I discovered Askville by Amazon first, and really enjoyed the concept, but there were a few things I didn’t so much like about it. One was that almost everyone there seemed much older than me (and I’m in my mid 30s). Another was that it was a hotbed of knee-jerk Conservatism at times. And you could really run into a lot of people who would just build straw men and go off on ad-hominem attacks, almost a daily occurrence. As time went on, the quality got worse and worse, and we started to see more insipid questions. Well turned out they started to pay their other users on MTurk to come up with questions, and employed a robot to come up with others, and they incentivised putting Amazon products in your answer. They had his points system that was supposed to be used for something really great, which never materialized. Then when some people started to really game the system, setting up fake accounts and cheating to get points, or basically refusing to hear anything that contradicted anything they said, and people called these users on it, all these people who really cared about the site started raising a big stink about it and trying to get them to do something, and their answer was “play nice”. Then they started adding mods to the site, but the mods didn’t really do anything, they were just there so that if someone reported abuse, they could punish whomever was reported, and they did so arbitrarily. There ended up being a thread where one user was basically belligerent, who was unable to own up to a modicum of personal responsibility for her own actions, who had a significant other on the site whom she used to game the system, and she started to take full advantage of all these bonus questions Askville put on the site for the sole purposes of getting more of their product links displayed in the answers.
And on this thread, about 50 different users took her to task, any rational, reasonable person would have thought this one user was wrong and the other 50 were right, and users kept trying to get the site managers to intervene. Then suddenly they arbitrarily suspended 17 people…the one person who was causing the problem and 16 others who had been the most vocal in trying to stop this person’s shenanigans. When that happened, a mass migration came to Fluther and about 90% of us stayed…some posted on both sites, but most left entirely. I straddled the fence for a while, but then I encountered my own troll, I took him to task and they suspended this person and gave me a “warning”. As I saw it I did nothing that should have resulted in a warning, it was the same story repeating itself…they just painted everyone with the same brush, and would never respond to questions about their reasoning. And I realized, everything they were doing, it was all about revenue…they wanted to turn the site profitable, and moderation comes with a cost. So, they basically were getting annoyed by anyone who dared report abuse, and were punishing everyone who couldn’t just get along and not bother them.
So, I stayed here, and it’s night and day. The mods basically don’t want you to attack anyone….at Askville people were attacked personally on a daily basis. The mods pretty much do what they do in order to keep up quality…at Askville it was about quantity. The mods here want people to be able to show appreciation…there they wanted people to compete with each other, they had leaderboards and tried to make people think their fake “Gold” was worth something. There the terms of service were like a huge legal document which says basically ‘We own whatever you post”. Here the terms of service read like “have a good time and be nice to each other.” And in staying here, I found a far more like minded crowd, one where the average user was my age or younger, where there were no trolls…there were people with whom I disagree, but they are intelligent and make their arguments well by and large, rather than spouting talking points, which was the status quo over there.
I see no reason to ever leave and why would I try another one? This one already eats up WAY too much of my time, and I know and respect a number of people here…if I have a question, I know I’ll get a good answer, and if someone asks a question, I’ll genuinely want to help them. Anywhere else I’m just a random member, here I’m a respected member of a community where I hold a mutual respect for the people on here.
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