Most of the others are much bigger. They do not require you to write English, nor do they require you to be nice. Those are requirements here, and posts that do not meet those standards, as per the volunteer moderators’ opinions, will be taken off the discussion.
Questions must also be understandable. Your fellow jellies will flag any question they don’t understand or disapprove of for some reason, and the moderators may or may not agree with them. If they do agree, they will send the question back to you and you can fix it if you want.
They try to minimize points games here. You can only give any other individual 20 GAs on answers that will count towards their point totals. You can GA after that, but the person’s point total won’t increase. No one places a huge emphasis on lurve (points), but it does mean something. It’s just not the main reason people hang out here. People hang out for the discussions and the information.
We do have trolls, I think. I’ve never seen one, but I hear people talking about moderators getting rid of them all the time. They must be really efficient. We have spam, but that, too, is efficiently eliminated.
We pretty much demand that people argue using reason and backing arguments with data that go to credible sources. Not everyone does this, but when we get down to it, that’s what we have to do if we want to be believed. Some of us have a history here, so we can say stuff more often without using links to sources and people will believe us because of our past credibility. Or lack thereof.
Fluther can be addicting because of other aspects of the community. People really do establish caring relationships. Sometimes they even marry each other. Once, anyway, that I know of. We have our cranky people; our whimsical people; our zombie people; our political heads; our conservatives (yes, we even have conservatives—I can’t decide if that means we’re doing something right or wrong); our religious people (but we have a very strong atheist contingent); and for the most part, we speak to each other respectfully.
Not that there aren’t fights and hurt feelings, but we deal with it. Some people deal by leaving. So if you are going to get into it, you probably need a semi-thick skin. My advice is that you try not to take disagreement personally. Nor other tastes. Someone once left at least in part because she didn’t like my avatar. It’s as if she felt I was putting my ass personally in her face. I feel no guilt about that. I have earned that avatar the hard way. I’m sorry when people can’t accept me, but I’m not going to change my avatar in order to gain acceptance from everyone.
Just don’t take it personally. Nor anyone else’s avatar. Nor anyone else’s arguments. We’re here to talk and learn and sometimes we may get offensive but we try not to, and the mods keep us in line and anyway, it’s really not about you, or me, and any individual. People forgive and forget here. You have a fight one day and a week later, you’re flirting again. It’s just not that big a deal.
So jump in. Have fun. Be provocative. Be wise. Be funny. Not necessarily in that order. Ask good questions. Feel free to put thought into things. Even write long posts. I write longer posts than almost everyone else, and I know a lot of people don’t read them, but I write to find out what I think, so it doesn’t matter so much if only a few others read what I write. And I do have a few fans. That makes is all better!
