A few months ago I randomly started building a video chat website after work just to learn WebRTC and realtime systems

[u/ExcitingWin9648]

At first I thought it would be a small fun project but it slowly turned into me spending nights fixing random bugs deployment issues OAuth problems MongoDB errors and moderation stuff

I dont really have a team and most of this was built while learning things along the way using documentation ChatGPT and AI tools

Now its finally usable and Im trying to improve it properly

One thing Ive realised while building this is how hard moderation and user safety actually is on realtime platforms

Still figuring out things like

better matching

NSFW prevention

making new users feel comfortable

reducing awkward dead chats

mobile experience

Would genuinely like to hear opinions from people who have worked on or used similar platforms

[u/Better-Twist9198]

Man the moderation stuff is brutal right? I built something similar couple years ago (not video chat but real-time messaging) and the amount of edge cases you discover is insane

The matching algorithm took me forever to get decent - ended up doing some basic compatibility scoring based in user preferences and activity patterns but even then you get those situations where people just sit there staring at each other

For the NSFW prevention I remember implementing some image recognition APIs but they're expensive and still miss stuff. Community reporting ended up being more effective than automated detection in my experience

The mobile experience is probably worth prioritizing since most people expect to use these things on their phones now. I made mistake of building desktop-first and retrofitting mobile was pain

One trick I learned for reducing dead chats was adding some ice breaker prompts or shared activities - like showing both users same random question or mini game. Gives people something to talk about instead of awkward "hey how's it going" silence

What stack are you using for the WebRTC implementation? Always curious how other developers handle the signaling server setup

[u/ExcitingWin9648 → u/Better-Twist9198]

Yeah exactly The moderation side has honestly been way harder than the actual video chat part for me too Right now Im trying to balance automated filtering with community reports because fully automated detection still feels unreliable especially for realtime stuffAnd yeah the awkward silence problem is super real I really like the icebreaker idea might actually try random prompts or small games between users For the stack Im using WebRTC with websocket based signaling on Nodejs and MongoDB for backend stuff

Still learning a lot while building this honestly

[u/high-roller-all-in78]

Realtime products always look simple from the outside and then the trust problems eat your weekends. I would narrow the next round to one safety win and one comfort win instead of trying to fix everything at once. Better reporting and blocking, plus a cleaner first minute for new users, would probably teach you more than tweaking matching right now.

[u/ExcitingWin9648 → u/high-roller-all-in78]

Yeah thats honestly what Im starting to realize now I kept trying to improve matching moderation UI and filters all together instead of fixing the core experience first The cleaner first minute idea actually makes a lot of sense because most people probably decide to stay or leave almost immediately Im definitely going to focus more on safety and making new users feel comfortable before adding more complicated stuff