Live video call app: where the automation actually lives

Running a script costs somebody money. Not much, but enough that it only happens where there is something to collect at the end, and following that back explains the whole distribution.

An application has two things a web page does not. It has a store, which is distribution — a bot operator can put something in front of millions of people without owning an audience. And it usually has an internal currency, which is a reason to farm attention rather than merely to spam a link.

A browser video chat has neither. One outbound link, no purchase screen, no coins, no notifications to hijack. There is very little on such a page for a script to convert into anything, so fewer scripts bother, and the ones that do are the crude kind that fire a single address and leave.

It doesn't mean the browser side is clean. It means the two sides fail differently — different tells, different speeds — and somebody who learned to spot one will misread the other.

On the live video call app side the automation is good, because there's money behind making it good — patient, responsive, capable of several turns, aimed at getting you to spend. On the browser side it's crude and quick: one line with an address in it, delivered at once, gone in four seconds.

1. Notice which door you came through, because it decides which kind you are meeting.
2. On a page, judge the first line. If it contains an address, the encounter is over and you have lost nothing.
3. In an application, judge the third turn rather than the first. The good scripts survive one exchange and rarely three.
4. And treat anything that asks you to move the conversation elsewhere as settled, whichever door you used.

None of it amounts to a complete defence, and pretending otherwise would be silly. It's a way of aiming your suspicion at the right thing, which is most of what suspicion needs.

The conversation that stuck was with a dispatcher at an airport, halfway through a shift on which nothing was landing. He was drawing something on a pad just out of shot and kept forgetting he was in a conversation at all.

He lost the thread twice, apologised, answered a question I had asked four minutes earlier, and never once showed me the drawing. And that, I worked out afterwards, is the test entire. A script doesn't fumble. It doesn't lose its place, it doesn't answer late, and it never forgets what it was doing.

Every guide in this category tells you to hunt for signs of a machine. Turn it over. Look for signs of a person instead — and the signs of a person are all forms of being worse at this than a script is.

The corollary is more cheerful than it sounds. If you're worried about looking foolish in the opening minute of a chat with strangers — don't be. Looking slightly foolish is the strongest evidence going that you're a person, and everybody who's been here a while reads it that way.

1. Let your own opening be clumsy rather than polished.
2. Answer something slightly late, on purpose, once.
3. Say what you are actually doing instead of this, which no script has ever been given to say.

I taught somebody younger than me this last year, and the change in their evenings was bigger than any change of service could have managed.

On the browser side, at an hour when some large place is awake, with a free video chat rather than anything that wants installing — not because the installed sort is worse at conversation, but because the sceptical position you turned up with is mostly a description of that half.

Open the chat in the browser