Does/should Fluther have a tool to find the "greatest questions" and "greatest answers"?

What defines a great question is subjective. I don’t think we need such a feature here. Fluther isn’t other sites. It’s fine as it is now.

Sorry I have to agree with @AstroChuck!

But there does exist an objective measure. The entire Fluther collective has the option to, and often does, mark questions and answers as “great”. There must be some of them that are absolute gems that will get lost and buried over time, never to be seen again.

Especially for new people who weren’t there when they came up (like myself), this would be a wonderful way to show off the awesomeness and the potential that is contained in the collective.

@barumonkey

Yeah, unfortunately I don’t think there’s any way to do that. But I think it would be cool if there was. I’m interested to see which question has the most “Great Question” votes of all time.

With some repetitive searching, it looks like the current top question is:
http://www.fluther.com/disc/1411/what-does-it-mean-when-a-guy-you-met-once-at/ (currently with 49), unless there’s a question with more than 80 votes (I stopped trying after that).

@barumonkey Look on the FAQ, there’s a link to some of the top questions which include the Fluther Memes.

Just because a bunch of people mark it as a great question, does not mean it really IS a great question. And what is great to me is not necessarily what is great to you.

Sure, the functionality is dead simple to implement. But the real question is what value would this have to the community, what impact might it have, what purpose might it have, and is this enough to justify the investment of time and effort in pursuing. From my observations of Ben and Andrew, they tend to value spending their time on features that improve the functionality of the site for actively contributing, versus improving functionality for perusing or browsing content already made. Perhaps when they are less busy on making the active features a priority, they could investigate new and unique methods of browsing the content they’ve accumulated.

One of the things I like about fluther is that they do not rank people or questions and they seem to resist efforts to do that. When you start ranking, you also start tearing apart the community. You build cliques and favoritism and system gaming. It can destroy a website. It is the kind of thing that destroyed Askville, and who knows how many other social networking sites.

Ranking, to put it bluntly, sucks! There is no good reason to do it. It brings out the competitiveness and venality in people. Frankly, that list of “top” questions shouldn’t even be there. If you called it “illustrative” questions, I’d be fine with it, but the ranking stuff makes anyone who thinks they write good questions, but whose questions are not in that list, feel bad.

@daloon: What are your views on Fluther’s unofficial “10K club”?

There’s a club? No one invited me. Generally, the amount of GAs you have reflects the amount of time you spend here. That people ask questions to recognize the milestone bugs me for the same reason as I described above. It makes me wonder how I compare, and I probably have the least amount of good wishes on my 10k question, since at the time, I had deleted my account (long story, search for it if interested, but not worth reading about in my opinion). Shit, even thinking about it brings back some of the feelings I had at the time. I better go.

@daloon

Ranking is not a good idea, believe me, I’ve seen its effects on AIROW. One user went batshit insane after discovering her low rank and insulted almost every user on that site. But that was because the individual users were ranked. This is just about seeing what question has the most Great Question votes. For me, at least, it would be more about curiosity, especially since I bet some of those “top questions” would be written by users who no longer come on this site and I don’t give two shits about who has the highest score or any of that crap. I deleted my old account and started over, losing over 2700 points of accomplished. I didn’t care.

And that’s why Fluther needs an API.

Yes, I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a sort by number of responses feature. Or a sort by GA feature. Might require some extra CPU power.