Why I Joined the Random Chat diptok Team
Beyond Gagalive, Becoming the 'Chitchat' of Korea
Hey diptok friends! Today, I want to share a deeply honest and personal story that I've never told before: why I decided to join the Random Chat diptok Team.
I am now a co-founder and the main blogger for diptok, but as a child, I honestly thought random chat was just a place filled with perverts, where you wasted time and only ended up feeling upset. I know many people still think that way—after all, over 90% of the conversations still involve sexual talk and scams. However, if you've ever had a truly sincere conversation amidst all that trash talk, you'll understand why I hold this space so dear.
The Only Sanctuary During My Exhausting High School Years
It was my junior year of high school. Like most people, I was worn out by the heavy academic burden, cram schools, late-night studies, and friendships. I was struggling, but the struggles felt either too trivial or too burdensome to share with friends or family. So, I kept them bottled up, passing the days until, by chance, I accessed a random chat service popular in school at the time called Gagalive.
Honestly, I had zero expectations. Most chats ended after just a few lines that left me feeling uncomfortable, and I closed the window thinking, "I knew it." Most people just wanted to know if I was male or female, and once I revealed I was female, the conversations were, as you can imagine, filled with obvious perverted questions and demands to meet.
But about a week later, on a day I had decided to quit because I thought it was a waste of time, I met someone. It felt like a miracle. This person didn't ask if I was male or female, didn't ask where I lived, but simply said they had a hard day and asked how mine was. It was the first time I had ever met someone who just calmly shared their day. We exchanged mundane worries, and they didn't dismiss any of my fragments of distress; instead, they sincerely comforted me. "I think I know exactly how you're feeling right now." That one sentence allowed me to finally share the innermost thoughts I couldn't tell even my closest friends.
For me, who thought random chat was just a den of perverts, I realized for the first time that the anonymity and the stranger could actually be a safe haven—a digital bamboo forest. Inside that shelter, I could exist, if only briefly, not as a high school student obligated to study and suppress deep worries, but just as myself. I don't know, maybe I romanticize it, but it's no exaggeration to say that conversation helped me survive those miserable high school years.
Current Random Chat: Filled with Bots, Ads, and Explicit Photos
Time passed, and now I'm in my mid-twenties. I suddenly missed that warmth and sought out that kind of anonymous conversation. I searched for 'random chat' on Google and Naver, hoping to meet someone kind again. But the reality I faced was devastating. Existing random chat services, nearly a decade old, suffered from neglect and were overrun with bots, simple macros, and users with malicious intentions. Other apps forced me to upload a photo, and I couldn't bear the deluge of messages on sites filled with explicit photos of men and women. The anonymous space I knew for sharing sincerity was gone, replaced by a digital dumpster filled only with fatigue.
I know the common advice: 'Why not use an AI chat? There are so many AI companion services where you can choose a conversation partner that matches your personality.' That's true, but I wasn't looking for a conversation that would 100% agree with me. I wanted to talk in a space that smelled of real human presence—where a person could genuinely listen and offer sincere advice based on their own background. Was it truly impossible now to have a sincere human-to-human conversation anonymously? It was heartbreaking that the space meant for honesty—random chat—had become contaminated by the most dangerous and impure intentions. Finding a clean random chat seemed impossible.
Meeting diptok: Why I Joined This Team
While sinking into that disappointment, I met the diptok Team. Back then, my only joy after work was scrolling through blind self-introductions and 'I Am Solo' channels. Then, on a developer channel, a post popped up. Someone was building a random chat service as a side project. And they wanted to open it only during evening hours so people could focus on emotional conversation. I was intrigued: 'Someone actually wants to build an app like this?' That day, I messaged that person and was introduced to the vision of the diptok Team.
When I first heard the diptok Team's vision, my eyes lit up. They too had experienced Gagalive and were talking about the restoration of that sincere conversation I had known. They were agonizing over how to design a space to encourage genuine dialogue and create a chat environment where women wouldn't feel harassed. The planning from that time is now embedded in diptok:
- No Login: To allow fast conversation in the very moment you feel frustrated and want to share your heart.
- No Photos: To ensure users focus only on the conversation, not appearances.
- Stronger Reporting Features: To prevent the platform from becoming a digital ruin like other random chat platforms.
The Random Chat diptok Team's goal was to create the cleanest, most sophisticated new type of random chat in Korea. Recently, a similar service, Chitchat, has been gaining traction in the US. That team was also formed because they were frustrated with the decline of services like Omegle and OmeTV and wanted to build a refined chat experience. The diptok team shared the same ambition to build such a service in Korea. For me, this wasn't just a business; it felt like restoring the abandoned sincerity I had experienced as a teenager.
I decided to join the journey of this random chat side project, driven by the belief that that warm spontaneity could once again support someone's life. diptok is the team that wants to prove to me, and to you, that safe, anonymous conversation is still possible.
Hope my story brought you a little comfort tonight. If you ever need a chill spot to chat about these things in the late-night hours, why not give diptok a try and start your own honest conversation? 💜