What happened to answerbag?

Beats me, answerbag always looked like a mess to me.

Demand Media happened to it…

A little over a year ago, the owners announced “SUPER AWESOME NEW CHANGES MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS PEOPLES COMMUNITY OF ANSWERBAG” which everyone was pretty excited about because the changes sounded cool. Well, it turns out they radically altered the site, removed everything that made it fun, and opened it up to the Twittertween/Facebookderp demographic and the whole thing entered a hard and fast downward spiral into trolling and tardfuckery.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard The website itself is completely messed up. It looks like the site has some kind of problem. It doesn’t look right. Looks like something happened to it.

It was taken over by trolls and religious conservatives after they added a lot of changes.

Some changes are good, some changes are bad.

There is no good in the bad on Answerbag.

@Blackberry It has been taken over by trolls but I don’t see many religious conservatives on that site. It has alot of people who cruelly mock anyone who is religious or a conservative.

@Mikewlf337 Oh, I haven’t been on that website in about a year, so it could have changed.

And the COATS abandoned their original mission and have turned into a clique of bullies…

I’ve never seen anything right with it. Its always been fucked up.

YaHooo Answers Bitches!!!!!

@HungryGuy The coats?

Oh yes it is all cliques and bullies. No matter what or who you are or what you believe inyou will get mocked by someone.

The site does seem to be in bad shape as far as the appearance of the site goes.

@XOIIO It stood for the coalition of answerbag something or other.

@Blackberry ahh

COAT = coalition of anti-trolls

It was group dedicated to policing trolls.

I left Answerbag within days of the changes. It doesn’t surprise me at all to hear it’s turned into a garbage bag.

@hawaii_jake Ahh, there we go. Wasn’t there a coalition for cats or something too?

@Blackberry : I’m not aware of any other coalitions, but then I literally have been back to AB only once since I migrated to Fluther.

@hawaii_jake Lol, yeah I went back 3 or 4 times and that was enough for me.

@Mikewlf337

Weren’t you at Canswerbag when it went malignant in December, 2009?
If you were, are you saying that it’s even more FU now than it was when they metastasized the changes?

@Brian1946 yup. It is a wasteland now. It probobly is dying now.

There was a number of little clubs: the COATS, the Jetpackers, and a few others. AB had this nice feature that you could change the suffix of your user name whenever you wanted, so if your screen name, for example, was BigHunk you could make your screen name say BigHunk is a COAT or BigHunk has a flaming Jetpack or anythng else you want to say. Most of the clubs were just for fun. It didn’t confer any special powers or admin privileges to be a COAT, but at one time, they were the go-to people when a troll was harassing someone or trashing the site.

The original owners Joel and Rich sold it to Demand Media. They made wholesale changes to the basic structure of the site that made it difficult to follow a conversation. The old Answerbag promoted conversation and friendships even better than Fluther (sorry jellies) because answers had to be ontopic and answer the question. But the conversations took place in the threads of comments attached below a given answer. Questions and answers were strictly moderated, but conversation in the comments wasn’t moderated at all except for personal attacks. Also all answers were voted on and the answers were listed from best to worst instead of just listed one after the other like a conversation.

Answerbag has turned into a conglomerate of people who just want to fight with someone else; theres no incentive to behave, just flamebaiters galore.

Yup, answer bag is doomed indeed!

@LoboDelMar15 – I don’t think it’s doomed. It’s just not the wildly addictive and crazy fun place it used to be. It’s just one of many corporate cash cow type sites now…

I went back for the first time after receiving an e-mail that I received a best answer for something I posted who-knows-when. I couldn’t believe it was even worse than it was the day The Big Change occurred. Even the “professional answer” people that were introduced seems to have been relegated to the background somewhere.

It was…embarrassing.

I slunk off quietly, sorry I had witnessed the devastation of a once great Q&A site.

@LoboDelMar15

Cash cow?
Someone should call the humane society.

That cow is as good as dead.

@Blackberry I must add that proboby both the atheist and religious on that site became rude. Answerbag turned into a religious war lol. I hope that doesn’t happen on here. there reason I came here from AB was because 1) the changes made it less enjoyable. 2) the insults became too much and nobody would respect one another. Here on fluther the moderators are good at keeping the personal attacks out.

@SABOTEUR I tried to stay on AB but it became a wasteland. AB became a sinking ship and I had to flee on a floating door to fluther.

@Mikewlf337 You’re right about the religious intolerance at AB. It’s interesting that you reminded me of this because for the past few days I’ve seen that same type of intolerance begin to creep into Fluther. I sure hope it doesn’t proliferate.

@Mikewlf337 – There’s always been religious wars on Answerbag…

I really don’t miss my answerbag account and I might still have followers there. Been a while since I’ve checked.

It works when I alternate browsers from Internet Explorer and Chrome. If I don’t do that then I get a 403 Error. The leader board goes to Einstein for 500,000 points. Fun1 is at that level.