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.
> Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it.
To me small talk is the lubricant that makes conversations flow smooth with strangers. You can hear inflections and humor and irony all in a relatively safe, unemotional topic. Also, since your philosophical side is not needed, your emotional intelligence can be more engaged. For example, just by seeing how someone responds to a comment on the weather, you can learn about the person and maybe even find a shared bond(even if it is one as small as you both dislike hot, humid weather). Finally, especially needed in this divided time, it serves to humanize one to the other. So, I guess I am a fan of small talk.
I've also noticed that, while not really relevant here, small talk is a good way to gauge people's interest in having a conversation at all. If you dive right into big topics like hopes and dreams right off the bat, the other person might not be engaged, but if you ease your way in with small talk and receive a lot of energy back, that can be a positive signal to get to the deeper stuff.
Counterpoint: Most smalltalk topics actually get people to give an almost pre-rehearsed response.
For example if someone asks “What do you do for a living?” I will give the same answer I have given 1000 times. Ill ask them and they will do the same. There is nothing unique here.
> Counterpoint: Most smalltalk topics actually get people to give an almost pre-rehearsed response.
yeah, but you're supposed to then extrapolate on the other persons' pre-rehearsed response in order to escalate the conversation into something that flows without effort.
"What do you do for a living?"
"Mergers and Acquisitions."
"Oh. I have a friend that does nearly the same thing. They told me this anecdote, does that kind of thing ever happen to you?"
"Oh, as a matter of fact.."
Without small talk there is no sharing of useless trivia by which to use as a jumping off point into real conversation, unless there was some introduction or motivation behind the meeting, anyway.
>I will give the same answer I have given 1000 times.
If I'm just meeting you, it's new information to me, regardless of how many times you've said it! And that opens the door to more interesting conversation. Maybe I do something very related, or are interested something about that job, or whatever. Or maybe it leads nowhere. But that's how smalltalk goes, you dance around until you find a mutually interesting topic.
Without small talk how am i supposed to get to know "the basics" about someone?
If i don't know what he does, has he studied, his hobbies and what his interests are, i can't seem to start a deeper conversation. Yes, i can start a generic "what's the meaning of life" conversation, but wouldn't it be better for everyone if i asked specific questions related to that person?
Its a bit of a false dichotomy to say that the alternative to asking “what is your job?” is “what’s the meaning of life?”.
Just talk about anything. Talk about how the seats in the pub you are in aren’t comfy, then just yes and whatever they say and it will form a natural conversation.
You will know the basics about someone because the conversation will inevitably loop back to that naturally during stories.
I very recently came around to this opinion. I used to loathe it as a waste of time and energy for everyone involved, but then I realized that as I participated in it more with my coworkers, I felt those acquaintances really start opening up into something more like friendship.
This is a good point. However, I think one of the issues of small talk is that many times there is no progression from small talk to "deep" talk. Some people can get stuck trying to find things to say for the sake of conversation. And without getting into something that both parties actually have a passion for, small talk can get very boring very quickly.
I have a theory that smalltalk functions like a proof-of-work for social relationships. It's not strictly achieving anything directly, but it's proving a certain amount of effort.
I hate it too but I'm trying to learn to be okay with it and get good at it - it's never going away.
I agree. As a woman working as a major minority in STEM as a software developer, and seeing this being advertised on HN means I'll probably be paired with a male if I used it.
Not only are these not appropriate, it's the kind of information you could give to a dangerous man to give them all the cards to know your deepest weaknesses and manipulate you. That trust has to be earned, and it turns vulnerable people into potential targets.
It almost makes me feel like you've never considered how awkward these questions could be for anyone but particularly off putting to any woman whose parents taught them how to be safe when talking to strangers online since they were little girls.
Like the AI app thing where two young men advertised and bragged you could snap someone's pictures and get their asl is an absolutely horrifying prospect for any women to consider having available to anyone on the streets.
Sometimes these types of concepts seem so poorly thought out and ignorant especially in light of the goals being centered around the deep and social nature of human beings, I have to often attirbute this to childish ignorance in my head and remember the feds have another thing they need to regulate on the list. Being inclusive and considering abused of people who are not white males in power is literally the center of attention for most of the world right now. Take it to heart in your everyday life.
