The following data and conclusions are with reference to the first 450 responses to the official interest survey. The survey is, however, still open and future responses will be added to my evaluations and action plans in groups of 100.

TL;DR

• The responders showed a strong preference for “topic focused” social media, rather than “person focused” social media in which knowing others personally is strictly necessary. So, I’m leaning away from my original social-networking-centric idea and focusing instead on a more topic-centric format that uses a lot of categorization (like post flairs, tags, and groups) to make the site browsable by topic, not just by personally knowing whoever is posting.
• The groups feature was developed with the hope of being able to compete with Discord and involves each group having an exclusive activity feed, gallery, chat, and forum, as well as having 3 privacy settings: public, private, and hidden.
• Though I initially planned to bar minors from the site entirely, nearly half of all interested responders were minors, so I abandoned that idea. Instead of a ban, I’m adding a DNI toggle to profiles that can hide all minors from an adult user or all adults from a minor user. The site will be open to users that are 15+.
• Match-making and marketplace were discarded as potential features due to massive unpopularity. Family tree as a feature might not be implemented at debut because of technological concerns.
• In response to user’s requests I’m working on the following features that weren’t included in the interest survey: a sitewide gallery for sharing art and writing, highly customizable fields for profiles, and a “Chu” feature similar to Tumblr “boop,” or Deviantart’s llama badge in that it does nothing but let the user you sent it to know that you sent it.
• In descending order, the popularity of the voted features was: E-learning, Forum, Games, Gamification, Social Networking, Events and Shop. Matchmaking and Marketplace were discarded due to being unpopular and safety concerns.
• NSFW is still prohibited along with bigotry, harassment, and other harmful behavior. Diapers are not prohibited by default but can be reported case-by-case if that gets abused.
• All advertising for other websites and resources will be centralized to a resources section on the site. Users will be able to submit new resources and links to be added to the resource page.

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website Demographic Report

I posted the link to the official survey to Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter with a flyer for users to spread to other platforms. Still, the majority of responses came from Reddit and Tumblr, and the post failed to circulate on Twitter at all.

With the highest number of users being native to Reddit, Tumblr, and Discord, I’m taking care to avoid making the site too “Facebook-like,” as was my initial vision, because responders showed low interest in it. The most popular platforms among responders are topic focused platforms: the users interact with whoever has posted on the tag they’ve searched, the subreddit they’re browsing, or the server they’ve joined, with not much further barrier to interaction. Social networking sites are rather person focused: rather than any particular topic, it’s more about checking in with specific people that the user knows, and interacting with others outside of their established interpersonal unit isn’t necessarily a priority.  I’ll try to format interactions on ChuChuu to be more broadly topic focused than person focused, given these results. My focus is on post categorization and browsability (e.g., Tumblr’s tag system and reddit’s flair system), so that users can find the topics they want to interact with, not just the people.

Groups

Discord has remained the second most popular platform among the responders, regardless of whether the Tumblr or Reddit demographic was in the lead. So, since I’m competing with such a strong platform for group interactions, I’m focusing a lot on having great group infrastructure. Any user will be able to create a group that is public (anyone can join), private (must request and be approved to join), or hidden (can only be joined with a direct link). The group creator can also decide who is allowed to invite new members: admins only, admins and mods, or everyone. Each group has its own activity feed that users can post to and can contain its own group-specific gallery, chat, and forum. Essentially, groups are a small-scale collection of all of the website’s features just for the creator and their friends.

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Age Demographic Report

My initial intention was to bar minors (people younger than 18) from the website entirely. However, I re-evaluated after 45.6% of all interest in the site was from minors, and 27.9% of them were under the age of 17. This means that minors as an audience make up almost half of all people who would use the site, with adults older than 18 taking the slight majority at 54.4%, with 45% of that being within the 18-25 range.

