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Does the Chowhound emperor have no clothes?

The Boston Foodie actually puts it a bit more bluntly: Chowhound sucks:

Call it a rant but the entire dinner conversation tonight revolved around how plebe the site is and the way it is dominated by blowhards, people who get weird jollies stuffing anything but their cranium, dollar store shoppers who "review" the latest beef jerky and, well, basically drunks. ...


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that make people think you're a robot.

http://1smootshort.blogspot.com

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This is the guy's entire blog post: "Call it a rant but the entire dinner conversation tonight revolved around how plebe the site is and the way it is dominated by blowhards, people who get weird jollies stuffing anything but their cranium, dollar store shoppers who 'review' the latest beef jerky and, well, basically drunks. As a total libertarian myself I say it's great to hear from people with a black ring of dirt under their dining fingernails. I have to agree, though, the site never has anyone young, or even older and refined, to share real thoughts. What would James Beard think? The general concensus was that the Chow attitude basically sucks. You can't shine shit."

I don't know what site this guy is reading, but it ain't Chowhound, which has some of the more knowledgeable and passionate amateur food reviewers in town. I'd love to see some examples of what he's talking about ("beef jerky"?). How does he know how young or old people are, and which ones are drunks? Slurry typing?

This looks like empty name-calling from a blogger who has been criticized on Chowhound for being a shallow "foodie" (ugh, hate that word), the kind of reviewer who trashes a restaurant (Tory Row) after trying exactly one dish and not liking the crowd. Compared to this guy, I think the typical Chowhound contributor has more range high and low, digs deeper into restaurant menus, is more adventurous, actually seems to care about the food.

This blogger needs to stop pretending he's somehow better than the dirty-fingernailed plebes, and start writing more substantive reviews himself. Meantime, I'll keep taking my tips from local Chowhounds, who actually explore the remote corners of the dining scene, routinely uncover great places, are mostly better writers, and are quick to deflate pretentious, empty, self-styled "foodies".

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I stopped at "...a black ring of dirt under their dining fingernails" because my eyes suddenly rolled so hard I was afraid I was about to have a seizure. Seriously? I do not want to eat at the places this guy eats at for fear I might pass by him and accidently get some smarm on my shirt.

I guess I should have stopped at "plebe", but we're gluttons for punishment.

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CFO- That’s a pretty harsh indictment of everyone who posts on Chowhound. Even if you wrote it after several cocktails, you must mean it because you haven’t deleted or ammended the post. Your self-described “rant” is far from a balanced, measured opinion. Chowhound can be a very cliquey site, and there are a few blowhards revered by lemmings on the site. But if you filter out the noise and get past the egos, you can learn a lot from several thoughtful posters. The problem I have with Chowhound is how sterile the boards have become as a result of the heavy-handed moderators, especially when it comes to posters who defend restaurant owners and employees. One recent, popular poster called a restaurant owner obnoxious, and said that he “deserved to be slugged.” The true story, confirmed by the owner and 2 employees, was that the poster wasn’t allowed to be seated with an incomplete party, and then behaved like a petulant child because he didn’t get what he wanted. Several posts detailing the real story, by several different posters were removed by the mods.

There was an article in the Atlantic on June 1, 2009 titled, “American Dining’s Service Deficit” by Nina and Tim Zagat. The article came back to bite the Zagats in the follow-up comments. It’s a worthwhile read if you get a chance. One of the replies really captures the state of affairs for me.

Posted by Renn on 6/1 12:46PM;

“To get right to the core of it, I believe our dining culture in America to be one of entitlement, mismanaged perceptions and disconnection from our food. Dining attitudes are far too transactional, ‘I'm paying my hard earned money, I deserve the best.’ Before, only the professional critic had a voice that carried. Now, individual diner opinions have been amplified by the internet, and we often develop a false confidence in our own expectations of the dining experience. While there are a significant minority of diners who eat out not to ‘play critic’, but to get to know a restaurant and staff and enjoy what they do, there's little incentive for the diner to put in any effort into the experience. Over time, the diner gains more power over the restaurant. Whether it be our ‘merit-based’ gratuity system, the rise of message boards, food blogs, and aggregated, rated reviews...it seems that there is little recourse for restaurants. And the more we, as diners, squeeze them to our increasingly unreasonable whims, the less restaurants are able to provide their vision of a dining experience. If we only considered ourselves ‘guests’ at restaurants and conducted ourselves as such, I think we'd see a significant improvement in the service that we receive.” Amen.

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Insulting a group of people by saying they have dirt under their fingernails is so nasty and classist I don't even know what to say.

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I disagree with the comment on over-aggressiveness of the moderators on Chowhound's Boston board. I spend enough time on the site to see many of the posts that the moderators remove before they disappear, and the offending contributors generally fall into one of three categories:

1 The Shill, someone who is obviously connected with the restaurant (owner, employee, investor) and raves about it while pretending to be an ordinary customer. This is a very different thing from a poster who defends restaurant owners and staffers, something I and other Chowhounds routinely do without getting deleted.

2) The Axe Grinder, a competitor or disgruntled ex-employee who slams the place unfairly while posing as a customer.

