Fatwallet to go dark: what about deals sites did/do you love? And more evidence for the dwindling of deals sites
7FatWallet - All good things must come to an end on Monday October 9th, 2017
It’s never easy to say good bye. We’re announcing the end of the road for FatWallet - the community will be closing the doors for good on Monday October 9th, 2017. If there are relationships you wish to continue outside of FatWallet, we encourage you to reach out to those friends as soon as you can.
We’ve built some great relationships with you all in the last 18 years or so, and we’re going to miss you all.
And more in the announcement, about saving content and cashing out any remaining Cashback I think. .
https://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/1586370
At some point Fatwallet was sold to Ebates, and Ebates now belongs to Rakuten.
The years before about 2012 or so were glory years for deals.: The HP Touchpad; Reasonable gaming computers from Dell for around $200 by adding and then removing bundle items from a shopping cart; insider employees posting advance notice of coupon codes and PDFs of printed coupons; cashback for Ebay purchases.
The madness that was Bing Cashback. Just OMG on that one.
And, oh, yeah:
insane and hostile moderation <cough>.
And the one community i treasured, first for the deals, and soon enough for the quality of the people and conversations:. Deals.woot.com. Happy to still have most of the people. : )
(For me, the VMP thing is as much a way if saying thanks to Meh for this community as it is free shipping. Deal with that, @unixrab.)
Slickdeals and dealnews and a few others are still going strong, I guess.
Brickseek can be wonderful, Esp for Walmart and Target.
What’s the best or fav thing you ever got from a deals aggregation site?
(Besides friends)
(Oh, what the hell. Including friends.)
- 13 comments, 30 replies
- Comment
Nothing.
(But does nothing then become something?)
@mflassy
Interesting question.
Both TV and physics seem to posit some answers.
(Assuming that human words and mathematical formulations and human sciences are sufficient to encompass this topic, which I do not.
[My personal attitude on this neither implies nor excludes a theological overlay, the question of which I would consider separately in any case.
(Since theological overlays are, as humans know of those, distinctly the of the quality of human thought and understanding anyway.)])
Tl;dr
WTF? Unknown.
Excuse me, @carl669. I want this to go into the Fuck Count. My bad.
So:
What
The
Fuck.
Unknown.
@f00l
So what you’re saying is that you’re not as knowledgeable as the Meh Discord channel assumes?
@mflassy
I’m not as knowledgeable as any person or community assumes. Including self.
@mflassy there’s a Meh Discord channel!?
@UncleVinny
@jbartus set it up. . Friendly place.
https://meh.com/forum/topics/meh-community-discord-server
https://discord.gg/mp2pWvF
@f00l hey neato! Now if Meh.com is washed away in a tragic candy corn avalanche I’ll have some way of contacting my forum pals.
@f00l
Probably why no one told me.
@f00l if everyone is chatting on discord, is that why the forum is more quiet? I don’t really understand why people wouldn’t just post here?
@RiotDemon The discord is rather quiet, except for maybe the politics channel.
There’s also a Slack channel I hear, but I’m not currently on that.
@dashcloud oh ok. No politics for me, so that’s good if they keep it there.
@mfladd
There was a big fat active “welcome everyone” thread about it.
And the channel has been mentioned periodically in other threads.
If you go all dark and vanish, and then come back, you gotta poke and get up to speed.
Or maybe 2016 and 2017 just suck for you even more than you knew.
It’s a great place. Active at times, not at other times, afaik (not there a lot).
Join. Be welcomed. Or not.
@RiotDemon
Re politics in Meh Discord channel.
They keep that segregated into its own subthread. You have to deliberately go there to see it. You don’t see it accidentally.
I’ve never seen nastiness there. It’s cool.
Some of them like gaming and talk a lot about that. Or hardware. Or general stuff. Or crafts.
@RiotDemon
Could be why these forums are quieter. Dunno.
In the beginning I resisted it for the reasons you cite: people vanishing into separated subcommunities.
But it stayed active enough to survive, and so I joined and check in sometimes.
A few small differences:.
Instant notification via the mobile client.
More of an “instant conversational feel” - ie one word replies and quick responses.
A really nice mobile client.
Private messages.
“Public messages” in the threads are not visible to the world and can’t be googled.
For some, their closest connections are more there than here.
Anyway, it lives, and varies from “slow” to “thriving”.
Re smaller forums here:. I suspect that is somewhat universal on general-interest forums with many US based participants? And possibly a consequence of the recent political and social discord and condemnatory conduct/feelings?
