Is it just me, or has question quality... degraded, recently?

liek dis if u cry evry tiem </3

<crickets chirping> There aren’t many people here :/

It does seem slow of late; I don’t find as much to engage with but I always find there are slack times here.

Is this a joke? Yeah, clearly we need more questions like this beauty. Uh huh, right.

Everything is fine. Your computer must have a virus. Better take it in to get fixed.

IMO, answer quality has degraded more.

@FutureMemory Just because people can’t look at something logically doesn’t mean its a bad question, it just means people are too sensitive. It beats “Why do you think I’m not socially confident” or questions like that.

@FutureMemory HAHAHAHAHA

@XOIIO I don’t think it does, honestly. At least those are questions.

The place is just real slow as of late. Sure, you get your oft fluff question, but compared to other places like this, I think we’re doing pretty damn good when it comes to intelligent matter and constructivism. Plus you gotta have fun sometimes. Fun that doesn’t include rape.

LMAO @FutureMemory.

This is but an example.

I don’t know about anything objective, but I’ve found the questions this week to be lacking in interest to me. The ones the week before seemed pretty good, but I was away on vacation and didn’t get to answer them. So, I fear it might be my fault. But I will take one for the team. If you want to take up a collection to send me and a jelly of my choice off on vacation, so as to improve the quality of the questions, I will, albeit reluctantly, go.

Oh, snap! @FutureMemory just won the internet, ladies and gentlemen, ballgame!

On a mildly serious note, I have noticed a wee decline. But every website has it’s slack periods, Fluther is no exception. Thankfully, I see the quality of answers hasn’t degraded in the slightest.

@XOIIO Whenever I don’t like the questions, I try to think of one others may have fun answering.

@FutureMemory Awesome! Point goes to FM!!!!! What the hell… game, set, match… do your victory lap. I’m finding a trophy for you as we speak.

I think I’d rather be raped, as long as it means by my husband, at 2 AM, when I’m trying to sleep…........... oh fuck. Wrong question, sorry.

@FutureMemory

Here’s your trophy

It’s actually the International Cricket Council World Cup trophy. I kind of liked it, but India’s going to want it back eventually.

at least the word retarded wasn’t used in the question title~

everything can be googled.

I don’t know, I’m not around as much so I can’t gauge what’s happening.

@woodcutter I beg to differ, my friend. Not everything can be googled. My heart and mind cannot be googled. Nor can my spirit! :-)

And there’s a bunch of other crap that can’t be googled anymore either, IMHO. Google is pretty useless these days, I think. Google is dead to me.

I think there are less questions and that is amplifying the prevalence of the less intellectual or serious questions. I think we should all aim to post one good question a day :-) (Says I who is not a prolific question asker).

@Simone_De_Beauvoir commmmeeee baaaccccckkkkk.

I don’t think so. It’s very quiet some days here, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to ask questions that are a little bit light-hearted (or might seem Yahoo-ish) if it means people engage in the site more.

Holiday weekend, slows things down I reckon!

@FutureMemory Also, do you screenshot every question on fluther or somehting? lol

Despite your obvious effort @XOIIO, it is not just you.

Everybody left. In the recent meta thread How many Fluther users are there?, I hand counted the number of questions on April 5 last year and compared it with the number of questions on April 5 this year.

On April 5 last year, there were 34 questions in General, 55 questions in Social, and 2 questions in Meta.

On April 5 this year, there were 17 questions in General, 27 questions in Social, and 0 questions in Meta.

As you can tell, the number of questions has halved, almost exactly halved. It has been a long time since I have seen 55 or so questions in a single section.

@PhiNotPi Interesting, and with that it seems traffic we are getting is from people who were on lower quality sites, I guess with the exodus of several good fluther users the good quality isn’t as common now or something.

Someone please do check @FutureMemory pulse, I’m beginning to worry.

It might be a vicious circle: Quality goes down, so a few experienced members leave. The lower quality users stay becuase they come from a place with worse quality. Since a few experienced members leave, the quality goes down, thus inducing more high quality people to leave, and so on…

@XOIIO If someone says something particularly fucked up, something that you just know will be modded, often I will take a screen shot in order to preserve a record of it. How can we know the true depths of an individual’s deranged thinking process/state of mind if the most extreme evidence is always removed? We can’t. That’s where I come in. I’m like the photo-journalist that takes pictures of dead bodies on the battlefield.

Horrors that are not well documented will eventually be forgotten.

@PhiNotPi Do we know that a perceived dip in quality is what caused experienced members to leave though? I don’t know…there are so many factors.

@FutureMemory I take it you’ve read The Heart of Darkness then?

@Avocado Haha ;) I was interrupted while writing that. Sorry for the delay!

@FutureMemory Ah. Understandable, understandable, I was merely concerned for your well-being. I do, ever-so-much hope your interruption was in the pleasant spectrum.

@Avocado I have not read Heart of Darkness.

And thank you for the kind words regarding my well-being. I am near tears.

@FutureMemory I’m not sure if I would recommend it to anyone, but it is very great writing… It is not, a bucket of laughs though.

As I’m sure, @Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard can tell you/us, King Leopold the deuce was, not so cool.

@Avocado What’s up with your avatar? Need help centering it?

Well, one thing that needs to be improved is the return rate: If a user leaves (for any reason), what is the chance that they will ever come back? Slowly, all of the old members will eventually leave and be replaced, but will the new people be as active?

”If a user leaves (for any reason), what is the chance that they will ever come back?”

Quite high! So many second accounters here. rofl

Nah, it’s always been so. Think of fluther as a sewer, a sea of shit beautified by the occasional goldfish…...what the fuck am I on about!?!

Is it just me, or does anyone else picture @ucme as Eddie Izzard? Not in drag, of course!

I, for one, suspect @Avocado is a returnee.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Would it help? I no longer think so.

@PhiNotPi Actually, I was told by several departed members that what made them leave was all the whining and moaning about, “Oh my god, I’m so offended” and the rise in victim mentality.

Question quality has been degrading since Fluther opened. Answer the interesting ones, and ignore the rest.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir well it’s your choice, of course, but I don’t see you of all people being one to give up on something because there happen to be a lot of discouraging fuckery associated with it.

@Avocado Leopold II was a douchenozzle of the highest order. Also, he was crazy as fuck.

@lillycoyote Well not every single thing in the world will turn up in a google search but pretty much everything that anyone would be curious about will get something to look at. My point was that ya, we all could just skip the whole Fluther middleman deal altogether and just go straight to google to get answers that were put there by people too. But even knowing this, it still has the appeal to get a discussion going right here almost in real time. And there are going to be subjects that have been discussed a dozen times and they ,the questioner, will be redirected by a member to that thread in hopes that the questioner would simply be satisfied with reading a thread 9 months old by themselves as if it was a google search, but somehow I don’t think that is what they wanted. I mean just how many things are there to discuss, before we run out of the good ones?
People who are rankled by repeat subject matter seem to me the type who would make lousy spouses huh?

@woodcutter People who are rankled by repeat subject matter seem to me the type who would make lousy spouses huh? I love this comment. My husband has heard me tell the same stories over and over at least 2 dozen times (and I have heard the same from him). He smiles and engages me each and every time. He doesn’t tell me to stfu. (A good spouse wouldn’t do that.) I think there is some truth to your statement. :)

@jonsblond I was going to quote that exact line also :) Love it.

@jonsblond Well, “keepin it fresh is awsome but if you have a job, a commute, kids…a normal family life there should be a finite number of topics that come up. Meh it’s good to have the same o same o. Better than having the hubby come home to tell you his secretary flashed him her tits at the office….again. Would not like.

@woodcutter You’re so earnest sometimes, but I find it rather endearing. :-)

I perceived a general reduction in quality of both questions and responses so I took a break for a couple of weeks. Having returned, I am still forming my opinion on the general state of affairs.

I tried to ask a discussion provoking question, or so I thought it might be. I got a “of course, duh” answer and the question went kerplunk. My feelings weren’t hurt, but I was disappointed that a discussion didn’t initiate.

I think some people are trying to put spark in the questions but for some reason the collective doesn’t seem to be attracted to those type of questions as they used to be.

I think we don’t write our questions as well as we think we do. The way I figure it, every question I write is brilliant. The way they get answered, I’m lucking if one in six makes a hit in terms of the interest it attracts. And people (at least used to) compliment me for my questions.

I think we could benefit from workshopping some questions because I think a lot of people don’t say what they mean to and aren’t aware of it. I know some of my questions—well—it’s hard to figure out how to say what I’m trying to get at. I have to try several times before I get it good enough.

It’s just not so easy to write a good question, and yet I think we get a lot more good ones at fluther than we do in most places.

I feel that while there are certainly new topics and new members, many of us have hashed and rehashed some issues to death. I’m personally just not that interested any more in participating in discussions about whether G-d exists or gender equality unless something really sparks me as new. I know who is going to say what and how they are going to be set off. I’m also not that interested any more in what you eat for breakfast or whether you sleep with one blanket on or two.

^^word.

I would be perfectly happy to never see the words gender, god, atheists, or christians appear in a question title ever again. (oh, and rape too, @XOIIO)

But, but, but what are people gonna talk about then?

Dreams, whether or not the boy that looked at you for 3 seconds straight likes you, and….Obama.

Thanks for jogging my memory @FutureMemory.

Things are never as good as they used to be, as they once were. No matter what the thing, this is always true, or at least there is always someone who will argue that. No matter what one is talking about, there is always, apparently, some “golden age” of that thing or some thing, when it was better, and whatever that thing is, it’s gone downhill and degraded, ever since. This is something that can always be counted on, no matter what that “thing” may be: There will always be people who will tell you that whatever it was, it was good then, it was better then and now it sucks.

Not saying it doesn’t play out that way; I think there really are things that used to be better and now we have things that aren’t as good, but all these things that used to be better but now suck are all stacked up, one on top of the other; there is an almost an infinite number of things, piled up, one on another, that used to be better but suck now. Every who knows how many years, but at the very least every generation or so, someone adds something to the big old pile of things that used to be better and then, well, after some period or time or some event, everything went to shit and now, all those things that were better, that were good then, have been replaced and usurped by other “things” that are crap. It’s the way of the world.

Well I’ll take a ‘stupid’ question any day where the author at least gives some type of his/her own personal input vs people asking ‘quality’ questions who don’t get involved at all. I also hate the ‘quality’ questions where the author avoids thanking those people who’ve responded trying to help them with a problem they posted about.

@Paradox25 God damn quality…where does it get off sneaking into Fluther questions?