What happened to the smart people?

Fluther has never exactly been a place of deep learning and introspection, but there used to be people here with a variety of professional skills and personal interests ranging from the mundane to the esoteric.

I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I consider the moderation of Fluther oppressive and authoritarian, so I haven’t spent much time here over the last few years. For the last week I decided to make an honest foray back into Fluther to see what, if anything, has changed. And change there has been.

Questions requiring some kind of practical knowledge or creative thought are now completely ignored. On the other hand, questions requiring completely unqualified stating of personal opinion instantly attract swarms of people desperately seeking to shove their oar in the water. I remember a time when there was a qualitative difference between Fluther and sites like Yahoo!Answers or AnswerBag. Now, other than a somewhat higher literacy level, there’s little to differentiate Fluther.

What the hell happened? Yes, I’m aware of the big civil war over moderation here where half the remaining contributors left, but that alone doesn’t seem to explain the near-total absence of people with interests outside of small talk and dad jokes.