Which makes the parallel fit even better since in both cases the characters of the opposite gender show up in the lore rather than the actual gameplay.

World of Tanks. Came for the fun FPS/TPS hybrid gameplay, left for Wargaming's unforgivably greedy and short-sighted monetization practices. But not before siphoning away a lot more of my time than they deserved before I caught on.

For me personally, downtime tends to be a moment where I seek no conversation with anyone. Just me, whatever my train of thoughts happen to be derailing into, and sometimes some music and/or some mindless activity like scrolling social media, as I was doing until this thread caught my attention.

Assuming this isn't a recent development or happening so often actual interaction is grinding to a halt, this is probably nothing to be worried about.

Catbox claims to keep files forever. I find this claim dubious, what's the catch?

No, and I will go one step further by blocking the Threads domain assuming kbin itself doesn't choose to defederate from it.

This might just be me, but arbitrary CAPSLOCK on words and Title Case on threads that aren't a link to a news article are clickbait patterns that I'd prefer to not see on kbin.

As for the object of the thread itself... I am thoroughly unsurprised. I have never seen IranianGenius involved in any positive manner with /r/tumblr whereas TayTay was singlehandedly responsible for making /r/tumblr into slightly less of a garbage heap. Removing the one mod that was actually improving things is perfectly in line with Reddit's recent behavior.

So, is that an order to abandon ship?

This seems to be a no strings attached good deal on xQc's side given the lack of exclusivity clause. Worst case scenario is a particularly bad scandal hitting the platform could tarnish xQc's reputation ~~such as it is~~ but that's a risk for literally any platform. However...

As a start-up, Kick is prepared to operate at a loss

Aaand the platform is doomed. Focusing on growth over viability is whats makes you a prime enshitification target.

I can understand the value of making your community a more tight-knit one with a proactive stance on moderation, that's how Tildes operate and they're doing fine. The thing is I'm not sure I understand why, given this goal, Beehaw is part of the Fediverse in the first place, where there isn't much preventing someone from an outside group coming in. This sounds like a case where a centralized instance makes more sense. Maybe they're trying to see if such a community can exist on the Fediverse, in which case fair enough, but this seems like an uphill road.

Given that kbin (or at least kbin.social) generally doesn't have restrictions on making accounts either I would assume we're next, eventually.

Perhaps a bit too seamless as there is no indication of which instance users are from unless you go and check their profile. I can see this becoming an issue down the line, so I picked up a userscript that fixes the problem (it has other features, but that's the one I mostly use it for).

Eh, whoever takes up that offer is going to learn in short order why the protest is happening in the first place. As will the rest of the community once the content quality drops into the gutter because the would-be replacement mods can't keep up with getting rid of the garbage. You try moderating a subreddit of any significant size with gimped moderation tools. If anything, this would accelerate Reddit's fall into irrelevance as users start looking elsewhere for a place that isn't overrun by spambots of various flavors.