A final message from the Alpha Dog
March 9, 2022 3:27 PM   Subscribe

So, they're shutting down Chowhound. Jim Leff, the Alpha Dog, has thoughts.
posted by jindc (36 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not ready for this emotionally. Chowhound changed my culinary life. Oh man. Ouch.
posted by lextex at 3:34 PM on March 9, 2022 [8 favorites]


🍴
posted by lalochezia at 3:38 PM on March 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


Red Ventures bought Chowhound in September 2020 as part of their $500M deal with ViacomCBS to acquire CNET Media Group, which includes Gamespot, ZDNet, Metacritic, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, and TechRepublic.

The VC reaper comes for all
posted by CrystalDave at 3:42 PM on March 9, 2022 [31 favorites]


Yeah, I haven't looked at it in ages, for obvious reasons, but I'm still sad. When my now-husband moved to Seattle nearly twenty years ago, Chowhound helped me discover all of the hidden gems that made me fall in love with the food scene here. I also loved letting like-minded people know about my culinary discoveries like the little Thai place tucked away in a strip mall in North Seattle with a great kao mun gai. I'm sorry it couldn't last.
posted by creepygirl at 3:56 PM on March 9, 2022 [3 favorites]


It's for drearily cautious monetization. Not because these people are so greedy, but because they completely lack creativity. It’s not that creativity gets rejected; it doesn’t even register.

Founders are the creative ones, able to make something from nothing, while corporations are patently uncreative vehicles for relentless management of Something. To the uncreative, creativity seems like loosey-goosey touchy/feely bullshit, of interest only to children and whackos.


The whole essay from the founder has a lot of great stuff in it. Sounds like a great website. I don't know how anyone ever finds out about anything but I've been on this website for 20 years & never heard of Chowhound. I wish I had, sounds like something I would have liked.
posted by bleep at 4:25 PM on March 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


I appreciate this bit from the second link, when Leff is talking about an executive at the company:
This executive, who truly understood and cared, did nothing constructive. It broke my heart, but I got it. Fresh initiatives - and going out on limbs, generally - might have endangered a fast-rising exec career, and no quantity of Chowhound love was worth putting that at risk.

Don't cluck your tongue disapprovingly. Empathize! It makes me crazy to see people righteously expect career sacrifice for higher principle when those very same people would meekly look the other way if their boss poisoned a nursery school. Other people aren't cartoons. They live lives as visceral and high-staked as one’s own.
It's so easy to be judgemental toward EVERYBODY. Leff is more interested in identifying his own errors.

I don't see a clear announcement about what WILL happen - will all the content completely go away? Is there a way for participants to archive their own posts?

I am SO glad the Internet Archive exists. I wish it were more searchable. I also wish they had an endowment to acquire content like this (not PAY for it, just be able to maintain a copy of the site that COULD be indexed by search engines), so the content would still be as fully available to the world as it is now.

Thanks for sharing this sad news, jindc.
posted by kristi at 4:35 PM on March 9, 2022 [11 favorites]


Oh, that's sad! I wasn't a regular reader, but when looking for cooking solutions it was one of the places that turned up often.
posted by tavella at 4:39 PM on March 9, 2022


Hadn't visited in years (I went and found my profile -- member since The Beginning, most recent comment 10 years ago), but it still feels like such a loss. Jim's essay A Tale of Two Chowhounds is a great description of the spirit of the site.

Back when it was young and vital, it helped me find so much incredible food, especially when I travelled. When someone from my old job went to the same conference as me, their boss's main piece of advice was to just follow me at mealtime, and I rarely disappointed, thanks in no small part to Chowhound. When I went to Vegas for my buddy's 30th umpteen years ago, I found out his wife's favourite cuisine was Thai, and thanks to Chowhound, our group had one of the best meals of our lives at a strip mall joint... a few years later, Lotus Of Siam got the James Beard Award and the media attention. Oh, and Han's here in Calgary -- that was a perfect Chowhound find; a tiny place buried in a strip mall serving Taiwanese food with the most indescribably great garlic pork and dry fried green beans dishes.

