“CH requires people to contribute the content. Let’s see if today’s newbies are willing and able to provide the content that the site was known for”
Very well said.
The only contributions I see are from the CH Staff, a few remaining long time members & people promoting themselves.
I don’t know about that. I don’t find much to get interested in there these days, but I just counted 55 or so posts in the last 21 hours (Sunday, 2/21) using the “Latest” page. How can you tell who is “staff”?
Rather than look at Latest, I personally find it more useful to look at NEW Topics. After all, one of the things that CH used to have in proverbial spades was lots of new topics every day across a wide variety of boards . . .
Just looked at the (moribund) WINE Board. According to CH – at least on my screen – the top 10 topics, those most recently replied to, were started (and replied) as follows:
In other words, no brand new posts within the past 24 hours. It used to be far more active than that.
SAN FRANCISCO? Used to be a highly active board. Well, it’s more active than the Wine board, but in similar fashion . . .
That’s two new posts in 24 hours.
In the FWIW mode, six of those topic were started by Melanie Wong; she was also the most recent to respond for six of those topics. Seems like a one-woman show . . .
figured out how to include a pix…
Here’s a useful way to make an apples-to-apples comparison. A poster created identical threads on Chowhound and Hungry Onion. They’ve both been up since 2/6. The Chowhound thread has 89 replies. The Hungry Onion thread has 44 replies.
That would be me 
I must say while the montreal chowhound board is more established I prefer the formatting options on hungryonions (the posts are better looking).
I don’t have a clear favorite, I have people I like that are still on chowhound even though they messed up their site and I don’t have any beef with the moderators but they do erase the links I try to do to here (I haven’t translated my “Montreal food and gifts” to chowhound yet and I sometimes try to link inquiring minds here with no success).
I wonder if Captcrunchfinds notices any difference in the quality of the responses/discussion?
Doesnt show well for CH when you compare the number of forum members.
Half the posts with a fraction of the members.
But it clearly shows that Chowhound has more activity than Hungry Onion, and that that activity is not limited to “the CH Staff, a few remaining long time members & people promoting themselves.” Eh, whatever. Disgruntled former Chowhound members are determined to remain disgruntled, obviously.
Overall, its pretty similar qualitatively. You have to remember there are people I know well on the chowhound montreal board so that tends to generate more discussions.
There seem to be more europeans and even some italians giving feedback on chowhound, which is really interesting to me (the thread is a lot about exploring what seem to be authentic “italian” cuisine too (although with italy I guess I should say exploring a regional variant). Chowhound is an older board so that’s not surprising.
Some people asked me to contribute to threads already started on chowhound on Hazan but like I said I’m not a big fan of omni threads and I tend to be a bit verbose so I’d rather thread bomb my own threads than intrude elsewhere.
In terms of attitude the sample size is not big enough for me to draw conclusion. I’m not going to paint a whole community with the same brush just because lisa had an aggressive post.
As for sunshine842’s comments I would suggest to be careful about looking for questions when you have answers. 
I know some of you guys are a bit bitter about chowhound and I don’t know from all boards but the MTL chowhound board is still alive and kicking and we rarely get moderators to visit. I’m sorry if that isn’t what you want to hear. I try to participate here and there at the same rate (I will often post the same content on both places) and I have no preference but I can’t present a formatted version of reality just because it fits a useful narrative.
Scuse me, but I didn’t say a word about my disgruntlement. I’m not – I still log onto Chowhound, as I’m one of the dwindling few who haven’t been booted unceremoniously to the kerb.
The math speaks for itself.
there are 222 users on HungryOnion at the time of this posting.
This article http://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-chowhound-20151010-story.html puts the number at 10.2 million unique users just before The Great Change.
Let’s get a wild hair and assume that 50% of those were inactive. Okay, 5.1 million. Let’s assume another 50% of the active users stormed off in a huff, leaving 2.55 million users still stumbling along. Let’s say 25% of the active users got booted – that’s still 1 million unique users.
All these numbers are silly, of course – but the bottom line is that there’s a Queen-Mary-sized boatload of users on CH and a comparative lifeboat with room to spare over here…and they still only outpaced our discussion by 44 posts.
I don’t hate Chowhound. I find the new format to be nearly unusable, and most of the new post to be mindless drivel that isn’t anything I care to respond to. Saying that I’m disgruntled would be giving my feeling about the site far more credit than they deserve. I don’t give a shit, if you really want the truth.
Deleted. I thought Sunshine842 was replying to me, but maybe not.
Its hard to say definitively who is posting but right after the new format came out site activity dropped sharply. Then all the sudden there was a sharp increase in old popular threads being dusted off and brought back to life. Many long time Hounds picked up on it and have commented about it.
At the same time this was happening, a whole bunch of new members showed up and dominated the posting. I found this flood of new posters curious as well as their ability to flawlessly navigate a site that overnight became a complex maze to the rest of us.
I don’t hate Chowhound. I find the new format to be nearly unusable, and most of the new post to be mindless drivel that isn’t anything I care to respond to. Saying that I’m disgruntled would be giving my feeling about the site far more credit than they deserve. I don’t give a shit, if you really want the truth <<<
Wow, I read that no less than 6 times and really can’t even add an adjective . NICE!!!
1 Reply
89 vs 44. Wow. Much closer than I thought.
Well, it’s truly not something very worthy of debate but all that is pretty circumstantial stuff. FWIW, I never found the new site anything close to “a complex maze”. For me the issues were the change away from geographic community, serious performance problems on my older iPhone, arrogant and condescending attitude about the change, and heavy-handed moderation especially regarding the user backlash. Plenty to chew on, but I quickly found a way to post and to realize that a very significant percentage of the posters I valued had disappeared.
Not bad considering the age and long term exposure of CH (vs) a brand new site, “HO”. In addition, those that care and make a site great are here, not there.
Yes, there’s no doubt that Chowhound traffic has dropped steeply on certain boards. Two of the ones I visit frequently, Home Cooking and Manhattan, are still fairly active, although less so than before the re-vamp, probably by about 30%. On the up side, threads about tipping have become as rare as unicorns. Can’t say I’m sad about that.
NY state is all but dead. They have been reviving very old threads and it’s days before anyone responds even to new ones.
That’s very unfortunate. I wonder why certain locations took a greater hit than others?
