David Lerner's Uneasy Relationship with Delight

Sylvia Carter, a food writer who was one of my mentors and also a favorite of David Lerner (the founder of the shimmeringly great Manhattan Mac store, Tekserve, who died recently), loved a quote from a soul food chef named Ruby, who said "If the people shut their eyes when they eat, that means someone back in the kitchen is keeping their eyes wide open."

It can be read lightly as a reminder that quality requires diligence. Or it can be considered more deeply as a profound insight about the self sacrifice required for delightful outcome. Delighters don't participate. They're rarely delighted. So why do they do it? Well, few do. Which explains why true delight is rare.

Until 1997, I was a brashly free-wheeling writer/musician. Never a leader, always a sideman, though too creative to be happy blindly following orders. In the 1990s, I perpetrated a series of larks, pranks, schemes, and brainstorms. Only one gained traction, but traction was never the goal—I did stuff to do stuff—so it threw me. When your kooky conceit succeeds beyond imagining, you're faced with the need to knuckle down and serve the machine. In the first installment of my series about the sale of Chowhound, I wrote:

I had started Chowhound as a lark, out of fondness for discussing food and swapping tips with others. But my life had come to have nothing to do with food or its discussion. It's a uniquely American problem: you start off with a passion and talent for something, and natural inertia draws you away from that thing and into managing a structure wherein others indulge their passion and talent for that increasingly distant-seeming thing. All energy winds up going into maintaining the structure, which is generic (you may as well be operating a tanning salon), and starkly divorced from your original interest. And so I found that I'd become a businessman, a manager, a marketer, an editor, a publisher, a retailer, an umpire, and, most of all, a tireless janitor, all in the interest of keeping alive an operation facilitating other peoples' discussion of food. None were roles I desired or enjoyed. I'm a writer and musician.

I shoveled coal at the tanning salon for ten years. I could not do my signature disappearing act because this, for once, was genuinely cool and useful. It rang every utopian bell in my fevered psyche. If not Chowhound, then what?

So I actually learned to manage, finding ways to ensure that Chowhound—which, in its raw state, was a cesspool of spam, mendacious raves, and out-and-out brawls—gave the impression of a sparkling wonderland of savvy, kindness, and on-the-level great tips. "What a swell group of guys!" enthused its users, as I managed an eyes-open staff while my own were splayed back like Malcolm McDowell's in Clockwork Orange.

I devised ways to recruit busy volunteer workers, and to acculturate them into our way of doing things while keeping it all as fun and delightful as the forum itself. I instituted a ground rule: "Show up whenever. If you get busy, or go on vacation, or just don't feel like it anymore, no problem, thanks for everything, and stop back if you ever get a spare minute." How well did this glue workers to our operation? When CNET bought the operation, every one of them stuck around to keep helping, unpaid.

They believed in the mission. As did I, so it was existentially necessary to glue it all together, forcing me to become a weirdly good manager against every inclination.


Tekserve was a Mac shop run by and for people who loved Macs in an age when this was a countercultural choice. Customers weren't treated merely "right", but delightfully so. It was a new model for principled retail. Not ala Starbucks or Ben & Jerry's, where a brand image is self-consciously stoked via cheezy gesture; David and his partner Dick really meant it. It was real, and this intention helped them stoke delight.

The new retail model never widely caught on, but we customers sure loved it. Tekserve had an antique Coke machine dispensing bottles for a nickel (they took a loss) and a porch swing hung from the rafters. Everything was ultra honest and helpful. It felt like bubblegum from Walter.

When I was very young, there was a substitute school bus driver named Walter, an older gentleman who'd periodically appear, like an apparition, and give out bubblegum to kids as they got on the bus.

It gobsmacked me that such a person could exist. Bus drivers - I recognized with the instinctive reflex of those low on a food chain - were a nemesis for children to fear and avoid. You don't need to be a particularly clever bunny rabbit to know to run like crazy when a german shephard comes prowling. So you get on the stupid bus, walk all the way to the back, and try to avoid setting off the driver at all costs.

Imagine if you discovered that a certain mosquito, once you slow down its whine, is actually singing Mozart arias just to soothe you.

Walter Crowther rocked my world. Representing more than just a good version of a bad thing, he spurred a fundamental shift in my childhood experience. It had never occurred to me that anything positive could ever come from a bus driver. I suddenly realized, thunderstruck, that the world was studded with hidden and delightful Easter Eggs. A hunk of bubblegum had squarely launched me on my life path.

David and Dick conjured the change they'd longed for. It entailed exhausting themselves and fighting their slackerish, non-corporate impulses. David was no manager (and Dick, who did design, didn't even try), but he was forced to figure it out. Intensely introverted and curmudgeonly to the point where his eyes could barely unroll themselves, he set mechanisms into play and let others inhabit them while he remained back in the kitchen with his eyes clockworked shriekingly open.

You might imagine an idealistic utopia masquerading as a business—where customers feel uncommon delight and workers feel part of something great—as run by a boss who's a jolly giggly teddy bear frequently hugging members of the happy family.

No. Jesus, no. There's no time or energy for that. If you have resources to devote to being that person, it means you're not leaving it all on the field. That's not a labor of love, that's an image of a labor of love. Real love means investing everything. No time for image creation or self-mythologizing. No room to seem delightful, or even to feel much delight. Those are all separate projects, and if you have assets leftover for all that, that means your eyes weren't fully open.

Ruby was not urging us to "enjoy the journey." The secret to making and keeping a thing delightful, and to stoking morale and preserving mission, is to work like a slave. For people to shut their eyes when they eat, someone in the kitchen keeps their eyes wide open.

Trying to do a cool thing, David was pressed into being a businessman and manager, both inherently uncool. But he never stopped finding ways to inject anomalous coolness; aka delight. His operation was delightful. His employees were delightful and delighted, and it rippled outward into a jolly enterprise imprisoning him in his basement office, compelling him to shovel coal interminably.

I rarely had time to read Chowhound postings and was eating cold cereal. David wasn't much of a Mac enthusiast by the end. He finally sold out, and Tekserve was in short order ruined and shuttered, just like Chowhound. He and I couldn't muster full-throated spite over the ignominious fate of our babies. We'd done what we'd set out to do, and, never feeling particularly capitalist, hadn't intended to create enduring operations. It was a ride, a lark, a utopian project that began and ended.

We showered strangers with candies for a while—really good ones, not just Werthers caramels—which they savored with their eyes clasped shut in delight.

Midnight Trains

There was an idealistic little company called "Midnight Trains" trying to create a new culture of overnight sleeper trains serving European capitals, and the founders dreamed big, envisioning a transportation utopia with greatfood and culture and affordable comfort. Environment-friendly without austerity. It was the exciting, vivacious European train system one might imagine in one's dreams.

They tried to make it happen - actually tried to buy train cars and such - and they sent around a strange and beautiful email newsletter which dreamed so vividly that one might easily conclude that the operation presently existed. Where do I buy my ticket?

In May, they shut it all down, like an enormous balloon suddenly deflated. The vividly-etched counter-reality was revealed as not only vaporous but futile. It was painful to read their farewell email, so one can only imagine how the founders felt. Months later, I caught up with the news and sent them this:


Hello, and forgive my very belated reply. Perhaps I'm getting the last word?

I myself blundered into entrepreneurship, and chose the roughest of all roads, eschewing all investment, including seed money. I built upon my own adrenal glands and nearly died.

Because it was a web company, launched at the opportune moment of 1997 (and required no investment in train hardware, etc.), and because it was really good (because my adrenal glands were ripe), it was a success. We attracted 1 million regular visitors. And I even managed to sell the thing, though not for a ton (I still fly coach).

But while this sounds like a success story, the company that bought it, naturally, wrecked it (I told the surreal tale in this series). And the spin I so doggedly worked to impart proved as ephemeral as a spritz of perfume.

Even if I had personally seen it through further growth, the writing was on the wall: heroic effort might make a thing happen, but never per the original vision. At least not for long. Mission creep (aka entropy) is the way of things, especially amid meteoric success. And I'm describing success. Ozymandias was no unicorn.

The original operation is now long gone (the brand got re-re-bought and turned into a zombie site, don't even click) and while there is fond nostalgia among many, the distinctive spin that gave it its unique edge has utterly dissipated. All lingering traces are banal, like a discarded Lego set. The "What" is remembered, but the "Why" - the actual substance - evaporated ever so swiftly.

The vision you had in your head would never have manifested, at least not for long. You might've made a buck, there might've been trains running somewhere that didn't completely suck. Or it might have grown into an enormous monster with scant resemblance to anything you were aiming for. These were always your best case scenarios.

