Quote Originally Posted by Riverkilt View Post
Or, as the Lakota say, "We are all related."

There's a synergy here.

The owners need posters to attract advertisers and they use our posts to get hits on search engines to attract even more posters which helps attract more advertisers and justify advertising rates which finance the site.

The advertisers need us to buy their products to offset their advertising expense and to promote word-of-mouth advertising of their products. And, of course, the advertisers need the owner to provide this venue to reach a niche' market.

Posters need the owner to maintain the site and the advertisers to finance the site so we have a place to share information and ideas and fellowship. We need the advertisers to gain resources for the goods we want/need/crave.

Pull out any one and the whole deal collapses. We are all related.

Chicken or egg?

Well said Ron, all things are inter-related and like Newton's first Law for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Like all things in nature there are dynamic equilibriums, that have finite levels of acceptable perturbation that still allow them to return to normal after a few cycles, but when perturbed hard enough or far enough, then the equilibrium changes drastically and a new equilibrium reached at a different level. This forum is no different---there has been a perturbation with the change of owners and his change in some rules and format of the forum, but in my opinion that is one that is within the overall acceptable range and one which, given time, will return to equilibrium again, possibly slightly changed, but very nearly what it was before.

One thing I disagree with is the Chiken or Egg question. Any biologist knows that dinosaurs were laying hard shelled eggs thousands of years before chickens even evolved, well, from dinosaurs.

Jeff