With that in mind, banning minors as a user base wouldn’t be sustainable. A few people wrote into the free response questions about their concerns for the safety of certain features for minors, with one quoted as saying, “…a lot of minors are probably likely to be using this website (even if it’s aimed at adults).” A quick look into the state of age moderation on popular sites agreed with them, with a lot of users on cyber giants like Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr being under or close to the official age limit of 13. It doesn’t seem realistic that a single developer would be able to do it more effectively.

That said, operating under the safe assumption that some significant number of minors will be on the site regardless of what I say or do, I would rather officially allow them on the site and put in the extra work to make it safer for them than to hide behind “they shouldn’t have been there anyway,” while leaving them no recourse against predators, harassment, or other cyber threats because they are afraid of reporting users due to the risk of their age being found out and their account being banned. So, ChuChuu will be open to anyone over the age of 15.

DNI Toggle Feature

The responses to “What is your most unpleasant experience,” and “Are there any features you don’t want to see,” showed me that a lot of adults weren’t comfortable with interactions with minors and vice versa. The best solution is to implement an optional filter between the two age groups. With the divide in place, a user would be able to toggle to hide users of the other age demographic and be hidden from them in turn, essentially operating like a massive automatic DNI. The only time a user would be able to view or interact with another user of the opposite age demographic, would be if both users have toggled to allow it; just like a typical block function, only one “no” is enough to cut off contact.

	Allow interaction with minors/adults?
“Yes.”	—-	BLOCK	✖	“No.”
“No.”	✖	BLOCK	—-	“Yes.”
“Yes.”	—-	Allow	—-	“Yes.”

Banning minors from the site is no longer in consideration at all, so this is the most balanced option for keeping it safe for them while also respecting that a lot of adults in the community don’t feel comfortable hanging around them and vice versa.

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Feature prioritization report

The average popularity of the 10 proposed features was, in descending order: E-learning, Forum, Games, Gamification, Social Networking, Family Tree, Events, Shop, Marketplace, and lastly Match Making.

These results are being used as a roadmap for which features should be given the most attention first in the development process. That is to say, I’m developing the daycare platform before worrying about the forum, and so on. The features at the bottom of the list have zero priority for the debut of the site, so even if they do get added in some form down the line, I won’t wait until they’re finished before putting up the site (because no one really wanted them anyway). The bottom two features have been discarded from consideration permanently because of low interest and people writing in to the unwanted feature questions about them.

Discarded features

Match-making

10% of all responses to “are there any features you don’t want to see?” mentioned not wanting a match-making feature. The most common concerns were the threat of the website sliding into just being a dating site, people that aren’t “aesthetically pleasing” enough being unable to make friends, or the site becoming a kind of easy “shopping list” for groomers to find vulnerable people to try to manipulate. After considering all of the safety concerns, the potential benefit of having a slightly easier time finding someone to talk to doesn’t seem worth it for the risks and downsides. At the end of the day online matchmaking, especially in “swiping” format comes with a lot of issues and potential for toxicity, so I decided that it’s not something I ever want to introduce to my site.

Marketplace

I included marketplace as a suggestion after a few people mentioned it on my original reddit thread. However, it was consistently rated very low in interest and users seemed to prefer to just have a ChuChuu exclusive shop, if there is to be a shop at all. In the unwanted feature write-in question, people were worried about international shipping, potential for scamming, and due to the low moderating power ChuChuu may have in the alpha stages, it would be difficult to effectively regulate poor quality products. Those roadblocks are not necessarily impossible to overcome, but because it was generally unwanted, it’s not a feature that I consider to be worth fighting for, and I have no intention of adding a marketplace to the site in the foreseeable future.

Write-in Inspired Features

 High profile customizability

8.5% of all write-ins for “Are there features you do want to see” mentioned profile customizability and statuses. Suggestions ranged from having many selectable fields within your bio, to wanting large-scale Tumblr-style page building capacity. The latter isn’t possible, but I’m planning to make sure users have highly specific optional fields for their bios, such as the ability to populate what kind of regression you participate in (agere, agedre, flip, pet, etc), your pronouns, whether you have/want a caregiver and optionally what their username is, or even possibly a status flag that shows up next to your username that can display whether you are currently regressed.

