Uproar over Chowhound’s redesign
It’s getting more coverage - I’m intrigued that this time they didn’t score an interview with VIPg (possibly a reflection on his quotes in the East Bay article?).
Maybe somebody (who has a BG account) could post a link to FTC in the comment section?
True, it was just a company’s spokesperson, but I was annoyed enough by this one line (“CBS Interactive, which acquired Chowhound in 2008, is receptive to constructive criticism”) that I sent the following to the author of the piece:
Clearly you took CBS-I’s spokesperson Susan Lundgren’s word for that. It doesn’t seem as though you asked any USERS whether they took constructive criticism well . . . had CBS-I done so, then Sampson Shen would not have felt compelled to start Hungry Onion nor would Robert Lauriston have launched Food Talk Central.
Within 45 minutes, I received her response:
I think the departures of core users speaks for how truly “receptive” CBS Interactive is to criticism. Users did tell me that Chowhound wasn’t positive to suggestions. Regrettably, I could not wade deep w/ limited space as I was also trying to explain CH to non-users. think the article reflects overall displeasure w/ the revamped Chowhound. Thanks for writing.
And so it goes . . .
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I think it does convey some of the displeasure - but not the passion we felt, seemingly collectively, as we saw something we loved and had poured a lot of our time into, being tossed aside. But I also don’t know how one can convey that in a brief coverage piece.
Yes, that one jumped out at me, too. I might very well have snorted when I read it. It sounded like the comment, from marssy (I believe), along the lines of “In the spirit of cooperation,” which appeared in one of the posts about the redesign. Pure and utter pablum.
I’m very happy that we’re getting coverage and it’s slowly starting to spread. The momentum is there and building. Even though in this day and age it seems that everything you might want is obtainable in short order, in actuality things take time to build up to some sort of critical mass.
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"We redesigned Chowhound to make it easier for both our long-term and new users to quickly find and discover the topics, resources, and conversations that are most important to them.”
Except long-term users didn’t have any big problem with that. That’s not what we primarily did on the site.
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"We redesigned Chowhound to make it easier for both our long-term and new users to quickly find and discover the topics, resources, and conversations that are most important to them.”
Actually, my problem with the redesigned Chowhound was that I found it too difficult and taxing to quickly find and discover the topics and conversations that were of interest to me. So yes that was exactly how I previously used Chowhound, but it became too difficult.
For instance, I don’t find that having to scroll and scroll because now everything is in huge print with lots of white space to be conducive to a quick look to see if there is anything new posted that interests me. It reminds me of how you search the web for a topic and articles will come up that don’t allow you to quickly scan the text to see if it is of interest. Instead, the article is broken into 3 or 4 or 5 pages and no option to load as one page, so you have to keep clicking and clicking. I don’t bother with those websites because hey, I have a job and I don’t have time to endlessly click. Has Chowhound been redesigned for the retired and unemployed with endless hours to scroll?
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Posted link in article comments to FTC.
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