Just on a lark I went into a Yahoo chat room. Holy crap, what a wasteland.
I thought, isn’t that strange. I went into a few more. All the same.
I went to some other Web site with chats. More of the same. My fiancee tried one. More of the same. We were amazed.
Are there ANY chat rooms on the Internet populated by smart people, or is this a Net-wide phenomenon? If so, why? You can find decent message boards (e.g. this one) so why not chat rooms?
I don’t spend much time in chat rooms anymore, but I can guess as to why they aren’t usually populated by smart people. In a chat room, the conversation is real-time, and very fast-paced. On decent message boards like this one, we ask questions, get intelligent answers (well, usually), and most always “speak” in paragraphs. What I’m trying to say here is that being an active participant on a board is more time-consuming than chatting, and more, eh, shall I say “stupid” people are much more likely to go somewhere where no one expects them to act intelligent: a chatroom.
Now, I understood that, does anyone else? 
I bent my wookie.
I like pickles. They’re silly.
I understand Kerrigan. I do frequent chat rooms but I mainly do it to play games and in those rooms the conversation is ussually about the game. This is almost exclusivly done on mplayer for me. But I do wander into the assorted “chat” only rooms. I complare it to watching Jenny Jones or what have you. The drama(thats what they call it) is really thick. People always fighting and being pricks. Why? becuase they can. People who claim to be hackers becuase, “they got this program from a friend that makes your computer go crazy.” Until you hit the esc key of course. On there its mostly red necks and losers. Its sad really. Sitting at home at 3am on a sunday morning “cybering” with a large red neck with 5 kids IS as bad as it sounds. But hey if you just got out of jail for beating your wife while she was pregnant then you will fit right in. But there are perfectly normal, ok maybe not normal, but some non-loonies on there. O, and for the OP, there are none that I have found, probably for the reasons Kerrigan gave.
A few (ok, quite a few but in percentages of the 8,000+ members it’s only a few) members of this board meet at #StraightDope on IRC’s Undernet server. So you might want to give that a try if you trust us enough to ask us about it in the first place.
If you need any additional assitance on how to get there, mail me. My mail is available through my profile.
Keep in mind that #StraightDope is not owned by the Chicago Reader, nor does the Reader, the Straight Dope, its staff or admins in any way endorse or condone #StraightDope.
Given the previous hub-bub, I won’t respond further to this topic (which is probably better suited in IMHO anyway).
Who wants to cyber?
I spend far too much of my time in the IRC Dalnet channel #Atheism… this chanel is open to those with religious beliefs as well, but prepare to be challenged on what you believe! I’ve had some incredibly intense debates with people there on a wide range of subjects and I have a lot of fun.
Having just recently visited #straightdope for the first time, where I was warmly welcomed by all, I would recommend it highly!
I also chat at Virtual Places, which is Excite.com’s chat. There is usually a good game going on in the trivia room, but for the most part, finding good intelligent chat takes a bit of determination. But it’s not impossible. I think you have to spend a little bit of time in a room before you write it off as completely awful. It is very much like searching for a needle in a haystack, but there is a needle in there somewhere.
Before I discovered the SDMB, you could often find me in http://www.zone.com playing backgammon (or occasionally chess or checkers) and chatting with my opponents. Since these games are not for idiots, it does tend to weed out most (but not all) of the a$$holes. We chat about much more than the game. I’ve learned a lot about places like Turkey and Australia from chatting with my opponents who live there.
I went to #straightdope this last weekend and had a fun time. I’m not a big chatter but these guys crack me up.
I used to do Yahoo chat. The only room anyone was saying anything useful was #Lesbian. The catch was if you said the slightest nasty thing they would kick ya.
I Think TeemingMillions has a nice chat room, havent been to it for sometime.
I hang out at deafchat.com Slightly better than the others if you can get used to how deaf people talk.
I tried som general video chat rooms but too many guys where using them to jerk off.
Not a factual question, therefore not GQ.