A decade ago, Chatroulette was an Internet supernova, which exploded in popularity before collapsing under a torrent of male nudity that repelled users. Now, the app, which combines unknown traps for video chats, has a second chance, thanks in part to a pandemic that has restricted social contact in person, but also thanks to advances in artificial intelligence that help filter the most unpleasant images.
According to Google Analytics, user traffic has nearly tripled since the beginning of the year, reaching 4 million unique monthly visitors, most since early 2016. Founder and President Andrey Ternovskiy claims that the platform offers a refreshing antidote to diversity and serendipity in family social echo chambers. On Chatroulette, strangers are found anonymously and do not have to give up their data or delete themselves through ads.
A sign of how Chatroulette has thoroughly cleaned up its act: an embryonic corporate conference business. Bits & Pretzels, a German conference on startups, hosted a three-day Chatroulette event in September, including a roulette founders session that coincided with participants. “But no knots, but full of amazing conversations,” the conference announced. Another change: women are now 34% of users, compared to 11% two years ago.
AI that has helped keep visitors free of unwanted nudity or masturbation has been a good investment, Ternovskiy says. It can also offer lessons for much larger social networks that struggle to moderate content that can turn into fake or toxicity. But Ternovskiy still dreams of a platform that creates happy human connections and warns that technology cannot achieve it alone. “I doubt the machine will be able to predict: is this content desirable for my user base?” he says.
A 17-year-old, Ternovskiy, coded and created Chatroulette in November 2009 from his Moscow bedroom as a way to kill boredom. Three months later, the site attracted 1.2 million daily visitors. Then came the exodus. Ternovskiy participated in some unsuccessful partnerships with Sean Parker and others to try to keep Chatroulette relevant. In 2014, it launched a premium offering that matched users based on the desired demographics, which generated some revenue. He invested some of that money in cryptocurrency companies that brought in additional profits. Today Chatroulette is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, a cryptography center.
In 2019, Ternovskiy decided to take Chatroulette a step further, as a more respectable business, led by a professional team, with less “adult chaos”. The company was incorporated in Switzerland. Ternovskiy hired Andrew Done, an Australian with experience in machine learning, as CTO. Earlier this year, Done became CEO. He was joined by a senior product researcher with a doctorate in psychology, a community manager, a talent acquisition manager and more engineers. Then the Covid-19 hit and traffic prospered.
The new team took advantage of increased traffic to conduct user research and test ways to moderate content, including artificial intelligence tools from Amazon and Microsoft. He created a filtered channel, now known as random chat, designed to exclude nudity, alongside an unmoderated channel. By demarcating the two channels, Chatroulette hoped that the filtered feed would feel more secure and attract users interested in the human connection. The unfiltered canal remains popular, but use is declining and Ternovskiy plans to eliminate it by mid-2021.
In June, Chatroulette brought in Hive, a San Francisco-based AI specialist, to take a nudity screening test. Hive software also moderates Reddit content. Executives were quickly impressed with Hive’s accuracy, especially in not scoring innocent actions and users. At the same time, Chatroulette tested the moderation tools of Amazon Rekognition and Microsoft Azure; I had previously tried Google Cloud Vision AI.
“Hive has a level of accuracy that makes it practical to use this technology at scale, which until now was not possible,” says Done. He says Hive is “so accurate that using humans in the moderation loop impairs system performance. That is, humans make more mistakes than they eliminate. “