Social Question

DaphneT's avatar

How do chat rooms work?

Asked by DaphneT (5750points) July 29th, 2012

Chat rooms have been around for a long time, but still I’ve never participated in one because I don’t understand how they work. Have chat rooms a dying breed of communications? What has replaced them?

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12 Answers

poisonedantidote's avatar

They have been mostly killed off now yes, they are not as popular as say the 90’s, when it was all about IRC networks with 1000’s of rooms. They have been replaced with skype, msn and other messanger services now.

The way it works, is basically you have a room that has a name, and the room has a topic. Some times the name and the topic are related, some times not. There is a list of names usually, the people in the room, and then you have users, voiced users, half ops, ops, and some times even ircops. Each has more “power” than the last. Ranging from people who can talk in the room, right up to people who can ban people from the room, all the way up to people who can shut down the entire network.

You go in to the room, and you have a chat, some times about the topic, other times not. Some are used to download music, or share info, or even just play trivia games.

dumitus's avatar

Most of the chat rooms I’ve ever participated in were full of perverts or people in submarines(this is how we call it in Korean language), so it was never interesting. Does anyone know a good chatsite which does not show this weakness?
Sorry that my answer isn’t related to the question of DaphneT.

PhiNotPi's avatar

The basic idea of a chat room is that a group of strangers can talk about something that they all share in common, which would be the topic of the chat room.

They have been replaced by Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, and other similar services. The basic idea with those is that to can talk to a select group of people about many topics, and is more personal.

Fluther kind-of has a chat room, which can be found in a link in the upper right corner. I’m currently in the room, but more often than not there is nobody in it.

elbanditoroso's avatar

Not very well. The problem in a chat room (and one of the things that has tended to kill them off) is that there are always a couple of loudmouths that monopolize the conversation, and since most chat rooms are not moderated, there is no way to silence that person.

On issue related chat rooms (religion, politics) it is even worse, because the fundamentalists (of the right or the left) tend to pick fights with everyone else – it becomes a shouting match and not a friendly place.

wundayatta's avatar

Pheromones.

Shippy's avatar

Maybe virtual chat, where I spend most of my life unfortunately.

wundayatta's avatar

Anonymous sex. Kind of like the baths of the internet. But hey! Kind of hard to transmit AIDs in a chat room!

blueiiznh's avatar

Used by people who only care about A/S/L.

Texting has replaced/diminished the use.

DaphneT's avatar

@wundayatta, only one word? What does it mean?
@blueiiznh, what is A/S/L?

wundayatta's avatar

@DaphneT It’s a joke. Pheromones are smells emitted by the human body that attract other people in a sexual way. Obviously you can’t transmit smells on the internet. Not yet, anyway. God help us when we can.

But it tickles my sense of absurdity to imagine us all in a chat room emitting pheromones at each other. I think that would be hysterical!

And why not? Surely we can build artificial smell emitters. It could sample your smells on one end, and cause the smell emitter on the other end to emit the same smell. You could turn up or down the volume, as you wished. Imagine a virtual mosh pit!

Brian1946's avatar

@DaphneT

A/S/L stands for age/sex/location.

blueiiznh's avatar

^^^what he said.
Ty for answering afor me.

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