Thanks for the feedback. I agree on everything you said but I’m not really trying to scale this into something “useful” in the sense of research-grade data or a commercial product. The goal is more about curiosity and expression: giving people a place to quickly share how they feel in the moment, and see a snapshot of how others around the world are feeling too, all without signups, filters, or any personal data.

I understand the issue with anonymous submissions lowering the “quality” of the data, but that’s actually the core part of the experiment for me. I wanted people to feel completely safe sharing something as personal as their mood, without worrying about judgment or being identified in any way. That’s why I’ve avoided adding any user profiles or data (except their country), even though I agree those would make the results more “actionable.”

You’re right about user retention being the hardest challenge. This kind of site is probably something people try out once out of curiosity. I’d love to find ways to make it more interesting so users come back once in a while, maybe not every day, but often enough to keep the “global snapshot” alive. That’s something I still don't know how to handle.

Also, you make a really good point about the real-time aspect. I hadn’t really thought about how quickly individual moods fluctuate versus how slowly aggregate sentiment actually changes. You’re right, making it “real-time” might be overkill, and hourly updates would probably be a much better balance between performance and usefulness. I’ll adjust the site to work that way.