I suppose he found the several million he got for it quite handy.
I used to come across his CH posts from time to time. What a fucking pretentious git!
3 Likes
But on the bright side, he hasnât run for office.
6 Likes
I so much miss interacting with people who didnât escape the trash fire that Chowhound became. But with the hindsight of seeing how social media has progressed in the subsequent time (and how fewer people internet with desktops), the epoch of message boards, certainly profitable ones, was dead. Iâm glad George found a way to keep the site on life supportâ I imagine parties wanted to kill it all together.
Mainly though, Iâm grateful @sck and Robert Lauriston created new venues while there was still energy amongst us. With modern luxuries like hyperlinks, wiki-abilities, and photo formatting etc., theyâve made our chatter more accessible than CH and may well have prolonged the communities. Plus, and unlike the Leff-era for practical reasons or CBS era for profit reasons. thereâs no fear the lights are gonna get shut off.
Itâs a shame Facebook has become a popular place for food âdiscussionsââ those discussions are invisible to search engines and people not in the know.
4 Likes
I love my friends and acquaintances on FB, hate the format and their insane greed. I share food and restaurant content all I can for places and foods I care for because FB pretty much sticks it to business owners, and the ad inserts are so shoddy as to defy belief.
1 Like
Yes. The discussions are in their closed ecosystem. You canât google the discussions. But thatâs just how Facebook wants it.
The good thing about modern technology is that with some diligent cost optimizations and declining hosting price, we can run the site at ~$20-25/ month. That of course, excludes the substantial amount of time and effort that all the @HOCollective volunteers contributed. The staff has done a wonderful, and at times, invisible job, in keeping this place running smoothly. Make sure you give them a warm cyber hug from time to time.
Jim Leff didnât have that cost luxury at his time though. If he didnât run it as a full time job and count on it financially, he wouldnât have to sell. But those were the early days of dot com riches and nobody really knew how big these web entities could grow.
9 Likes
Iâve always cut him some slack because of the two poles, I can deal with reverse snobbery better than the regular sort - not to mention that he gets props for never using the phrase âhidden gemâ in an Interwebz post, at least that Iâm aware of. But his fetishistic idolization of âmagic chefs/cooksâ (whose mere touch turns ordinary foodstuffs into culinary miracles), âtotally unknownââ places, and restaurants where only three of the dishes on the menu are worth ordering at all (and only on random days ending with the letter Y in months not ending with R, or possibly ending in R âĄ
) but itâs otherwise the Most Incredibly Authentic restaurant of its type, is rather notorious in some circlesâŚ
â âUnknownâ to other notorious webloggers, at least⌠
⥠And if you feel differently, you were obviously there on the Wrong Day or benightedly failed to notice that the lineup of Miraculous Dishes had changed by thenâŚ
2 Likes
I think what did it for me was that I presume he was directly responsible for writing the âChowhound Manifestoâ which I had the misfortune to stumble across one day. It is the most awful âformalisationâ of the points you make. And , in fact, a direct condemnation of most people who used CH effectively describing those of us who would not go out of our way to find the âtotally unknownâ as unworthies (his actual words, as I recall, were actually more insulting)
2 Likes
When CH first got going most of the content was directly in line with his interests. Itâs been interesting how a forum organically begin to grow in different directions. It seemed the more the site became a distinct entity the more staunch J.L. became in trying to rein it back to his vision.
In some ways I think the best things that came out of CH were all the new forums. EG, LTH and more recently HO and FTC. Iâm sure there are others which began due to similar frustrations with CH.
4 Likes
Certainly eGulletâs UK/Ireland board was streets ahead of CH or, indeed, HO. Iâm sure that was because it attracted contributors, albeit small in overall number, from across the UK, rather than CHâs board which was, effectively, a place where American tourists could ask fellow Americans about London.
2 Likes
What is LTH?
Itâs a Chicago based food forum created from dissatisfied area Chow-hounds.