It's the journey. Everything you did, everything you wrote, everyone you persuaded, and all the readers you delighted (certainly way more than you disappointed!) were real. None of that was offstage, in-queue, or stillborn. What you did, you DID, and if some non-sucky train ran for a while, or if you'd made a buck or birthed a monster distant from original intent, it would not have felt materially different to you. Very different to outside observers, certainly! But I have the standing and experience to authoritatively tell you how it would've seemed to you.

You actually did stuff, and the fairytale result in your imagination was always a fairy tale. Nothing's a straight line; it's all bank shots. If you'd continued - if you'd even prospered - it would have still felt like the exact same striving, but for ever-higher stakes. Perpetual striving. You never arrive. No one ever arrives, at least from their own perspective.

This means you didn't fail. You strived, and now you'll strive otherwise, and when you're old and frail, you'll recall, with satisfaction, how faithfully you strived, all along, for visions both grandly ambitious and minuscule (it doesn't matter).

Jim Leff
Founder, Chowhound.com
For Those Who Live to Eat

Creativity and Empathy in Business

A friend runs a brewery. It's successful, but what he really wants is to open a second location; an intimate tap house with live music. Ideally it would serve beer brewed back in the mothership, but he has a business partner with no interest in such an endeavor. So my friend would need to open this venue on his own, which would mean buying beer from his own brewery at full price. Ugh.

In his mind, he's trapped. But my mind roils with possibilities. There are always creative solutions. If you frame your world as chock-full of potential alternative routes and workarounds, that fosters a spaciousness of perspective which really kindles creativity.

As inspiration, I told him this story:

I own some "junk" silver as part of my coin collection, and I didn't want to bring it with me when I relocate abroad. But I don't want to sell it now because silver's price is currently at a low. So I contrived an offer and emailed it (Subject: "Potentially Saving Your Life") to a friend. After explaining my situation, I wrote:

Can you stow it for me in your basement? If your house is burglarized or burns down, it would fall under your homeowners policy, and I'll eat your (entire) deductible.

If society devolves into a hellscape where only precious metals have value, TAKE IT AND LIVE! IT'S YOURS!

If not, when silver prices rise, I'll ask you to sell it and transfer the $$ to me, minus enough for a very nice dinner for you and your wife.

I'd turned a rather difficult "ask" into a good deal for him. The hellscape scenario might strike you as a longshot, but millions of people hold a cache of precious metal just in case. It's not nutty, it's prudent. Protecting your family means planning for bad scenarios.

And paying the deductible was also meaningful. Deductibles are eternal bitter pills. Between the two, I was offering a solid dose of peace-of-mind. And I could wait as long as I wanted for a nice high silver price, because, the moment we sold, the peace-of-mind would vanish. So the longer the better, from his viewpoint!

There is always a way to conceive and fine-tune incentives to get what you want, if (and only if) you're empathic - i.e. able to reframe from your own needy grabby selfishness to see the world from the perspective of the other guy. Load the other party up with value, even more than strictly necessary. Load and load full-heartedly to your outer limit of feasibility. The key to getting what you want is to fully apply your generosity.


My friend turned down the offer, fwiw. I understood why; I hadn't considered everything (e.g. homeowner's insurance might not cover it). Fine. I'll sell the silver now and take the loss. I stay lithe (also: SIGA is currently at $24).

...A Farm Upstate Where He Can Run and Run

So they're shutting down Chowhound, just four months short of its 25th birthday. Converting dog years to human, that's "long dead-and-buried already." Which sounds about right.

Here is my 20th anniversary post...and my 15th anniversary post.

This will not be my touching final goodbye to The Chowhound Project. I've already offered that via a series of postings, written years ago; an epic and hilarious tale full of hindsight, juicy background on what actually went down, and deep affection for Chowhound's users and gratitude for its fantastic moderators and supporters.

If that's the sort of thing you're looking for, I've linked to that series both here and below. But having previously "reflected" at length, the following will be a mere gaggle of impressions jarred loose by the recent news.

A Three Hour Tour. A Three Hour Tour.
I was never trying to build something to last forever. I was an old-school entrepreneur, building a cool thing largely for the challenge and satisfaction, rather than territorial ambition. A brief caprice. I never intended to, like, run a big thing. I'd perpetrated a slew of cool ventures, hoaxes, goofs, and schemes before and since. This was just one you heard about.

Mark Zuckerburg is a freak, dug in on both sides of the equation: building and sustaining. And now everyone wants to be him, so that seems normal. But it's not. There used to be a firewall between creative, free-wheeling entrepreneurs and dreary corporate wankers. Before Zuckerburg straddled both sides, these were seen as very different tribes (Steve Jobs also crossed over, but only after a humiliating decade of retooling).

I used to joke with Chowhound co-founder Bob™ Okumura about buying guns so we could ease each other's misery in the event the thing dragged on for 5 years or - impossible to imagine! - even longer. So 25 years seems like extreme extra innings. I’m fine with this news, and relieved that the data continues to live at Internet Archive (I hope people pass the word around about that, as Chowhound content will no longer appear in standard web searches).

When I built my magnum opus, a smartphone app called Eat Everywhere, I needed to research and check thousands of food facts, and it was immensely gratifying to see, again and again and again, Google pinpoint esoteric bits of knowledge found exclusively within old Chowhound discussions. And it's never not authoritative. To this day, no resource in any other media compares.

While I'm not wistful, it's my nature to assess things, and moments like this organize one's thoughts. For example, while I've previously accepted some blame for how things turned out (the site hasn't been good in a long while, hence the dog joke, atop), I'm realizing that I deserve a larger share than I'd initially imagined. But more on that later.

We Had Our Own Mole
Chowhound was badly mismanaged by a succession of companies who tossed it around between themselves like a hot potato. And here's a surprising chunk almost nobody knows: At the largest of those companies, the divisional super boss was an old fan and site user who, in a previous life, had been part of the effort to find a solution when Chowhound originally turned into a scaling monster (I told the story of that period, and the ultimate sale to CNET, in this epic, traumatic series of posts, referenced above), too much for a freelance writer/musician to support out-of-pocket in his "free time".

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.

This uber-boss hired on one of a series of bold geniuses to run things, none with any feeling or savvy. They’d all tell you how frustrated they were by the lack of financial support - as if throwing money would have been the answer!

Note: I'm complaining about the strategy people; the honchos. The day-to-day admins were genuinely devoted to the thing, especially the final one, Pat "Sully" Sullivan, who worked tirelessly alongside a couple of anonymous volunteer moderators from the old days (who stuck around to the bitter end and were absolutely the unsung heroes of the entire ordeal).

My Master Plan
I had a plan, dating back to 2002, to create a structure to organize and streamline our fire hose of timely local food info, polishing it for syndication into local newspaper columns, books, maps, alerts, plus the holy grail: a way for non-fanatics to query our chaotic resource cleanly and effortlessly. Find a great place to eat without delving into gigabytes of spidery, contentious discussion.

That would be the shiny front end. A black box offering casual users sleekly dependable output, while the spidery contentious discussion gushed undisturbed, daunting to all but the devoted fanatics who stoked the operation with their great reporting. Chowhound's delicate ecosystem would be preserved, while we'd normalize, utilize, and monetize our famously expert torrent of data.

My first step was to launch ChowNews, a weekly email newsletter cobbled together by smart editors who read everything posted for a given region, extracted the best tips, looked up address/phone/web info, and distilled the smart consensus. ChowNews answered the prayers of food-lovers who didn't have time/interest in following hundreds of daily posts. It shot them all the hot tips in polished form.

As I sold Chowhound, I was hard at work creating a system to digest all editions of ChowNews into a database, so people could search for, say, great Southern Italian places within X miles of a certain address. I'd built a prototype, and it worked. Bear in mind that Yelp was still two years away as I launched this plan (and they didn’t reach critical mass until 2006, long after I was gone).

We could have been Yelp...while staying smart. All for the cost of a dozen part-time editors (doubling as moderators), plus a copy editor. Just keep feeding the beast as the great tips flowed in. Repurpose our fantastic crowd-sourced reporting in more or less real time.

Here's how I summed it up:

The geese who laid our golden eggs, contributing the savvy, cutting-edge food information and news that made the site such a draw, wouldn't enjoy having their clubhouse diluted by hordes of Olive Garden fans raving about free breadsticks. Hardcore chowhounds would bolt in a nanosecond if all of America ever dropped by to inject food opinions. This was another reason we needed a shiny front end; a glossy layer to absorb and entertain less fervid newbies. The discussion part would be de-emphasized, requiring persistence to find and join. Ideally, only serious people would make the effort, and the resource wouldn't dilute. The rest would be entranced by shiny baubles up front.

None of the bold geniuses charged with managing Chowhound for the various mega corps were the least bit interested in the founder's kooky ideas. Each, in succession chose the lazy route, tarting up the design, festooning it with ads, and aiming to attract the widest possible crowd to maximize ad views. Just as they'd heard me predict, this strategy diluted Chowhound's unique expert vibe. Our data no longer dependable, the community deteriorated into ditzy nonsense, the torrent dried into a trickle, and, with no one left to view the ads, well, here we are.

