I work on Camdiv, an anonymous one-to-one video chat. You open the page, you get matched with a stranger, you talk. It's the Omegle-style format, and from the outside the hard part looks like the video: WebRTC, NAT traversal, keeping latency down.
It isn't. WebRTC is mostly a solved problem. The hard engineering is moderation. You're putting two anonymous strangers on a live camera together, with almost no friction, and you have a few seconds to catch it if one of them does something that gets your platform pulled from every app store on earth.
Three things shaped every decision below, and they fight each other the whole way. The first is cost: moderate live video naively and the bill alone will sink you. The second is false positives, because a wrong ban is a real person you just kicked off for nothing. The third took a near-miss to learn, so it gets the longest section here: you can't actually trust the video frame you're moderating.
Why live anonymous video is the worst moderation surface
Most moderation problems give you time. A user uploads a photo or writes a comment, and you can scan it before anyone else sees it. The content sits still while you decide.