Oh, yeah, as far as I know, the Manifesto was pure, unadulterated JL and was pretty hard to swallow if you took it at all seriously, but I mostly found it hilarious. I found the zeal with which so many Converts took up the banner to be kind of off-putting, but I have to admit to having a semi-soft spot for JL himself because he reminded me of certain of my high school classmates who made my eyes roll even back in the late 70s with heated arguments, never any less heated for being repeated several dozen times, about who had the Best Slice (of pizza, naturally, and at least south of 14th St in NYC 
), or the almost equally endless debates over the relative merits of the whopping two places you could get cheap falafel-to-go in Greenwich Village at the timeâŚ
One thing I definitely have to hand to Leff was that he saw which way the online wind was blowing when the Public Internet was barely off the ground and created one of the first, and certainly most enduring, of the Internet food forums⌠(I didnât start paying much attention to CH until the Home Cooking board was created around the turn of the 21st century, so I donât know exactly when Chowhound.com came to be, but I do distinctly remember a few posts from Leff on a long-defunct AOL BBS forum, circa 1993-1994, outlining the broad strokes of his Master Plan for what eventually became ChowhoundâŚ) And for that matter, I also have to give him what I consider credit for not cashing in (or out) earlier than he did, when he probably couldâve gotten more for CH than he ultimately did, if he had wanted to milk it for all it was ever worthâŚ
3 Likes
Ah, thanks.
Totally agree. I stopped following any blog, but Instagram is just a picture, rarely a discussion. I like this forum, though I doubt that makes it less of a dinosaur.
1 Like
I also thought doing whatever results in hiding messages (âflaggingâ?) enough for it to be hidden was an overreaction, but I suspect the reason was that several people perceived it as spamâŚ
Re Instagram: I donât have an IG account and it takes more than passing curiosity to get me to click on IG links, but while I think itâs a really weird venue/format for it, I have seen fairly extended âconversationsâ in the comments appended to IG photos. Which I guess is just further evidence of a shift to social media and away from the âtopical forumâ format mentioned earlier in this threadâŚ
I appreciate the forum format now more than ever. Facebook is a dreadful format and I have no interest. This forum in particular is friendlier, more informative and easier to find the content you are looking for. Long live HO!
9 Likes
I was very active on Chowhound but bailed with the format change. With Hungry Onion, I find much of value in the board I regularly checkâthe cooking, ingredients, etc.âand then sometimes I look at cookwareâs board.
I feel that giving premier placement in the homepage to regionalâmostly coastal USA and other metropolitan areasâmakes me feel a bit second-classed, as living in Indiana (or almost anywhere), people will find the hottest thing in San Francisco or Manhattan to be really immaterial. And with tech evolution, I think that the regional boards are increasingly prone to become challenged through competition, whereas smart, thoughtful detailed understanding of and conversation about cooking itself is closer to universally apt and not so easy to come by on the internet.
3 Likes
Insightful observation, @BadaBing. My senseâand not-secret wish! âis that HO does want to encourage inclusivity, curiosity and respect in all things food-related so that the community can grow. Please keep in mlnd, I am a participant like you so this is only my two cents.
For me, HO is two communities in one: universal topics and regional topics.
Having enough regular participants gives life to any discussion board, of course. We can see this activation is easier with universal topics such as cooking techniques or whatâs for dinner.
Regional boards are more challenging, and you have pointed out a dimension I had not considered before.
Participation and traffic are what had occurred to me with regard to the regional boards. Youâd think that would not be a hurdle for say, the Boston and New England discussion board that happens to be my âhome,â yet as fellow posters can attest we sure can use more participants there.
I think placing regional boards before the cooking discussion boards is intentional. This is to encourage the cooking discussion regulars (which is far more active) to also participate at the regional boards when some headlines catch interest. I live in France, so imagine how many threads. At times, even restaurants in other regions caught my interest as I scanned from the top of the homepage till usually cultural discussions. If we loss the regional restaurants boards, HO will be just a cooking club.
3 Likes
