Glad you made it out of the Gulag.
This place is great, floridahound.
ever since the Putsch I pretty much stopped looking at CH with an exception here and there.
Moreover, I’ve lost my “appetite” for following the food scene. It’s not as fun anymore.
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There’s truth in the old saying that retirees are usually so busy that we don’t know how we found time to go to work.
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Just out of curiosity I posted a topic on CH the other day, and did the same here. I have had no responses on CH at all. Here I got one, but it was on the New England Board which I understand is a bit slower. CH seems dead, dead, dead.
Although CH’s UK/Ireland board has had activity on 17 threads in the last month.
By comparison, HO has had activity on 23. Ten of them are threads I started in the period.
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This poster put up identical threads, one here, one on Chowhound. The Chowhound one got four replies (and one from its OP) in 12 hours. Here? nada.
Reports of Chowhound’s death seem greatly exaggerated.
I know you are – or, at least you seem to be – invested in the concept that
but no one has ever said it’s a Norwegian Blue.
//////////\
Round numbers for the sake of discussion . . .
If you’re a Formula 1 race car, zooming around at 200 mph, and then – for whatever reason – you can’t do more than 25 mph, someone might indeed (in the non-scientific, vernacular use of the word) say that car is dead . . . even though it’s still on the track, moving s-l-o-w-l-y towards the pits. On the other hand, if you’re a Winnebago climbing up the windy mountain road at 25 mph, getting passed by every other car on the road, no one thinks you’re dead – they know you’re probably going as fast as you can, and as long as you pull over and let other drivers pass . . .
Chowhound was the 900-pound gorilla on the proverbial block, and they imploded. Is it “dead” as in – literally – no one posts, lurks, joins that site anymore? No, of course not, and no one here (or anywhere else) has suggested that is the case. But is it a “shadow of its former self,” with but a fraction of the traffic/participation that the site used to enjoy? Ab-so-f***ing-lutely!
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Some boards have definitely slowed to a crawl, like Not About Food and Chains. But Home Cooking and Food Media are pretty busy, as is my home board, Manhattan. Yet that doesn’t seem matter to the posters here who are very invested in their own Chowdenfreude and gleeful about whatever evidence they find, or think they find, that Chowhound is going down in flames. Because if that actually does happen (it probably won’t), it means they were right to leave. I get that. When you feel betrayed, it’s natural to want terrible things to happen to your betrayer.
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I agree. I stopped posting on Chowhound as I did not like the new format, and frankly, was also pretty appalled by how the moderators shot down their critics, many of them veteran Chowhounds. But that doesn’t mean Chowhound is dead & gone - there still are quite a few contributors and die-hard Hounds out there.
I’ve made a decision to move on, and don’t see myself going back to CH again. But I had a great time there - 7 years of active participation, and got to know many wonderful people through the years - limster, Howler, Charles Yu, etc. I’d taken part in quite a few Chowdowns in HK, Singapore & London, and they were great fun. I really hope CH will go on - its database is pretty useful, for the time being.
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When I analyzed the number of participating members who have joined since September, and found that few were not participating on regional boards, The number of people who posted to cookware threads jumped out at me.
The SF board is being upheld by a small, but dedicated group. Precisely how that differs from the past, I don’t really know – – like many online communities,there has long been a pattern of a small group of users doing most of the heavy lifting, and a wide base of infrequent users filling in the gaps. The SFBA dish of the month, for example, had 116 unique contributors between 2012 and 2014, but only a small handful kept it going
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I’d say, since September and registering here, I’ve posted a half dozen or so times at the old place. For the most part, they’ve all been more manipulative than substantive. The exceptions being a couple calling out Leff on his bullshit.
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Much respect, Mr Z.
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I don’t think it’s about “Chowdefreude” at all. But it is about betrayal. No one started out wanting to see CH fail, fall flat on its face, or otherwise implode. Indeed, I would say that – quite to the contrary – we all (former and remaining current CH’ers) want it to not merely succeed but thrive. There was a sense of community, of belonging, of shared experience (be it vicariously through, for example, dining at the same restaurant as someone had posted about; or in reality, through “Chowdowns”). And there is a genuine sense of loss that people feel when they see something they participated in “die” – just as campaign volunteers feel when their candidate loses, or pulls out of the race.
What was worse in the case here is that [the collective] “we” tried to help fix it, to keep the old sense of community, to build upon (not tear down) what went before, all the while acknowledging that businesses (and there is no doubt that CH is a business) need to move forward, to change and adapt, or else stagnate and die. THAT is where the sense of betray comes from – from, basically, being told by the moderators and “powers that be” to basically sit down, shut up and hold on; that we were basically told we were unimportant, we didn’t know anything – certainly not as much as “they” did – and that what we were feeling was simply wrong.
What we were not expecting is the self-inflicted gunshot wound!
That isn’t automatically fatal. After all, plenty of people shoot themselves in the foot. (My cousin once shot himself in the thigh accidentally while on duty as an MP in Berlin!) Not even shooting someone in the face is automatically fatal – just look at Frank Serpico and/or Harry Whittington – but it sure as heck doesn’t feel good!
I have little doubt that CH as a website will survive (no 404 errors here), albeit in a reduced and far less important capacity . . . but, that said, to many now former CH’ers
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And I’d add to that that there were LOTS of folks who went through the Beta tests (there at least two) at CHs request, only to have all but thw most minor complaints summarily dismissed with the sneer that THEY were the great and powerful Oz, and who were we to have an opinion or god forbid, but any actual experience with online forums!
I remember one Beta that promises teeshirts for the testers…those who even received something got leftover shirts from a musty marketing closet somewhere with old logos, shipped out on random sizes that didnt fit.
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Well said.
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I sure did!
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I was one of the many who did the beta test on the latest redo. Turns out they had NO interest in any suggestions for improvements. They were just looking for technical mistakes. That’s what sent me and others over the edge. We replied in good faith. And then when we criticized that, well…, you know.
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I like the atmosphere at HO and I post in the home cooking section which is pleasingly active. I’ve tried to initiate more activity on the NYC board without much response. While Chowhound is a shadow of what it used to be, its NYC & Outer Borough boards are more active than here, so I do post there.
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NY is an odd duck on this site. Stats says that NY state has the 3rd most traffic after CA and MA (pretty close to MA). and half of that NY state traffic comes from NYC.
its probably because of what you said, that Chowhound has a more active board in NYC that most people seem to read or respond to inquiries here, and not as many posts.
on the flip side, the nyc suburbs don’t have nearly as much traffic as NYC, it has a more active board (NYCT). my guess is that a few folks are quite active there and discussing with each other.
Yeah, we are missing a couple of prolific Lawn Guyland posters, and there weren’t that many of us on CH to begin with.
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