Meanwhile, .tech exists and is not country-specific but is far less popular for some reason.

Simple answer: length.

Two chars look a lot better than something with more chars, and all two chars TLD are ccTLDs.

Yepp, and no one really listens to the others, just trying to remember what you did and make sure no one dumps more work on you.

Only issue I see is that the 8 chars required is very short and easy to brute force. You would hope that people would go for the recommended instead, but doubt it.

Re: Downvote bots. I can’t say they’re necessarily bots, but my instance has scripts that flag accounts that exclusively give out downvotes and then bans them. That’s about the best I can do, at present, to counter those for my users.

It is usually not a good idea to specify what your exact metrics are for a ban. A bad actor could see that and then get around it by randomly upvoting something every now and then.

The same goes for pretty much everything in life, not just games. It might suck in the short term, but just don’t put up with friends/partners/jobs you don’t like. Make a change

There is also the risk of homograph attacks. The link below is for domain name encoding via IDN, but the same applies to usernames. You could easily impersonate another user by having chars that look similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

And ethernet port!