I didn’t know question answering sites existed outside of Yahoo Answers’ babby until my housemate introduced me to Fluther. So i really have not basis for comparison, beyond the aforementioned frigth.

One! I just got lucky and found Fluther one day.
And my life is considerably better for it!

This is my second one, and I think it’s the keeper. I still need to figure out all the in’s and outs, but I think Fluther.com is my new home. My first stop was Yahooanswers, my one and only question, “Are there any other displaced answerbaggers here?” was deleted due to a violation of the terms. It was too chatty. Oh well, I guess I should have read the terms before posting. Anyway, here I am!

This is #3 After several incarnations on AB and once on YA. I think I’ve found a home here but I’m keeping a low profile and staying away from old conflicts.

I took the advice of an Answerbager that i respect and trust. if this person suggested Fluther, i went to the site and just observed for a few hours. i liked everything i saw. i liked the format, the questions and the Fluther Watchdog. if you make a mistake, Fluther is going to let you know it…..pronto. this site appears to be clean and respected. this fits my specifications. Fluther was the first and only site i examined. john

There are other sites than fluther? Huh. Fluther is my one and only. My eye has never roamed.

I really like it here. I like ask.metafilter, too, which is where I found out about Fluther, but I don’t love it.

Now, the Fametracker forums used to fit me, but then the moderators got tired of ever-increasing hordes of trolls and simply locked down and left. Wow, I’d never seen such a madhouse when they split until the server shut down! Every single thing people had held back because of obeying the mod rules just went flying like so much poo.

Back in the day, there was Suck. Bob, but I loved that site. And then it died. Heather Havrilesky writes for Salon now, but it’s not the same. Oh, and Plastic! I would go there and Timothy McSweeney’s “Internet Tendency” every day.

Every so often I’ll go to TWOP (started by the same people who did Fametracker), but if my show’s not on, I really don’t bother in the forums over there..

I saw Fluther mentioned on a question on A/B ; so I thought that I’d give it a try…

So far ; it is ok… easy to use and get around… although I do think they can get a little stiff on the questions submitted… BUT; I’m still taking my time deciding IF I will stick around…

I like the greater sense of discipline and civility on this site.

AB until it changed.

thank you all for your wonderful answers :)
the discipline is great ;)

I don’t see any point in sticking to one, I participate in several. They all have their good points and their bad points.

This is my 4th Q&A site I have joined. I am also on a forum and I blog. I don’t have any favourites. They are all special in their own way. I have to add that Fluther really is unique. All the others follow the same recipe. This site is different, which is a good thing.
I will not return to AB, mainly because I am unable to log in and admin is ignoring my requests for help.

@Confuscious That’s really strange. I actual tried to get thrown off AB and they won’t do it. They’re just not paying attention to anything users do now.

I dunno, just joined. AB changed as in “new coke”. I am sure it will continue forth, but without me. Google works rather well. :)

@stranger_in_a_strange_land They have ‘bigger fish to fry’. Probably working non stop trying to fix the mess they made.

Me? Im still trying, using all the ones I have found up to now. Cant pull the plug!!!!

I discovered Askville by Amazon first, and really enjoyed the concept, but there were a few things I didn’t so much like about it. One was that almost everyone there seemed much older than me (and I’m in my mid 30s). Another was that it was a hotbed of knee-jerk Conservatism at times. And you could really run into a lot of people who would just build straw men and go off on ad-hominem attacks, almost a daily occurrence. As time went on, the quality got worse and worse, and we started to see more insipid questions. Well turned out they started to pay their other users on MTurk to come up with questions, and employed a robot to come up with others, and they incentivised putting Amazon products in your answer. They had his points system that was supposed to be used for something really great, which never materialized. Then when some people started to really game the system, setting up fake accounts and cheating to get points, or basically refusing to hear anything that contradicted anything they said, and people called these users on it, all these people who really cared about the site started raising a big stink about it and trying to get them to do something, and their answer was “play nice”. Then they started adding mods to the site, but the mods didn’t really do anything, they were just there so that if someone reported abuse, they could punish whomever was reported, and they did so arbitrarily. There ended up being a thread where one user was basically belligerent, who was unable to own up to a modicum of personal responsibility for her own actions, who had a significant other on the site whom she used to game the system, and she started to take full advantage of all these bonus questions Askville put on the site for the sole purposes of getting more of their product links displayed in the answers.