The Critical Failure Was Mine
I naively imagined that a big corporation might deploy fresh, creative initiatives like my scheme. But even my secret friend/fan in the exec suite wouldn't lift a finger for any such thing. That's just not how it works.

The shiny front end should have been bolted on before selling Chowhound. I needed to demonstrate its effectiveness at my risk, not theirs, because I'm the risk guy, while corporate executives are ass coverers. But, alas, I'd run out of gas before I could hook it all up. And my plan was too unusual (at the time) for managerial honchos to listen to, much less envision, much less approve. It should have been completed on my watch, and that failure made Chowhound's slow decline inevitable.

Here is a gem of insight that popped up in the epilog of my Chowhound exegesis:

The best route for creative people with business impulses (or vice versa) is to hatch one's own startup. And then sell out to puddy pudpuds who'll follow procedures to maintain it and apply relentlessness to profit from it.

I did not pass the property on to the pudpuds in full bloom. I figured they'd help it happen. Instead, the pudpuds, imagining themselves virile swaggering geniuses, had their own master plans, thanks very much. And the plan was always the same: sell ads until it all collapses.

Genius!

Creativity is not their strength. But it’s definitely mine. So I should have breathed life into my idea on my own, rather than hope to develop it "in-house." The corporate "house" isn't for brainstorms. 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.

Here's the story of the CNET manager enraged by my clever proposal to solve his multimillion-dollar problem for a few thousand bucks.

The Energy of a Thousand Suns
I'm a jazz trombonist and food writer. I had no entrepreneurial skills or training. No funding, no structure. No tech guy. Just boundless enthusiasm and dedication. Chowhound scaled mercilessly, which was fun for about three weeks, but $50/month server bills began accruing $800 or $3000 bandwidth surcharges, and the software couldn't support the load (and developers need $$$$$), and I found myself engaged in 24/7 existential warfare with hundreds of psychos and vandals, anxiously downloading immense Apache log files every 15 minutes via dial-up because, even at the late date of 2004, I couldn't afford broadband. Having worked seven or eight full-time jobs for Chowhound for nearly a decade, unpaid, I was beyond exhaustion.

But, even so, I was proud to have kept it all up and running, at a high level of quality. It felt miraculous to me as-is, and it would have been unrealistic to imagine pushing forward with big ambitious plans in a state of exhaustion, with negative net worth and zero income, all possible favors already called-in, all for a breezy project that was never supposed to be more than a sidelight.

Here's how I explained it:

There are two main reasons why building stuff is harder than you'd think: First, most capable people are pretty maxed out doing whatever they already do, so there's little marginal time or energy to pour into big new initiatives. Second, while a great idea is a nice thing, there's vastly more devil in the details than you'd imagine. "Get some ads!" "Talk to some venture capitalists!" "Upgrade your software!" "Move to a cheaper serving company!" All these suggestions spill easily off the tongue, but it's the dark matter - the hidden complications and expenses, the unintended consequences, and the black swans - that gets you. Pushing through the swamps, time sinks, and aggravations, all above and beyond preexisting commitments, requires nearly superhuman resolve. People who lack experience building things always vastly underestimate this dark matter, and that's what execution is all about.

This explains why CEO's get paid so ridiculously well...and why so many people are so mystified by their pay scale. Everyone's a genius at sideline quarterbacking, but only a very few human beings have the competence, the stamina, and the cojones to navigate the miasmas and wrestle into existence something successful.

"There's only so much a fatally over-extended penniless shlub can achieve without funding or manpower or tech. But I did amazingly well, considering." That's been my rap this whole time. But I've repeated it long enough that I can spot my own fallacies.


"It's Hard" is No Excuse
Every successful endeavor pushes past "completely unrealistic" points. There was nothing unique here. What I did was very hard, and required vast work and commitment, yes. But everything is very hard to build. Including, counterintuitively, crap.

Let’s consider that last part for a moment (I previously examined this here):

•It takes enormous commitment and labor to open and maintain a crappy diner serving crappy frozen burger patties on freezer-burnt buns.

•Every mediocre book or movie gave its creator an ulcer and took years off their life.

•Even rip-off car repair shops are barely solvent, despite the cheating. Most sleazy people are just barely hanging on. Their lives are not easy.

•Beyond the business realm, consider your worst-ever relationship. It still involved mountains of consideration and compromise. Immeasurable bullshit toleration on both sides. For any two human beings to closely associate for more than a single day without exploding into aggrieved contentiousness requires miracles of bilateral tolerance and self-sacrifice. Even the most unbridled, selfish, and impulsive asshole tries, in innumerable ways, much harder than you'd ever recognize. Every shmuck is Hercules.

Sticking your nose out to build something - to do anything beyond idly drifting to Point B, i.e. serving as a cog in some larger machine - is unimaginably hard. The universe favors entropy. Chaos is the default. The energy to fight the tide and establish some momentary sort of Order powers galaxies.

So "hard" is no excuse for failure. "It's a miracle anything got built at all!" is not an excuse for failure. The daunting odds defied to get something partially made do not excuse the failure to bring it to full fruition. Every success (except for a few lucky bastards) bucks the same tidal opposition. Near-impossible hardness is the starting point of any worthy endeavor. So this was really on me.

Some of that may sound bitter, and overly self-critical. But no. I write this with lively bemusement, recognizing that we're all, ultimately, failures. Entropy always wins in the end, sand castles wash away, and my kudos to anyone who makes an effort. I take my hat off to the windmill tilters, the Herculean shmucks and the larcenous mechanics! I am comfortable among their rank.

We don't like to think of ourselves that way. Americans are all winners, every single one of us, including the myriad shleps who idly drift to Point B. But I favor truth even when it doesn't fit a glorious narrative of stupendous achievement. That's my greater Order.

Failure and Faith in Business

Two irreconcilable truths:

1. All startup companies launch facing near-impossible odds.

and...

2. Companies are deemed failures when their odds are assessed as near-impossible.

Think about it a minute. Obviously, the two positions could not feel more different, right?

The difference is faith. Startups have ample faith, while failures have lost faith. Faith is a framing - a matter of pure perspective. It's how you view it.

Now for the coup de grâce:

A dismal failure is far better poised for success than a startup.

Wait, what???

As a business failure, you have at least some assets (material and immaterial). You have deep experience with the market, and someone somewhere has heard of you. You're way way way better positioned than some shmuck with a plan. A failure at least is something. It exists!

Put yourself in those shoes and see if you can shift your perspective that way. Or, better, don't, because it might drive you insane, and the Slog has lapsed its liability insurance.

Is this a case for never closing a business no matter what? Sheesh, Idunno. Tough question! But I'm pretty sure the above is correct. I, alas, have been there (more on that below, which is mostly just lumpy riffing, aside from the buried lede about giving Heaven a chance to oblige you).

---

Consider my position with Chowhound, circa 2004. I'm working eight full-time jobs unpaid, there are enormous expenses and paltry revenue, and any scheme to increase revenue would require loads of time and energy when I'm already delirious from exhaustion (for a more detailed account, see the epic series, "Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out", about selling my labor of love to a major corporation).

"Close it! Walk away!" screamed my mind, several times per hour.

Reasonable! But then what? Start fresh with some other endeavor facing impossible odds of attracting interest and creating impact? Chowhound had plenty of both! My excruciating position was, paradoxically, a triumph I'd never replicate. It made me physically nauseous to try to reconcile these irreconcilable truths.

I'd never again gather this audience, this press, this exposure, this momentum, this impact. If I couldn't make this work, there'd be no point in ever building - ever doing - anything ever again. Any subsequent project would just kill me all over again without yielding a fraction of the impact!

I failed to realize at the time that I'd defied odds in failing so little. I was merely impoverished, exhausted, and demoralized. A fantastic result! This is the paradox of success.

Success (unless you're spectacularly lucky and hit an easy jackpot) never really arrives. As scales fall from your eyes, you glimpse the parched earth upon which you've been flailing. In this featureless terrain, advancing a light year is akin to standing still. And there's no rainbow ahead. No bluebird of happiness. Just more parched earth.

Decent income would have helped, obviously. A real programmer and professional-grade software would have helped, too, and some staff designers and copywriters and some chunk of funding. But those assets would only seem livesaving to those who've never run anything.

Just for one thing, "delegation" is a myth. You have to recruit, train, manage, and clean up after those you delegate to. If you're very lucky, it's just barely worth it. When parents hire a babysitter, they know full well they'll return home to crying kids, a messy house, a ransacked refrigerator, and cigarette burns in the couch's upholstery. All this just so they can go see a frickin' movie.

