Anonymous chat rooms. Why they do not have an increase in the audience?
2011 - we enter the market with our information and analytical system ist-budget.ru , in parallel we are monitoring new startups on the subject of public procurement, and once in one of the directories the anonymous chat project nekto.me attracted attention. We visited, got acquainted, the site online was about 1K users, looked at similar projects: chatvdvoem.ru (there is also always in the area of ​​1K), the American equivalent of omelge.com looked cooler and showed 25K. Some resources worked since 2009, someone entered the market later. Who exactly is the first in history launched an anonymous chat - we do not know, but there was clearly something unusual in the idea.
On Habré, the topic of anonymous chat was raised several times, there were different opinions: someone spoke about the futility of such projects, another part of the audience supported, but the fact remained: every day such sites are visited from 20K to 600K users . This means that such projects have their own audience and demand.
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A detailed look at anonymous chat rooms (we identified a total of 5 projects for ourselves), the following conclusions emerged: why, with such figures every day, there is almost no increase in attendance; what scenarios of behavior among users prevail in them, what they like, what they lack.
So, in our opinion, existing anonymous chat rooms, in the form in which they are, are nothing more than just a “time killer”, “a platform for trolling and virtual fun. If we discard the semantic component of the dialogues, and look at the user patterns, we will see a number of interesting conclusions:
- Before the beginning of the dialogue, all the visitors are in a state of an obvious desire to communicate here and now, the reasons may be different (I wanted to lively and there was no one there; the admin closed access to social networks, and the habit of chatting remained; other reasons could also be let's forget about the fun and understandable adult subjects);
- Anonymity is conducive to the ease of starting a dialogue. Even those who experience the problem of communication in reality can easily and quickly adapt to the conditions of communication offered by anonymous chat. Psychologists call this the “accidental traveling companion effect”, when a stranger can easily say things without the fear and fear that it can harm the image we carry through life. If we talk about the "bad guys" who live in chat rooms - it is obvious that such a gop audience here clearly attracts impunity and the possibility of self-affirmation at the expense of others.
- Scenarios for starting a conversation in each chat turned out to be typical: greeting, specifying gender, age (if there is no filter by age and sex), name, place of residence, etc. Usually, from the first phrases, the degree of adequacy and intentions of the interlocutor are understandable. Based on this understanding, an interesting dialogue or transition to a new interlocutor is obtained.
If the conversation turned out to be interesting, regardless of the context of the dialogue - in most cases there is a desire to look at a photo of the interlocutor, and also to get the opportunity to continue the conversation with him on another day, because if a disconnection occurs, there is practically no chance to resume the conversation with the same person. Those who actually managed to find an interesting interlocutor, after breaking the connection, try in vain to find him in the social groups of these chats, and on the forums.
Today, none of the existing chats does not allow the transfer of photos and return to the previous conversation. To show their photos and continue communication, some give links to their pages on social networks, someone, observing the principle of anonymity, uploads a file to a file sharing service or switches to communication in other messengers: ICQ, Skype, etc., the result is always the same - people to continue communication leave the chat site.
Another reason for leaving the chat is a meeting with inadequate and preoccupied types. After such meetings, some people lose the desire to visit the site. It seems that there are more than half of such people there, but this is far from the case, experienced users are talking about it
Unfortunately, no existing chat gives you the opportunity to add a cad to the blacklist, which would sometimes be very useful. This measure could create an outflow of an inadequate audience, since after repeated banning, with the filing of many people, the boor will simply get tired of coming to the site, without reaching their anti-goals here.
And it is called - the futility of communication. Even with high loyalty to the site, chatovtsev is always in the mind is the idea that most of the interesting interlocutors among themselves are still virtual friends. They can know a lot about each other: from ordinary habits to various nuances and preferences in sexual life; Still, the dialogue between a man and a woman, whatever one may say, is based on the interests of the sexes. But it is quite possible that each of these interesting interlocutors could occupy an important place in the real life of each other as a good friend, companion in life, or just a temporary companion. But the thousands of kilometers that separate people can be very, very difficult to overcome: the current worries and the world built by each of us keeps people on a short leash. Therefore, interest in such conversations without real continuation gradually weakens, turning the chat into a banal killer of time, to which you return only occasionally, when the truth has nothing to do to spend time with another interlocutor "from many."
To eliminate this implicit leakage, it is possible to choose the interlocutor closer to you, so that you can somehow, keeping the usual way, get the opportunity to discover new acquaintances with interesting people next to you. Unfortunately for users, geo-position accounting is not implemented in any such chat.
All these conclusions lead to the idea that maintaining an audience on such a platform is possible if implemented:
possibility of choice:
chat functionality:
In this form, anonymous chat is much more likely to go from a time killer to a real tool for real dating, where, instead of leaking the audience, there will certainly be an increase in it, and users will get tangible results in real life.
