I confess that I haven't really warmed up to it myself. The interface and audience is more catered to prose than poetry, I find, and I'm not a fan of the awkward hipster vibe.
I had the chance to hear the founder of Figment speak and promote the site at my university, and the poem she read as one of her favorites from Figment was one of the worst in recent memory. It embodied all that is wrong with contemporary poetry.
Criticisms and bad poetry notwithstanding, here I am.
I don't see this is much different from DA to be honest, and I prefer DA by miles, because it encompasses much more varied categories of art, plus the community there is way larger.
So what is this site all about anyway beyond being yet another community to share your writing? What makes it stand out from all the other communities?
The way it's formatted apparently, it seems to be quite popular amongst young writers, and the contests they offer give me the impression that it allows amateurs to interact with professionals. I must admit, while a lot of the poetry leaves something to be desired, I have found diamonds amongst the rubbish, same applies to literature. Also there isn't an enormous art presence to overshadow the writing, which seems to happen on DA quite often, although I'm not familiar enough with DA to make such an assumption. The main reason I favor figment over DA, it doesn't have an enormous number of pay features, nor can people pay to have their work show up higher on searches.
I'm gonna go off on a tangent, seeing as this is as good of a place to ask (and I've needed to know for a while); is posting a story about AG on a sharing website a copyright violation?
