Not really. The “Outer Boroughs” board and the Manhattan board in NYC both have some of us long timers checking in periodically to help each other out and sometimes to help others coming in to the area for a visit. But the days of real back and forth about “finds”, etc are pretty much gone. Since its of interest to a # of us, there is some interesting stuff that we participate in on the Italy and France boards. But, “busy”? No.
What happened? They never allowed me to post. I thought, “wow, that’s extreme, they went offline to avoid me?” LOL.
And eGullet has gone to heavily moderating my posts.
This forum thing and I are not working out.
I wouldn’t say busy, the same people who have posted there forever still post there, but you know, they might be employees. I have my suspicions.
But as for content, um, yeah… I just can’t relate anymore. Seriously, some posts make me want to stab my eyes out.
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I see a lot of talented (ex)Hounds on Instagram.
Maybe they had you confused with me!
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Some boards are busy, home cooking for example, the cookware board for another.
But other boards are only as good as who’s posting and what the discussion is, and they’re sparse.
I miss the restaurant discussions. I was on an unintended CH hiatus for a while, and when I came back it was a shell of its former self. I was wondering if it became obsolete with yelp and eater and infatuation and all the others, but those aren’t communities with back & forth discussions.
Then I read about the site reformat issues, which seemed like an extreme reason to blow up a community. But I guess it was really, really bad? They’re having some tech challenges again, and I can feel the frustration, can only imagine what a total overhaul did.
Re search - it’s a “known issue” - I found an old post about doing an external site search instead of using the CH search, and it has saved my sanity.
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Oh, even back in the day, CH search sucked. I would Google something like
chowhound coliver pork shoulder
Still do.
yes, much more effective
I really like the “What Are You Baking These Days” thread every month on Chowhound. I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from the talented bakers there.
I doubt it’s us. Forums just aren’t a good sustaining model. Back in the day, it’s all we had, so people begrudgingly posted, but nowadays, there’s so many ways to get your creativity out there and connect. cough Instagram cough.
I really wanted the eGullet to work, there are people who posted there, then went on to do great things (i.e. Grant Achatz, Jose Andres), it would’ve been exciting to see that. But those same people are on different platforms now. There’s a reason why they left eGullet, you just can’t compete against the rising tide of stupidity, trolling and mediocrity.
Instagram is a much better platform for me now. They don’t seem to care about controlling people’s content and so far I haven’t had a trolling problem, just a spam problem. But oh well, I’ll take that over an overly zealous mod any day.
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That’s exactly what Discourse (which this site runs on) is designed to do, in large part without requiring intervention by moderators.
Instagram seems mostly about promotion and not a good platform for having a discussion.
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Yes! That’s one of the busy home cooking threads. It’s the restaurant threads that are very quiet now.
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.
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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 
Yes, you can have dialogues on Instagram (and everybody sees such replies)
Instagram is kind of like a photocentric Twitter. People exchange comments but neither really encourages open-ended discussion like forums do.
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That’s kinda what I thought but couldn’t put into words. I see some where a person posts a photo with or without a comment. And people may reply
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Chowhound will be closing down on Monday, March 21, 2022.
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I’d put an ad for this site on Chowhound but I can’t find how to do it.
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