Okay, that number is approximate. No tracking system, no log. But somewhere in the ballpark of 47 conversations with people I’d never met before, across different platforms, over the course of maybe four weeks. Some lasted two minutes. A few stretched past midnight.
I wasn’t lonely. That’s the first thing people assume. “Oh you must be going through something.” I was fine, honestly. I was just bored of talking to the same twelve people in my life about the same twelve topics. My friends are great but we’ve been having the same conversations for years. Same opinions, same jokes, same references. It’s comfortable but it’s also kind of… flat.
That sent me searching.
The thing nobody tells you about random text chat is that the first few conversations are almost always terrible. Like, genuinely bad. You get the one-word responses, the immediate inappropriate messages, the bots, the people who clearly just want to be weird at someone and disappear. I almost quit after day two.
But then something shifted.
I think it was a Tuesday. Econ ended at 1 and Stats didn’t start till 2:15, so I had this awkward gap where I didn’t want to sit in the quad but also didn’t feel like walking back to my dorm. I opened one of those random chat apps — I was testing a few at the time — and ended up talking to this guy, Marcus, who was killing time waiting for a car part to arrive. He was somewhere in Ohio. We talked about whether it was worth fixing a 2009 Civic or just selling it for parts.
I know nothing about cars.
But I was completely absorbed for forty minutes.
The conversations that actually stuck
That’s the thing that keeps surprising me. The conversations that stick aren’t the ones where you find some deep soulmate who understands your entire personality. They’re the random ones. The guy who explained how competitive sheep shearing works. The woman — she said she was a retired librarian in Nova Scotia — who had extremely strong opinions about how digital lending is destroying local library culture. A teenager in the Philippines who was trying to decide whether to study engineering or music and wanted to talk it through with someone who wasn’t his parents.
None of these people knew me. I didn’t know them. Weirdly liberating, that part.
I’ve read a bunch of the research on this. There’s a concept called the “stranger on a train” effect — basically, we’re often more honest with people we’ll never see again because there’s no social cost. You’re not protecting a reputation. You’re not managing how someone who knows your whole history perceives you. You can just… say the thing. Whatever the thing is.
Testing a bunch of platforms (most of them bad)
I tried a bunch of different platforms during this period. Most of them were fine. Some were terrible. A few were actually interesting.
The one I kept coming back to was Knotchat. Found it kind of by accident — someone mentioned it in a thread and I clicked on it mostly out of curiosity.
What I noticed first was that it felt calmer than the alternatives. That sounds like a vague thing to say but I think it matters. On some platforms there’s this constant sense that anything could go sideways at any moment, which keeps you sort of braced. On Knotchat the moderation was actually doing its job, which meant I could relax into the conversations instead of waiting for something weird to happen.
The matching also felt more intentional. I wasn’t just getting thrown at whoever was online. Something was clearly doing the sorting. Could’ve been placebo — I genuinely don’t know the algorithm — but my hit rate for actual conversations went up noticeably when I was using it.
Also, it works in the browser. I know that sounds like a small thing but I hate installing apps for things I’m going to try once. The fact that I could just open it and go was genuinely nice.
Not perfect. Sometimes the connections dropped randomly and I’d lose a conversation mid-sentence. That happened maybe four times over the weeks I was using it. Annoying, not dealbreaking.
The bigger thing I’ve been thinking about
There’s a broader thing I’ve been thinking about, which is that we’ve built all these social networks and messaging apps that are optimized for staying connected to people you already know — but almost nothing optimized for meeting people you don’t know yet.
Think about how you made friends before the internet. School. Work. Parties. The gym. You were physically colocated with strangers and some of them became people. Now most of us live digitally in these very tight circles, and the only way to get new perspectives is to either move to a new city or be famous enough that interesting people reach out to you.
Random chat fills a gap that I don’t think most people realize is there until they stumble into it.
The retired librarian from Nova Scotia — I’m never going to talk to her again. We didn’t exchange anything. That conversation existed in one evening and then it was gone. But I’ve thought about what she said about digital lending probably a dozen times since. It changed something small in how I think about libraries.
That wouldn’t have happened if I’d just stayed in my twelve-person loop.
Is it dangerous though
I’m not evangelizing here. I know random chat has a reputation and some of it is earned. There’s a lot of garbage to wade through. The bad conversations are bad in ways that feel kind of specific to the internet — impersonal, blunt, sometimes actually unpleasant.
One more thing I want to say, because I’ve seen this question come up whenever random chat gets discussed online: “Isn’t it dangerous?”
And I mean, sure. The internet is not a perfectly safe place and pretending otherwise would be weird. But I think the question is kind of misframed. The risk is real but it’s manageable, and the calculus changes a lot depending on where you’re doing it.
The sketchy platforms are sketchy in obvious ways. Usually obvious pretty fast — like, a minute in at most. There’s no friction, no moderation, no sense that anyone running the thing cares what happens on it. Those ones, yeah, be careful. But that’s not the only option.
The better platforms put actual work into the experience. There’s real-time moderation that I noticed making a difference. That matters more than most people give it credit for. I’ll take “slightly more friction, much less garbage” over the alternative every time.
Also, and this might be obvious, but: text is text. Nothing leaves that box unless you type it. The conversations I had were with people who had no idea what city I was in, what I studied, what my last name was. That’s fine. You can have a real conversation with someone and stay completely anonymous. Actually that’s sometimes what makes it work.
What actually changed for me
Something I noticed changing in myself over these four weeks was my tolerance for ambiguity in conversations. My usual conversational style — the one I use with people I know — is pretty referential. I assume a lot of shared context. With strangers you can’t do that. You have to actually explain things. You have to ask what someone means. You end up being more direct because there’s no shorthand to fall back on.
I think that made me a slightly better communicator in my regular life too. Not dramatically. But I caught myself a few times in real-life conversations actually asking clarifying questions instead of assuming I knew what someone meant. That’s new.
Also I’ve learned more random things in the last month than I have in a while. Not deep, life-changing stuff. More like: the sheep shearing world record, how curling actually works (still don’t fully understand it), what the engineering school curriculum is like in the Philippines, three different opinions on whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and a surprisingly detailed explanation of why competitive esports players burn out faster than traditional athletes.
None of that is useful. All of it is interesting.
That might be the actual value proposition of random chat: it’s a machine for generating interesting-but-useless knowledge from real humans who actually care about the thing they’re telling you. Which is, if you think about it, a kind of rare thing to have access to.
I’m probably going to keep doing this. Not obsessively — I don’t think 47 conversations a month is going to be my new normal. But probably a few times a week, when I have those awkward gaps in the day and my twelve-person loop is quiet.
If you want to try it: https://knot.chat. That’s where I’ve been spending most of my random chat time lately. Start there. Keep your expectations low for the first session. Raise them after that.
The stranger on the train might be more interesting than you think.
random chat online strangers internet culture knotchat social connection
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