I think make people (not just here at Meh), went offline and left even entirely non-political groups in the aftermath. It’s kinda like people just got discouraged and tired over trying to be social and bond online. And people kinda stopped thinking the online social world was a rewarding place to be?
I dont know. Anyone else observed this?
I’ve been using ebates for a while and have gotten $440 cashback so far. I also use Retailmenot for couponing, sometimes in conjunction with ebates.
@heartny
I signed up for some cashback, but apart from Bing Cashback (Bing basically tried to buy all the Google search users and failed), never much used any of them.
I get most of what cashback I achieve from credit cards.
@heartny @f00l
I use deal sites in conjunction with a different cashback site.
@mflassy
Share?
@f00l I have an Amazon card that gives me 5% cashback on that site, which can come in handy. I have a credit card that gives me points, which I used to get an Alexa tap. I get points from my eBay credit card, which I mostly use to buy gift cards at Amazon and Starbucks when they offer special discounts on them from time to time.
The Amazon credit card upped their cash back to 5% (from 3%) on store purchase, so it’s as good as the store card now (2% restaurants and gas stations and something else, 1% everywhere else).
Discover does 5% back on things that change every quarter. Last quarter was restaurants, which was great, but this quarter it’s Amazon (which I already get on the Amazon card) and Target.
Discover has to be losing money on me. There’s no way they are charging retailers 5% on my purchases, and I only use my Discover card when I’m getting the 5%.
I recently changed my other card to Chase Freedom Unlimited, which was an error. I should have gone with the regular Chase Freedom, which does rotating 5% cash back the way Discover does, but, one assumes, on different things. That’s the card I’ve had since 1989, though, so I have to use it every now and then so they don’t turn it off. Having a card that old is very good for the credit score.
@f00l Chase Freedom and Discover Card 5% cash back categories change quarterly, and usually work in conjunction with other offers, but not usually the cash back sites like Ebates.
Both cards did Amazon Q4 of 2016 which was perfect for holiday shopping. I wound up with a couple hundred dollars in cash back between the two cards (I order a lot of business stuff on Amz).
@heartny So far I’ve earned $15, maybe I should put a little more effort into it.
Slickdeals.net has been my go to site, even before deals.woot (which I enjoyed the community of much, much more).
Have to say I’ve bought all my hard drives, computers, phones, network stuff, tablets. and much else, after checking deals sites.
And I bought too much of all of that because if I check deals sites, I get tempted and think I need it somehow.
Stupid me. I got gamed by my own unchecked instincts.
But it’s been fun.
I first found woot from a mention on a deals site. Either Slickdeals or Dealnews. I forget now.
And I found Deals.Woot.com from Woot, shortly after it came out of beta.
Gotta love how our species essentially games itself becaise we attempt to game something or someone else.
@f00l “Look at how much money I saved by spending $X.”
Me? Noooooo… I NEVER do that.
@ruouttaurmind
At least you have a business as an excuse.
@f00l I used to have a General Motors MasterCard which paid 5% in “GM Points” good toward the purchase of a new GM vehicle with NO cap!
I paid every business expense I could with that card. Beyond office supplies, I bought thousands of dollars in job materials, paid sub contractors, utilities, rent, insurance… if there was a way to pay with a credit card, I found it.
I bought a new S10 pickup using points and about $2,000 out of pocket (which I charged to the GM card!). One year later I traded it in on a S10 Blazer for points and paid about $1000 out of pocket. A year later I traded up to a fully loaded Tahoe. Points and about $5,000 OOP. So the brand new fully equipped, top of the line Tahoe cost me less than $10k total OOP. Everything I used the GM card for I would have otherwise written a check for anyway, so the GM points were truly free money.
The year I bought the Tahoe GM capped the value of points you could use to $5k, then $3.5k, then they reduced to 3%, then 2%, then I switched to Discover. It wasn’t worth it anymore.
I like to think in some small way I was responsible for GM modifying the program because I used the benefit until it screamed for mercy.
The Sunday games crowd may recall that I said last week that I’m interested in either switching to a Linux machine or a Chromebook.
Because I don’t know which one I’d prefer, I can’t narrow it down, and as such, I can’t look on deal sites yet…
@gumtreertmug
Slickdeals, at least, has a fair amount of reasonably informed discussion on almost all aspects, if you read the longer threads. Can be educational.
They also have a fair number of repeaters and trolls. But easy to ignore both.
