C@ got your tongue
So, I guess CuriousCat is dead.
While I'm not exactly going to play a dirge for it, I do think it was in the best interests of most social media users to keep it on (I have to assume) financial life support for as long as possible. It wasn't very well-designed, sure, and it wanted to be more than it was (at some point, I think it may have started to see itself as a potential social media platform of its own), but it filled in a gap present in most text-based social platforms.
On most platforms, the only ways of directly speaking to another user are via a public post where you @ them or via a private direct message, both of which pose an issue for those with qualities like "tact" and "shame". A public post means that your followers will see the message before the person it's directed at, and you may not necessarily want them to see it (or at least for it to be on your feed) at all. Even more embarrassingly, if there's no response, then you end up looking like a jagoff. As for a private message, general etiquette (in my experience, at least, though certain other people seem to have few qualms about it) is to avoid using this option with people that you don't "know" – or more accurately, people that don't "know" you. "Knowing" a person online is obviously a fluid measure, but the vibe of the thing (I watched the 1997 movie The Castle the other day) holds true. Also, it may be the one motive for the message is to provide an opening for the user to make a joke or just to send them something interesting, in which case you don't necessarily want it to stay in private if they respond.
Now, I hate to give Tumblr any praise because I think the collective ego of its userbase is fallaciously inflated ("fallated"?) enough, but its robust (enough) ask system is a genuine boon to the platform by allowing individual users to circumvent all of the issues described above, and anonymously to boot (begrudgingly I will say that Tumblr excels in this realm in general, that of non-intrusive commenting and engagement, as exemplified by tag commentary). Additionally, the answerer has the option to respond privately if it's a sensitive topic as well as to disable either the anonymity or the whole ask system if they don't want to deal with it. I think the ability of Tumblr to accomodate discourse (in the non-combative sense) and foster the development of friendships between users would be significantly impaired if, like most other text-based platforms, it did not have this feature.
CuriousCat sought to provide this function, like a contractor, for those other platforms. One thing it boasted that Tumblr asks (obviously) could not was inter-platform functionality. Since CC was a separate site, the same profile could be used for Facebook or Twitter or even Tumblr. However, in order to flourish it needed a deeper integration with those platforms which it never received. Perhaps this was what motivated it to attempt to justify itself as a platform.
I think it's very strange that an ask system like Tumblr's is not available on every platform, especially since they all like to ape each other's features. For Twitter, surely, with its emphasis on creating conversation spaces (if you want to believe the line pushed by its PR department), such a feature would be a perfect fit. And after all, hatemailers have plenty of practice beating ur ass in the QRTs. ~∓~