all of the above for me. honestly. sometimes the best writing must be slapped down quickly to get the ideas out and edited before hitting publish. sometimes the sequel takes your story in a completely different direction you never dreamed and it is good. and sometimes the restriction causes you to grow, forces you to nirvana with a one-hit wonder, a gem of a tale.

I’m echoing all of the above – sometimes it’s playing with community stories, where we take turns writing prequels and sequels, sometimes it’s jotting down things for feedback, sometimes it’s trying to edit something down to it’s cleanest form. Sometimes, it’s just getting it out of my head and onto the electronic equivalent of paper. :)

So far, mostly for the restrictions. I’ve been able to write more with a mandate of 1024 characters than with a blank sheet of paper and a pen. And I haven’t even written any non-genre stuff on here yet.

it has helped me to realize how many words we write that are unneeded. Like instead of saying she bent down and picked up the policeman’s gun and shot him. Bang!! She shot him. Elmore leonard says the only advice he has to give new authors is leave out the part the reader would skip over. Ficly shows you that path.

Um, I’m not clear whether you’re genuinely asking the question, or whether you’re offering a bit of a critique. The first line seems to suggest that you believe there’s an intended purpose, which is collaborative storytelling, and that anyone not focusing on that aspect of their writing is somehow mis-using the site. I’d disagree.
Yes, the collaborative storytelling is one aspect of ficly (and a great one). Lots of us use the challenges as a jump-starter for writing playfully and regularly when there aren’t other writing projects on the go. The restrictions are great for overcoming that ever-looming squasher of creativity – The Pressure to Write Something Huge. Some stories are experimental meta-ficlies; others are novels in progress. There are probably as many ways of writing here as there are writers!

Sorry – meant the second line, not the first, obviously.