Curious Cat

» see curiouscat.live as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The anonymous question box is a young person's format, and by the time this one existed I had aged out of it twice over. In 2016 I was thirty-two and working, and the people putting a curiouscat link in their Twitter bio were students and fandom accounts. That crowd was never going to overlap with mine, and I only ended up reading about the service because of how it died.

It started in Spain in early 2016, built by two cousins, as a small tool for one specific behavior: you paste a link, people ask you things without signing their name, you answer publicly on your own profile. The whole product was that loop. Vonvon, a South Korean company best known for the viral personality quizzes that were everywhere on Facebook around 2015, bought it in 2018 and ran it from then on.

It got large. Archive Team counted roughly ten million accounts when it went to preserve the site in 2024, which puts it in the same weight class as the anonymous Q&A services that came before it. It was also disproportionately popular outside the English-speaking internet, heavily in Indonesia and across the Arabic-speaking part of Twitter, and it showed up in Turkish timelines too. That last part is the reason the name is faintly familiar to me at all. It kept turning up in other people's bios.

The end was not dramatic. Some time before 20 december 2021 the primary domain, curiouscat.qa, went through the final stages of expiry and a squatter picked it up, which took the site offline and then handed the address to somebody else entirely. The service moved to curiouscat.live on 25 december 2021. Users who had watched their bookmarked domain change hands were not enthusiastic about typing a password into the replacement. The exodus started there and never reversed, and on 7 october 2024 the company put an orange banner on every profile saying it was closing because of sustained losses. It went dark at midnight UTC.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

There was no feed and there was nothing to scroll. Curious Cat was a form and a page, and its distribution was entirely parasitic on Twitter: people posted their link, answered whatever came in, and screenshotted the good ones back onto the timeline. The service never needed to become a destination because Twitter was doing that job.

The obvious problem with this design is the obvious problem with every version of it since 2009. When you remove the name from the question, the median question gets more interesting and the tail gets much worse. Formspring hit this. Ask.fm hit it hard enough to end up in coroners' reports. Curious Cat's moderation was thin and mostly reactive, and the standard advice among its heavier users was to turn anonymous questions off entirely, which meant turning off the only thing the product did.

~ the domain ~

Losing curiouscat.qa is the part of this story worth writing down, because it is a failure mode that has nothing to do with the product. A.qa domain expired. Nobody at the company renewed it. Archive Team tried DNS overrides to keep grabbing data before the transfer completed. A squatter took the address and started posting from an account users still associated with the service.

The company then asked ten million people to trust a new domain. From the outside, a site that vanishes and reappears somewhere else asking for your login is indistinguishable from a phishing operation, and a good number of users treated it as exactly that. Archive Team's own assessment was that the whole affair looked more like incompetence than anything worse, which is accurate and did not help at all. Once a service has taught its users to be suspicious of its own URL, there is no version of the next three years that goes well.

~ the actual end ~

The shutdown notice was a banner rather than a press release, and it gave two weeks. Retrospring, a smaller open-source service in the same category, was mid-shutdown itself and had to edit its own farewell post to remove Curious Cat from the list of places its users could go. Two anonymous question sites closing in the same fortnight is a category dying, not a company failing.

Archive Team got somewhere under eight million profiles out. That is most of it and not all of it, and the missing fraction is the usual one: accounts that were set private, accounts deleted in the final weeks, everything past whatever the crawler could reach before the servers stopped answering. Ten years of people asking each other things they would not sign their name to, and the surviving copy is a partial one in a torrent.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »