What is the difference between Fluther and Quora?

Who says Quora is successful? It’s more like a collection of tweets.

Really? You joined Fluther just so you could run Fluther down? If this question is an example of the “success” enjoyed by Quora, you can keep Quora and Quora is welcome to keep you.

<Sigh> Not again!

Have you come from Quora? If so, then ask it on Quora instead. How the hell do we know why we aren’t as successful as Quora? The more successful one must have the answer.

Seriously I hate all kind of comparison like this!

Or are you kind of trolling here?

Both are interactive sites designed to connect individuals, and help them get answers to their questions. Both sites are equally successful, now if someone feels one site is more successful than the other then it might be due to unrealistic expectations. People must learn to accept it as what it is. Comparing Fluther with Quora and the like is (in my opinion) slightly unfair.

And @Palkobratislava, if you think Fluther is worse than Quora then can you give us some evidence (except the one I give)?

Are people really so insecure that they can’t bear any mention or comparison with Quora? Get over it, there are obvious similarities between the sites – asking questions like this is not the same as disparaging Fluther.

This is comparing apples to oranges. The two sites are completely different. There’s also something to be said for the community and culture on a site.

If you want to play in an info-saturated, twitter style forum with a huge crowd of casual users who have no problem repeatedly asking questions that can easily be answered with a google search, then enjoy Quora.

If you want a tigher-knit, dedicated community with fewer, yet more focused questions that aren’t so easily answered with a search engine, you might like Fluther better.

Exactly how is “Why did Quora become so successful and not Fluther?” a comparison, @dappled_leaves?

Why did you stop beating your wife?

@Palkobratislava: are you asking this because you are, after a time of observance ( “lurking” if you will), unable to discern a difference? I have spent a fair amount of time observing a number of different Q&A sites and, I assure you, if you watch just a bit longer patterns of variance will emerge. It is unlikely that members of a site will be objective about this.

If you’re asking just to get a rise out of people, well I can’t help you there.

@ibstubro I think people are confusing the word “successful” with the word “better”.

This reminds me of the misplaced outrage sparked by John Lennon’s similar comment comparing The Beatles to Jesus.

And… that does not mean I think Fluther is better or worse than either The Beatles or Jesus.

If people want to take issue with the comment that Quora is more successful than Fluther (which may very well be inaccurate), begin by asking how success is measured in this instance, not by attacking the question.

@ibstubro Again: the OP did not say anything about which site is better. That is your own inference, and an ungenerous one.

I have a Quora account that I use rarely, and I see a few members from fluther there, too.

For me, it just seems a little immature and unattractive, not very user-friendly, and although I’m sure you could get to know regular users, wading through the questions in that format is not very conducive to getting to know each other, like this one. The questions don’t interest me much either.

@ibstubro You okay there buddy? We normally don’t feed the trolls, just ignore…lol

“Why did Quora become so successful and not Fluther?” @dappled_leaves.

Quora is so successful. Fluther not so successful. As much as I hated diagramming sentences, it’s not a difficult line to draw.

So, the question is, “Fluther users, why is your site not successful?” Clear flame-bait. It’s not the question I’m taking issue with, but the bias in the details.

Do you have plans to stop beating your wife?

I’ve never been to Quora, but from what I researched, it started four years later than Fluther. It might just be following the same graph that Fluther did. That is, if comparing them is relevant. Fluther started out, had a hey day, and died down. Quora may just still be in that peak phase.

@ibstubro Success is a measurable thing. The question is not flame-bait.

@dappled_leaves I wouldn’t mind seeing the measurements proving quora is more successful and the definition of that, I’m not sure I believe that unless it’s sheer number of users. I bet we’d kick their butts in a knowledge war…lol

@KNOWITALL I wouldn’t mind seeing them, either. I’m puzzled as to why no one has asked the OP to provide evidence of his claim. Too busy making inappropriate analogies, I guess.

@Palkobratislava Can you get us the data showing quora is more successful than fluther?

All the cool kids hang out on Fluther.

“Too busy making inappropriate analogies, I guess.”

Is your wife beating a pattern? Did your father also beat your mother?

Couldn’t say. Went to Quora, but the interface chased me away haha.

