Provide a brief critique of other Q&A sites?

http://ask.metafilter.com

Brutal moderation keeps the stupid away.
No spam

Cons – One time fee of five bucks. But that is why the spam and stupid stay away. And you need to have a credit card to join. So damn near everyone is over 18 and knows if the cute boy likes them.

Askville: used to have decent questions, but too much drama. My understanding is it has become worse.

Experience Project: Q&A is pretty insipid, but the personal stories are exceptional!

I swear to God if one more person asks me to go dig up those posts about Vark and Formspring, then I’M going to vark and spring. ~

Still, too lazy to go and look for it again. All I remember right this second are that both are very anti-community and rely on one-on-one Q&A entirely; multiple users cannot answer the same question on Vark, and on Formspring, you can only ask one person at a time a question, and it is not made available to the public for others to answer. (Formspring also relies heavily on Facebook Connect and other social network sites to find people to ask questions.)

I started with Google answers but they soon killed the project. Then I tried Yahoo Answers briefly and gave up on it as a waste of time. Idiotic answers would get voted to the top, and the actual answer often didn’t get a single vote.

The first social media site I stuck with for any time was a News discussion site called www.propeller.com. Then AOL acquired it, and with near unparalleled ability to foul up everything they touch, they modified it till they killed it. It ended life officially October 1, 2010. May it RIP.

I migrated to www.answerbag.com and really enjoyed it for a year. Then the owners “improved” it to make sure that all the features that made it fun to use were gone. Cut down n bandwidth drain, I guess, because I was part of a mass migration of AB users to Fluther.

One of the AB refugees got irritated with the level of moderation here (there had been virtually none on Answerbag.com) and invited me to a custom group she created at www.Sodahead.com. I signed up there and while I soon lost interest in the private group and another on www.Ning.com, I did get into the heat of all the political debate on Sodahead.com. It is a heavily right-wing site. Post anything even slightly moderate or less than flaming far right and you can expect all sorts of threats, ridicule, the ubiquitous “You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid” and ugly cartoons about your lack of character and/or intelligence. But there are some intelligent people there as well, and I do learn from the discourse with them. I just let the rest of the garbage slide down the garbage shoot where it belongs. I also like that they allow posting images and even videos and sound clips.

Never done anything like this before, just stumbled in with my question, and stayed because I respect and like the people. Would not seek out another Q and A site if fluther goes gently into that good night. I was never seeking to spout off about stuff, just find out what was wrong with my home network. Now I am concerned about someone’s sick cat and someone else’s something else, and happy about an impending wedding. And I get laughs and ripostes along with info.

What ^ ^ ^ said. Many lurve for you, @anartist .

Wis.dm didn’t have a good business model.