[El Diablo]

Mat: If OOT was just posts like that, I would not frequent it. Nor, I believe, would many other quality posters. And there's a huge potential snowball effect. I think you would be stunned at what would happen if 20 or so key posters stopped participating in OOT. The fact that random stuff from time to time gets a lot of interest does not mean that people will come to a place just to search through that random stuff. However, if they are coming to read about movies and restaurants and happen to see a random topic getting a lot of interest, that's a different story.

BT: My positions are not inconsistent at all. This is a poker forum. Once there is critical mass for a split in a poker area, there are many reasons a split can be beneficial and successful that do not translate to non-poker areas on this site.

jason: I do not know about the total traffic, but I am quite sure that fewer people participate in sports-related discussions on 2+2 now.

All: I do not disagree that an A&E forum may well generate "better quality" discussions. However, I am positive that the total traffic to 2+2 would be less, and potentially significantly less. It is simply a critical mass issue. Anyone who has been involved in running high-volume Internet sites or businesses should be familiar with this issue. Once you have critical mass in a certain core area, your business can support spinning off new areas. However, if you compromise the core area, you can end up killing off not only the core area, but also all the spinoff areas as well. Politics, Sports, Religion, Math/Science, Philosophy have all already been removed from OOT. OOT was still fine, though, because A&E alone is enough to support a forum. BTW, had A&E been spun out first, I'd probably now be making this argument about Sports (though for a number of reasons I think Sports is better to be split out than A&E) However, I do not believe that what would remain if you removed A&E now is enough to maintain critical mass in OOT. And if you lose OOT as a forum, that can easily cascade down and kill other subforums, because I am sure there are a lot of people who check out OOT, then occassionally click over to one of the other subforums, but would never do that if they weren't here already. FWIW, I've seen this phenomenon occur at Internet sites/businesses with FAR more traction than 2+2.