And on this thread, about 50 different users took her to task, any rational, reasonable person would have thought this one user was wrong and the other 50 were right, and users kept trying to get the site managers to intervene. Then suddenly they arbitrarily suspended 17 people…the one person who was causing the problem and 16 others who had been the most vocal in trying to stop this person’s shenanigans. When that happened, a mass migration came to Fluther and about 90% of us stayed…some posted on both sites, but most left entirely. I straddled the fence for a while, but then I encountered my own troll, I took him to task and they suspended this person and gave me a “warning”. As I saw it I did nothing that should have resulted in a warning, it was the same story repeating itself…they just painted everyone with the same brush, and would never respond to questions about their reasoning. And I realized, everything they were doing, it was all about revenue…they wanted to turn the site profitable, and moderation comes with a cost. So, they basically were getting annoyed by anyone who dared report abuse, and were punishing everyone who couldn’t just get along and not bother them.

So, I stayed here, and it’s night and day. The mods basically don’t want you to attack anyone….at Askville people were attacked personally on a daily basis. The mods pretty much do what they do in order to keep up quality…at Askville it was about quantity. The mods here want people to be able to show appreciation…there they wanted people to compete with each other, they had leaderboards and tried to make people think their fake “Gold” was worth something. There the terms of service were like a huge legal document which says basically ‘We own whatever you post”. Here the terms of service read like “have a good time and be nice to each other.” And in staying here, I found a far more like minded crowd, one where the average user was my age or younger, where there were no trolls…there were people with whom I disagree, but they are intelligent and make their arguments well by and large, rather than spouting talking points, which was the status quo over there.

I see no reason to ever leave and why would I try another one? This one already eats up WAY too much of my time, and I know and respect a number of people here…if I have a question, I know I’ll get a good answer, and if someone asks a question, I’ll genuinely want to help them. Anywhere else I’m just a random member, here I’m a respected member of a community where I hold a mutual respect for the people on here.

I used Yahoo! Answers, but quickly got bored with the teeny bopper questions and the amount of times I was reported, or whatever the hell they called it. So I found Answerbag, and stayed there until the big update.

I’m pretty content with Fluther.

AB was perfect for me from the first minute I saw it, but now it’s wrong. And sadly I don’t think Fluther fits me perfectly either.

@Finny I can sympathize with you. The pace is much slower here. But I like the structure, tone and intelluctual level here so I’m staying.

I wasn’t looking for “perfection” or “the perfect fit”.

I was just looking for a Q&A site that was similar to a format I was accustomed to.

I didn’t have to look very far…Fluther was the second site I visited.

About 3, one i liked for over forty shut down.im still not sure what im doing now, i was new too answer bag when they changed.

AB was the first I liked. Fluther seems ok. I have found www.blurtit.com I like it to. It is the closed I have seen to the old AB.

I did a lot of my searches before coming to Answerbag, and I’m still looking.

My questions in Wikipedia’s Reference Desk and RationalWiki’s Saloon.

“Answerbag has left me and my fellow AB’ers, possibly for Facebook—what am I gonna do?”
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/RationalWiki:Saloon_bar#Answerbag_has_left_me_and_my_fellow_AB.E2.80.99ers.2C_possibly_for_Facebook.E2.80.94what_am_I_gonna_do.3F

“Answerbag has left me and my fellow AB’ers, possibly for Facebook—what am I gonna do?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing#Answerbag_has_left_me_and_my_fellow_AB.E2.80.99ers.2C_possibly_for_Facebook.E2.80.94what_am_I_gonna_do.3F

I don’t have a problem with getting used to new websites or changes on websites I’ve gotten accustomed to, so I didn’t have to look very far. If I like a website enough, I’ll find a way to make it suit my needs somehow.

@AnonymousGirl: Generally I agree, nor have I totally abandoned AB, but they have made some big changes; and for the why, they aren’t working so well. Also keep in mind that the first answer site I was on was YA.
:-D

@Civic_Cat :D