CBS’s 2015 makeover replaced the regional boards that had been the fundamental structure of Chowhound since Jim Leff and Bob Okumura started it in 1997 with topical “communities” in which the original region was preserved only as one tag among many. After going through the wood chipper, most of the threads from regional boards ended up in the Restaurants & Bars “community.” My guess is that the goal of the makeover was to increase revenues by making it more of a search engine like Yelp.
Non-regional boards such as Home Cooking were basically just renamed Communities, so the makeover had much less effect.
I’m an ignorant old person when it comes to Instagram (and other things). I’ve only looked at photos some friends post. Is there actually a way to have a dialogue. Say I post a photo and comments. Can people reply and who sees those replies? Can you reply to a specific comment? Color me old
We need everyone’s help in writing to your local food writers about Hungry Onion as an alternative to Chowhound. Obviously many of us came from Chowhound and had great memories about our conversations on Chowhound. But good things come to an end unfortunately. And I’d like to invite as many folks over to continue the conversations here on HO.
If you recall the start of HO, we benefited immensely from outreach to the press during the 2015 turmoil and got a few valuable press mentions that brought a large influx of members to help us build up the community here. East Bay Express, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times. With that said, a small site such as hours with no marketing budget don’t really have great means to attract large number of new users in normal times. And we do need new members to compensate for loss of existing members over time.
That’s why we need your help in writing your local food writers now. Local newspaper, local Eater, etc. If you can let them know we at Hungry Onion have thriving discussions about dining and cooking, and would welcome any Chowhound users, that’d be much appreciated!!! Some of them may be writing articles this week about Chowhound’s closure so love to be mentioned as much as we can.
Also please invite anyone you know on Chowhound!!!
This will not be my touching final goodbye to The Chowhound Project. I’ve already offered that via a series of postings, written years ago; an epic and hilarious tale full of hindsight, juicy background on what actually went down, and deep affection for Chowhound’s users and gratitude for its fantastic moderators and supporters.
I can see how Chowhound doesn’t fit Red Ventures’ business model the way Gamespot, Metacritic, TV Guide, and ZDNet (all of which they acquired in the same $500 million deal) do. Buying advice for video games, movies, computers, etc. is of interest to millions of consumers. Restaurants, except for chains, are by their nature of little interest outside of a relatively small local audience.
a way for non-fanatics to query our chaotic resource cleanly and effortlessly. Find a great place to eat without delving into gigabytes of spidery, contentious discussion.
I’ll start reading it again, but, man, 2002 was def a different era. I’ve become so cynical about the human species over the past 6 yrs that I don’t think we deserve such a service. And I know that we’d ruin and destroy such a service, if it could ever even exist.
I remember being banned from Chowhound. I was on eater . And maybe a couple other sites . Then i stumbled upon Discourse . I think there was ciaobob . Ipsey and three other people. It was like standing around in third grade with hands in pockets first day of school. Whats up. The rest is history.
