Our World of Text Unofficial Survey
The Our World of Text Unofficial Survey was a survey held by Crazy Cat Lady in December of 2024. Having been on OWOT for only one month, CCL wanted to learn more about OWOT and its community.
On December 12th, 2022, the survey was released on both the Discord and the Canvas.
The results were released seven days later, on December 19th.
The full, unsanitized list of responses was released on December 20th.
Questions
1. Roughly how long ago did you first join OWOT? (You can also mark the period you became active, if that's more relevant to you!) 2. How did you find OWOT? 3. What continent are you from? 4. [VERY optional] What Country do you live in? 5. Native language(s)? 6. How old are you? (in digit format - 20, not twenty) 7. Give OWOT a rating! 8. Wanna do the fun section? 9. What's your favorite thing about this place? 10. ...And what's your least favorite thing? 11. If you could change anything here, what would it be? 12. Most interesting thing you ever saw on here? 13. Any hobbies outside of this site? 14. What's your favorite media? (game, TV show, movie, etc) 15. Are you a cat or dog person? 16. If you have any final thoughts to share, write them below!
Final Results
Copied from the OWOT Discord.
Survey Results 🐈
✨ Total number of respondents: 58 (note that not everyone answered each question) ✨ Average user-voted site rating: 5.98 - 8 was the most popular user score, with 1 being second-most popular. ✨ Median join date: 10/16/2022 - This likely suggests a user retention issue. ✨ Median user age: 16.5 ✨ Percentage of employed respondents: 13.6% ✨ User distribution: - 47.7% of respondents are from North America, with 70% of those users specifying the United States. - Europe was the second-most populated continent, and the least populated was Australia/Oceania.
Below are some responses I thought were interesting, funny, or insightful. These are just cherry-picked by me, but i'll post the full response list later! anyone's free to read through it 😁
✨ What's your favorite thing about this place?
Many respondents mentioned art or creative potential in some way.
- "Scripting is easy & I've seen lots of cool art and scripts on here. I get to talk to some very cool people from time to time."
- "tech like moving and self-updating stuff. also just conversations in real time"
- "The endless void of random text and history"
✨ ...And what's your least favorite thing?
Lots of people mentioned the community.
- "Scripting is also easy for spammers/wipers/griefers/all kinds of things, but that's not exactly avoidable. Also, OWOT is notorious for having some racist, sexist, homophobic, etc kinds of people, which sucks :("
- "The chat's gone ahhh!!"
- "slur spam, excessive image pasting"
✨ If you could change anything here, what would it be?
- "a more expansive manual that explains how to make bold text, links, copy shit etc"
- "I'd love for slightly more moderation.."
- "Make it look more polished (like OWOP), be more mobile accessible, and get rid of the shitty people"
✨ Most interesting thing you ever saw on here?
- "that thing to the top left of the spawn that scrapes reddit. idk why it exists but it's impressive"
- "a working game of dwarf fortress on /main, it got taken offline by the creator though"
- "This form actually, or.. uhh, someone did a livestream of their own screen on owot with colored full blocks. bad apple in spawn, chika dance in high fps, and even whole movies were on owot"
✨ Any hobbies outside of this site?
Since these responses felt a bit more personal I didn't want to include any particular quotes, but i'll give some stats:
- 6 people mentioned Coding/software development, making it the most popular hobby.
- 4 people mentioned gaming, making it the second-most popular.
- 4 people couldn't think of a hobby at all
- there were a lot of random hobbies, but the most interesting/unique one i saw was ant-keeping!!
✨ What's your favorite media? (game, TV show, movie, etc)
- "idk i love many things"
- "Endless Sky, Space Station 14, Naev, Factorio"
- "Anything obscure/creepy (I recommend the OldRoot arg) "
✨ If you have any final thoughts to share, write them below!
- "I don't go on OWOT a lot (I'm not chronically online i swear). it's pretty fun to go to OWOT once in a while, talk to people (a lot of incels here tbh), do random shit"
- "If OWOT wasn't anonymous, there would be way less spammers and griefers. Even then, someone eventually will find a way to remain anonymous. Spam is just a fundamental part of OWOT and will never go away."