Gallery

Several respondents said they wanted to have some kind of page to post the art they made in the coloring game to everyone on the site. For that reason, I will try to develop a media gallery for users to add their pictures to. I might also try adding in written works to the gallery rather than just images/art. However, this might be difficult to set up on such a small site from the debut, so it’s possible it will stay in development until later on.

Chu

A user wrote in their suggestion of adding a feature like Facebook’s old “poke” feature, DeviantArt’s “llama” feature, or Tumblr’s seasonal “boop” feature. I think that this idea is adorable, and since it’s easy to implement I intend to add a feature to ChuChuu that allows you to “Chu” (smooch) another user. This does not do anything other than notify the other user that they have been chu’d. I might add a chu counter to the profile page as well.

Popularly voted features

E-learning (“Daycare”)

I felt that this was an unconventional idea, so it surprised me that it was the most wanted feature by a landslide – throughout the entire length of the survey, it hasn’t given up the number 1 spot. So, this feature is going to get a lot of attention so that it can live up to everyone’s expectations. At the debut of the site, all of the lessons available will be written by me, but I will manufacture variety by making them about a range of topics from arts and crafts tutorials to self-help to life skills. Following the debut, I intend to add the necessary structure to make it so that users can post their own lessons, too; however, those will need to be monitored and approved so that misinformation doesn’t spread and to make sure everything stays SFW.

Forum

It also surprised me, but this feature beat out social networking features by a long shot. So, I’ll make sure that the forum is well-formatted and front-and-center, unlike my initial vision to tack it on at the bottom of a menu because I assumed it wouldn’t get much interest. Each group will also have its own exclusive forum.

Games

This simple feature’s popularity was entirely expected. That said, I will acquire html and webgl games that can be played from a browser and put them in an arcade section of the site. My ultimate dream for gaming on ChuChuu would be for it to have its own virtual world like Club Penguin, but that would need to be custom developed from scratch, unlike simple games whose licenses can be bought outright. So, that idea will not be mentioned again until far down the line when there is time and funding for it.

Gamification

Gamification involves using achievements (“stickers”) and ranks to celebrate things that the users do on the site. It’s going to be an entirely free and non-competitive feature that is there for fun above all else. Users will get stickers for various things that they do on the site, like completing a course, reaching a high score in a game, reaching a certain number of posts, and so on. Ranks are just related to how many stickers you’ve got and how active you are on the site. Stickers and Ranks don’t change anything about your overall experience on the site, you won’t need to be a certain rank to access certain features for example, they’re just there to show you how awesome you are and that’s it!

Social Networking

This was not as popular as I was expecting. But it’s still at the heart of the way the site will function, and all of the features it entails will be there: friend list, home feed, private messages, and importantly, groups (which were explained in an earlier section) are all going to be features of the site.

Family Tree

This feature was fairly popular and is fairly easy to implement at the primitive level. Users would have a field on their profile into which they can populate the username of their current caregiver(s), BFFs, and so on. However, someone did raise the issue of this feature being used one-sidedly (for example, someone putting in a user that doesn’t know them as their little), so there would need to be some kind of infrastructure to make it a two-yes system. That’s a little trickier to implement, so since this is a bottom-five feature, it may not be present on the debut version of the site if working on it would delay the site going live.

Events

This feature is functionally identical to the Facebook events feature; users can post about events that they are holding online or in person, such as discord calls, public play dates, local field trips, twitch streams, gaming sessions, et cetera, and other users can mark that they will be attending the event. There will be features to report an event that seems unsafe and have it investigated and potentially taken down by a mod.

Shop

Popularity of this feature was somewhat low, but it was not discarded because the site does need to be monetized in order to continue operating. A shop lets me offer the users some value in return for their support, so that I don’t have to start right out with aggressive ads to pay for operating costs.