🍽
posted by Superilla at 4:48 PM on March 9, 2022 [12 favorites]


I don't have any deep opinions about Chowhound, behind I hate seeing any old school website die, but finding the founder's blog is a major bonus. I've been trying to build up my RSS feed list to keep away from Twitter, etc.
posted by COD at 4:59 PM on March 9, 2022 [2 favorites]


kristi: ...will all the content completely go away?

The first post says that the Internet Archive has it: https://web.archive.org/web/*/Chowhound.com
posted by wenestvedt at 6:20 PM on March 9, 2022 [5 favorites]


My coworker went to work at Chowhound after he got laid off from the place where we worked together. Must have been 13 years ago now. He made us all jealous telling stories of the food they got to eat after photo shoots. We never got free food at our office and they were eating all the food that had been featured on the site. Pretty unique job perk.
posted by potrzebie at 7:58 PM on March 9, 2022


Some of the comments on the announcement mention Hungry Onion as a site in a similar spirit, does anyone have positive or negative impressions of it as an alternative?
posted by rivenwanderer at 8:04 PM on March 9, 2022


Egullet, the successor seems dead too.
posted by Keith Talent at 8:13 PM on March 9, 2022 [3 favorites]


.

Chowhound was one of the first things that made me go "Hey, this internet thing is really great!" Like others have said, it was absolutely the first thing I checked for advice when I traveled, and I got so many great recipes there. This one is an all-time fave. And yeah, like everyone else, I gave up on it a while ago when its iterations just made it not fun and also no longer useful -- just logged in to see that my last post was 9 years ago. I'm still sad to see it go.
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:32 PM on March 9, 2022 [6 favorites]


Chowhound's Japan board spawned a vibrant community back before the site was first sold - I made several real-life local friends there and met a lot of interesting visitors to Japan, many of whom also became friends.

Once CBS bought the site they seemed to do everything possible to make it difficult to use as a community, either through incompetence or greed. Hungry Onion was a desperate attempt to provide a more welcome home for the Chowhound community, but it never quite got the same traction as the original site.

Anyway I'm glad the founder got a payday, but the site went into not-so-slow decline years ago, as soon as CBS took over.
posted by Umami Dearest at 1:09 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


I joined in 2007, so it seems like forever. Chowhound had some amazing members and posts. One of my favourites is this: In Memory: Yung Sing Pastry Shop

This bakery was an absolute treasure and so integrated with the community. To hear the back stories and even get some recipes is such a rare eulogy. For many other worthy places that served their last customer, they just return to dust (maybe crumbs is more apt) without acknowledgment.
posted by SNACKeR at 4:35 AM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


I just chose to resign from a Big Company that hired me to run a Big Deal Project and then got in my way when I tried to do my job. In the 8 months that I was there I also saw them acquire another struggling startup in a clumsy effort to absorb whatever ineffable innovative "startup spirit" they had, and then promptly squander it all. It was like working for a midlife crisis.

so this post about how creative entrepreneurs sell to big corporations and see their product get destroyed really resonates.

I always lurked on Chowhound but never really dove into the site as a fully participating member. There were some members whose views on dining out aligned with my own, and a couple of local food writers hung out there regularly and it was interesting to get their takes on local restaurants in a way that was more casual than the edited product that they gave out in our local papers. But otherwise, generally I find a lot of self described "foodies" overly precious and unbearable. Like those folks who say that they're not "tourists" but "travelers".