- "love u ♡"
- "play touhou -9029"
- "i was never really active on this site unfortunately so i don't have experience on it like others in the server do. it's a very interesting concept and i'm glad i found it from ywot a gazillion years ago...."
Unsanitized Responses
Released on December 20th, 2024.
Some interesting responses are listed below.
"i was never really active on this site unfortunately so i don't have experience on it like others in the server do. it's a very interesting concept and i'm glad i found it from ywot a gazillion years ago.
it's really interesting to see the difference in servers between owop and owot, owop has way more people in it but is dead as fuck. i blame this on admin neglect and horrendous moderation. this horrendous moderation in question being entirely the fault of a person named 'cygnus'. he is probably a pedophile if i'm being honest and is never going to be removed as a moderator because he's too active to be removed, which is right, unfortunately, the unemployed loser has nothing else to do than stop people from saying nigeria on owop, piece of shit. should pornographic material be allowed on a site that kids dwell on? the answer is easily no but can you believe that owop actually had a poll regarding that? like are you fucking serious. anyways, sorry for getting kind of off topic,
my point is that though many might think owot is like a bad terrible degenerate site or something but it has done a good job of keeping scum like that out of it (or at least out of more powerful positions) and somehow has kept the community decently alive. it's surprising to me when i go on the server sometimes and people are still talking cause i don't expect that especially given the state of the game."
- Anonymous OWOP User
"that i didn't spread laser like and bully lime
god I want to take it all back
I never wanted to become this
I'm a fucking loser bro
Im just so sorry
so so so so sorry"
- p_h
"it's probably already obvious who I am, I just wanted to say that I never wanted to leave owot, I wanted to continue making art and chatting with other people like guest, but I guess I'm just too haunted by my past. despite what you may have heard I'm not a creep or greifer, I just want to create stuff and talk with other nice people. unfortunately I don't know what to do to make that happen, I guess it's just going to have to wait for now.
p.s I'm sorry everyone, I promise not to lie again."
- former impersonator, place_holdrr
"If OWOT wasn't anonymous, there would be way less spammers and griefers. Even then, someone eventually will find a way to remain anonymous. Spam is just a fundamental part of OWOT and will never go away."
"Hey CCL,
I don't know if I submitted this form earlier,
but I thought I'd let you know ahead of time that I don't feel like returning to OWOT anymore because of the overwhelming toxicity, nazism, immaturity, sectionalism, racism, etc.
It's not a healthy place for me to be. Concluding this journey, If I don't see you again, then I will miss you and I wish you the best. I remember you saying you joined Discord, so if you would like, mine is [removed].
Thanks for everything,
Pear (🍐)"
"you seem to be a pretty level-headed person, active on the site even, which is honestly quite rare for an OWOT user. i just ask of you not to spend too much time in global chat or on PinkiePie's chat site (if you even know what it is). both of these could genuinely worsen your mental health. i love to see OWOT getting new actually decent people, because that's after all a plus to the community's average wellbeing, even if not by much. i have seen this community decline a lot."
"Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!"
"this site DESPERATELY needs a set of actual guidelines and moderation, and possibly an influx of new users from some big-ish youtuber whose fanbase is not a bunch of 12 year olds. we can't keep this hands-off moderation and this community's internet culture from 15 years ago otherwise we'll end up getting seen as "just another 4chan-esque site" by other normal people and it may end up getting reports to be taken down by the government or something like every other week"
"nice survey i hadn't seen somebody do this in owot before. don't talk with the people that didn't choose cats."
Trivia
- The survey was advertised on a world named /takeasurvey, though d9eoead has said that this was created by someone impersonating Crazy Cat Lady rather than CCL herself.
- The majority of users reported that they found OWOT from Your World of Text. Six users answered Our World of Pixels, three answered TextWall, and two answered Trollbox. A few people found OWOT from the Steam profiles of other users, while others simply responded "from social media" or "from a friend." A couple of unique responses were infinitehomepage.com, Edit the Text, fmhy.net, and "I jerked off, and the cum on the ground spelled out 'owot.me'."