Just as the fame, kudos, and media had quickly lost their thrill (I wrote, in that previous link, that "After the heady first couple of articles appeared, it became mere landscape to me, the way a restaurateur soon ceases to thrill at seeing his takeout menu on the desks of strangers"), income, support, staff, and funding would have larded on fresh challenges and stressors. Zero sum. Parched landscape, all the way down. It's never easy. It's never a kick. You never arrive.

I believed in the mission, even if it was killing me and even though it was barely visible through oceans of aggravation. That's what kept me going.

I'll repeat, for the third time in a week, my observation that humans pursue an "ever-vanishing prize no one's ever actually won or seen or can really even describe." Everyone has had fleeting glimpses of this, but those who've taken a mere 100 billion steps toward illusion lack my trillion step perspective. All striving strives for a phantasmagorical myth, a flighty cipher.

Many clearly recognize this but persist nonetheless. They state a need for visceral momentum - stakes! - and a conspicuous scoreboard. But I risk pariah status as an American by insisting that small pleasures and Easter eggs are plentiful and delightful. We've been peering into the wrong end of the telescope!

We bask in copious free sunlight and oxygen, and strangers poised to sacrifice to help us not die.

---

If I'd quit, the best I could have hoped for was to pack up and try something even more hopeless with the recharged vigor of naïveté. I.e. "faith".

I frame all of this negatively, even hellishly, because I'm post-traumatic. I didn't like it. It wasn't for me. I lost faith to the nth degree. I'd touched bottom and fully grokked the futility. Less idealistic types with more pragmatic dreams (the classics: fame, fortune, and/or power) might endure longer - though, I'd imagine, no more happily. Faith in a concrete outcome at least gives Heaven a chance to oblige you. My aim was blurry, so I received a gigantic cauldron of useless blur.

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find."
~ The Bible

"Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!"
~ Aesop

But to return to my point, my situation late in the game with Chowhound - a wretchedly futile stalemate - was, from any objective view, vastly more favorable than the situation of Chowhound's starting point. Which is not to deny that our predicament was hopeless.

I grew miserably bewildered trying to reconcile my completely appropriate feeling of doomed failure with the unquestionable evidence of stupendous victory. I didn't enjoy quite as lithe a perspective in those days. But I'm not sure greater pliancy would have helped. Under great duress, pliant reframing can spark kooky results. A lithe perspective (aka carefreeness, aka creativity, aka blitheness, aka equanimity) can, unless you're extraordinarily disciplined, even get you killed.


This sheds some light, though I despair over my inability to "bake it in" to my perspective.

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Redux

Previous installment
First installment
All installments in reverse chronological order

Way back in 2008, I began telling the tale of the rise and sale of Chowhound.com in a series titled "Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out." It started here, and, seven years later, I reached the epilogue, where I noted that a number of successful entrepreneurs had described the series as a harrowingly accurate account of what idealistic founders go through.

It's now been seven years since I posted the Epilogue, and while I wasn't planning on adding to the series, Pat Hammond just reread it and piped up with a text message.

Pat was Chowhound's longtime head moderator (here's an interview with her from 2007), and pretty much the heart and soul of the operation. She sopped up every posted word for years, while I flailed around like a manic robot trying to keep it all together. I rarely had time to read the site for enjoyment. Like chefs back in their noisy, hot, cramped kitchens, I never experienced it like a customer. But Pat knew both the front and the back of the house.

Here's our discussion:

The Cambrian Implosion

You likely come here for surprising opinions and contrarian analysis, and this posting is more surprising/contrarian than usual.

Surprise comes from (and leads to) reframing, and my reframings sometimes can make me appear unsympathetic. Either 1. I'm stone-hearted and unable or unwilling to properly say the standard platitudes, or 2. I opt out of all that because I feel like I'm being more helpful by sharing fresh, lithe, surprising shifts of perspective.

Spoiler: it's #2.


Rolling in Dough
I once held a public potato chip tasting in a computer retail store in midtown Manhattan, where a small-but-toxic element of jerks seized the opportunity to shoplift.

I apologized profusely to the owner, who waved it off. "Shrinkage is expected," he said. What he was saying was that this was simply a cost of doing business, but what it really meant was that his business was so profoundly profitable that money could be left on the table. And it struck me that this was not normal.

The restaurant business is the high point of abnormal profitability, which is why restaurants are ubiquitous. Consider the proposition: any slob able to churn out bread covered with canned tomato slop and mucous cheese (plus: rent and equip a location) can charge dollars for a couple pennies worth of ingredients, oven heat, and labor, and make quite an excellent living so long as he doesn't completely mess up.

This explains why 95% of restaurants are so awful. Given that awful ones print money, there's no reason not to be awful (as I once wrote, Adam Smith's invisible hand reaches for lousy chow).

Yet despite the foolproofing, the restaurant business is notoriously volatile. A huge percentage of new operations go out of business in their first year. This makes us figure it's a tough business with slim margins, but, no, it's an easy business that makes gobs of cash for clueless slobs. So how to resolve this contradiction? Why do places go out of business so frequently if it's all so easy?

Here's the reason. It's such easy money that imbeciles are attracted, many so lavishly incompetent and greedy (petty enough to shave corners off a wheel) that they can't follow even a foolproof forumula. Also: work's involved, and humans have trouble actually doing stuff.

Just because a field is highly competitive doesn't mean it's hard. This can be seen in many realms, perpetually throwing talented, diligent people off-guard and psyching them out. They falsely assume a high failure rate means you've got to be fantastic, but there are few realms in human society requiring bona-fide excellence. You just need not to be a total nincompoop - plus actually do stuff (and, often, cajole others into doing stuff). For many slackers and fuckups attracted to easy money in the restaurant business, that is an impossibly tall order. And this accounts for the high failure rate.

So long as you can get the thing done without accidentally slicing off your own arm or getting stuck en route because you glimpsed cupcakes in a window and wasted hours slobbering with your nose pressed against the glass, you're good to go. It's a dauntingly high bar if you're a cretin, and a disquietingly low one if you're not. I'd ask you to read The Shallow and Self-Defeating Illusion of Competition, but you likely won't click that link (because that would require doing something). So, here, I'll kindly vomit the sundae cherry down your expectant throat:

Explaining how to break into TV comedy writing, one of Craig Kilborn's writers sums up the situation:

There aren't many jobs. Less than 100 total talk show jobs, maybe another 50 asundry game show jobs.

And there are lots of people trying to get those jobs. We are a nation of 250 million or so. Of whom probably about 25 million think they can be comedy writers. Of whom maybe about 25,000 actually pursue a comedy writing career. Of whom probably 15,000 or so do some standup and even move to LA or New York.

That's the layout of the comedy talk show occupation. You have a huge morass of people trying to get a few comedy writer jobs.

Is there any hope, you ask? From the scenario I've set so far, you wouldn't think so. But there is a rub, and here it is:

Most of the people applying for these very few jobs... suck.

It's all just a shaggy dog story, this whole life on Earth. It's not so hard to succeed. Just be a notch better than ridiculously self-defeating, stupid, and greedy, and possess the rare ability to actually do stuff. The most stringent barriers and competitive battlegrounds function as coarse filters to remove absolute slobs.

We realize this, subconsciously. This answer is blowing in the wind; glimpsed in jokes and aphorisms. Woody Allen once noted that "80 percent of success is just showing up." In the food world, which is nearly foolproof, this is especially true. And that brings us to the story of Duane and Biff (whose names I made up, fwiw).

The Sensationally Easy Triumph of Duane and Biff
A pie shop I know closed permanently in April due to the pandemic. And what makes me crazy is that I've hankered for pie this whole time. What does a person crave under adversity? Comfort! And what's more comforting than pie?

This business should have been rocking. But that's our view from out here. From their view in there, Duane and Biff had a formula; a workflow. And it was disrupted. And, since they were capable only of rotely following formula, they were gobsmacked. As helpless as upturned bugs, they just stopped coming to work.

Duane unlocked the place every day at 5 and started making dough. Biff came in at 8 and arranged the wares, mopped the floor, and opened the cash register. And as customers arrived, Biff, with his signature attitude of thinly veiled contempt - and the brisk efficiency of a sow on a hot day - sucked up money and emitted pie. There was never any value added to the enterprise, nor did there need to be. A nickel's worth of ingredients and another few pennies of oven heat, labor cost, and rent/insurance money, produced a $22 pie, and that was the entire proposition. Why on Earth would customers be greeted cheerfully? Why would captivating new flavors appear? Why adjust the egg wash, hone the sugar balance, or explore evolving market opportunities? Why would ANY DAMNED THING outside this stupid, plodding, formulaic workflow ever be considered when the stupid, plodding, formulaic workflow produced great big wads of cash - just so long as Biff didn't actually attack the customers and Duane didn't save a penny per metric ton by switching to veterinary grade flaked coconut?