I also appreciated Leff's recognition that the site was caught in a downward spiral of poor search and content discoverability was turning off readers who couldn't trust the site's content. And bad content discouraged participation. I wound up gravitating to sites like Eater, which wound up hiring a few Chowhounders that I liked. Their recommendations have generally been reliable regardless of which city I have gone too, and so I have learned to trust them with an ease that I never found on Chowhound.
posted by bl1nk at 4:54 AM on March 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


Just a thought: In the menu bar up top of this page, is there room for MetaFood?
posted by beagle at 6:06 AM on March 10, 2022 [20 favorites]


Man, Chowhound pointed me to some great food! I travelled a bunch in the early 2000's and used the site extensively. Never a disappointment. I remember hitting restaurants/grocery stores along Armitage Avenue after reading about members' taco crawl. The food had variations down to a particular village. Extensive use of seeds...so many flavors and textures...from a carniceria taco!

He touches on the Zuckerburging of American entrepreneurship and I hadn't thought of it in those terms but it seems right. I believe people who "do business", by and large, don't have the creative spirit. Their passion lies in their ability to amplify capital. Creativity isn't something that you get an MBA in. Creativity is the secret ingredient in that it amplifies passion and curiosity. It is the umami. When you take it out, it gets pretty bland.
posted by zerobyproxy at 7:31 AM on March 10, 2022 [5 favorites]


Superilla, I think I found Lotus of Siam via chowhound too, and had a couple of fantastic meals. Another Las Vegas Thai place, the similarly named Secret of Siam, made the news recently for THC in their food. Though I remembered the meals I suck at remembering names, so I had it confused until this post. According to the local news, I wasn’t the only one!
posted by Phyllis keeps a tight rein at 7:43 AM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


W/rt alternatives, I do stop in at Hungry Onion occasionally, and there is still some commentary there. It's not super-active, but it's still going, and Chowhound refugees are actively encouraged to join.
posted by suelac at 8:17 AM on March 10, 2022


Here in Chicago-land we have the LTH Forum, which split off from chowhound ages ago. LTH stands for Little Three Happiness, which is an actual restaurant named Three Happiness so beloved they confusingly named the whole forum after it. Of course there is another "Three Happiness" restaurant, officially named New Three Happiness, but often called "Big" Three Happiness because it is much bigger, caters to tourists and at the time had a bigger profile. The restaurants are across the street from each other, but are completely separate and distinct businesses.

The LTH maintains the Great Neighborhood Restaurant Guide which focuses on "little neighborhood joints" that are great FOR THAT neighborhood, either as representative of the local community, as having a few stand out dishes or just generally great. The focus is not on fancy, touristy or expensive places to eat. They love to longboat a thread - so the Italian beef discussion has been ongoing for like 15 years.

LTH remains old school, the search is almost functional and a bit like old chowhound, which is to say strong opinions loosely held.
posted by zenon at 8:32 AM on March 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


Or is it loose opinions strongly held?

They aren't jerks, just opinionated.
posted by zenon at 8:33 AM on March 10, 2022


I feel that Flickr got ruined about what, 15 years ago? when they were redesigned and rejiggered to be, to me, more of a hassle to use as a viewer (perhaps not as a customer/contributor). That they hired the same guy to absolutely ruin Chowhound in their Grand Redesign was just icing on the shit cake of Internet 2.1. Chowhound may have been bullied and gaslighted by its various masters, but the redesign was a murder.
posted by rhizome at 9:42 AM on March 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


I'm all in for MetaFood!
posted by hydra77 at 11:28 AM on March 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


This is too bad. I think part of the problem might be the insane amount of competition. It seems like there are thousands of sites out there that will tell you what to eat, where to go to eat it, how to cook it, and how to grow it.
posted by freakazoid at 11:50 AM on March 10, 2022


I don't think I ever joined officially, but was a regular reader of Chowhound. When the Chronicle's food critic at the time never stepped out of San Francisco (okay, maybe he'd hit up the French Laundry) it was so great to have people talking about their food experiences in Oakland and the greater Bay Area. People with deep knowledge of regional Chinese cooking or extensive experience in Mexico letting people know about tiny, off the beaten path restaurants, food trucks, and kiosks. Yes people got cantankerous when someone would show up on the SF board saying "I'll be in San Francisco for two weeks; where should I eat?" but it's kind of an unanswerable question without more info. Then the 2015 redesign completely ruined the site. Not only that but regulars were constantly getting banned for strange infractions while trolls ran rampant. Really a shame for what was a really vibrant site, and truly encompassing all of the Bay Area (and beyond).

