A decade ago, Chatroulette was an internet supernova, exploding in popularity before collapsing amid a torrent of male nudity that repelled users. Now the app, which randomly pairs strangers for video chats, is getting a second chance, thanks in part to a pandemic that has limited personal social contact, but also thanks to advances in artificial intelligence that help filter the most offensive images.
User traffic has nearly tripled since the beginning of the year to 4 million unique visitors per month, the highest number since early 2016, according to Google Analytics. Founder and Chairman Andrey Ternovskiy says the platform provides a refreshing antidote to diversity and serendipity for familiar social echo chambers. On Chatroulette, strangers meet anonymously and don’t have to give away their details or search ads.
A sign of how thoroughly Chatroulette has cleaned up its act: an embryonic conference business venture. Bits & Pretzels, a German conference on startups, hosted a three-day event on Chatroulette in September, including a Founders Roulette session with attendees. “But without nudes, but full of surprising conversations,” read the conference. Another change: Women now make up 34 percent of users, up from 11 percent two years ago.
The AI that helped visitors avoid unwanted nudity or masturbation has been a good investment, Ternovskiy says. It can also provide lessons for much larger social networks that struggle to moderate content that can turn into untruths or toxicity. But Ternovskiy still dreams of a platform that creates happy human connections, and warns that technology cannot do this alone. “I doubt the machine will ever be able to predict: is this content desirable for my user base?” he says.
A 17-year-old Ternovskiy coded and created Chatroulette from his Moscow bedroom in November 2009 as a way to stop boredom. Three months later, the site attracted 1.2 million daily visitors. Then came the exodus. Ternovskiy made some fateful partnerships with Sean Parker and others to keep Chatroulette relevant. In 2014, he launched a premium offering that matched users based on desired demographics, generating some revenue. He invested some of that money in cryptocurrency ventures that brought in additional profits. Chatroulette is now based in Zug, Switzerland, a crypto hub.
In 2019, Ternovskiy decided to give Chatroulette another spin, as a more respectable company, led by a professional team, with less ‘mature chaos’. The company was founded in Switzerland. Ternovskiy hired Andrew Done, an Australian with expertise in machine learning, as CTO. Earlier this year, Done became CEO. He was joined by a senior product researcher with a PhD in psychology, a community manager, a talent acquisition manager, and more engineers. Then Covid-19 struck and traffic boomed.
The new team leveraged the increase in traffic to conduct user research and test ways to moderate content, including AI tools from Amazon and Microsoft. It created a filtered channel, now known as Random Chat, designed to rule out nudity, in addition to an unmoderated channel. By demarcating the two channels, Chatroulette hoped to make the filtered feed feel more secure and attract users interested in human connection. The unfiltered channel remains popular, but usage is shrinking and Ternovskiy plans to phase it out by mid-2021.
In June, Chatroulette hired Hive, an AI specialist from San Francisco, for a test to detect nudity. Hive’s software also moderates content on Reddit. Executives were quickly impressed with Hive’s accuracy, especially for not flagging innocent users and actions. At the same time, Chatroulette tested moderation tools from Amazon Rekognition and Microsoft Azure; it had previously tried Google Cloud’s Vision AI.
“Hive has a level of accuracy that makes it practical to use this technology at scale, which was not possible before,” says Done. He says Hive is “so accurate that using people in the moderation loop hurts system performance. That is, people introduce more errors than they remove. “