The regret I have in seeing the current downfall, and perhaps the potential demise, of Chowhound is that the current iteration of our culinary Galt’s Gulch appears to be a closed ecosystem of sort (hence the name, I suppose). And this is true whether one is referring to FTC or HO.
The subscription base, for now, appears primarily (if not solely) former members of Chowhound. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but for a site like this to have enduring appeal I think there needs to be a stream, even if it is a trickle, of new fresh voices. This is something that @secretasianman mentioned in another post, and I think it rings with much truth.
Even the guys at the bar in Cheers every once in a while had some vagabond stroll into the bar and order, heaven forbid (!), a cocktail.
I’m not a web person, but is it possible to set up some SEO stuff for FTC to pump up our search results to attract some new folks? Maybe Barry C knows something about that?
i think a user defined set of subregion tags works better, using local vernacular, SOUTHBAY, EASTBAY, THECITY (SF proper), etc. better to have the data drive the design than try to impose an inappropriate design on the data.
I believe that if the discussion stays informed and lively it will attract more people who are into this kind of thing. Authority and depth of knowledge are their own SEO in the long run. If a board is the kind of place where someone makes a connection between ngo gai, culantro, and shadon beni and tells a Trini which Vietnamese market has it fresh, Google will keep sending people there.
Chowhound had been going for eight years before I learned about it.
One significant side effect of the new design: since the regional boards have been deleted, their names no longer appear in the page title, so I can no longer use Google’s intitle operator to limit searches to a particular board (e.g. intitle:francisco or intitle:angeles).
The regional boards were deleted, their topics moved to other boards, and the previous region added to the topic as tags. Most of the topics on the regional boards have been moved to the Restaurants & Bars board.
Prior to the redesign, each topic page’s title included the name of its board, for example, “Suggestions for Oakland/Berkeley restaurants - San Francisco Bay Area - Chowhound.” In the redesign, the board name has been removed, so today that page’s title is “Suggestions for Oakland/Berkeley restaurants - Chowhound.”
If you can find what you’re looking for using the chowhound.com search, then this is not an issue, but I’m often looking for topics I know are there and the site’s search won’t find them, so I use Google.
I honestly find the new CH format unusable for seeking out specific geographic recs. Successful searches depend on how well one tags their OP. Moreover, it is very cumbersome - even with proper tags - to filter out the chaff.
I went on CH just yesterday for the first time after a month away from it. I still find it to be a vast wasteland relative to my demands.
Regional boards were the ones named for cities or specific geographic areas. Many people found that the most ‘communal’ and important aspect of the site was the ability to share questions and answers with people around a specific place. That geographic ‘base’ was the highest level ‘sort’ or ‘anchor’ for discussions started under that place name. Now only ‘subjects’ are the highest level anchors and ‘places’ are at a lower level. You can still ‘follow’ the TAG for a city or area, but what you see that way is limited by the correctness of the tags applied to topics, since they don’t start in that geographic place and can have incorrect or limited place tags associated with them. Also, the huge task of going back and ‘tagging’ ALL the posts ever made on the site is open to the probability of misinterpretation of where the topic is best ‘anchored’ or searchable [CH calls them communities now]). ‘Subject’ boards, like Not About Food, Food Media, etc., are still there as before.
The prevailing thought is that CH chose to break the geography-centric focus of the site to open it up to a broader world-wide user base. If you have no trouble getting what you want from the site the way it works now… more power to you.
That seems completely off base to me. CBS’s customer base is advertisers. CBS Interactive has offices in the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, China, France, and Australia. If they wanted to expand their base, they’d open offices in other regions.
It seems clear to me that the goal (not necessarily achieved) of the redesign was to make the site more appealing to casual users looking for information (a la Yelp and TripAdvisor), resulting in more page views by more people = higher ad revenues.
Making location tags optional and supporting multiple tags per post means over time the quality of the content will become more similar to what you find on non-community-oriented sites (like Yelp and TripAdvisor).
I don’t REALLY care enough to be that precise. Maybe “world-wide” was an ill-advised and too broad choice. I just meant that having the focus be on small geographic areas was not something ‘universal’ in the way a Facebook is universal. I’d think getting the MOST clicks would mean eliminating or reducing things about the site that are limiting… like small area geographic focus. That’s all I was thinking.
"Making location tags optional and supporting multiple tags per post means over time the quality of the content will become more similar to what you find on non-community-oriented sites (like Yelp and TripAdvisor)."<< ------------- That’s really what I meant.
Several times recently I’ve come up short when searching for things I know were on Chowhound before the redesign. It seems like either topics were lost in the makeover, or they’ve screwed things up somehow so that neither the native search nor Google can find them.
Ironic given that the primary goal of the redesign seemed to be to make the site a better search tool.
Looking at the changes they made it seems clear to me their goal was to make it more like Yelp and TripAdvisor, which are more about being search engines and less about community.