I'm surprised it lasted this long.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:05 PM on March 10, 2022


FetaFilter, where we talk about Mediterranean food.
posted by jferg at 2:02 PM on March 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


I found so many great restaurants in Europe based on reviews and travelogues. It was always really helpful and up to date on what was good *now*. I’ve really missed it. And hey, I also found out about Lotus of Siam in Vegas through CH!
posted by misterpatrick at 2:21 PM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


Keith Talent: Egullet, the successor seems dead too.

eGullet is still puttering along, but it's a fraction of the site it once was. Back before the rise of social media, web forums like CH and eG were where we went for food discussions. Mouthfuls is also still around, but again, the traffic has waned to next to nothing. You could do a sort of "begats" of foodie forums: Chowhound -> eGullet -> Mouthfuls.

I never participated much on CH, but it makes me sad to see them go.

.
posted by Surely This at 2:49 PM on March 10, 2022


Back before the rise of social media, web forums like CH and eG were where we went for food discussions.

So this is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me. There are still webboards that are the place for their topics. More traffic than a good-traffic subreddit, no FB consciousness, with experts that don't hang out in the new places and long-ass and informative threads, some extending for years. It's fascinating the nooks and crannies where this Web 1.3 stuff survives.
posted by rhizome at 4:23 PM on March 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


eGullet is still around (you have to go to egullet.org, not egullet.com.) I'm still there every day. It is a fraction of what it once was (not unlike some other text-based forum sites I could mention) but there's still a lot of good stuff there.
posted by Daily Alice at 5:18 PM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


zenon, thanks for reminding me of LTH! I found some cool restaurants through them, and tons of resources for shopping and cooking. Yes they seemed opinionated but also very enthusiastic and inclusive.
posted by BibiRose at 6:01 PM on March 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


I got, and gave, a lot to the Chowhound site for about ten years, between 2005 and 2015 or so. It was a period in my life when I was traveling and moving around a lot, and Chow was a way to explore and learn about world cuisines and the various cities I was getting to know. With the help of the Chowhound community, I got to experience food and travel in a deeper, more interesting way, in addition to genuinely feeling part of an online community there. It's sad that the inevitable growth of the site led to its demise. I gradually lost interest as it tried to monetise itself. It made me happy, though, to jump over to this Favorite Memories thread and see so many familiar handles.
posted by amusebuche at 8:48 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]


I only visited Chowhound when planning a vacation somewhere, but, man, what a resource it was. And a nice place!
You could tell regulars disagreed with each other sometimes, but a stranger could drop in and say "I'm going to be near X neighborhood with X constraints, anyone have a recommendation?" and get a lot of great advice. In theory this can all be replicated on reddit, but of course building an online community is a little more tricky than that.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:11 AM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]


I LOVED Chowhound for a few years, until 2015 when they took away sorting by Date Started, which completely broke how I browsed it. (I remember that detail because I was trawling through my old posts to see which to rescue, and my distressed question about it was in there.) It's long enough ago that I won't miss it all over again, but I'm still sad to see it go. There are some very pertinent thoughts for MeFites in the treatises from Leff about the travails of keeping a website flourishing when it's all about high-quality community-generated content.

While the Internet Archive does have lots of it (as noted above), there's also a lot that's not there yet. But I wrote to them about it, and got a near-immediate reply from Mark Graham, the director. He says, "We are 'on it'. There are more than 1 million URLs. We are archiving as many as we can."

He also encouraged me to spread the word about donating, since "We eat many hard drives every day :-)." Between his reply, the great new feature that Rhaomi recently posted about in MetaTalk, and the object lesson of a once-great site's demise, I'm motivated to toss a little their way. RIP Chowhound, and long may it be preserved in the Internet Archive.
posted by daisyace at 8:19 AM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


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