chatlobby v2: Everything That Changed
v2 adds a name that stays yours, a picture swap with strangers, and levels that only move when someone else talks to you. Here's the whole release, explained.
chatlobby v2 went out on 23 August. It is the largest change to this site since it launched, and the changelog covers it in about six lines — which is the right length for a changelog and the wrong length for explaining what any of it is for.
So this is the long version. What's new, what it does, and in a couple of places, why it works the way it does rather than the obvious way.
The short version: the chat is unchanged. What v2 adds is a way to keep something.
A name that stays yours
Until v2, chatlobby had exactly one kind of visitor: you picked a name, you talked, you closed the tab, and you were gone. That is still available and still one tap. But there is now a second option — a free account.
An account is a username and a password. There is no email field, no confirmation link, no recovery address, and no third-party login. This is not a privacy flourish we're proud of; it's the only design consistent with the rest of the site. A site that doesn't want to know who you are shouldn't collect an inbox to mail you at.
What the account holds is the part that matters: your name stops being available to anybody else, and everything you accumulate attaches to it rather than evaporating with the tab.
The trade is honest and worth stating: no email means no password reset. Lose it and the name is gone. That is the cost of not having anything to reset it against.
swap
This is the feature that has no equivalent anywhere else, so it takes the most explaining.
You put a picture or a gif into a shared pool. One comes back — someone else's, picked at random, and you don't find out what it is until you open it. A gif comes back for a gif and a picture for a picture, so the thing you receive is at least the same kind of thing you sent.
Three design decisions inside that are worth pulling out, because each one was the less obvious choice:
Every reveal is identical. There are no tiers, no rarity, no framing that dresses one draw up as better than another before you've looked at it. There was a version with tiers and it got removed. The reason is that the person who sent the picture gets paid when you like it — so anything that tells you how to feel about a draw before you've formed an opinion is quietly rigging the thing it's supposedly measuring. The only variable is what's actually behind the blur, and you're the only one who gets to judge it.
Sending pays nothing. You earn when somebody likes what you sent, never for the act of sending. If submitting paid, the pool would fill within a day with whatever is cheapest to submit, and the pool being worth opening is the entire product.
Nothing enters the pool unscreened. A submission sits pending until a human has looked at it. This is the slowest part of the loop and it is not going to get faster, because the alternative is a pool nobody should open.
swap needs an account rather than a guest session, because what it spends lives on the account.
Levels, and the odd thing about them
Talking moves you up a level. The odd part is what counts.
Nothing on this list is something you can do by yourself:
- someone replies to you
- a conversation keeps going in both directions
- you talk in a room while other people are actually in it
- someone likes a picture you put into swap
There is no experience for logging in. None for posting into an empty room, none for sitting in the lobby with the tab open, none for a daily streak. Every single trigger requires another person to have done something.
That was deliberate, and it's the design decision I'd defend hardest out of everything in v2. A level is supposed to mean "this person is good to talk to." The moment you pay people for presence, the number starts meaning "this person leaves a tab open," and every leaderboard on the internet that has ever gone this way has gone this way.
Each trigger also has a daily ceiling. Those exist to make farming pointless rather than to cap a good night — nobody having an actual conversation will ever reach one.
The curve is steep on purpose: level 2 arrives quickly, level 4 takes a while, and past that it stretches out.
Sparks, and what they're for
Sparks are the site's currency. They pay for swaps. There are three ways to get them, and the order here is deliberate — it's the order in which a new account can actually reach them:
Levelling up. Every level from the second onward pays out enough for a swap. This is the one that works on day one, which is why it's first.
Somebody liking what you sent. If your submission gets liked, you're paid by the person who liked it. This requires having already swapped at least once.
Watching a short ad. Available from level 2 onward, not before. Worth being precise about, because the unqualified version — "you can earn sparks from ads" — promises a tap that a brand-new account cannot open, and we had that wording on three separate screens before an audit caught it.
The store
From level 4, sparks buy cosmetics: name colours, badges, and effects on the line under your name. That line — a tagline, a short "here's what I'm here for" — also unlocks at level 4.
Everything in the store is decoration. Nothing in it affects who can talk to whom, what you can see, or how anything works. That constraint is the point of having a store at all: a cosmetic economy is a thing people can enjoy or ignore, and a functional one is a paywall wearing a costume.
What didn't change
Worth being explicit, because a release this size invites the assumption that everything moved:
- Messages still clear within a day. v2 did not add history, archives, or search. The reasoning is unchanged from the case for ephemeral chat.
- Guests still work. Name, age, country, and you're in. Accounts are a second door, not a gate on the first one.
- Moderation is still people. Reports go to humans, which is what actually happens when you file one.
- Still no video. Permanently, for the reasons we wrote out — that one is not a roadmap item, it's a decision.
- Still no email, anywhere, for anything.
Where to start
If you've never used the site: pick a name and go, exactly as before. Accounts make sense once you've decided you're staying, which is not a decision anybody should be asked to make in their first thirty seconds.
If you're coming back after a while: the thing to look at is swap, and the thing to know is that your name is claimable now — an account takes one screen, and the name you've been using is available until it isn't.