Online, we’re all voyeurs. But who else is watching?

The peculiar dance of the first date usually begins in fits and starts, proceeds with tentative probing and ends in an awkward goodbye. It’s a ritual that has long enthralled viewers of romantic comedies, reality shows and, on Monday night, hundreds of computer users who logged on to the DateCam at HowAboutWe.com to watch two people sit on a couch and exchange flirtatious remarks about each other’s tattoos.

The live streaming date is an occasional marketing stunt launched by the new dating site that pairs people with common interests (“How about we . . . go to Spy Night at the Spy Museum . . . grab a pizza at Comet . . . dress up in our finest “Mad Men”-era clothes and have fancy drinks,” read recent Washington area entries.) Most of the dates are not live streamed, but the ones that are attract big crowds of viewers who can comment on the potential love match.

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(Harry Campbell/For the Washington Post)

The webcam’s popularity underscores a favorite online pastime: eavesdropping.

Since the first message board sprung up on the Internet in the early ’90s, some people have taken to oversharing while others have been happy to sit back and listen. It’s become so much a part of the culture that, for many of us, social sharing has changed the way we interact with the news, one another and the world at large.

Now more sites — and tweaks to established sites — are allowing people to listen in on others’ thoughts and exchanges. Facebook, built on the idea that people would want to talk to college buddies online, recently decided you might enjoy talking to strangers, too.

Now available on Facebook: a subscribe button. In the model of Twitter, the button allows people you don’t know to virtually listen in on your Facebook status updates, reading about your child’s first step or your thoughts on a recent New Yorker article. The only division between friend and subscriber: the title. The “friend” designation allows you to listen to their thoughts as well. Subscribers can read what you write, but that’s it. The feature, for now, is opt-in.

The Web can provide the same vicarious thrill we get from watching reality television. Gossip sites breathlessly detail every action of stars.

Ordinary people can become Web celebrities based solely on the number of followers they have on Twitter. In fact, the final vestiges of television production that reality shows employ — story editors, makeup artists and the rest — disappear in the live stream, such as the HowAboutWe DateCam, and viewers are fine with it. We don’t even need compelling reasons — we just want to watch, or listen.

CompassionPit.com lets you listen to people complain about their problems. The same live stream company that beamed out the awkward first date, UStream, also hosts a steady march of videos from protesters in the streets of Egypt, Syria and Libya. There is a beguiling sense of security that the anonymity of the Web offers, lulling people into sharing secrets they might not otherwise. Of course, eavesdropping can also be used by others as more than a mere pastime.

The Libyan government built up an army of cyber-trackers thanks in part to technology developed by Western firms, which monitored dissidents’ chat messages. Syria has been attempting to identify activists in YouTube videos.

Online, there’s a short distance between love and danger.