@dappled_leaves is correct. “Successful” is a valueless statement concerning website traffic. Relax people. Quora is ranked #442 in traffic, while fluther is ranked #55,138. It’s no contest.

Is it the spelling?

In terms of traffic, Quora is more successful. I still like Fluther better…

Imagine Fluther and Quora were schools you’re thinking about sending your kid to. Would you go by the numbers? I’d be looking for fair teachers, interesting projects, and a friendly atmosphere. Quora is big, sure, but Fluther is a close-knit community. Some like that.

Bottom line is Quora knows how to advertise and promote their site. Search Q&A social forums and you will see Quora but you will not find Fluther in any search results. My honest feeling is Fluther prefers to be invisible and off the grid.

<Sigh> Today I encountered too many trolls here. And the conversation mostly went nowhere. I quit!

@Cruiser: As you know, there is no development happening at Fluther; therefore, there is no point to trying to grow the user base. When the Fluther team was actively promoting the site, our traffic numbers were huge. The site still exists solely by the generosity of the founders for us to maintain our community.

Well, not coming back for further argument (did I say I quitted?), just for side note: it seems that the OP hasn’t replied to our question: where is the evidence of Quora being more successful than Fluther?

What counts as success depends on one’s goals. As such, I am not convinced that Quora is more successful than Fluther. Perhaps it has higher traffic, and that may matter to some people. But I prefer quality to quantity. I also prefer Fluther’s privacy policies and openness to Quora’s insistence on linking profiles to other social media sites and restricting access to its content. Quora may be a more popular product, but Fluther still seems to me the superior one.

To each their own, of course. I just prefer this site to the others.

I was just thinking along the same lines, @SavoirFaire. It’s sort of like people who live in NYC asking why Mayberry never became a success.

Obviously, the people living in Mayberry/Fluther consider their community a success, so driving all the way down here to ask the question is just rude. If someone prefers Quora, more power to them. I’m not looking for a $400,000,000 product that opens my legal name to search engines.

I’d never log onto Quora, and I certainly wouldn’t log onto Quora for the express purpose of running them down. They don’t care what I think, and I don’t care what they think…that’s the reason there are two sites.

I have been here a long time. I trust Gail if my plant looks ill or my sentences are fragmented. I trust jerv if I need help with electrical stuff or a CNC machine. PhiNotPi can probably help out if I have a math problem. It has been a long time. I know who to trust if I need help on subjects.

I have been a member on Reddit for 8 damn years. I have no clue who those people are. I have never made a single connection there. And I spend more time there than I do here.

And WTF Quora? Why do I need to log in to see past the first answer. I don’t even bother clicking anymore when they pop up on search results. This isn’t terribly surprising since it was founded by Facebook employees.

@johnpowell Yeah! Why do I have to sign up to see the questions? And even after I log in, it’s quite hard to see the questions because things are so disorganized!

Sorry @hearkat…as a business owner who owns 2 websites, that makes zero sense to me. Why would they/you not want more people to join the ranks of Jellies???

Well… it seems my trolling theory is right. I was right to quit in time :)

@Cruiser – Disclaimer: I am not speaking for the site’s owners, I am making observations from my experiences here and on other sites where a strong sense of community was built.

You are a business owner who owns two websites – you are trying to build those businesses and generate revenue from them, yes? Ant thus you invest in hardware, software, and personnel to develop and manage and promote those sites hoping to generate profit, correct?

Fluther is owned by web developers who have moved on to other businesses and projects. There is no investment of funds and little investment of time (other than that time volunteered by the moderators) into Fluther – and that is just restoration of service when something goes awry.

They elected not to close this site (unlike other Q&A sites, many of whose refugees now reside in the tide pool) out of Lurve for our community. I do not know whether any revenue is generated by this site at all, and if so, whether it’s anywhere near enough to self-sustain. As far as I know, the Founders are being very generous to us.

Sure, getting new members coming in is great for the community; but we have limited resources, in terms of servers and such, so I don’t know that we could handle a major influx of traffic. @ibstubro‘s Mayberry/NYC analogy is a good one here. We just don’t have the infrastructure for that kind of volume as we did when there was a paid staff to develop, manage and promote Fluther.