Studying anonymous chats, we certainly did it with a distant sight, but what if it turns out to create something interesting. At the end of 2013, we decided to implement a chat with the functionality we described in the section above. Through the efforts of our company's programmers in early June 2014. the first version of stairschat.com was made . The guys immediately said that they were far from ideal there, they could call us curvature, even though all the functionality works, but realizing all the nuances, after the project appeared on the network, they started writing a new version where the code would not be ashamed .
In the meantime, we have to understand: will our chat model contribute to the growth of the audience or not.
We do not know whether a tool can help create a concept, or vice versa, a concept should help create a tool, and whether it can be said that this is a concept in general, this is probably not important, but briefly outline the essence.
The most important point in this concept - the acquaintance begins against the background of an obvious desire to communicate right here and now. At the very beginning of the conversation, chat users evaluate the intellectual and emotional component of the interlocutor for compatibility. In this dating strategy, people do not come from the image that is created in social networks and on dating sites; there he is, as a rule, idealized and far from reality, and from the mind.
In social networks, very often the message of an outsider is perceived as an invasion of personal territory. On dating sites, people have a very long time to separate the “grain from the chaff” because these resources are full of announcements of sex services; a huge part of users created questionnaires for a very long time, and now they are no longer active, and the other part simply does not meet the expectations of the parties. Template statuses and questionnaires are more contrived, online dialogues there are very rare, and the message sent in the morning read in a completely different way in the evening.
Secondly, after all, it is obvious: mutual understanding is born among interlocutors who are matched by sex, age and interests (filters are used for this). It is more convenient to choose the interlocutor closer to your city or in your city, so that thousands of kilometers do not share interesting people.
You can also search in a particular city, because you are going to a foreign city, and you don’t know anyone there, and you’ll be waiting for you.
Thirdly, in the course of communication after a coincidence on an intellectually / emotional basis, people complement this understanding in a visual way, exchanging photos directly in the program, and if these images continue to excite the interlocutors, and once again return to the program (anonymity continues to persist, because there are no transitions to open social network accounts), interest in each other continues to exist and grows, inevitably there will be a meeting in reality, because in one city it is really very easy to do.
We can say that all this is quite controversial, but the process is running, let's see what happens.
On Habré, the topic of anonymous chat was raised several times, there were different opinions: someone spoke about the futility of such projects, another part of the audience supported, but the fact remained: every day such sites are visited from 20K to 600K users . This means that such projects have their own audience and demand.
')
A detailed look at anonymous chat rooms (we identified a total of 5 projects for ourselves), the following conclusions emerged: why, with such figures every day, there is almost no increase in attendance; what scenarios of behavior among users prevail in them, what they like, what they lack.
Verdict - useless time killer
So, in our opinion, existing anonymous chat rooms, in the form in which they are, are nothing more than just a “time killer”, “a platform for trolling and virtual fun. If we discard the semantic component of the dialogues, and look at the user patterns, we will see a number of interesting conclusions:
- Before the beginning of the dialogue, all the visitors are in a state of an obvious desire to communicate here and now, the reasons may be different (I wanted to lively and there was no one there; the admin closed access to social networks, and the habit of chatting remained; other reasons could also be let's forget about the fun and understandable adult subjects);
- Anonymity is conducive to the ease of starting a dialogue. Even those who experience the problem of communication in reality can easily and quickly adapt to the conditions of communication offered by anonymous chat. Psychologists call this the “accidental traveling companion effect”, when a stranger can easily say things without the fear and fear that it can harm the image we carry through life. If we talk about the "bad guys" who live in chat rooms - it is obvious that such a gop audience here clearly attracts impunity and the possibility of self-affirmation at the expense of others.
- Scenarios for starting a conversation in each chat turned out to be typical: greeting, specifying gender, age (if there is no filter by age and sex), name, place of residence, etc. Usually, from the first phrases, the degree of adequacy and intentions of the interlocutor are understandable. Based on this understanding, an interesting dialogue or transition to a new interlocutor is obtained.
The first reason for audience leaks
If the conversation turned out to be interesting, regardless of the context of the dialogue - in most cases there is a desire to look at a photo of the interlocutor, and also to get the opportunity to continue the conversation with him on another day, because if a disconnection occurs, there is practically no chance to resume the conversation with the same person. Those who actually managed to find an interesting interlocutor, after breaking the connection, try in vain to find him in the social groups of these chats, and on the forums.
Today, none of the existing chats does not allow the transfer of photos and return to the previous conversation. To show their photos and continue communication, some give links to their pages on social networks, someone, observing the principle of anonymity, uploads a file to a file sharing service or switches to communication in other messengers: ICQ, Skype, etc., the result is always the same - people to continue communication leave the chat site.