3) The Jerk, a person with bad Internet manners, someone who attacks other posters personally rather than civilly disagreeing with their opinions about restaurants.

The reason the site is so valuable is that Chowhound's moderators do an excellent job of keeping these people out. Some of my own overly-snarky posts are occasionally removed, and I understand why: the mods work hard to keep a civil tone there.

If you find your posts getting repeatedly removed there, it's almost certainly because you're not complying with Chowhound's very simple and clear posting etiquette. The overwhelming majority of contributors manage to play nicely enough, and don't get their posts removed. It's not a tea party -- there's plenty of lively, free-wheeling, occasionally contentious discussion going on -- but it's about the restaurants and the food, not the posters. Civility does not equal sterility.

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I too spend enough time on the site to see many of the posts that the moderators take down before they disapear, including several of yours. I clearly understand why they moderate the boards, and think they do a pretty good job of ferreting out the people you describe. Obviously they're aiming for integrity and concerned about morphing into another Yelp. I believe they stop short of being as effective as they could be. For me, the discussion is not real and lively enough at all. The moderation stifles a lot of discussion that holds posters who only tell part of the story accountable. They really should allow "the rest of the story." I know several posters who have had their posts removed, and then subsequently been e-mailed by the mods and told that they are too close to the industry. These are people who dine out a lot and have no investment, ownership, or any other connection to any restaurant at all. Like you, they know employee's names because they go out a lot. Selectively excluding frequent diners with valuable information (who play by the rules) from the discussion really prevents readers from getting the full story. As a result, the discussion is dumbed down, and not free-wheeling enough at all. Civil discourse does not have to be boring, and that's what the boards have become by virtue of their censorship.

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The moderation on Chowhound is absurd. Myself and others have relegated Chowhound to the last resort category for other sites to rely on for quality opinions as well. I agree that there needs to be some level of moderation however, Chowhound has taken way too many important discussions down that, in effect, make the site too bland. It's great for finding some info but really, I find it to be a place for whiney diner's verbal diarhea and unfair encomia, misleading other diners. i.e... People always talk bout the "lovely view of the Common from Troquet's front window". I don't think I have ever used the word "lovely" to describe a CEMETARY!

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Not that anyone should care at this point, but The Boston Foodie responded to the comment Server.not.Servant made on his blog (which S.n.S reposted above) that maybe everyone who posts on an online board is a restaurant employee, has lousy taste/manners, and is impossibly demanding. He then decries the [sic] "wild west frontier environment of the internet", where anonymity obviates slander and libel protections.

It should surprise no one that he chose not to post my follow-up comment:

"You must be reading a different Chowhound than me. First you suggest that everyone there is an ignorant lowlife, now you’re implying they’re probably all shills or impossible to please. That’s not what I see at all: the majority of posters are reasonable, obviously sophisticated diners with a broad range of experiences in dining out and good online manners. The shills, cranks, and obnoxious wielders of ad hominen attacks, the 'Wild West' types you allude to, get assiduously weeded out by Chowhound's moderators. I find it deathly ironic that you accuse Chowhounds of rude online behavior while insulting an entire community of people you've never met with baseless assertions about their character, taste, and upbringing on your blog. Who really needs the lesson in manners here?"

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I own a restaurant in Providence RI. A woman came in after we'd been open five weeks and totally trashed us. That was seven and a half months ago. In the meantime we've had good reviews from the Providence Phoenix, Billy Costa's TV Diner Hotspot, Pigtrip.com. What comes up 2ond or 3rd on Google? (search United BBQ) This woman's extremely mean-spirited rant. Yes, we were having a bad night. We were new and some employees who weren't working out quit with no notice. The rant references the 'owner', saying he seemed unresponsive. That was actually the chef/manager. I was not there that night. If I had been certainly this woman would have been comped since she was obviously not happy. Dealing with the occasional dissatisfied customers is another item we have improved. We've come a long way. As I pointed out in my own response to this "review", one doesn't punt a baby because it can't tap dance. We're better than we were when we opened and getting even better all the time. What are this woman's professional qualifications aside from being a member of Chowhound? My response was deleted from the site within an hour. For good measure, after I attempted to respond, every positive comment in the thread was removed as well. I don't mind constructive criticism but I don't consider this to be such. I think Chowhound should review its policies on allowing insider responses. Owners, if they identify themselves, should have a chance to give their side of the story. It's that simple. Otherwise it's quite deceptively one-sided and a very heavy-handed form of censorship.

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The Cuchi Cuchi thread is another perfect example of why chowhound's censorship has rendered it irrelevant. Yes, they took the whole thread down eventually, but they are completely missing the mark not allowing a healthy discussion to play out.

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Please be very careful and think twice before you post photos on Chowhound. If they like your images they claim they have ownership over your copy right and will not allow the removal of your images. Think twice before you submit ANY content to Chowhound.
There are claims that they have even published a book and altered the posts of members as content.
Chowhound stands for every thing a true hound should hate. Big corporate America running over the little guy with heavy handed moderation and what in my opinion amounts to little more than theft.
I have emails from CH refusing to remove my images after I requested them to be taken down several times.

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Chowhound deletes too many posts, it's a waste of time so I just read other review sites.

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