This put a smile on my face- thanks!
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You are welcome.
Itâs actually kind of amusing to watch if you donât take it too seriously.
I actually did a test over on the Manhattan board a couple of weeks ago to see if there was anything going on worth paying attention to. One thread was nostalgia/old restaurants, the other was a lunch under $ 10 thread.
Two or three years ago these would have generated 200 plus posts easily.
The lunch thread died in a week with 37 posts.
The nostalgia thread lasted a little longer, but only because people were complaining about nostalgia threads. Hows that for irony?
Again, not a lot that was positive or interesting.
By the way, the CH Manhattan board is the board that started all of Chowhound in 1997, or 20 years ago.
Itâs sad to see whatâs left of it today.
You know if you want to do something hilarious go search the CH Manhattan board for âBouleyâ or âMareaâ.
From the number of times these have been recommended on the Manhattan board in the last year you would swear they are the only restaurants left in NYC.
The cookbook of the month (COTM) still has activity, but nothing like it used to. And I donât recognize most of the people. Some of the most involved âHome Cookingâ people just, Poof!, vanished.
Well itâs up for 11 days now and they still havenât taken it down.
But itâs hard to blame them because there is so little activity, if they took it down there would be no content left. The Westchester Board at CH is a perfect example of what I was referring to above.
If you count down 10 posts on Westchester, the newest response in the 10th post is 25 days old !
If you check the locations page itâs worse. They have locations all around the country listed that havenât had a post in years:
Check out Albany NY, Allentown PA, Atlantic City NJ or Camden NJ for some things that are close to us for example.
And Bayonne is actually emptyâŚ
Well when you accuse the CH mods of this they will flat out deny, but I suspect that they are actually bumping old threads to promote activity.
All of a sudden you will see a thread that is 12 years old get bumped by a poster who has no post count. What is that?
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So if you do the count down 10 posts test on CH for the San Francisco main board, itâs two days.
For Los Angeles, itâs 7 days.
For San Diego, itâs 16 days.
For Houston, itâs 2 months !
Manhattan is actually busy compared to these other cities, which are some of the largest metropolitan areas in the US.
All of a sudden you will see a thread that is 12 years old get bumped by a poster who has no post count. What is that?"
All that means is that someone looked at it, more than likely as a result of a Google search.
It was clear Chowhound didnât want to do discussion boards any more when they changed format. Now there are only a few zombies from the âold daysâ on their site feedback board still assiduously complaining about the UI and they are for the most part being politely ignored. CH has loads of social engagement, discussion boards no longer a priority.
Curious as to what you mean by âsocial engagementâ vs. âdiscussionâ.
Iâm confused too. Doesnât the site exist from traffic? If you have no traffic how does the site live on? 
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. Chowhound now can monetize itself by clicks and engagement metrics. They didnât have too much to sell before.
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How do those channels generate revenue though? Iâm just curious. Maybe itâs just someoneâs hobby and money isnât an issue. I donât know. I used to like that site until it became a wreck to navigate and the moderators ruined the fun.
Still not getting it. What do they have to sell NOW that they didnât before, especially with less traffic on the boards. When they made the site changes it seemed to be an admission that the boards were more of a draw than the Chow âmagazineâ content.
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Iâm pretty sure thereâs a Whatâs for Dinner Facebook page out there somewhere; there may be a Cookbook of the Month one as well.
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For example please check out the following:
https://twitter.com/chow?lang=en
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=chowhound
Some of the statistics on users and views are published on those webpages.
What MrGG is saying is that Chowhound doesnât care about drawing people into the boards or generating traffic this way any more because they are getting the revenue elsewhere, basically by having you subscribe to their feed and then having them feed you a constant stream of what in the old days would be known as food-related spam.
They recycle this same old tired content they are producing in house to literally thousands of subscribers on all the different platforms. They also have this crap on the website if you want to look for it. In theory, each time some body gets a feed and clicks on it , they get paid.
Itâs not interactive or social in the same sense that the old boards were, since it is basically them feeding you content, and not people responding to each other.
Itâs also not in depth or searchable in the same sense that the old boards were, the boards are becoming an archive for people who want to do searches on a topic.
Btw, it seems the more popular feeds are on home cooking, so apparently these generate more traffic. They have no user generated restaurant reviews on the feeds. Iâm guessing they have looked at this, and decided to leave the user review segment to google, yelp and trip advisor.
Itâs pretty clear that if Chowhound were depending on the boards theyâd be dead by now.
They are probably keeping them as an historical artifact. Hence my original question, which is I still donât understand why they just donât kill them.
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So theyâve become some kind of content aggregator, actually more like a regurgitater?
Please donât tell Melanie.
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Actually the way I read it is kind of a declassĂŠ version of Martha Stewart that is spammed to you on a regular basis.
For example, pumpkin spiced drinks and how to scramble eggs in a microwave (Btw, Iâd say never, ever, to both).
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Great post and, I think, right on the money (the long one, answering MrGGGâs question).
By the way, none of this means that CH canât still have some value. Although its not a discussion/user driven board any longer, some discussion does take place and, at times (especially when traveling), I get to connect with folk who are helpful. As for the Outer Boroughs (NYC) board drop off, several of us still use it, albeit pretty infrequently. Recent dinners at Nargis and Shanghai You Garden began with CH contacts and pulled in good folk who Iâd never met before, as well as us old timers (Ziggy, foodwhisperer, Dave CookâŚ). And there are some decent reviews and âfindsâ still out there. Donât get me wrong â Iâm not recommending that anyone join CH or even go there too often. But, free is a good price for what I get.
There is a Whatâs For Dinner Facebook page out there populated with several ex-chow Patriots and several HO members. @linguafood is the page admin if you are interested. Keep in mind Facebook is more revealing with personal info so keep that in mind.