The second reason for audience leaks
Another reason for leaving the chat is a meeting with inadequate and preoccupied types. After such meetings, some people lose the desire to visit the site. It seems that there are more than half of such people there, but this is far from the case, experienced users are talking about it
Unfortunately, no existing chat gives you the opportunity to add a cad to the blacklist, which would sometimes be very useful. This measure could create an outflow of an inadequate audience, since after repeated banning, with the filing of many people, the boor will simply get tired of coming to the site, without reaching their anti-goals here.
The third reason for audience leaks
And it is called - the futility of communication. Even with high loyalty to the site, chatovtsev is always in the mind is the idea that most of the interesting interlocutors among themselves are still virtual friends. They can know a lot about each other: from ordinary habits to various nuances and preferences in sexual life; Still, the dialogue between a man and a woman, whatever one may say, is based on the interests of the sexes. But it is quite possible that each of these interesting interlocutors could occupy an important place in the real life of each other as a good friend, companion in life, or just a temporary companion. But the thousands of kilometers that separate people can be very, very difficult to overcome: the current worries and the world built by each of us keeps people on a short leash. Therefore, interest in such conversations without real continuation gradually weakens, turning the chat into a banal killer of time, to which you return only occasionally, when the truth has nothing to do to spend time with another interlocutor "from many."
To eliminate this implicit leakage, it is possible to choose the interlocutor closer to you, so that you can somehow, keeping the usual way, get the opportunity to discover new acquaintances with interesting people next to you. Unfortunately for users, geo-position accounting is not implemented in any such chat.
All these conclusions lead to the idea that maintaining an audience on such a platform is possible if implemented:
possibility of choice:
- sex;
- age;
- selection of the closest interlocutor on the scale of cities (to comply with the principle of anonymity, the exact coordinates within the city should not be taken into account);
- choice of communication language;
- selection of the language version of the site;
- the choice of the interlocutor in a particular city;
- the choice of interlocutor of interest;
chat functionality:
- transfer the saved image;
- transfer of a picture from the camera of the device;
- adding a buddy to the blacklist;
- maintaining an interesting dialogue in history;
- the resumption of dialogue from the story, when the interlocutor is online;
- rename the name of the room, the name of the interlocutor or any other;
- the ability to simultaneously conduct up to 10 dialogues and more;
- the ability to include video dialogue or audio chat;
- the presence of a game console with games for two.
In this form, anonymous chat is much more likely to go from a time killer to a real tool for real dating, where, instead of leaking the audience, there will certainly be an increase in it, and users will get tangible results in real life.
The implementation of anonymous chat on the scenario of increasing the audience
Studying anonymous chats, we certainly did it with a distant sight, but what if it turns out to create something interesting. At the end of 2013, we decided to implement a chat with the functionality we described in the section above. Through the efforts of our company's programmers in early June 2014. the first version of stairschat.com was made . The guys immediately said that they were far from ideal there, they could call us curvature, even though all the functionality works, but realizing all the nuances, after the project appeared on the network, they started writing a new version where the code would not be ashamed .
In the meantime, we have to understand: will our chat model contribute to the growth of the audience or not.
What comes first: concept or tool, tool or concept?
We do not know whether a tool can help create a concept, or vice versa, a concept should help create a tool, and whether it can be said that this is a concept in general, this is probably not important, but briefly outline the essence.
The most important point in this concept - the acquaintance begins against the background of an obvious desire to communicate right here and now. At the very beginning of the conversation, chat users evaluate the intellectual and emotional component of the interlocutor for compatibility. In this dating strategy, people do not come from the image that is created in social networks and on dating sites; there he is, as a rule, idealized and far from reality, and from the mind.
In social networks, very often the message of an outsider is perceived as an invasion of personal territory. On dating sites, people have a very long time to separate the “grain from the chaff” because these resources are full of announcements of sex services; a huge part of users created questionnaires for a very long time, and now they are no longer active, and the other part simply does not meet the expectations of the parties. Template statuses and questionnaires are more contrived, online dialogues there are very rare, and the message sent in the morning read in a completely different way in the evening.
Secondly, after all, it is obvious: mutual understanding is born among interlocutors who are matched by sex, age and interests (filters are used for this). It is more convenient to choose the interlocutor closer to your city or in your city, so that thousands of kilometers do not share interesting people.
You can also search in a particular city, because you are going to a foreign city, and you don’t know anyone there, and you’ll be waiting for you.
Thirdly, in the course of communication after a coincidence on an intellectually / emotional basis, people complement this understanding in a visual way, exchanging photos directly in the program, and if these images continue to excite the interlocutors, and once again return to the program (anonymity continues to persist, because there are no transitions to open social network accounts), interest in each other continues to exist and grows, inevitably there will be a meeting in reality, because in one city it is really very easy to do.
We can say that all this is quite controversial, but the process is running, let's see what happens.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/229249/
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