Oh, I didn’t realize this wasn’t ratroulette.com. Sorry for partying online with the greatest Pixar movie of all time. Jinjin Sun/YH

Chatroulette.com is an unusual Internet phenomenon. Following in the footsteps of random-text-chat websites like Omegle, Chatroulette allows participants to engage in completely random video chats with tens of thousands of other people. Many people take advantage of this opportunity, and I am sure there are plenty of normal, nice people who log on with the purpose of making genuine connections.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many of them.

What I have seen, however, is an unbelievable amount of anonymous men engaged in very private solitary acts. As a disclaimer: If you don’t want to be surprised by a random act of masturbation, do not go to Chatroulette.com. I’m not suggesting that those of us who browse the site want to be surprised in this manner, but either way I can guarantee that you will be. You have been warned.

Click the “Next” button on Chatroulette.com and the text “Looking for a random stranger…” appears. If this makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable you should thank your parents for raising you properly. And if Chatroulette is a representative sample of “random strangers,” then they were absolutely right about another thing—strangers are creepy and dangerous. When I considered the number of extremely strange chatters, however, I began to wonder if they came to Chatroulette as social deviants, or if perhaps the website changed them.

There’s no doubt that the ability to click past someone you don’t like or to provide a stranger with a hit-and-run insult brings out a strange side in most people. In order to understand my “partners,” as Chatroulette calls its conversation matches, I decided to try and engage them on a personal level—in short, I wanted to make some Internet friends. I prepared a question to quickly copy into the text box and stepped out into the virtual crowd.

Before continuing, I must provide another disclaimer. Remember those men I mentioned, doing things all by themselves? They do not want to answer questions—they simply want to masturbate. I received but a single response from one intrepid stimulator. When asked why he was on Chatroulette today he provided this enlightening, if not obvious, answer: “To beat off…duh.”

Many of my other “partners” were more forthcoming. One group of particularly dim-looking college-aged men replied, “Because your mom is a r*tard.” I guess I am the real idiot here, however, because I immediately responded, “NO SHE ISN’T.” I don’t think they believed me. Another man pointed a gun at the screen. Plenty of teenage boys flipped me off. I even encountered a few would-be philanthropists holding up signs reading “Tits for Haiti.” Some, such as the watermelon wearing sunglasses and a wig, did not answer.

My early attempts to make a genuine connection with my “partners,” needless to say, were discouraging. I needed to get past the initial flip-you-off-and-next-you stage. Unfortunately, having a question ready to send right away was not doing the trick. I have a lingering suspicion that many of the people I encountered could not read. My only recourse was to find something that would engage others on a primal level, some cultural icon that could not be ignored—much less nexted. Instead of asking a question, therefore, I decided to simply hold up my copy of Ratatouille on DVD.

If I learned nothing else from my Chatroulette experience, it is that everyone loves that movie. It changed things almost instantly. While there were still those groups of guys who would call me “gay” the second they saw it, most other people would react with glee. Finally, I began to make those Internet friends I so desperately wanted. A group of theater students from the University of Alaska, Anchorage fielded all of my probably annoying questions about Alaska. An NYU student introduced me to her stuffed animal. I talked Jersey Shore with a bunch of people from the University of Maryland. I even met someone from Japan, who, despite not being able to speak English very well, expressed his interest in anime extremely clearly. I played along, I don’t actually like Inuyasha but this guy loved it so much that I wasn’t about to let him know. I even met another person writing about Chatroulette for Barstool.com. Very meta.

It is difficult to say precisely what purpose a website like this serves, or why we like it. For some, I suppose, it is a simple release—both figuratively and physically. Others use their presumed anonymity to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do—like viciously insult a stranger or solicit a flashing. Voyeurs also occupy a special niche. Somebody is watching all those lonely guys.