Duane and Biff felt elevated by such choices and self-restraints. Not-totally-sucking was their source of pride. Other operators might shit in the food and shortchange customers and run out of pie early, but they had standards. And as highly successful businessmen with six figure incomes, Duane and Biff would take umbrage to any critique of their complacency and lack of imagination. "WE'RE FUCKING GENIUSES," they'd bray; "JUST LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY!"

I once explained that since a chicken is basically a biological device for pecking endless grain, you just need to set up your Skinner box (a process systematically rewarding a particular behavior) to feed the chicken, which will never stop responding in the way you've trained it to. Nor will it want to. It never wises up to the game. Blessed with the result it most seeks, it doesn't ask deep questions. The chicken thinks it's just killin' it.

For years, Duane and Biff figured they were killin' it. But then the pandemic hit, and despite my desire for yummy pie in my quarantine den, they were unable to muster the imagination or the gumption to contrive a way to connect my desire with their endeavor. They froze, baffled, waiting for the Skinner Box to start working again. And now their shop's gone forever.

The Duanes and Biffs of the food industry have been getting killed. And some very small number of them were good. Even without imagination or gumption, a diligent touch and refusal to cut corners can deliver quality. Top-notch Duane/Biff-style operations are worth knowing about. But such places had been coasting for years, and nothing lasts forever. If you can make a killing selling sand castles at the beach, thank your lucky stars, but don't be shocked and indignant when the tide comes in.

At the other extreme are the survivors; the super-geniuses who managed to hire some kid to deliver, or figured out a new distribution model and modified their offerings to suit it, circulating word to customers about their exploits. These people remain in business, though it's no longer a money machine.

Not all these survivors serve good food (plenty of competent, smart restaurateurs don't give a damn about food quality - or they give a damn but don't have a clue about conjuring it up), but, for the most part, those who can pivot are the ones with the spare bandwidth required to pursue higher-level aspirations such as deliciousness.

Receding into a Tight, Mean, Self-Defeating Crouch
Much structural rot in the restaurant industry was exposed by the pandemic. Even at the public-facing level, we've seen how rigid and limited many of these operations actually are, and also how untethered they'd become from their mission of serving those who patronize them. Foundational considerations of hospitality have proven to be a thin veneer swiftly abandoned as things get rough.

For months I've strained to keep tabs on a slew of restaurants which exist like Schrodinger's cat - in a weird twilight state of open-closedness. You know the ones. Their latest Facebook posting is happy-talk from June or July, but you can rake through their website, their Instagram, and even peer into their front window without ever figuring out their current Deal. If you can get someone on the phone, you'll be told "We're re-opening next Tuesday". But, no, they won't.

Why are they so opaque? Well, they're sad. Duane doesn't know how much dough to make, and Biff can't figure out how to install plexiglass over the cash register. It's all just way too much, so when it comes to keeping you, their loyal customer, in the loop, well, if they need you, they'll let you know (not really; mostly they'll just resume mulishly doing their thing and figure you'll somehow hear about it).

I've spent countless hours trying to get information so I could help out and support and spread word about favorite places, but communicating with customers would be a task, and these guys exist to bake pie/take money, not do loosey/goosey crap like "spread word" or "reach out".

I've seen places go belly-up with nary a word, or continue to operate without offering a clue as to their particulars, because our customer concern and curiosity are vastly overshadowed by their operator angst and confusion. Making dough while spruicing up the back patio for open-air dining requires 130% of their capacity, so there's nothing leftover for posting a note on their door or social media page. Remember: they went into business for an easy moron jackpot, so we're wanting them to act smart even though you can't expect damaged people to self-repair to accommodate you.

Fervidly Repelling the Solution
I wrote, in Slate, back in 2000, about a wonderful little restaurant called "Bo" that never caught on despite the mighty efforts of chef/owner Maria. As crowds failed to materialize, Maria just kept improving until every bite was pure magic. She kept getting better up until the very last customer (me) took the very last bite and Maria had to take the sign down.

I've eaten in something like 30,000 restaurants, and been a regular in maybe 800, so I've watched countless places go out of business. And I was deeply moved by Maria's diligence because hers was not the normal course. Most places decline when they have trouble. Food quality slides (corners get cut, less is prepared fresh, expiring ingredients are kept on-hand longer), and waiters get pissy serving sparse rooms. I've seen this phenomenon over and over, and it always shocks my dining companions. If the place desperately needs customers, why are they treating us and feeding us so poorly?

Here's what's going on: they're mad and sad about the lack of customers, and you're there, so they're mad and sad at you, even though you're their potential salvation. That's it. Simple as that.

It's far from the only example of human beings counterproductively putting their emotions first, nor is it the only indication that many people are of poor character (they discard their values as stakes raise...even when those values are their sole hope for reversing misfortune).

Pandemic Darwinism: Herd-Culling
I'm sorry for the turbulence and suffering. I'll miss the better Duane/Biff operations. And I recognize that the most savagely entrepreneurial operators will find fiendishly clever ways to assert yet greater dominance, leaving us with more useless garbage to need to photoshop off of our chowhounding window screens (the cliché of "pandemic crap" may take on fresh meaning).

But I see the broad arc of all this as unsurprising and non-tragic. The herd was due for culling. The easy jackpot finally dried up - sandcastles smashed by incoming tides - but the industry will shuffle itself and interesting, innovative new places will emerge. Space is being cleared for new shoots to bloom with deliciousness. As a faithful chowhound, I'll be eager to suss out this new treasure.

Sanity Checks and Caveats
1. As I said, babies have been lost amid bathwater. I grieve for the good places. So, quality Duane/Biff operations: I mourn for you, and was proud to have tried harder than anyone to support and evangelize you.

2. Duane and Biff have families. I don't lack sympathy. And I recognize that their jobs - as grindingly blinkered as they plied them - required hard work and fortitude. This conditioned them to feel they'd earned their enormous good luck. But mulish head-down work has never been lavishly rewarded, historically. Duane and Biff had it way easier for way longer than they had any right to expect, and no one's entitled to eternal status quo, much less a miraculously lucky one. Again, selling sand castles ahead of the tide is precarious.

3. Some operators have diligently tried to innovate, and shared with customers (helping us to help them), but faced obstacles that couldn't be beaten even with creativity, smarts, and hard work. I'm very sorry for such people, their families, and their communities. If you're one of these genuinely good guys who truly cared about quality and customers, and who tried valiantly to pivot and innovate - then you already know I'm not talking about you. You also recognize that I am speaking truth about the industry, as a whole.

It's Not All Going to Hell
I was in Manhattan this week, where I saw tons of people eating tons of food in, from, and around tons of eateries and vendors. Pretty much every creative channel of commerce was on display, aside from the traditional model of squeezing bodies into tight indoor spaces. Clever innovation provided a glorious display of resourceful adaptability. COVID-19 is not fatal to restaurants. It's just culling those unable to adapt.

And while I'm far from saying anything like "good riddance", I acknowledge that the coasting lasted far, far longer than the industry deserved. Complacency left them ill-equipped to handle turbulence. Whereas most industries expect stress tests (and this expectation keeps them agile), restaurant owners felt immune from such peril, and their failure of imagination led to the inevitable winnowing of a great many sluggish, outdated, sclerotic operations (as well as a few agile and diligent ones, per caveats above).

Sacrifices to, and Blessings From, the Goddess Kali
Conditions always change in this world, and the constant churn fuels creativity, perpetually scraping out at least a small, flimsy foothold for Quality.

As I wrote here, the Hindu goddess Kali, known as the goddess of destruction (remember those depraved cultists in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"?), is poorly understood.

She gets a bad rap. What she actually is is the goddess of creativity. But to those who tenaciously cling to status quo, her bottomless thirst for change and the immense energy she wields in empowering the world's ceaseless churning represent all that is destructive, dangerous, and deathly. She's the very root of all our fears because, being infinitely surprising, over time she breaks absolutely everything.

Supplemental Lesson

Yesterday, I offered a brief story worth $145,000 for its deep revelation about consumer behavior. Today's story is a companion piece, probably worth at least a few hundred bucks. But first a bit of history.

When I was three years old, I looked up at my parents and said "Smart people have no common sense". So I'm not exactly someone who's been overestimating human intelligence, having been thoroughly disillusioned around the time I'd learned to stop making poopy in my diapers. Yet every few years I need to lower my assessment even further. I constantly discover I've been overestimating.

(Fortunately, it didn't take long for me to make a much more important observation - one managed by very few people who recognize human lunacy: I myself am plenty bad and dumb and slow and deluded in my way. Spotting idiocy doesn't mean you're smart; it just means you're observant.)


We invited people to sign up for Chowhound's mailing list, but, as always, had no tech. So we asked users to send a blank email to list@chowhound.com with their email address in the subject line. We set it up this way so they could sign up addresses other than the one they were mailing from (at the time, circa 1998, many people were locked into their work addresses when emailing from work). And it would be easy for us to cull the intended addresses this way.