@hearkat It means you don’t encourage more new jellies? :(

No, @Mimishu1995, I said that getting new members is great for the community. The point is that Fluther is not being promoted to try to get traffic to where it once was because we no longer have the resources to handle it. We’re not trying to compete with any other sites.

We have truly become like a tide pool and we’d be overwhelmed if a big wave were to come in, but being lapped by smaller waves every now and again is refreshing.

@hearkat It costs nothing to submit your URL to search engines to be seen especially Wiki who could easily add in Fluther to their list of Question and Answer sites. I am sure there are more than a dozen Jellies who could web jockey Fluther into the forefront. There are a myriad of ways to make your website visible for free so the fact that Fluther is relatively invisible to search engines for what ever reason “they” must have wanted it this way from the get go.

@Cruiser – I’m not sure which “get-go” you are referring to, as there was a time when Fluther and its content popped up at the top of many Google searches, and the site won an award at SxSW, and received lots of attention and praise around the web.

Perhaps there are free ways to promote the site, but there are not free ways to have the infrastructure to withstand greater traffic and manage the site much beyond what we currently have. Once again, please refer to the tide pool and Mayberry vs. NYC analogies.

We are all free to promote the site in non-spammy ways, and to invite new members – please do! Since we no longer have a staff of developers, and are limited to the servers on which the site currently resides, the site’s performance would likely suffer if there were a large increase in traffic here, and we volunteer moderators would have an even tougher time keeping up with it. Thus, our current trickle pace and perhaps a little bit more, is all our current system can handle.

As mentioned in my previous comments, I have been on other social sites where we had a very tight community, but the owners abandoned it for one reason or another – I know what it’s like to miss that. I’m sure that the many other Jellies who migrated here when their Q&A homes were shut down can also appreciate the fact that we are very fortunate that the founders have not shut down the site, and allow us to splash around in our little microcosm. I am grateful that we are still here.

@Cruiser There was a push some years ago to add and develop a Wikipedia page for Fluther. It was removed on the basis that Fluther is not notable enough.

Google kinda fucked things up.

It should be pretty obvious when google started punishing Fluther. Google pretty much destroyed a healthy business with a few mouse-clicks. I still have no idea why this occurred but I know they tried to have it fixed and haven’t had any luck. Google’s support if you own a site is pretty much nothing.

Oh.. if you have enough VC money Google will pretend to care. Rap Genius clearly tried to game Google and they got a slap.

@johnpowell I am not even close to being a web expert but prior to rebuilding my companies website I got 2–3 orders a month and maybe 1–2 inquiries per month. A year ago I launched a new website and I am now getting 7–10 orders a day and 2–3 inquiries a day and it is growing exponentially just by following a few simple Google friendly rules. If I can do it…surely the brains behind Fluther who were courted and hired by Twitter can do a much, much better job.

@Cruiser We did try, repeatedly and very hard, in fact. Google wasn’t having it (and neither was Wikipedia). For whatever reason, we got the short end of the stick.

@Cruiser :: This isn’t about being noticed by Google. That is easy. This is about being punished after getting 50K visitors a day and having that drop 90% since Google played with their algorithm.

I found Fluther with no advertising. I like it here. Too many users wouldn’t make it feel like I have a few more friends, but a bunch of know-it-alls that I can’t keep up with or get to know.

GA, @GloPro. Invite friends.

Quora has a much larger user base than here. Quora attracts quality users just like this site does, but it has a more variable user base because it’s simply larger, which means you can get more quality discussions about more different topics. It allows picture media, like sodahead did, but the users on quora are a bit more intelligent, and very rarely do I see lame photos in place of actually debating points (unlike on sodahead). Picture media can be a plus, especially when one wants to show graphs and similar things.

Fluther has decent moderation and a smaller user base. This means you can get some quality discussions pertaining to certain topics on here that you can’t on quora. I’m guessing that quora simply went out of their way to attract more users.

@KNOWITALL Actually there’s every type of question and topic one can think of on quora. Sometimes it’s difficult to get a quality discussion on some of them though.

Omg Sodahead, that place was a cesspool of unwashed butts.