A few regular posters on Slickdeals know a lot about certain topics (heavy equipment, tools, generators come to mind), and will answer questions.
Never got into FatWallet. I have been a Slickdeals member since before Mr Slickdeals got married in Hawaii. SD was the origin of my Internet name in fact.
Years ago I used to be a regular on fatwallet. I met a guy I dated for 3 years there.
You are a f00l AND a very …well … um… Well there no other way to say this: you are a very mediocre person… Sorry
@unixrab
Why, thanks. I’m honored.
@f00l
Some of my favorite fw deals: Network cards from Dell, a replay tv with lifetime subscription, there are more, I’ll miss it but it’s community was getting toxic. I’ll miss meh too. I was a Vmp but there was a credit card issue and it was cancelled. Deals aren’t what they used to be. Now get off my lawn.
@poppaearl
CS might be able to fix the VMP/credit card issue.
As for the rest:
If you stuck around the forums some you could tell us that every day.
We might need to hear it, you know.
(I first put this into the fuko arrival thread. This post was supposed to go here, but I was too much in a hurry to be careful to check the thread after a mobile browser crash. Damn. Apologies.)
Hey. peoples.
Some of us got deals and friends.
Well, I was never active at FW and barely so at SD. And if so, mostly all about info. Those are not “wanna spend a lot of time reading the thoughts of people I admire” kinds of places.
I did get some laptops from Cowboom. This one may have not sourced from FW. I don’t remember.
Dell Yoga Pro i7. Maxed out ram. $400-500 or thereabouts? During the period where this was the current release?
Nice machine. It’s what I use when I use win. Which means it’s not patched for that networking prob, because I haven’t booted it in months. I have a nice Chromebook so that I can help Google track me more effectively, and it boots in 10 sec and has all day battery life.
Unfortunately the Dell shipped with Win8. So I went ahead and put 10 in it.
And I don’t boot it much, in part, because Google and Apple and various smartphone apps and the Russians and Chinese and N Koreans and the NSA already spy on me. Why should I help Microsoft join in?
But it’s a nice machine.
I first started on Fat wallet and posted what I thought was a good deal and most crucified me for it. So I mostly just checked deals after that and joined Slick Deals. The attitude there was way better and I actually posted a few deals I found and people were happy and supportive.
I kept hearing about Fat Wallet so I finally joined. I’m sure I got a few computer part deals from them but most of my great deals came from SD.
I found out about Woot from SD and joined them pretty early and then somebody posted about here so I joined here too.
I was also on HoopStick for a while and they had a few good deals sorta like here and Woot and I always got my stuff but they went away suddenly too.
Friends.
@moondrake
aww. i just lost 4 paragraphs on my ‘ode to fatwallet’, by accidentally hitting a back button.
I was a serious FW’er , with a few front page deals, and average of three posts per day, and won a fatwallet black friday t-shirt every year. I got in on the HP Touchpad firesale, and then used webOS phones…up until 2 months ago, when my palm pixi plus glass shattered, (I’ve been using the palm pixi plus on induction charging for like what? ten years now?..And Apple just started using that?)
When FW was originally sold, it became less conversation, and more deals with few comments.
Since I just found out today FW closed, it’s obvious I drifted away from FW. I do feel bad that I wasn’t there in it’s final days to say goodbye, so I’m grateful for this thread so i can post my feelings. The FW finance section was always incredible but over my head, and I always thought that was gonna be my new home when I got smartr.
Sorry I wasn’t there for your last days FW, (I think you owe me about 47 cents in cash back). But FW, you were my first. And you set me on a journey. It was just a wonderful time.
Nowadays, it’s pretty much meh and my VMP. I’m sure my friends and relatives wonder what happened to me, as I used to buy the best gifts.
They’ll really be wondering when they get candy corns for Christmas.
@wew
For finance, I think Slickdeals has some decent forums.
But take a look at some dedicated sites:
The fico forums (perhaps at myfico?)
Thinkorswim
I’m sure there are other good ones.
I have been told that the forums at
Youneedabudget.com
can be excellent.
@f00l But what if I already have a budget? A really tight one? That I stick to. What I really need is www.Ineedmoney.com and when I type in that url it tells me the server can’t be found. This temp job isn’t going to be nearly long enough to bail me. I am going to need it even more so since the 50 fidget spinners I bought that were going to solve most of my christmas presents at 40 cents each apparently have broken ones included (eg don’t light up but the battery works) according to someone who has already got theirs.