Question: What percentage of our users (triple filtered for smarts being computer users, early Internet adapters, and appreciators of a niche all-text web site) would you think managed to follow these directions?

I obviously can't account for those who put their sign-up address in the "To" field. But way more than 50% of the remainder put their address in the body, or didn't add it at all. Most arrived with a subject of "Sign Me Up!"


The fact that many people tend to respond to this story by saying "Duh, you made it super-complicated!" does *NOT* invalidate my point!

The Greatest Lesson Ever Taught

You should be charged $145,000 to read the following. I'm not even kidding. It teaches virtually everything you need to know about interface, web design, consumer behavior, and customer friction; the stuff that really matters in commercial enterprise.


Earlier this year I bought a cover for my second car, an old Miata, to keep the birds from crapping all over it. It takes just one minute to easily uncover the car, and another minute to easily replace the cover after I get home.

I have not driven the car once since.


See also "Filtering the Zombie Army"

50% of Dropouts are Undercover Rejects

It's impossible to distinguish a dropout from a reject. And nearly all rejects pose as dropouts.

Your friend who entertains you with crazy horror stories about his nightmare ex who he's finally decided to let go? There's a 50-50 chance he was dumped, and that he deserved it.

Your friend who quit her much-hated job? And feels wonderfully free to pursue new opportunities? Just as likely, she was fired (and deserved it).

You do not know. You cannot know. The truth is indeterminable, because such people mask the truth not just for your eyes, but for their own. Their deep cover stems from deep denial. They could likely pass a lie detector test.

I once recruited someone to help out with some Chowhound business issues. He'd been a player in the first dot.com bubble, but had dropped out to take on much smaller work, and was infinitely happier with this "downsizing". It seemed like a terrific opportunity to get help from the sort of figure who was normally too busy to pitch in with the likes of us.

At some point, a distant slightly scary possibility arose. The sort of prospect normal people shrug off, since, of course, no action in this world is without risk. But this affable, non-emotional, grounded, sensible person went into utter freakout mode, forcing us into some very painful, very expensive restructuring to rule out the contingency. He threatened, with uncharacteristic belligerence, to walk away if we didn't. Oddly, a year later, he could not remember any of this. It was like he'd had a small stroke.

Being less experienced back then, I called this same person to help with a subsequent project. And it happened again. That time I let him walk away after he issued his ultimatum, having recognized that he was no drop-out. He was damaged goods.

Be careful with dropouts. 50% are what they claim to be, but 50% are in deep denial regarding flaws and fissures that spurred a pattern of rejection. And you’ll only know after those flaws and fissures have become painfully obvious. 

My $10 Billion Idea

They’re trying to get AI to the point where it’d pass a Turing Test, in part to service the incipient age of home robots, where the things will need to have a voice and a personality, and the problem is that humans are extremely sensitive to fake/canned responses - and, even more problematically, revolted by simulation that's merely close-to-human (uncanny valley).

What if we took 1% of that R&D and paid actors? Real live actors, who'd give your robot maid/butler/companion a completely convincing personality. You could, during set-up, flip between a number of candidates (i.e. an audition process for remote actors), finally locking on to the one with the personality you want.

We’d allow the actor to sleep - and to multitask as multiple robots in parallel - very easily. It's just a matter of ignoring conversation at certain times (while fulfilling all robotic functions). That actually makes the robot more like real people (“Fido gets very quiet after 9pm; I’ve learned not to bug him!”). The actor would also pre-prepare certain canned responses for everyday functioning ("Yup", "Ok", "Thanks", etc.).

It sounds expensive, but we could surely pay 30,000 out of work actors, cam performers, or college kids a decent living for the R&D it would otherwise take to convincingly simulate conversation (I don't think it'd ever happen, anyway, as consciousness is not an implantable, cultivatable thing).

If owners get gross or abusive or cross some sort of line, the robot could stand up to them, draw lines, say mean things back (again, this makes them more human!). If an actor no longer wants to work with a given owner, the robot would sulk silently, waking up the next day with a fresh outlook and voice (i.e. actor switch).

To handle inevitable actor churn, maybe there would be a few dozen standard personality types, with back stories and a repertoire of typical expressions, and actors would be trained to portray one of those types. This would ensure some continuity when actors shift (if the owner, per above, gets gross or crosses lines, they'd need to select a personality more in line with their new requirements).

Consider this

Investors Want Apple to Do a Big Acquisition

"Investors Want Apple to Do a Big Acquisition, JP Morgan Says", Barron's says. While there may well be short term technical financial reasons for acquisition, it's ludicrous to imagine that such a move would be beneficial for a company's long-term well-being (much less a company like Apple whose strongly unified culture makes a great virtue of non-fragmentation). You can't buy integrated breadth. That's just not how it works. Whenever I hear such a thing proposed, I remember this story:


Shortly after Chowhound was acquired by CNET, we were trying to figure out ways to integrate photos into the message boards. I was having trouble coming up with anything creative, so I made a suggestion to "Clay" (the nom-de-gloom I created for my boss in my tale of our acquisition). CNET had also bought a large, popular photo-sharing operation. (It was an expensive acquisition of a very famous web company which no longer exists. In fact, I can't even recall its name. Ah, Internet....)

Why don't I go upstairs and talk to those guys? They live/breathe photo sharing. They'll surely have good ideas! Let's take advantage of this corporate inter-brand synergy you guys are always talking to the press about! Give me just 10 minutes to get their input!

Clay erupted in laughter. Never even answered my question. I didn't get my 10 minutes, never met "those guys", and Chowhound's photo sharing feature was laughably, embarrassingly poor for a full decade (it's slightly better now, but still a weak point).

Four Trendy Enigmas of Retail Engagement

"Take All the Time You Need!"

This one is two enigmas fused together. You're seated at a restaurant with an extensive menu. The waiter shows up 45 seconds later, briskly intent on taking your order. It has not occurred to him that you might be less than ready, even though your head's obviously buried deeply in your menu (which he knows contains 70 gajillion entrees and combo deals), and you haven't made the slightest eye contact to indicate readiness. Despite all cues and all logic, he is blithely confident that of course you're ready to order. Hey, is this not a restaurant? Are you here to eat, or to dick around with your menu?

You ask him for another minute, he indulgently nods and takes off, and you can kiss that mofo goodbye. He will not return before the ice shelves re-advance. Having lost you in his peripheral vision, he's unable to register your angry stares, even your airport arrival terminal full-barreled waving. With your customer status descended to "nonentity", you are quite literally off his radar. It dawns on you that his "Take All the Time You Need!" was less obliging than cackling.

If I understand the psychology, it's something like this: what customers do is they order and they eat and they pay. And they must order to eat and pay. So if you haven't ordered, you're completely outside my workflow; beyond my frame. Just as I don't care where you were and what you did before entering the restaurant, you are similarly beyond my interest in this situation. The play has not yet begun. You are not one of my 25 customers, you are one of the 6,999,999,975 homo sapiens I don't need to pretend to give a fuck about.

Possible workaround: sneak out, then re-enter under disguise and order fast enough to remain solidly in their petri dish.

"Don't Look at the Menu Board"

This one's new-ish. I believe it's completely unremarked-upon, but it's gone viral over the past two years.

You walk into a place with counter or bar service. A large menu board occupies the better portion of a wall, and you stand briefly outside the line of fire to scan it and weigh options. Suddenly your train of thought is interrupted by a worker handing you a printed version of that same menu. They're providing mercy; relieving your pain and gently guiding you to a far better and more civilized experience. Rather than tilting my head 30° upward, wouldn't I prefer to bask in the ease of a 60° downward head tilt?

It inevitably happens the moment I've finally gotten my bearings within the menu board. At that precise moment, I'm guided/subtly commanded to start over, parsing the same data in an entirely different layout/format. With no imaginable benefit. All just because, apparently, the gigantic board - which management put great effort into building and displaying - is an abomination one must not peer at.

The printed version is foisted on you with two unstated but clear intimations: 1. We're doing you a favor, like handing you a towel when you're wet or lighting your cigarette. Isn't this better? 2. This is not optional. You will accept this print version. Only an asshole would refuse. Indeed, if you do decline, workers narrow their eyes and walk away muttering. Sure, asshole, no problem, peer cluelessly up at the board. Enjoy your ungainly slight head tilt! Be a skeevy board-reading rube! Will you be needing to pee into a Pepsi cup, as well? Or have us provide a comfort animal for your visit with us? Let us know what other marginal issues you'll need us to tolerate.

Why did you put that huge board there in the first place? Why have you goaded me into this?

"Do You Need Change?"

I surely don't need to explain.

