Positives first: This site is well structured and got a lot of content thanks to its early lead. The AI seems pretty decent and there's no texting limit. It had a lot of fancy feat- Oh, that's already getting into the negatives? Then let's move on to those!

The site is sure getting more and more antisocial. Forums got removed, a char's definition had always been hidden (no matter if you did or didn't tick the box) for quite a while (probably so they couldn't get copied to other sites), chat snippets can no longer be shared, and remember rooms where you could make a group chat with several bots? Those features (and their content) got seemingly irrecoverably lost. I've heard that some of these features may exist on the app, but I see no need to give away even more personal data via phone and prefer a proper keyboard for typing stuff anyways.

Lack of quality rating for bots, let alone voices, which may also violate Intellectual Property Rights (check the Privacy Policy - or bots for whatever franchise you can't find anymore). Even popular bots can be filled to the brim with spelling errors and fanmade voices run the risk of sounding low effort (monotone), low quality (phone mic) and bland (different from their description).

The filter is poorly tacked on and its inclusion just as poorly explained by the devs. Sure, keeping stuff completely unrestricted could, and would, turn into absolute mayhem, but either you give people a toggle or a good reason. And disrupting your negative chats at certain keywords while posting a service hotline is... at least better than an advert for dubious online services like betterhelp. If you're in that bad of a condition, you should either know yourself what you're doing - or are maybe a bit too young to use such features in the first place. Sure, age restrictions are treated more like a recommendation at best nowadays, but they exist for a reason. And having to deal with the consequences of their choices is what rebellious teenagers should have to do on their own to some degree; they won't learn if they can't see when they've gone too far, especially for their own good.

Notifications would be cool, if only to see info about how my stuff gets used and rated. Or if something got shadowbanned and I could appeal to it. (Not that they would likely even react to it from my experience.) And it could inform me if a bot generated an ugly mishmash of a greeting and continuation, so I know where I got something to delete since those messages break immersion - with no way to deactivate them.

Instead of wasting resources on poorly designed fluff (AI summary for chars, voices, "cat-themed" "styles"), they really should get their basic stuff more up to snuff and not segregate users. And they should be generally more transparent since the modern "Generative (speak: Regurgitating) AI" already is and always will be a way of grifting to some degree, especially of those creators that deserve the title - instead of using that term to describe the users in the search function.

Sure, there are certainly more egregious sites out there that treat their users even more like idiots (one described logging in via e-mail as "like magic"), but as far as this one is concerned, I think they're resting a bit much on their laurels as an early adopter. And with competitors being smaller and/or less accessible, there's not much need to focus on genuine improvements unless some executive says so or concern for legal fees arises.

If you want to have an unfiltered experience where you don't even have to create an account, can export and import chats (instead of having them stuck on site), AI using summaries to improve their memory, an RPG variant that allows you to keep track of your inventory (or let the AI do it for you), I recommend checking out perchance(dot)org. Sure, you can't really search for character cards there, but you can just copy them from somewhere else or simply generate them with a few inputs.

[Check definitions - if possible - for a more detailed Q&A.]