I sincerely appreciate the responses. You can see the prototype at
https://camsense.io/ but be aware, it's just using mock data to render the front-end visual of the application. What you see are just possibilities and ideas of what it might or could look like. The majority of actual work that's been completed is behind-the-scenes - to process and store the data in a scalable and cost-effective solution. In fact that's something I want to touch upon as it's relevant to some of your questions
@Brett M.
Firstly, just to just clarify
@yetieater, the application and I personally have absolutely no bias to gender, identity, or sexual preference - it will be open equally to all people. The constraints I put in place were done in haste - but also just gave me a starting point. Just to paint a picture: within less than 24 hours, I was pulling in over 15 billion bytes of data (15GB) from monitoring 3209 models that fit the criteria. Most of this data was just ignored by the application and tossed away (think of every single message you see in the chat on Chaturbate). I attempted to predict the amount of data I would see and estimate costs to the project ahead of time, but really you just don't know for sure until it starts coming together.
Brett to address your questions:
Q) Will you be wanting to target/help any and all models so this means ones who are not earning as much as the top models?
A) The mission is to help
all models. This cannot be emphasized enough. As of now, this is a side passion-project of mine. I've been kicking around this idea for years now and finally deciding to see it though. This is not designed in mind, for any specific socioeconomic quintile. I want it to be beneficial, useful, and to a degree, community-driven - although that will likely take time, trust, influence, and governance that is just not available, nor deserved at the moment.
I envision the final product to be mindful of and accommodating to the diversity in disparate backgrounds of people that makeup the cam industry. How that relates to cost is yet to be determined, but I have many thoughts and opinions towards this.
One basic but more progressive idea I've considered is: since the application can have a sense of how much you are pulling from any cam site/account you associate it with (e.g. I associate or "link" my CamSense account with my Chaturbate, StripChat, and ManyVid profile), there's a chance we may be able to implement a dynamic system that provides room for those below an "income threshold" before asking them to consider upgrading to a paid account. In my mind though, there will always be a free version.
Q) I hope you can/will find a good, reasonable balance for the pricing.
A) I strongly believe this to be possible. One of the benefits to the underlying technology I've chosen to work with is that I can fully break down the costs to every single aspect of the application. I can empirically show you, for example: when I run the database queries to:
- store a client's tip
- store a new broadcast record
- calculate my monthly earning's summary
- view my broadcast statistics
- etc etc etc
Every single database read and write can be measured in the amount of processing power (or request units) and thus, associated to $USD. This has helped me shape the overall database design to make things as cheap and cost effective I can; reducing redundancy where possible. e.g. instead of storing everything, just store and index what's necessary.
To be more succinct and less technical, we can show users of the app, how much it takes to run - broken down by-feature so everything is as transparent as possible. Imagine logging into a cam site and just being able to see or understand the costs involved into hosting & operating an application like that and how it affects the commissions per-token.
Q) Will the pricing be monthly, quarterly, annually, or all 3 options? How will you accept payment?
A) TBD. It will likely be free for a considerable amount of time before any Pro or "Rockstar" option is offered. Primarily because I believe that some of the real opportunities here would only come after months of data gathering for each model.
Q) How long does it take for the bot to go into a model's room? Someone I follow has been online for 58 minutes so far and no "CamSense" user has crawled the room....
A) This question is so loaded given the events of this week ... I will ramble on in detail below. The "cam-account status monitor" is probably the most consistently changing aspect to the backend that I've been working on as of recent.
To be brief, you've not seen the CamSense user enter your friend's room in the last two days, most likely, because Chaturbate has banned that user account completely.
Yes, I woke up one morning to find this out. As this project is still in its infancy, I've known this was a possibility that might and would likely occur. I've worked to design the monitoring system to be as respectful as possible to their servers - meaning don't keep checking every second to see if a model is online. And it certainly didn't start out as a mature "respectful" system, but it's been a gradual learning process of understanding how their servers react to CS' queries. For instance, in a given span of time - say 1 minute, how many requests to see if a model is online can I send before they start limiting me?
I'm well aware reps from CB are on these forums and may even be aware of this thread. There are other applications which monitor Chaturbate. e.g. cbhours, chaturbate100, Siren. Most of these applications get around CB through use of proxy servers to mask their behavior. In my initial attempts to build CS, I've attempted to build this openly - at least in the sense that I've listed the CamSense CB user account name here to make models aware of the account so they can choose to ban it if they so desire.
As far as I know, since no one from CB has reached out to me, their devops team more likely just saw that the CamSense user was listening to hundreds of rooms concurrently and just decided, "nope". Again this was somewhat expected, although emotionally draining and disappointing this week. I don't like the idea of hiding the app through proxies and fake accounts.
Instead, I would love to see a strategic partnership grow out of this, by inviting the industry into the problem-space and working with them to develop solutions with their consent and/or support - whilst being mindful that the data they sit on is in-part critical to their intellectual property, but also may be very useful to models and is currently not being offered to them in any manner. However, it's just far too early to even think about that given I don't have a working prototype to show for.
All that being said, this is continuing on as a work in progress and I remain uncertain how best to handle the current issue at hand. Until then, you likely won't see a "CamSense" user any longer.