There is no greater disproof of the free marketer's conviction that business instantly and shrewdly adopts and evolves to serve consumer prefs and needs than the fact that at this late date waiters still ask this most famously irritating of questions. I can only assume it's like direct marketing: a ploy savagely hated by absolute everyone (including its perpetrators), but which is always so dumbfoundingly successful - unrivaled in its success - that, having mixed our signals (i.e. what we say we want versus what we actually do), this is something civilization is stuck with, forever.

In other words, the practice must pay well enough, in the long run, to be worth infuriating slews of customers.

"What Were You Looking For?”

In this posting, I wrote:

One of my pet peeves is when you run into a store, don’t see what you need (you're certain they don’t carry it), and the owner stops you as you exit, indulgently asking what you were looking for. You say “I’m positive you don’t have it”. He kindly replies “Try me”. Figuring you're doing him a favor by informing him of unmet consumer demand, you explain what you were seeking, and he drifts back to his previous task (you're no longer a customer, no longer of interest) indifferently sneering that, no, they don’t have that. Like you’re the asshole.

Apparently dismissed, you silently trod out the door.

A Business With No End

I have never before seen a newspaper story anything like "A Business With No End", published, somehow, last week by the NY Times.

Remember that weird FBI raid a while ago on Newsweek, which hooked into the cultish group that had bought the company and had immediately set about mass-firing the journalists?

Do you ever wonder about those Amazon marketplace sellers who price items several times higher than Amazon itself does?

Have you ever had the subconscious impression that clickbait is growing like kudzu - just as fast as you've learned to evade it - and that it may have become vastly vaster than your vastest imagination could imagine?

And have you noticed that the clickbait model of aggressive, empty, attention-clogging trash has adapted and propagated to every plane and realm? As the article asks,

What is the experience of clickbait other than realizing we have vastly overpaid, even if only with our attention? News, information and products are simply someone’s inventory.

Most scarily, had you ever imagined that the kudzu of multi-realm clickbait might leap from our monitors and begin taking over our actual world? Quoting the article again:

Still harder for me to grasp was the total interpenetration of e-commerce and physical space. Standing inside Stevens Books was like being on a stage set for Stevens Books, Stevens Book, Stevens Book Shop, and Stevensbook — all at the same time. It wasn’t that the bookstore wasn’t real, but rather that it felt reverse-engineered by an online business, or a series of them. Being a human who resides in physical space, my perceptual abilities were overwhelmed.

What if all the above are weirdly related? Well, they certainly seem to be. Check out the article. But I would discourage you from reading it in its entirety. It's a vertiginous microcosm of the vertiginous house of mirrors it futilely attempts to map.

I'm dumbstruck that the NY Times even published it. It lands absolutely nowhere, serving as a deftly researched/written performance piece more befitting of Werner Herzog or Lars Von Trier than the Grey Old Lady (I suppose they did it to swipe back at the folks who ran Newsweek into the ground; journalists grant themselves unusual indulgence in score-settling against those who attack their profession).

Read the first few paragraphs, and, each time you start feeling as if you're drowning, jag forward via agitated punchy scrollings until the narrative retracts itself from each of countless rabbit holes and cul-de-sacs. Do not read thoroughly/carefully. Do not attempt to follow all the way down, and for god's sake, do not Google. There madness lies.

A ten minute browse is sufficient, and well worth the effort. In the 70s and 80s, weighty "futurists" would tell us what the future would be like, their predictions inevitably laughably wrong. But there's something about this article - this article! - that leaves me certain I've been shown a sharp picture of Life on Earth circa 2025 (i.e. just before we all perish in the rising waters). It may - or may not - be the diabolical and unknowable scheme of a slippery Korean-American evangelical pastor/spider named David Jang and his shady company, IBT Media, and his shady bible college, Olivet University, in association with all matter in the visible universe.


Update: check out this comment on the article.

Why American Biz Rejects Chowhoundishness

Me: Why is there no super-competent wine bar in the Finger Lakes, where you can go try glasses of the best stuff, without needing to trek around to far-flung tasting rooms?

Local Wine Expert Friend: The best-selling Fingerlakes wine is Haslitt Red Cat, which is sweet hybrid swill. It would take a leap of faith for someone to open a top-notch wine bar.


He's right, and, unfortunately, this sort of thinking is seen everywhere. I first noticed it back in high school, when I went to the beach with friends who had good taste in music but chose to blast awful pop on the portable radio because “girls don’t like Frank Zappa”. We could have tractor-beamed every cool Zappa-loving girl on the beach and enjoyed an awesome summer, but instead we drew marginal bored attention from boring normals (while afflicting ourselves). It made not a bit of sense to me. Why aim for every single girl? We're smarter than orangutans!

It drives me crazy to see this thinking in nearly all business markets. It's tautological: they proffer only crap, because low-quality's the norm. I.e. they give consumers what they want, and what consumers want is what they give them. To me, it seems obvious that while 80% will indeed gladly accept crap, the 20% who care about quality - not just richy-rich snobs, but any folks who eschew the most well-trodden consumer pathways - also constitute a worthy (and scalable) market.

No. American business - even small business - usually ignores that 20%. One doesn’t need 80% of a town's population as patrons; 20% would do nicely. Yet most everyone chases the 80%, and this is why quality is so lumpy and chowhounding, even at this late date, still feels so against-the-grain.

I certainly understand why most aim for the 80%. But given that capitalism abhors a vacuum, I can't understand why the opportunity created by this neglect is so seldom pursued. Three hypotheses, none of them hopeful:

1. Statistical naiveté (i.e. "80% is more than 20%, and who doesn't want 'more'?").

2. It's harder to traffic in quality...and harder to please the intrinsically hard-to-please. You must really know your stuff, and keep up. You can't just blithely phone in an order for X pallets of commoditized widgets, ala The Sims. When "the product" is more than a bland variable, business complexity is substantially increased.

3. The notion that "better" might be preferred on the merits, rather than via luxury cache, is relatively new, and capitalism, which is far more laggy than Adam Smith anticipated, has not yet processed this new norm. For example, Danny Meyer's 1985 brainstorm of opening an everyday-ish cafe that happened to be way better quality than usual - and the success which ensued for Union Square Cafe - still has not been fully absorbed by the restaurant industry (or even by Meyer himself).

Management, Art, and The Price

George W Bush was correct: management is primarily about decision-making. Many, many, many decisions. You must be a decision machine, just spitting them out, one after another. Steve Jobs didn't wear those black turtlenecks as shtick; it simply removed a layer of decision-making from his day. Anyone who's ever managed anything can relate.

To be successful, 95% of those decisions must be smart (I cherish my beloved headroom of 5% stupidity, and viciously defend it whenever astonishment is expressed at my lapses). That's a lot of pressure. And a certain number needs to be beyond smart - either brilliant or else just super creative. That's not pressure, however, because that's a pull, not a push. As I once wrote: "the really good stuff arrives via epiphany, eureka, and inspiration - 'out of nowhere' and hard to claim credit for."

Creativity works the same way - it's all about decisions. This note or that? This color over here or over there? Which word in that place? In fact, art (in all its myriad forms) is a much denser aggregation of decisions - by at least an order of magnitude.

It is very serious over-exertion to try to do both at once. I did it once and barely survived, and now I'm doing it again - and once again experiencing the sensation of trying to warm an ocean. But it will be over soon.

The most important part of myself absolutely thrives from giving my all, but extreme commitment also exacts a terrible price.


When my impending project - which will be unlike anything that's come before - launches in January, I really hope people enjoy it, and support it by spreading the word. Stay tuned.

Magicians and Their Secrets

There are a few skills and faculties I've worked very hard on for decades (after having started out with natural aptitude), and I've gotten really good at them (though there are way more realms where I'm pathetically lousy; it takes all kinds!). Yet, most often when I find myself around people involved in those very same areas, they pay very little attention. Respect - or even admiration - might be expressed at the outset, but my process - which I never hide - is rarely observed.

I know that a lot of it's because I don't act like a pompous prick. As a low gravitas individual (LGI), I don't exactly compel hushed solicitation. But what I've learned is very surprising: even magicians who are loose and free with their secrets find themselves preserving their shroud of mystery due to sheer disinterest.


Similarly, it's a misconception that you must take great care to protect your creative ideas from being stolen. First, the very few human beings capable of exuecuting ideas into existence are already extremely busy executing ideas into existence, rather than fishing around trying to snatch your idea (unless you've got, like, a procedure for manufacturing a widget for 2¢ less per gross). The problem's never persistent over-interest. It's disinterest. Even those gifted with fantastic ideas and the eloquence to explain them are universally misunderstood and ignored until the big reveal (and even then, good luck with that better mouse trap!). Even the most brilliant innovations are invariably laughed at and undervalued in the beginning (even the iPhone) - and those are just the ones that we've heard of!