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Respondents’ Concerns

The following concern points are extracted from the responses to “Are there features you don’t want to see,” and “What has been your worst experience.”

NSFW

35% of write-ins across both questions mentioned NSFW content. From the beginning, ChuChuu was planned to be a completely SFW only website, and that hasn’t changed. That said, it wouldn’t be realistic to be able to thoroughly vet each user or try to ban people based on their behavior on other sites; ChuChuu is welcome to all regressors who are respectful of the terms of the site and engage in strictly SFW activity while on the site. To prevent NSFW from sitting on the site while waiting for mod review, moderation of NSFW content will be strict and bannable on the first offense. There will be an appeals process for if a banned user feels they got removed by mistake. As for what is defined as NSFW, a full policy for that will be released down the line, but at the basic level it includes:

• Graphic depictions of gore, and non-cartoon violence. (e.g., photos, videos, or otherwise graphic depictions of traffic accidents, police brutality, interpersonal violence, war violence, and physical/sexual abuse.) Posts about the user’s own life are not necessarily prohibited as long as they are properly flagged as unsafe and/or contained to sections of the site designated for venting or seeking support.
• Any form of sex work (onlyfans ads, etc)
• Content that is widely considered to be graphic, disturbing, and unusual (graphic depictions of physical illness such as vomiting, graphic depictions of bodily waste, graphic depictions of death and/or decay of a living creature).
• Content whose purpose is the expression of a sexual fetish of any kind (including but not limited to fetishistic fixations on particular body parts and processes, BDSM, ageplay, petplay, and so on)
• Photos, drawings, or other graphic depictions of genitalia.

This list has not been exhaustive. 

Harmful Behavior

At 24.5%, complaints about harmful behavior like harassment, bigotry, and threats to one’s safety were the second most common. Just like NSFW, these behaviors will be strongly moderated and bannable on the first offense. A full community guideline is in the works, but some examples of behavior that will not be tolerated are as follows:

• Bigotry and hate speech of any kind. This includes but is not limited to lgbtq+phobia, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and misandry. Any content which suggests that a person is immoral, lesser, or otherwise prescribed a negative trait by virtue of their biological or psychological condition will not be tolerated.
• Harassment/bullying of any kind. Posts and activity whose sole purpose is to alienate, insult, suicide-bait, criticize in bad faith, threaten, or cause distress to another user or group of users will not be tolerated. Call-out posts, posting “receipts,” and other attempts to get a user “canceled” are considered harassment and criticism in bad faith. Reporting functions will be available for if a user has legitimate concerns about a user’s behavior, so please reach out to mods about it instead.
• Body shaming of any kind. This includes but is not limited to ableism, fatphobia, skinny shaming, height-shaming, etc.

To keep the users safe from trolls or harassment from non-regressors, the community sections of the site, like user profiles and posts, will be completely inaccessible unless the viewer is logged into their account. At the site’s debut, registration will be invite-only.

Diapers

Diapers were brought up by a few responders, who asked if they’ll be a banned topic because they often get sexualized. Mentions and/or depictions of diapers will not be banned. There are medical reasons a person may need to wear them permanently or temporarily, so trying to moderate out anyone who uses them is an accessibility issue. That said, sexualization of diapers is strictly prohibited, and reports of this will be handled on a case-by-case basis. Simply existing as a regressor who wears diapers or just innocently depicting them is, however, not in itself considered offensive or sexual for the purpose of the guidelines. Harassment of regressors who wear diapers or depict diapers non-fetishistically is also strictly prohibited.

Misinformation and promotions

Several responders were worried about how self-promotion and misinformation/stigma would be handled. There will be a dedicated resources page/directory to which users can submit an application to have their external server, website, or group promoted. To avoid the site being overrun with ads, any self-promotion outside of the resource page will be prohibited. To address stigma, there will also be links available to articles about age regression and how it works available for visitors that are not logged in. For members, there will be a directory of external links to resources to which anyone can submit a new entry to be reviewed by mods.

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