Because I made it, at least the frontend part of it! (most of that process is explained in @nilsding's answer)

Generally, I really like the idea of social Q/A sites. It actually was my first form of major social media (I used Formspring before actively using Twitter). So even if there's some people that can spout quite horrible things, I can't help but liking the concept and the people around here!

Over time, most of the bigger sites either died down, or completely changed in their direction of what service they provided, which prompted us to make this, which is probably the closest version of a Formspring-clone to find, so much so we are calling it "Smiles" instead of Likes, the OGs will remember!

Good question.

I'm using it mostly to receive questions in my inbox and occasionally answer them (who would've thought?), but also because the good old Formspring is no more (or at the time they introduced some changes I didn't "vibe" with, as the kids like to say these days). That prompted me to build my own alternative.

The first one was a mess of PHP and MySQL called justask that I started in March 2013: it was single-user only (so if you wanted to have your own one, you'd need to set it up yourself on your own webspace), people could ask questions, I'd answer them, the answer would get posted to my Twitter, it was good enough. Until it wasn't!

I got curious about other web frameworks, so I tried out Python and Flask, built a prototype called justask2 which pretty much worked quite similar to how Retrospring does now. It had comments, smiles, some form of theming (as long as the theme was based on Bootstrap), Markdown formatting. It even had a single-user mode. @pixeldesu helped me with the layout back then. The code got quite messy over time (a single file with 1426 lines? Yes please!), and I got sick of libraries not being available for Python3 (I worked on it in the first quarter of 2014, a bit over five years of Py3's initial release!). I still don't enjoy writing Python code.

With the frustration of the py2/3 split (and how Python feels to me in general), I eventually learned some Ruby and Rails. I built some smaller apps with it, and in August 2014 I started working on a thing called justask3 (fun fact: I was on holiday in Croatia when I made the first few commits. after that holiday not much happened until November of that same year). This thing eventually ended up being Retrospring. One feature that was dropped from previous iterations was the single-user mode. Fast forward to this day, I still enjoy writing Ruby code; and Rails is actually not that bad of a framework.