I find it hard to fall back on being a "consumer" on these sites without wearing my product marketing/product management hat (everybody's a cr¡tic), so this post reflects that bias.

In general, the biggest problem with many of these sites is the pollution between user-reported deals and "sponsored" deals--you can tell (just as the music industry's been doing for years with grassroots marketing) that many of the listed deals exist due to paid placement, or a temp paid to sprinkle them through the web ether like Johnny Appleseed.

As a consumer, I am NOT looking for another destination that makes me the target of guerrilla marketing for pushed sponsored deals. Also, there's a randomness to many of these sites, a lack of editorial focus.

A counter example: DealNews provides a nice balance between sponsored results and a firm hand on the editorial tiller. When I begin a search for a specific ordinary Computer/Peripheral (or some CE products), that's the origin. Their "best price we've seen since Black Friday specials" and "if you're paying sales tax, Amazon's free shipping might offer a lower total cost" comments are also helpful. (Other than as a reader, I don't have any association with that site or any of its niche-focused siblings.)

By the way, do I catch a whiff of some market research on the downlow? There's this oddly familiar scent on the breeze, musky yet with an overtone of dashboard ketones...

I like http://www.dealighted.com previously http://www.popdeal.com as an aggrigate summary of the major deal sites (although mostly FW and DS is listed)

slickdeals and woot only. i started off with fatwallet, but the place has always nothing more than a bunch of yapping forums, don't like the format.

slickdeals seems to make it easier for someone who has a life outside of scouring a forum 24/7.

I am a big spoofee.com fan. It's how I discovered woot during a woot-off. Dealigg is another good one for coupon codes. As far as slick deals and and fat wallet, I don't think they are as user-friendly as the two I mentioned.

I was a Slickdealer, until recently I found out how uptight some of their mods are. I got a deal to the front page, and was answering all the tens of hundreds of questions posted, and one was how to make a web proxy. I gave him instructions on how to do so, and gave him some example proxy sites, I got banned for it. I also got infracted for telling people that it's not hard to look for cheap web hosts.

Thing is, SD has a super uptight rule about self promotion, where SD actually benefits from all the links clicked through their site. They are partners/affiliates with at least half the deals posted, and they get a percentage out of it. They have a forum script to alter all the links to redirect to the same link with their added affiliate ids in the URLs. What do the users get in return? Nothing.

However, at FatWallet, they have something called cash back, where users can get a part cash back for the purchases they've found through FatWallet. During the time I was banned from SlickDeals, 6 hours*, I posted a few deals at FatWallet, and little did I know, I was eligible for a free shirt. FatWallet had a promotion giving away a tshirt to the first thousand hot deals that were posted with a positive rating for 24+ hours. It's nice how FatWallet actually helps the members, and SlickDeals doesn't even tell the users they make a great amount of money from the links they alter from the original posters.

I self promoted my link today on FatWallet too, they just deleted my post and sent me a message via PM of why it's been deleted. If it was SD, I would of been infracted for it.

Of the deal sites, nothing beats Woot. Even though I've been banned from posting for 30 hours yesterday >.>

I use

www.dealdump.com

Nothing like having all the sites in one easy to scan place (with Woot being on top, of course).

Fatwallet and Slickdeals are listed there as well.

A member of a general interest forum I participate in runs Dealmein.net which was the first deal site I regularly checked, and did so off and on for a couple of years.

Then I started getting into using google's reader for some other feeds, and discovered it was much easier to sort through large amounts of deals through RSS feeds than wading through forums and website listings.

I added dealgonzo's RSS feed of slickdeals at first.

Then I added something like dealfeed.com's RSS, but that was churning out 300+ new items a day, most of them not really discount items, but just random stuff for sale.

From reading this thread, I've added Bens Bargains, which has a nice tech focus.

So in the end: dealmein.net, bensbargains.net, and dealgonzo.com which is a slickdeals aggregator.

And really, to reiterate I don't think I could handle this many with the extra visual overhead if I didn't have an RSS aggregator to make scanning through them very easy.

I use:

Slickdeals.net
ThingFling.com
Yugster.com
1Saleaday.com
HTHT.com
Amazongold.com
etc


oh and of course WOOT!

Seeing a lot of mentions about Ben's Bargains. Fair warning, they are paid to post "deals" which are actually just advertisements, with no discernible markings identifying them as ads.

I sent Ben an e-mail asking if there was any sort of disclosure policy about what is an advertisement or which were bona fide links to 'found' deals. His response: "There's no disclosure like that, but this is a for-profit business. We have an office and employees who need to make a paycheck."

So be wary, just because it's on Ben's Bargains doesn't mean it isn't a scam.

I use Slickdeals - - egalitarian!