There are plenty of other things you can discuss, even concept building ideas that don't center around personal ancedotes.
You sound like you have a lot of fear... it's literally just a chat app. No one is forcing you to use it, no one is forcing you to answer questions. No one is stopping you from joining the app, you get a question you don't like, and you hit quit. Objectively, how does this affect you or reality outside of this awesome thing called choice?
Not to downplay what you're saying, or sound harsh, but people these days certainly are hitting a level of sensitivity that I cannot even fathom.
The FBI wouldnt call it fear as much as they would call it multiple departments dedicated to busting child predators and other predatory behavior which is something the FBI works with almost every major video app to regulate, and take very seriously.
Your comments are not demeaning to me, they are demeaning to the severity of this issue worldwide.
I will forgive your comments and pure ignorance because I'm sure if you were educated on this topic at all in any kind of statistics based context you would have to be majorly sexist in addition to wrong.
Even zoom has recently used the excuse that they will not end to end encrypt video sessions for non paying users, because paying for it requires validation of identity through certain forms of payment and verification which can be tracked by law enforcement, because unverified accounts are the primary venue for the predatory behavior I speak of.
The previous CISO of Facebook who now works with Zoom on this very issue worked with the government to help catch child predators on Facebook as well and currently is a Professor at Stanford researching safety of specifically these types of chat apps. I'm quite sure these questions would be on the list of recommendations the FBI would encourage you not to ask, but if you feel so strongly I'm wrong about this I would encourage you to reach out to the world leaders on cybersecurity and the FBI and NSA on global efforts to reduce the kind of predatory behavior these questions invites.
I'm going to be ignorant and presumatory assume you're a man, and also ask you to please educate yourself on this topic before/if you have children. You'll be a much better parent.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. I think you raise a great point that women are more likely to be targets of harassment than men on the internet. I feel strongly that women should feel safe on the internet.
If you try the app right now, you'll find many women from Saudi Arabia currently using it (a Saudi celebrity tweeted it yesterday). I noticed several women who were using the app for hours but hiding their camera with a finger. Based on that user behavior, I'm building an audio-only option so women who feel the way you do will hopefully feel more comfortable.
Thank you so much for acknowledging my feedback. I strongly encourage you to reach out to security consulting firms and get multiple blind reviews to vet the work. Video chat apps are tricky but they can be improved for the betterment of everyone. They are expensive but cheaper than lawsuits with the government. The least you can do here is educate yourself on the legal risk the owner of the company assumes with this technology and work on identity verification of some sort.
And I'm really excited to see the demographic using your app and I'm really glad I can help. What you are doing is great, and great leaders surround themselves with diverse people who have constructive feedback, so it's great to see that quality in you. I'm excited to see where this goes.
And sorry for another comment. Your dismissive comments were so loaded there's alot to unpack here to properly address it instead of just letting you get away with this passively:
I never said I had to use the app or wanted to use it. I have been reading hacker news since 2010 and I wouldn't hesitate to say I've read it atleast everyday and used to be mildly addicted to it. I'm very familiar with the demographics of HN and that it is male dominated in addition to some large scale misogyny that exists on the site (i.e. there are open incel groups who chat in comments here often for example/no presumptions being made on my end, they are self proclaimed on the site) and I was highlighting that the creator might want to advertise in places with a more diverse demographic than HN.
I've been an engineer since 2012 and started college in Electrical Engineering in 2008 and went to a school that was 23% female and 6% female in my engineering department (as opposed to the tech school overall) and I can't assume you these statistics donot lend themselves well to an environment where it is easy for women to casually make friends with guys, if anything I go out of my way to live in urban areas where I can have a more diverse set if friends, whether it be males who are more likely to view me as a friend than the first girl they've interacted with in months, or just females or just people who are not so dismissive of women in general, and I was letting the creator know I would not go out of my way to reintroduce myself to a male dominated community to make casual friends with people, and this isn't the best place to bootstrap a userbase where the question set leans towards stacking the already majority make population on here with a set of questions that can easily exploit emotional vulnerabilities of women.
It's not that women can't be crappy as well, it's that crime statistics also lend themselves in the direction of being male dominated, not to mention just not being a very inviting place for females.
