Spam connections are now <1%

Spam content has impacted people’s experience of Chatroulette since the early days. Essentially, spammers highjack the user interface to pretend to be real users, then broadcast nefarious-sounding ads to others.

It’s not good. Not for our users, nor for us. To make matters worse, many ads are formatted in ways that make it look as though we’ve endorsed them. We haven’t and we don’t.

Today, though, we’re celebrating a resounding victory against the spammers. Obviously we don’t want to go into detail on the techniques we’ve used to combat this spam issue, but we can share some preliminary results. Prior to this intervention, spam ads had reached epidemic levels – 30% of connections were plagued by spam. With this latest release, spam is now at less than 1%. It’s a really excellent result and a terrific application of data science to this messy problem.

Though it’s the human results that matter the most. The site feels much better to use without seeing these ads, which makes us happier, and hopefully our users as well.

This project reminded me that spam is better thought of as an arms race than as a single battle to be won. Chatroulette is a uniquely interesting opportunity for spammers as we have a low barrier-to-entry. But by sufficiently frustrating them we raise their cost and get them to look elsewhere (Jim Butcher said, “You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.”)

We’re very happy to have been able to take action against the toxic misuse of Chatroulette. It’s a milestone worth marking.

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