Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
83
If you read my initial contribution to this thread, back in January last year, you’ll know that I’m content with this. My reviews are there if anyone wants to read them and it’s nice when someone indicates that they have, but it’s by no means essential that I think they have served any purpose whatsoever. No doubt an ice age will be along in due course to see us off.
Yours
John “Dinosaurs R Us” Harters
(PS: Do I presume correctly that, on Chowhound, you are Smokeydoke30? If so, please note that, in this small firendly community, the mods here are usually less tolerant towards contributors making dismissive remarkstowards others than seemingly CH is).
Well Harters, that isn’t a problem because I almost never post here and honestly never read your reviews either. So let mods be as intolerant as they want.
And I disagree about CH mods, they have no problem wielding the ban hammer, but they seem to like me (or at least tolerate me) so I keep posting and I tolerate them. It’s the best one can do for a public forum. I think there’s interesting posters in CH, although the spam and clash of personalities can be tiring, but I’m the last of the Mohicans, haven’t given up on the site yet.
Food forums have their place even if they’re a dying breed. I really enjoy reading the Asia-trip report posts, even if I don’t offer a reply to them, and the amount of local food-scene and cuisine-specific knowledge cannot be replicated anywhere else.
I’m also very active on Discord where there are cooking servers, but the maturity level of users is low, so it’s significantly harder to take part in meaningful and useful conversations there. It’s more useful for asking questions and getting instant responses from domain experts. There are also local Discords with robust discussion of local options, but it skews the discussion largely towards things you’d eat when you’re in college.
Keep it short and simple. When I joined Chowhound years ago . I was a troll . WTF is this stupid … . Iearned mello out . I eventually got kicked out like most of us . Ended up on FTC then here . If you can’t say anything nice then don’t say anything at all . Been really liking it . Cheers .
I’ve never seen a reason to create an account there, but I look at Instagram every once in a while – almost exclusively when people on a another site I participate on post links to promo codes for knitting and crochet patterns there – and I totally don’t get it…
I don’t remember where it falls in the Social Media Timeline (i.e., which came when; after FB which I’m pretty sure was the first “official” Social Medium, they’re all a blur to me) but to me, Instagram is like a weird Venn Diagram intersection of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. I’ve never had much (really any) interest in Facebook, but I “get it”. I sort of get Twitter, though I have no use for it. Pinterest I really don’t get at all, and find both cumbersome and almost vertigo-inducing… (so many photos, so little explanation of why there are all those photos, and links that mostly seem to point to other “pins” rather than to useful web pages?) But Instagram is just, well, weird… Photo-based links with few-word-long “titles” that really don’t tell me why I’d want to click on them, then short, sound-bite-y comments in a really awkward-to-read format? O-o-okay… It’s like, I dunno, maybe “blogging for people who don’t have the attention-span for actual blogging”?
Haha, well it’s part of biz now. An owner I’ve talked to who has a chain of successful pancake shops was very upset that his neighbour, also a crepe shop has much better TA scores than his with very inferior ingredients. That owner doesn’t work very hard on the presence of social network, does pretty well by good food with top ingredients. He thought it was bloggers and forums that contributed with his success though.
It’s a visual platform for people looking for visual inspirations (or to copy). There are artists, photographers, designers, architects around… I’ve keep track of some food porns, and you know what? I’ve noticed that there were some 1 or 2 stars Michelin chefs subscribing to my boards! Maybe they are too, looking for inspirations for plating.
Cedric Grolet, a French celebrity dessert chef on IG, he got 1.5 million subscribers in a relative short time. He is a good chef but there are a lot of good chefs like him. His pastries and cakes are impressive visually, and got a lot of likes and eventually a lot of sponsors like Adidas. Every post he makes now will bring him immediate income, either people going to buy his cakes or income as a fashion influencer.
Same as YouTubers, the videos bring more income than ads from the blogs. Much online recipes, food journal sites or blogs offer commentary sections, which I think can divert some audiences away from food forum. Most of the successful forums are create in the early 2000s or even before.
I think @shrinkrap 's daughter working in this domain can explain more clearly and better these marketing tools!
She calls it "digital marketing ", which I think she does for non-profits in the performing arts. Who knew there would be such a thing when she decided to be an English major a dozen years ago?
Funny my daughter did the “digital marketing” for a non-profit as well. She has since moved on to working for MGM in their marketing department. She was a communications major.
My company does digital marketing for many industries, tying in social media, geo- and IP targeting, mobile and desktop website visiting, etc. to better pinpoint appropriate ad serves to you specifically vs. carpet-bombing ads to everyone and their grandmother.
It’s everywhere, unless you’re off the grid. 1984, Skynet, Big Brother…all true.
I do understand how popular they are, and why people with things to sell use them. What I don’t really understand is the massive interest in their formats that makes them so popular, and so, such good “marketing tools” (at least while they’re still “hot”, which only seems to stay the case for about 5 years per medium?)
It’s probably a generational thing in my case. I look to the Internet mostly for “information”, with random “entertainment” coming in a distant second (though since I greatly enjoy learning new (relatively factual) things, activity like participating on topical web forums counts as “entertainment” for me; random memes, cat videos and similar clips on Youtube, not so much…) And probably unlike most Millenials, I don’t see the Web as my “portal to the world”… (That’s not a dig, I assume I would if I’d grown up with it, but I was well into my 30s by the time anyone but serious “geeks” were active on the Web. And while I was an early Internet-adopter (and private BBSes before it), all of that was definitely “the Internet” versus “real life”…)
I also trained myself to basically ignore “random” advertising long before there was an Internet, so I definitely don’t enjoy just flipping through pages and pages of what often amounts to “advertising”, whether it’s overt or in the guise of blog-type posts/pins/whatever from “influencers”…
“Manipulate” is a word that has been hijacked to have negative connotations. It means “handle or control (a tool, mechanism, etc.), typically in a skillful manner.” Data analysis is manipulation. It exposes information. I suggest that “highlight” is worse as it provides for cherry picking data that supports preconceptions instead of exploring truth and fact. Politicians highlight. Scientists and engineers do analysis.
– and I totally don’t get it…