If the goal is to make friends, I'd rather do so in an environment that is closer to 50/50 ratio which for me so far in life has basically been anywhere I can get outside of my industry to have friends both make and female, and I'm much better off for it.
Your comments as presumatory. I never felt forced to use it, I was just saying I wouldn't want to and why. To have the attitude of saying oh if you don't like the all white male environment then get out, noone said you had to be here is a very white male hacker news thing to say, but tell me more how there's no women in STEM because of them and not because of that kind of piss poor attitude you have there.
I like “small talk” a lot as a great way to know people. I disagree that these questions will make more meaningful conversations.
Every time I see one of these lists of ”meaningful” questions, from people who ”hate” small talk, they fit in one of these categories: it is virtue signaling, to show they are supposed to be more profound human beings than the average person; or it signalizes intelligence, show they can think of smarter things than the regular person; or they are intrusive questions, very personal questions that I would like to answer only to real friends, not strangers, and I would hate being asked that.
I would much rather engage with a simple person that asks those regular questions to start a conversation and it is there to actually talk to you, not put up a show to impress you on how profound and cool they are.
I agree. Given the description of the service, the topic could have been named "Show HN: Chatroulette Clone for Sapiosexuals" which would have been more informative.
> Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it.
Small talk is like two computers establishing a connection across a noisy network. Before you send real data, you need to establish some things like:
* Whether the other person speaks your language
* What their name is
* Whether they are feeling ok
* Whether they are interested in a conversation
* Whether they are someone you want to invest time and effort in talking to
* What (if any) common interests you share
... And so on.
When you use a platform like Virus Cafe to establish a connection with another person, you can bypass all of that. But in normal life, small talk is important.
These questions are selected as particularly relevant to dating while being innocuous. Even if Virus Cafe is not a dating site but I guess they can still be great conversation starters. They are:
Proxy for "Will my date have sex on the first date?"
- Do you like the taste of beer?
Proxy for "Do my date and I have long-term potential?"
- Do you like horror movies?
- Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
- Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?
Proxy for "Do my date and I have the same politics?"
- Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?
If your date answers 'no'—i.e. is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.
As someone who is not himself a believer, I found it rather heartening that tolerance, even on something trivial like this, correlated with belief in God, although I should've figured out that religious people are okay with small mistakes. Next to intelligent design, what's a couple typos?
It's also nice when two completely independent datasets corroborate each other. Last summer, we analyzed the profile text of half a million user profiles, comparing religion and writing-level. For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level.
So a religious person is more likely to be okay with spelling mistakes because they themselves are likely to not be good spellers, because they are likely to be less intelligent. It has nothing to do with religious people being okay with small mistakes.
Small talk is the foreplay of human discourse. Frankly most people's inconsequential talk is more interesting to me than their views on Big Topics where we mostly adhere to some tribal imperative.
These seem like extremely controversial, divisive topics. Not the kind of thing to bring up with someone you don’t know well, and the opposite of a good way to make a friend.
If you want to have "deep" conversations with a complete stranger without even getting an introduction first, then you're really not interested in a conversation, you're just interested in presenting.
Which is fine, just starting a YouTube channel is a better (and more honest) way to accomplish it.
One important suggestion I'd like to offer: prevent the site from being closed mid conversation with an alert (like, a confirmation dialog box), as sometimes a simple missclick can rudely end the conversation ;(
(I'm sorry monirz)
This is awesome. I ignored all the questions. Just make it a clean chatroulette to have a coffee with random developers. Secure it with a programming question.
funny.. all these questions are small talk to me :)
not a criticism at all by the way! i like the concept and interested to see how it works out (plus thanks in general for thinking of thing people may like and putting the effort into creating them!).
Just that i would describe it as small talk with interesting queues :) - note IMHO small talk is very important and is a great way of learning about people and the world without getting into a fight :D.. this is just small talk that is less likely to be boring :D
*edit: the assumption being that as there is no trust between participants - they will answer these questions in a certain surface only way. the only thing that would make these questions not small talk is if they were part of a wider conversation.
How long does it typically take for both parties to agree to the same question? Some of this stuff I'm not discussing with a stranger that might become a 'friend.'
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