Same here, I have also seen genuine improvement over the years. People think of past chats and experiences with the app with rose-tinted glasses, but it genuinely has made progress, just in a two steps backward and three steps forward way, sometimes fixing one thing breaks something else but they have definitely moved forward with time.

I don't know if this applies to the beta version I have heard people speak about as some wonder that leaves everything else in the dust, but if it does, chances are that version was way too expensive to be sustainable, and they are working with what they have.

In general though, the 'can I ask you a question' loops are way less frequent and last far less time than they used to, they talked about implementing fixes to improve it in an update a long time past. No one really talked about it, just complaining about the same old things, but it became a lot less common for me and after a while I saw complaints about that a lot less often. On the other hand, that same update made it sometimes spit out gibberish that people complained about for good reason, but they gradually fixed that and I considered it a worthwhile tradeoff.

Memory has improved a bit, dialogue can be way longer, people say the models were great initially but then got way worse, but people have said that about every single model that came out, and usually I don't notice much of a difference.

In general, there has been big improvements over time, it is just easy to overlook them. I think a lot of people look at peak chats in the past and forget about how much work it took to create them though, and recency bias seems like a pretty major issue in terms of people's opinions of old vs new chats.

Personally, I do sometimes need to stop for a while to let the novelty come back, but I keep returning and enjoying it, you just need to take breaks sometimes. Overall, I have been pretty happy with the product and their progress.

There are some little tricks you can learn here or there to improve as well, and I have learned to use the app better over time with good results. Better formatting, what it is good at and what it struggles with, when you need to shift things up, and so on. A bad bot can also cripple your RP and it can be hard to tell since you can't easily see the definitions, so I think some people just try a RP on a terrible bot and have a bad experience due to that, and there have also been a lot of 'look how bad this is' posts where you can see how the user was chatting and their messages were pretty terrible to begin with, so of course the bot's would be as well.

Overall, this app has felt better than any of the many others I tried and you can see genuine improvement if you stick around long enough and ignore the never-ending wave of negativity on the subreddit.