I admit I'm not the food board addict that I used to be. I would venture that I skip over the vast bulk of posts on LTHForum, surely missing some great stuff--not the least bit noticing that someone had asked about surplus cucumbers a day before I raised the question on the Local Beet. Dumb on my part for sure. If I read less of LTHForum than I once did, what about Chowhound/Chicago where I once ruled as the benevolent "mayor". I hardly ever drop by. Yesterday, though, in a fit of non-work pique, I decided to see what was there. What do I find, but a question on farmer's markets, a topic near and dear to me. I post some useful advice, namely a link to the Illinois Department of Agriculture's Agrihappening web site for a person to find a market in their area. Inspired and feeling generous, I find a second post on farmer's markets. I share a bit of my knowledge on downtown markets and vendors. Today, between cases, I decide to see if anyone noticed. They did. Gone! Both of my posts.
Gone! I never realized I was flat out banned from Chowhound. It would be a bit unfair and disengenuos of me not to say that in one of the two posts, I mentioned the Local Beet as a source for eat local discussion. I can possibly see the deletion of that post. How 'bout asking me to edit the reference. Still, why the other post with no reference to anything more than my blog, which I understand is within the CH rules? And why generally the drastic deletion of reference to another site? Years now, CH has allowed links and references back to LTHForum.
The Chowhound rupture ruptured a lot of things for me, personally. I've (mostly) moved on; I am surprised a place like that has not.
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My guess is that it was the Local Beet link. They're very stuck in the 1997 portal mentality that your users are your property and they must be stopped from knowing that the outside world exists because then they might go somewhere else! That the web is all about connectedness, about bridges rather than walls, that it's not a zero-sum game of who gets the most users and keeps them captive, well, they haven't gotten that memo yet.
I figure two can play at that game, so I don't link directly to anything on Chow, either. If they're not going to spend the coin of the realm on others, I won't spend it on them, either.
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