Here is the history of selling Chowhound in a multi-part series by Jim Leff. It’s a tremendous piece of writing:
So in 6 months dinner discussions got 5000 posts while the critters thread pulls about 10% of that per 6 months.
Critters is also swamped by any of Baking? Lunch? And many many others.
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Haha Roz threads! I’d forgotten.
Also @erica1 - I got a lot of mileage out of the standing rib roast how-to threads, and stole some ideas that have become my main steak, roast, large pork piece and sometimes fowl cooking techniques.
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The thing I really miss about the old CH was the exploration for new places to eat. The follow up discussions between people who had been to a place and disagreed about the merits was always entertaining. There are only a couple of posters here who regularly write about restaurants. Most of the traffic is not about chowhounding new places that serve great food. The number of regular participants is tiny. No crowd sourcing. I have to go to other sources for that like Reddit. I don’t spend a lot of time here these days as there’s such little new information.
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Create the content you would like to see. What’s stopping you from posting about your restaurant experiences (I believe you do that already)?
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When I think of the old Chowhound, my mind goes back to a discussion about eggs on General Topics. I can’t quite remember how it started, maybe by someone observing that eggs in European markets are not kept refrigerated.
Replying to the discussion were an egg farmer, a nutritionist, a food scientist, and of course many who’ve traveled to various parts of Europe posting about the practices there.
The next thing I think about is when I went out to dinner at a tourist-trap restaurant in LA chosen by a friend’s wife. She had been on Chowhound but turned away after her recommendations kept getting shot down. That is exactly why I loved Chowhound. For the folks who stuck around, you realized their opinions mattered.
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Same. I think a lot of that is due to What’s For Dinner now containing not only what people make at home (the way it was on CH) but also what people eat at restaurants. I would prefer the restaurant stuff to be separate (WFD is in the Cooking channel, after all), but I can see why people might not want to start threads that would probably have a single post, or multiple posts by a single poster. I remember RGR on CH being a regular customer at EMP and pretty much the only one who every posted about it.
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Guilty as charged. I’ve occasionally made singular posts about local restaurants, adding comments for followup visits, but given the small town I live in, with not a lot new businesses opening it would get pretty repetitive. And we tend to order the same stuff at the places we do visit more regularly.
Ya just can’t please everyone.
Not a thread exactly but what made it great for me was the exploration of hidden gems. I once drove 45 minutes each way to try a highly recommended hot dog stand. (Worth it!) Almost impossible that I would have found that place without CH.
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Yeah, there was a stretch when every time I checked back in, at least one notable poster had died (I don’t like this phrasing … every life is notable, but you know what I mean, someone who had been there for a long time, or was also a mod, or etc.—Brooks Hamaker is one of the ones to come to mind, for instance). It’s rough.
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I was saddened to learn of his death many months later, when I checked in at eGullet . He was based for a time very near to where my mom grew up - places I hadn’t seen since I was a child - and filled me in on what had become of some old “institutions.” He was a treasure.
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Sam’s “Does anyone else live in a magic house”
RGR’s Lower East Side food crawl
The April Fool’s day Banana board
And one particularly snarky reply to a request I had about demitasse/espresso spoons.
ETA: I remember one particularly odd set of posts–don’t remember the poster’s name–about boiling meat and eliminating salt from his/her cooking to save money.
Is this what my head is filled with a decade or so later?
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Yelp, social media and the slew of new web-only food/review sites slowly killed that off. CBS never knew what to do with CH and was too early to monetize things like social media, etc. A few years before they shut it down, I went to a marketing survey and feedback panel because they gave out cash cards and they posted a job and I wanted an inside view. Besides the nice digs (modern, techy but corporate) on Second St., the CH office and work place seemed like a morgue. Yes the office staff were monitor bound but the test facilities seemed odd. It was a rainy winter morning so it could be that but it seemed like more. Like it was on a down slope. Also the survey questions indicated they were really lost on what to do with CH.
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I won’t forget how on the first day of the new system, postings dropped to near zero. So quick! And I won’t forget how, a few days later, there was an error in their development environment, Ruby. By default, Ruby handles errors by listing a backtrace of the entire development environment. So, anyone could see all of the development network–computer names and IP addresses, Ruby configuration, paths to content files, everything except passwords. I saved it and forwarded them a copy, and they didn’t even thank me!
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I had forgotten about that!
That NEVER should have been removed! Locked after the joke had run its course, yes. But the removal was criminal. It was hysterical!
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i loved all of lauhound’s threads and still occassionaly refer to his website. there was the lan sheng thread where people debated if the food was great or just good, i worked a block away, was often there for lunch or dinner, so I followed it closely. and then there was the grad student who pretended to be chinese, that was fun, he did make some good recommendations. also, there was a great thread about where to eat off the 7 train in queens.
I was mostly readonly in those days, overwhelmed with long days on wall st and helping to raise three kids.
best,
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For me it was Allende and his Piedmont posts. I dont know anyone else that made a bigger impact on a place/region
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Yes, Allende. In the last years, VinoRoma was very helpful; she was the one who tipped me about Senigallia, which I’d never heard of before her posts.
There was a guy from Las Vegas with a love for pastries and a very unusual writing style that I recognize now and then on TA restaurant reviews. I think he had dinners with Roz. Something with “hockey” in the name.
Uhockey?
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