Hi all,
I completely agree with Kate - I really like the small, intimate, personal and private nature of this forum. When I joined at the start of this year, I was trying to decide between DhO, Kenneth Folk, and here, and here was hands down. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable posting the personal material I do presently in a forum that was more like DhO, in fact there's no way I would.
Just personally, DhO is not the kind of forum that I'd like to participate in at the moment - it shares a lot of problems of many big, long-running forums, i.e. trolling and tiresome argument, discussion over and over again in the same terms of a few discussed-to-death issues (e.g. rebirth, renunciation - not that interesting conversations can't be had about these, but you know what I mean), basically very low signal-to-noise ratio - I still find some great stuff there sometimes but for me I'd say it's about 5-10%. I'm forever grateful to Daniel (if you're reading) for MCTB, DhO and everything you've done in creating and maintaining a PD community so it's not intended as a criticism in that way, just an observation about my preferences currently.
From reading their thread it seems to me that the DhO people feel the same way about our 'culture,' though I can't help thinking that, from my personal experiences here, the criticisms (e.g. that we're not open to different practices, 'commercialisation' etc) are way off target. Some other criticisms from that thread also seem to go to the cultural differences, e.g. I really liked that I got a personal email on signing up to AN, it made it seem like a space where it was safer to share personal stuff, and also more friendly.
I know I've said this before, but I really don't understand why we have a drive toward being bigger. For me, NOT being bigger was precisely the attraction to AN. The only argument I've seen thus far is that a bigger forum survives better. That may be the case, but (and again this is my personal opinion) I don't think we can take it for granted that that in itself is a good thing. Look at Dharmawheel and Dhammawheel, which I sometimes used to read in my early years in Buddhism - they're really big and long-running (despite schisms) but they're really, really not conducive places, to my mind, having a lot of the problems I mention above about DhO, but writ even larger. And yeah, even with separate sub-forums in AN, I'm not sure how the Recent Posts thing would work, how this might affect the feeling of smallness and privacy, etc.
Finally, I am also extremely grateful to Chris, Tom and everyone involved in setting up AN, but I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't community consultation here about the merger before it was being presented as a possible fait accompli, and that the first I knew of it was being pointed to Daniel's thread over at DhO, indicating that conversations had already been taking place behind the scenes - for me this raises some broader questions about the nature of the direction of AN, i.e. is it community-driven and democratic, or is it run as the mods' creature/creation with secondary input from the community?