Not my cup of tea or vial of arsenic
Written: Aug 12 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Relatively easy to use, newbie friendly, self explanatory
Cons: Everything
The Bottom Line: It’s content, quality, spyware/adware is something I wouldn't give to my best friend or worse enemy.
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| icxcnika's Full Review: PalTalk |
Paltalk, Paltalk, Palktalk. Well, there are so many things that I can say about the program that I am going to require a bit of space. But, before I go on with my diatribe of negativity in my review here, I guess I’ll start with the pros. Paltalk is perhaps best known as an easy to use, simple program that allows individuals easy access to voice and audio over a chat medium. Also, the program itself is relatively small, containing not more than a few megabytes, however, this may indeed look like a pretty package but I will assure you it’s definitely the contrary. Paltalk is nothing more than a Pandora’s Box of problems, one after another. I will attempt to elaborate on each issue for the benefit of this review and the reader.
ADMINISTRATION: Like most programs which have corporate backing that must meet a terms of service and of course ensure that most of the users who partake of its services follow that terms of service, Paltalk does have an administration; so large in fact that one is often juggled between them in the search answers to problems or to relieve grievances. In other words the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. This is not to say that the administration is not always available. At any hour of the day there are Paltalk admins (often called ‘Red-Coats’ because of their nicknames highlighted in bright red) yet in this I have noticed that most of the administration are either inexperienced to deal with problems of customers. I also personally feel that a large majority of the administration hold grudges not to mention are rude to users at an attempt to demonstrate their power or much less compensate for their lack of knowledge with the program in order assist the user. In a sense, I have met employees of airports and DMVs who are much more amiable. Furthermore, I have also discovered that Red-Coats are allowed to sit invisible in rooms and observe the users in said rooms without their knowledge. Granted, there are members of the administration which I have encountered that are certainly the opposite of the majority, and if they weren’t in the minority, I think Paltalk would be a brighter place to sign into every day. To warn everybody in finality of this topic, it would be a good idea not to tick anyone off who happens to know an admin on a social basis. It is common knowledge that if you know the right individuals on Paltalk, you can easily have someone banned from the program for a week, to a month, to several months at a time-even permanently.
QUALITY OF PROGRAM: Over the years, the quality of what Paltalk boasts; namely it’s Audio and Video has begun to degrade. Whether this is due to the number of users growing daily or a lack of expansion in program is not to my knowledge. Personally, I believe the cause of it to be the Adult Category Rooms, which require so much bandwidth to operate due to cameras and constant use. Also, Paltalk amongst the hacker community is known as one of the easiest programs to hack, and just in the past months the program has underwent a gamut of DDOS attacks.
USER PRIVACY: Save for the issue of Red-Coats acting as voyeurs in your own rooms, if you do sign on to Paltalk as a member then according to the Terms of Service, Paltalk has every legal right to distribute information about your person to whomever it sees fit. Not only is it easy for hackers to gain personal information about you through the database, Paltalk further festers the wound by sending your info to companies for advertisement and the whatnot. If you do happen to place your email address with your information, you will receive advertisements and spam. Also, as a warning, Paltalk does make use of adware and spyware, not to mention pop-ups are a frequent aperitif with the daily usage. Spyswpeeper from Webroot.com detects the entire Paltalk program as spyware.
CREATIVITY: A minor complaint to the program, yes, but Paltalk does not offer any skins or other decorative marks of personalization to its GUI. One must stare at the same drab bluish cyan-gray utility.
RATING SYSTEM: If you have children, or even young teenagers, it would be best if you kept them away from Paltalk. Even though Paltalk does have a rating system[ (G (General), R (Rooms with course language but no sexual content), A (Rooms with both course language and sexual content)] it is every simple for anyone to simply bypass the adult content warning because there is nothing to bypass. No password, no keycodes, no parental lock-nothing. Don’t download it unless you wish to see little Johnny or little Suzie wandering into the Adult Categories watching people disrobe on camera and performing sexual acts.
RADIO SHOWS: This is touchy subject. I have found that many of the radio shows that Paltalk hosts were quite informative where individuals could come in and partake of a program in order to share common interests, however, like the rest of the program I find that a few bad apples tend to spoil the barrel. The program does host a number of individuals who are downright charlatans, televangelists, and self proclaimed “Prophets of Peace” (i.e. Hehpsehboah) that Paltalk will go out of it’s way to do anything to preserve advertisement for these people-including shutting down rooms that are contrary to radio hosts’ messages. In a sense, these people are using Paltalk to gain adherents, get money (donations for their projects/ministries), and separate the gullible from their dignity. It’s not that I personally do not believe that these individuals have no right to be on Paltalk. Idiots can choose to be anywhere, however, when such a program engages behavior of this fervor to ensure that they capitalize, I must question if they are ideologically aligned to these malcontents or is it simply for monetary gain. (I think the latter).
HATETALK: This is perhaps the biggest problem overall. I know that in the real world or ‘meatspace’ if we wish to use the comp lingo here, we must of course deal with bigotry, hatred, malice, racism, and prejudice on a daily basis but from what I can tell Paltalk is not a microcosm of this. Rather it’s a program which hosts people who take hatred to warp factor ten. This program is a breeding ground for racists, bigots, sexists, anti-socials, paranoids, and just generally not nice people. If you want an example of this, then take a look at the social issues category. Ever since September 11th, the category has become a festival of ‘We LOVE Jesus, But Moslems must die’ or ‘Mohammad is Prophet, Christians/Jews/Pagans die’ or ‘Israel FOREVER, Palestine NEVER’. I personally think that Paltalk offers a safe medium for individuals of this caliber to vent their hatred into the program because it allows them to do this from the safety of their computer screen, rather in real life if one were to spew this much hatred geared at racial discrimination or religious intolerance towards another person, they might find a pop knot on their forehead. This becomes such an issue that I have found that there are many people on Paltalk who claim that they have jobs, yet they spend their entire waking hours on this program doing nothing but making a career out of hatred. If you want a lot of drama with people who are probably unemployed embittered bigots, then Paltalk is the program for you.
CONCLUSION: In retrospect, Paltalk is not a program worth downloading. It’s content, quality, not to mention the “integrity” to utilize adware/spyware is just not for this country boy. I’ll stick to IRC, AIM, and ICQ when choosing to spend some time on the Net socializing.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
icxcnika
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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