I’m a male member, but hasn’t the Universe system been running slowly lately? What does everyone think?

Universe representative Kida would also like to respond. When we had coordinators nationwide test loading and displaying the Universe Club members-only site on their personal smartphones between 10 and 11 p.m., the results were: Women’s list page: 15–40 seconds Women’s profile page: 20–50 seconds The average was over 30 seconds in the Tokyo metropolitan area and around 10 seconds elsewhere. These figures represent the time required to fully load each page, so the initial display itself is somewhat faster. According to Maezawa-san’s materials, user drop-off increases when a page takes more than three seconds to load. I sincerely apologize for inconveniencing everyone with these slow speeds during our busiest hours. As other respondents have pointed out, the cause is a failure in my strategy and policies. We have been struggling to keep up with the members-only site’s specifications for the past five years. Three years ago, we launched a full site-renewal project and invested 10 million yen, but it ultimately stalled. The current members-only site was designed by highly skilled engineers and has been maintained through repeated minor updates since 2011. Given the pace of technological advancement, eight years is generally considered the limit. The fact that this system has remained operational for ten years is a testament to how excellent it is, and I have nothing but gratitude for the engineers. After a failed offshore development project two years ago, we decided to bring the full site renewal in-house. As a first step, we hired a project manager in February of this year to lead internal team development. We were also able to hire an excellent full-stack engineer. From here, we will take the time to develop a separate members-only site for Universe Club. I think everyone would agree that, rather than waiting for a full renewal with no clear completion date, we should prioritize improving the current system or upgrading the servers to achieve a comfortable speed as soon as possible. I naturally considered this as well, but we concluded that the current system is too complex to upgrade or migrate/replace efficiently. It would be faster to rebuild it from the ground up than to spend the time analyzing it. To summarize: The current slow loading may be improved by moving or freeing up some of the tens of thousands of image files and hundreds of thousands of data records on the site. We expect this process to take around two weeks. We have also been testing server boosts since last night, but so far there has been no noticeable improvement. When we added the reverse-offer feature, loading temporarily slowed down as well, but we were able to identify and resolve the bottleneck. We are currently investigating the multiple possible causes of this issue too. With these temporary measures, we believe the current delays can be reduced to some extent within a month. We will work on both a fundamental solution and an immediate solution. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Satoshi Kida

I’m Taro, a male member. It’s really slow, lol. And it’s not just the speed—there are all kinds of issues, like how hard it is to find women who’ve re-registered. I understand what they’re trying to do with the mobile redesign, but it really feels like they’re focusing on the wrong things. I think they should listen properly to what users are saying and overhaul the whole system. I wonder if they just can’t invest enough in IT. Are the apps’ systems more polished simply because they’re making more money??? If that’s the case, maybe they should rethink the business model from the ground up. It’s such a waste when they have such a large member base.

I’m Fuu, a columnist. So you’ve all noticed it too. It was already slow to begin with, but since the profile photos on the app’s home screen got larger and easier to see—making everyone look cuter—it’s become incredibly slow. Flag Maker, I’m exactly the same（笑）. Lately, I’ve been running out of time too, so I’m getting less time to enjoy myself⤵

Maezawa from the President’s Office here, answering as well. Thank you for your question. Yes, Universe’s system is slow. It suddenly became slower around last year. We haven’t been able to identify the exact cause. I suspect it has slowed down overall because we’ve added more features. Our membership has also been growing steadily... > And the server is still the old-fashioned kind of rental server. Haha, that’s true. Cloud-based systems are all the rage these days. That said, excuses aside, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

I’m Flag Maker, a columnist. Whenever I have some free time, I regularly go back through pretty much all the female members in the Kanto area. I tried to do it recently, but it was so slow that I ran out of time and gave up, lol.

I’m Kazu, a male member. I feel like things are running a little slow. The system seems pretty subpar, doesn’t it? They’re still using a rental server—the kind that feels almost nostalgic nowadays. With annual sales of ¥1.4 billion, I think they should reconsider their investment in the system. But it also makes me wonder whether outsourcing is difficult given the nature of the business, or whether their profit margins are surprisingly low. It’s certainly got me thinking.