Anyone know about this?
Looks like Buzzfeed to me. Meh.
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Nothing especially new here. It was acquired first by CBS Interactive as I recall, who I believe kept some humans and decent editors in the mix (but killed the forums, which were the whole point of the site), and then eventually CBS sold it on to Static Media, which runs a bunch of crappy listicle/AI slop sites.
And FWIW I’m still pissed off about the whole thing, a decade(?) on.
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Oh you were on CH back in the day?
Every day, for years. Sigh.
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It had a good run before it went to total shit. I think I left in 2012.
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Its nothing and been nothing for many years Im surprised you havent noticed it sooner. The only thing left from the old site is the branding. The articles are total garbage, probably at this stage mostly AI generated although “authors” are named. I mean, read the Rome article and the scattershot wine, food and resto recommendations. Barbera as a red wine recommendation in Rome? Cesare al Pellegrino as a budget choice? Id hate to see all the ignorant budgeteers heading there. Its a shame.
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The content that was lost from the forums was the worst part about the changeover (other than the MONSTER SIZED look to everything back in 2015 which led to many of us leaving CH). As I noted on vinouspleasure’s link, at least the Wayback Machine can resurrect some of the forum detail, albeit with some heavy-duty searching. But then you only get the first page of comments to the initial forum post. So the very long threads like the one about Mooch and Hooch are lost to the ether (unless someone knows how to get to the following pages in a long thread).
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OMG I forgot all about the look and feel changes they kept making toward the end … Now I’m getting ragey thinking about it, hahaha.
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The pizza advice there makes me wonder if that author actually spent more than 24 hours in Rome
Has anyone actually been to any of the restaurants mentioned? Most of these types of reports have a mix of good, meh, and yuck in various proportions.
“Our team of barely-adequate copy editors and outsourced/underpaid writers is committed to publishing lots of text that will generate clicks, and we regularly consult LLMs and Google to ensure that we’re bringing our readers some stuff that sounds okay as long as you don’t bother reading too deeply.”
FIFY
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if I put a query into Google AI mode, it comes up with much better recommendations than she does especially if I ask it to drill down so maybe I should not tar AI with the accusation that she is using it as a major source. But clearly the young woman named as the author had very little or no personal experience and spent very little time researching the topic.
The current chowhound certainly has no respect for their audience.
Did you send that to Chowhound? Otherwise you are barking up the wrong tree.
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(post deleted by author)
HOWDEE FELLOW EX-CHOWHOUNDER!!
IMHO, Nothing can replace the OLD Chowhound!!
The list of fraternity members, exchanges of ideas and rapport developed……PRICELESS!!
BTW, where else can we find, through an open forum food blog, two fellow avid foodies, one from Toronto, one from the Big Apple, having a chowmeet with another hound from Austria in Hong Kong?!!
Those were the days!!
Cheers & Take Care!!
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indeed. (sigh)
the Chowhound crowd ‘dissipated’ - the two spin-offs
HungryOnion
FoodTalkCentral
continue with many of the ex-Hounds.
HO has evolved into a multi-faceted cooking site.
FTC is basically a West Coast ‘best restaurant’ place - not a lot of cooking going on there.
the ‘change’ from the original CH type ‘community’ is not at all ‘unique’
Cooking.com, and others, have simply vanished.
other sites have really oddball “management” which eventually drives users away.
the management changes at CH vividly demonstrate that effect.
anyone who participated in CompuServe ‘Special Interest Groups’ aka ‘forums’ has witnessed similar very sad changes.
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…..Not to mention the total number of replies to the ‘ Critters ‘ thread are more than all the other food related feedback combined!! Very distracting and irrelevant to a ‘ food blog ‘.
In the good old days of the Old Chowhound, ‘Moderators’ will no doubt step in and move the thread elsewhere or even remove it?!
