by Guest » Thu Nov 13, 2008 4:37 am
Carmel, before I address your question specifically I want to go into some of my philosophy on lairs in general.
First, there are a million places online for people to discuss pickup related stuff. There are a lot of book-smart KJ's who can answer questions and maybe some experienced guys who offer good insight too. But it's fundamentally impersonal. The key value in a lair is that people know each other. The conversation can take a different (better) tone since the people are a lot more likely to care about each other and less about sounding cool. It doesn't have to be geographically based, but it almost always is, because geographically dispersed people are less likely to see each other frequently enough to get to know each other.
Another advantage over the big internet forums is the volume on some of the bigger forums is so huge, it's hard to keep up to date, and really there's no point in keeping up to date since I don't know or care about any of the people who are posting. I was following the Austin lair for a while, since I know some of those guys, but eventually I got tired of staying up to date, and nowadays I rarely go on there.
So if we ignore all the technical issues for a moment, trying to "merge" or somehow "link" the Dallas lair with the Austin lair would mean the percentage of users that people know personally will drop by about half. For a lot of the Dallas users, the Austin guys are not much different from random guys on the internet whom they don't know and are unlikely to meet. And vice versa. I believe that in the minds of the users, the personal relevance of the people is what gives relevance to the discussion. One random guy talking to another random guy will have low relevance and dilute interest. This reduced relevance would coincide with increased volume, and think it would be both less useful and less enjoyable.
That said, Oklahoma is a different situation because of the relative level of activity and also because apparently a lot of them are on here already. I know several have met a bunch of the Dallas guys. I don't think some kind of connection would detract. But I'm not sure what form it would take or how it would work logistically. Some of the Dallas guys may be interested in OK events, but the ones who aren't may not like sifting through notices for OK events, and vice versa. I dunno, there may be a lot of logistical issues but I'm not against it in principle.