I am happy and surprised by the success of the Los Angeles board. I feared that breaking from our former venue would splinter our contributors and a relocation troublesome enough to seriously diminish our conversations. Wrong about that. Our board is active and interesting.
I also remember the period on Chowhound leading up to last fall and our escalating dissatisfaction with editing and site policy. Frustrating, especially how unresponsive management was to its audience and participants. I think some of the result is indisputable: Our board has contributions to almost two dozen threads in the last day, and that doesn’t count multiple responses. Our former board gets just one to two posts lately.
So I admit that my hesitance has proven wrong. I’m very happy about this. I give credit to robert and ipse (and others, sorry for omissions); san francisco and most in our region are doing well.
But what I miss about Chowhound, and still occasionally visit for, are the other boards. For me, interested in St. Louis and a couple other cities I visit. And I liked the stream of responses site-wide, where I would regularly find topics about cooking, food media or etiquette that I enjoyed and participated in. Chowhound still leads back east and generally, with less focus on restaurants. And if my perception is a guide, there is much less traffic overall.
I signed onto FTC the first couple days of existence . If you live in LA or want to visit . This is the best website for information on LA . The San Francisco board San Diego and New York seem to do Ok . . Though I do like the sight it kind of blows if you ask a question of anything that doesn’t have to do with LA,SF,or SD .Thread participation is non existent . I do hope this website will last .
[quote=“nosh, post:1, topic:3474”]
And I liked the stream of responses site-wide, where I would regularly find topics about cooking, food media or etiquette that I enjoyed and participated in. Chowhound still leads back east and generally, with less focus on restaurants.
[/quote] I agree. I miss the Cookbook Junkies. A lot don’t have the same access to multicultural restaurants. They really get into cookbooks and make some pretty elaborate meals.
For me CH just got so cumbersome. I spent more time on the technical problem thread than the food threads. And when you, Nosh closed up shop and we lost DoTM, I was out of there.
Now I actually enjoy FTC’s site more than CH. The administrators are very clever. They make it simpler and more streamlined, but at the same time it’s technically forward.
[quote=“Emglow101, post:2, topic:3474”]
if you ask a question of anything that doesn’t have to do with LA,SF,or SD .Thread participation is non existent
[/quote] I think it would require someone willing to sign on as moderator. For example: Boston.
Wow, I thought about mentioning that I wanted my thread to remain on the LA Board, but I didn’t think I had to and thought I was being a bit paranoid. I refer to “LA Board” in the title and that region gets traffic, as opposed to Site Talk. Please replace my thread there.
I see no reason why other regions should’t get as much traffic as the LA and San Diego boards. I may do some branding and promotion one of these days to try to encourage that one of these days.
I don’t know why people put up with Chowhound’s crappy software and arrogant management.
I read FTC for the LA posts, but I ended up joining Hungry Onion a couple months ago because their other boards (Cooking, Food Media, etc.) have much more activity than the ones here. They have more posters from across the country, whereas FTC is more LA-centric.
I don’t think you realize, nor appreciate, how difficult it is to uproot an entire community from one platform to another.
Speaking as someone who has been involved in it, and up close, it is at times both daunting and frustrating. Human nature makes us creatures of habit. People are just comfortable where they are at – even if it’s a less than optimal condition. And for the most part people tend to be risk-adverse. New environment, new platform, etc. All very strange. And all very discomforting. Nothing wrong with that, just human nature.
Long winded way of saying people don’t like change, unless they have to change.
When the LA Chowhound community decided to hit the escape hatch and seek refuge here, en masse, it was (and is) a rather unique event. (Same for the SF community with Hungry Onion; and same with the SD community for the most part with FTC.) Not sure we will ever see something like that in quite some time.
Because FTC and HO haven’t reached critical mass (and might never reach it) to be interesting boards alone. FTC is more or less a LA board with hardly anything else. HO has a few more active boards but still far away from a overall interesting discussion board. Both boards should merge or try otherwise to get significant more active members if they want to be a real competition to CH.
The problem with merging is that Sampson’s ideas about how to run a board are incompatible with mine. It’s kind of a shame that he stole my idea, not that he meant to.
Is there any way you both could find some common ground to ultimately merge them ? I feel that both boards together would come close to a critical mass to really long term grow to something the size of CH on the old(er) days
Nothing was really tried. I sent Sampson an email and got no answer.
I don’t know how one could reconcile their idealistic notion that a board should be a nonprofit with my practical one that it’s less work to make it a slightly unprofitable business, or their Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported thing with “Food Talk Central disclaims all copyright and ownership in such works and all responsibility for them.”
This board will never be anything like a corporate property. The prime directive is to make it what the users want. There will never be censorship except of seriously obnoxious insults or bickering. There will never be advertising beyond the minimally intrusive banners at the top and bottom, or pop-ups complaining that you’ve blocked them.
