standards of a professional product, and will hence criticize a lot, but don't get discouraged, I enjoyed it.
- From time to time I got a repeated question, or the question was a bit lame/uninteresting. Maybe add a feature so you're able to "reroll" the question once per conversation (perhaps with agreement of the other). Personally I would like it if you could e.g. choose a category before getting matched.
- I got insta-disconnected quite often. This doesn't really bother me that much as I can try again immediately, but it could put people off when they try out the app and get skipped the first couple of times. People will judge the app on the first conversations. Do you punish frequent disconnecters? (Maybe put a limit, like max 2 disconnects per minute)
- The "no small-talk" is not very effective, some will entirely ignore the question. But I don't really think you can avoid this.
- I never got matched to a troll / something inappropriate. On the contrary: some conversations where quite wholesome (like a very friendly camel farmer with his little daughter). I hope it can stay this way.
- A majority of people I got matched to where from Saudi Arabia. This is not an issue on its own, but I found that many of these had poor English skills or a bad connection, which made conversations difficult.
- Some conversations where interesting, but some were also very lame. It's not so much the question that's important but also the personality of the person you get matched with. There are quite some people that go "idk lol how about you" after getting asked the conversation question. However the quality of the conversations are really the maker or breaker of the experience. It can be worth wading trough the bad ones for the good ones. Good ones occur less frequent tough, but tend to be longer. Indeed, 2 minutes is very short to have a proper discussion, so you extend it if it goes well. You could try to enhance this by e.g. making each renewal of the timer a minute longer.
tried matching with 3 people, all took one look at my face and peaced lol
nice app though! love the small touches with the emojis and sounds!
I love this, it is like chatroulette but everyone i met was super nice and polite. (no surprise dicks is a good feature IMO)
Maybe I am not stubborn enough, but my experience after 5 tries is:
- Nobody showed their face to the camera - why not but it seems odd to not be on equal foot
- 1 person was doing ONLY small talk and did not seem interested to discuss a specific topic.
- 4 people saw me and immediately ended the chat
I love the idea of forcing "deep talk". I found that the fleeting nature of the connection doesn't pair as well with in-depth answers and good conversation, but it pairs great when the conversation is bad.
I also ran into a lot of instances where I got reported with the message of "be nice" when the other person wasn't responding and/or wasn't on cam. I'm assuming I got reported, but couldn't confirm why.
Overall, really cool concept and slick implementation. Just wish more than 30% of the conversations had been fruitful. I'm assuming if you forced people to have accounts, you'd be able to improve this experience over time.
Hey! Great idea. I've had a lot of fun with it. Honestly, I'm not sure how this would even work, but it might be enjoyable if it were possible to randomise the location of both parties a little more. For the first 24 hours, I was meeting people from across the globe. However, for some reason, I now match exclusively with people from Saudi Arabia who don't speak very good English. I'm assuming the website was promoted there by an 'influencer' or something. I've met a lot of lovely people living in Riyadh, but it was a lot more fun when I didn't know where the other person was...
When I open it, I'm seeing "An unexpected error has occurred".
I'm assuming either website went down because of increased traffic, or it's not working in Safari private mode. My video is also off by default, if that matters.
I spoke to a couple of people and then I realised that I shouldnt cover my camera. My privacy filter was on and I got banned in 5 minutes. Good effort but I feel like its a clone of chat roulette!
Wow I was a little nervous at first but that was really fun!
I did like 6 or 7. For some reason over half were from KSA. Might check that random seed :)
But still fun. Kudos to author.
This sounds anxiety-inducing.
The screen that's visible when the video is not yet enabled is very annoying, might even be an epilepsy seizure trigger.
This app is awesome! great way to meet random people all around the world, and engage in interesting conversation.
The red button is clippped 80% on iPhone 7. My font size for OS is slightly larger than default
This is real cool. I would like something like this for blind matching a buyer and a seller in this covid 19 time. Sellers get 2 mins and a buyer can extend it by 5 mins. Speed dating for business.
The small talk dilemma, people like small talk use it to get into conversation with strangers. And the others just don’t want to talk to strangers (or people who are not alike)
End of story!
Hi feross! I presume this uses simple peer? We’re using simple peer in our app (currently on the front page as well). Thanks so much for your work!
The key to eliminating small talk is to announce observations and get to a point where you speak with more statements than questions.
Was fun to meet people there! Thanks feross
Whats the difference with chat roulette?
The "click the emojis" doesn't increase in difficulty ;)
Are the 200 questions publicly visible somehwere?
Nice! I have some feedback. Where can I send it to?
The rampant gratuitous flagging on HN has gotten out of control, this thread is exhibit A. Stop flagging stuff. If it has the slightest tinge of humor or sarcasm it gets flagged. Put the flag down. It's OK to be a little funny sometimes. Just stop.
Nice idea btw, the only problem that's full of Saudi's (no offense, it's just that I expected different people)
Also, I think enforcing camera is bad btw
He’s in, boys
Please tell me one of the topics is abortion. Always a good icebreaker. Virus cafe? Seriously, will my computer catch something using this site?
Gives out pretty negative feelings to me.
A sad emojii with a face mask is pretty depressing, and even worse if you see the mask as political.
Black lives matter is destroying cities across the USA.
I'm sure it's just me, but I wonder if anyone else sees this?
Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers.
Here's how it works:
1. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat
2. You're given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes!
3. The only rule is: no small talk!
Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it. I've expertly crafted over 200 questions designed to stimulate good conversation and skip past the boring introductions.
Here are a few samples:
- When in your life have you been the happiest?
- What would you be willing to die for?
- What is the biggest lie you’ve told without getting caught?
- What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?
- What human emotion do you fear the most?
- If a family member murdered someone, would you report them to the police?
- What absolutely excites you right now?
I hope you use Virus Cafe to meet a new friend and make a deep connection today.
Feross