What would you say is the culture of AskMefi?

December 29, 2013 10:24 AM

What would you say is the general culture of the AskMefi community? What sorts of questions get positive, supportive responses, and what sorts typically get negative responses?

I study social web culture, and this is just a question that popped into my mind, just out of curiousity. In my experience, I've had overwhelming support in certain questions, and constant attacks in others. I still think out of all the online ask forums, this is one of the best, with the most mature and thought out responses, but I suspect they skew toward certain biases. I'm not going to mention my hypotheses to not seed any ideas, but I wanted to know:

What do you think of the community? What sorts of questions get useful answers and what sorts just get bombarded with attacks, even when the asker was well intentioned and articulate? What biases do you think the community has? It'd be helpful if you could support your answer with specific examples (not necessarily links, but just descriptions of what you observed).

I'm limiting this to AskMefi, since I have not explored the rest of the site much (also, please feel free to let me know if this is not the appropriate forum to ask this. Also, though I am mostly focused on AskMefi, if you are regularly part of other forums (ie Reddit), how does this compare?

Thanks for your time!

posted by lacedcoffee to Society & Culture