Anonymous chat with interests

Purely random pairing is a slot machine. You pull the handle, you get a stranger with nothing in common, you pull it again. It is fun for about four minutes. Matching on interests is the difference between a coin flip and a conversation, and it costs you nothing: type a word or two about what you actually care about.

This page explains how our matcher really works, because most sites that advertise interest matching are doing something much cruder than you think, and the difference shows up as an empty queue.

The trap: filtering instead of ranking

The obvious way to build interest matching is to filter. You want to talk about music, so the site shows you only people who typed “music”. This works beautifully in a demo and fails completely in reality, because on any site smaller than the giants there are perhaps a few dozen people waiting at once. Filter that pool by interest, then by language, then by age, and you have filtered it to nobody. The user sees an endless spinner and leaves, which makes the pool smaller, which makes the spinner longer for whoever is next.

So we never filter. We rank. Everyone waiting is scored against you: shared interests count most, then language, age, gender and orientation preferences. The best-scoring pair is matched. Nobody is ever removed from your pool for failing to match a preference.

Two rules that make it work

A stated preference is a preference, not a filter

If you say you would like to talk to someone who speaks your language, that ranks those people higher. It does not delete everyone else. If there is nobody who fits, you are still matched, because a conversation with a slight mismatch beats no conversation at all. The one true exclusion is a block: if either of you has reported or blocked the other, you will never be paired again.

The same asymmetry protects people who would rather not say. An empty preference accepts everybody, including everyone who left their own details blank. But a stated preference can only be satisfied by a stated value. That is deliberate: it means “prefer not to say” stays a free choice instead of quietly costing you matches.

Waiting is rewarded, so nobody starves

There is an obvious way to break a ranking system: be very picky, arrive last, and outrank the person who has been waiting ten minutes. So the weight given to your preferences decays the longer you wait, and a separate bonus for having waited rises to replace it. The bonus for a long wait outweighs every preference combined. A fresh arrival with a perfect profile cannot jump the queue ahead of somebody who has been patient. In practice this means a picky user waits a few seconds longer and then gets matched anyway.

How to pick interests that actually find someone

You can enter up to 5. A few things genuinely help.

• Be specific, but not obscure.“music” matches nearly everyone, which is the same as matching nobody in particular. “shoegaze” matches one person a week. Something in between finds you a conversation with somewhere to go.
• Two or three beats five. Interests are scored on overlap. A long list dilutes the thing you actually wanted to talk about.
• Pick a thing, not a mood.“bored” is an interest thousands of people share and none of them want to discuss.
• Leave it blank if you do not care. An empty list is a legitimate answer and matches you with whoever has waited longest. It is not a worse experience, just a more random one.

The anonymous part

None of this requires knowing who you are, and we have gone out of our way to keep it that way.

• There is no account, no email and no password. Your name and interests are held in memory for the length of your session and discarded when you disconnect.
• Your country comes from your browser's language setting, never from an IP lookup, and never goes finer than the country.
• Age, gender and orientation are optional, self-declared, shown to the person you are matched with, and verified by nobody.
• If you and your partner speak different languages, messages are translated on your own device, inside your browser. The text is never sent anywhere to be translated. Chrome and Edge ship the API that makes this possible; Firefox and Safari do not yet, so there the translation simply does not appear.

What we do keep, and for how long, is written plainly on our privacy page. The short version: message text and photos sit in memory for up to thirty minutes so a moderator can act on a report, then they are erased, and nothing survives a restart.

Questions