To digress from my digression, here's my standard reply when asked whether I've ever "ruined" a restaurant by over-publicizing it: "I've seen way, way, way more great places wither from disinterest than from over-attention."

That's why keeping great stuff secret is a mortal sin in my religion.

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Epilogue

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Several people have described my "Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out" tale as a classic case of "Founder's Syndrome"...an inability to let go, manifested by endless peevish frustration with "the idiots who took over my company".

Perhaps it's true. But I don't think so. As I stressed repeatedly in the series, I completely expected the new owners to do as they liked. I expected the operation to change. I expected the promises made to me not to be kept, and my suggestions to be disregarded even though they'd hired me on, ostensibly, to run things. Above all, I expected changes in the name of profitability, with insensitive regard for the quality of the resource (though I have warned, all along, that the quality of the resource is crucial to its profitability; there are lots of places to randomly squawk about restaurants, but Chowhound's value - the lure for its traffic and the basis for its wide public recognition - has always been in the startling expertise of its contributors).

I've also heard, over the years, from a number of entrepreneurs, both massive and modest, who've described this series as a painfully accurate depiction of what we go through. Of course, this may just represent confirmation bias from like-minded whiney control freaks - my fellow sufferers of Founder's Syndrome!

So which is it? Is it that founders maintain a rigid, narrow-minded view of what's best for their creations, or that things tend to go south once founders sell out?

I think the answer can be found in the distinction I've often returned to, between creative and non-creative people. Founders are creative types able to make something from nothing. Corporations are vehicles for relentless management of Something. Ideally, the two would constitute a symbiotic yin/yang, and, indeed, the standard course is for the former to launch and the latter to acquire (it's very rare for founders to remain in charge as their companies mature; Zuckerberg's a mutant).

As I wrote a few installments back:

The best route for creative people with business impulses (or vice versa) is to hatch one's own startup. And then sell out to puddy pudpuds who'll follow procedures to maintain it and apply relentlessness to profit from it.

Both sides screw up when they encroach too far on the other's territory. I am absolutely a poster child for the woes of a creative founder hitting a wall after sticking around too long. With some funding, I might have instituted the revenue scheme on my own early on. But I lacked the funds and the time, and that's on me (though, in my defense, I was perennially being drowned by relentless scaling). I should have been talking to investors (learning to polish my shoes, to carefully modulate my voice, and to project gravitas), when I was mostly freaking out about the latest spammer, or getting the newsletters out on time. But, as I've explained, there's a point where you're so locked into daily overhead that the marginal time to push forward disappears.

I make a terrible pudpud, and CNET made a terrible creative founder. I stuck around too long and, paradoxically, they jumped in too early. The operation suffered from my poor pudpud skills as well as from CNET's poor creative skills.

The pass-off was the problem. If my boss - who mistakenly fancied himself as highly creative - was a few notches less cocky, realizing his limitations, as I understood my own - he'd have left the creativity to the creative and motivated founder he'd hired, and supported with the tools, skills, and funds I lacked. And I'd have gladly passed the result on to him to manage. And he'd have done a fine job with it, as would have CBS. Sure, it would have degraded, but it wouldn't have rankled me. Again: I went in expecting degradation! I had no illusions.

Instead, bad creativity was injected, and corporations, which are not vehicles for deep vision, have flailed in their attempts to undo and redo. And since that's my skill set, it's been awfully tough for me to watch from the sidelines.

A prescient version of this entire arc was posted by a blogger named John Wilson, shortly after Chowhound was sold. Noticing my sole public gasp of exasperation, he wrote:

Oh, the joys of becoming an employee in a big company.

Lifecycle:

1. Talent starts innovative business

2. Big company buys talent & their company

3. Big company "B listers" sit on top of talent, using their experience of never having had to build value from scratch to direct the new division activities

4. Big company can't figure out why it hasn't continued to see the success achieved by the business it acquired, in the period since purchase and decides even tighter control of new division is required

5. Acquired talent leaves in disgust [taking most of their riches] and lives on yacht for a while

6. go to 1.

Yup. Only no yacht for me (2005 was not a time when tech founders were being paid yacht money), but I have definitely moved on to new projects. Watch this space!

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Part 25

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A tale this tortured and tumultuous probably deserves a proper dismount - a contemplative final assessment of The Things I've Learned. However, this entire Slog fits that bill. Since launching it in 2008, not long after I left CNET, I've covered a wide range of topics - creativity, corporations, human behavior, marketing, fame, demoralization and resilience, and much more - which were slow-cooking as I gradually unpacked this disorienting experience. As bits of insight have congealed, I've shared them here. It's telling that almost nothing on this Slog could have been written by me prior to 1997. My 1996 self browses the more than 1400 postings and wonders, "Who is that guy?".

The telling of this origin story has, for seven years, weaved through my attempts to catalog the evolving psychic fruits of that very same story. This Slog is the result of having been made stronger by that which nearly killed me. The good, the bad, and the ugly are three avatars of the same teacher, and while some life lessons may flay you, the trick - always in this world - is to open oneself up, fully, come what may. To steer into skids. As I wrote in that last link,

If you can train yourself to respond to adversity and setback with an open, loose attitude, redirecting attention forward rather than obsessively locking attention on previous injury, life transforms miraculously. Just from that one tiny adjustment.

I can't say my equanimity has been perfect. Perhaps that's why the resultant insight has been slow-cooked, rather than swiftly served. But this much is for sure: throughout events both harrowing and triumphant, as I've been places I'd have preferred not to visit and learned things I'd rather not to know, and as my forbearance was rewarded with small hors d'oeuvres of wisdom, the entire experience leaving me a stranger to my former self, I have, paradoxically, felt like exactly the same guy through every moment of all this.

The same humming awareness has peered out from my eyes through it all - since earliest childhood, really - blithely unaffected. Everything that happens, it turns out, happens around you, not to you. If this seems an odd note to end on, I can assure you it's not. It is, after all, customary for grand sagas to conclude with a return home.


Read the next installment (Epilogue)

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Part 24

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A few installments back, I explained how management that is both stupid and ineffectual is not necessarily a bad thing. Bad ideas paired with poor execution at least maintains status quo. However, I teased:

One horrible initiative was actually pushed through...and put us on a shaky business trajectory which persists to this day.

And, the following installment left off with this note:

CNET/CBS's failure to capture, organize, and repurpose Chowhound's prodigious data torrent is the basis of the problem, as we'll discuss next time.

So here, finally, is exactly how CNET and CBS failed to capitalize on Chowhound's potential, giving rise to a painful decade of decline and dilution.

Clay (the pseudonym I've assigned to my slightly unhinged, tantrum-prone boss at CNET, who's long gone from the company) faced one overarching challenge. As a community site, Chowhound was a poor setting for ads, because advertisers prefer their products to be touted in highly-controlled surroundings. Ads positioned amid free public discussion might wind up associated with crazy, offensive, digressive crowd noise. Random big-mouths might even poke fun at the ads. Chowhound needed a shiny, composed, controlled front end where most of the ads could go.

Also, Chowhound's discussion needed to be screened off. The geese who laid our golden eggs, contributing the savvy, cutting-edge food information and news that made the site such a draw, wouldn't enjoy having their clubhouse diluted by hordes of Olive Garden fans raving about free breadsticks. Hardcore chowhounds would bolt in a nanosecond if all of America ever dropped by to inject food opinions. This was another reason we needed a shiny front end; a glossy layer to absorb and entertain less fervid newbies. The discussion part would be de-emphasized, requiring persistence to find and join. Ideally, only serious people would make the effort, and the resource wouldn't dilute. The rest would be entranced by shiny baubles up front.

So this was Clay's big idea: he bought a defunct magazine brand called CHOW, to serve as our shiny editorial front end. Get it? Chowhound and...CHOW! A natural! The fact that CHOW's frivolous tone and approach was completely at odds with the astute, passionate vibe of Chowhound was immaterial. The front end, after all, was for unserious eaters, and such people would surely prefer a lightheaded approach.

Corporate types frequently mistake ditziness for accessibility. I've never understood the assumption that intelligent people prefer unthoughtful treatment of topics outside their expertise. That we turn into babies when we start something new. This mistaken assumption explains all sorts of needlessly dropped standards and senseless pandering. The media have been trained to cast swine at pearls.

And Jesus H Christ did they ever sink money into this. Kitchens were built. Hordes of staff and reporters were recruited (identical-looking well-put-together 20-something females; don't ask). Photography studios were built, editorial power circles diagrammed, and, very quickly, millions spent to launch a new media brand with all the needless weight and inefficiency of old media. Watch out world, we're building a whole new Conde Nast! It's gonna be HUGE!

No. It wasn't huge. It was just another soulless, indistinguishable entry in a wide field. They did everything possible to divert Chowhound's healthy traffic through the Chow.com domain in order to juice the stats (e.g. Chowhound user profiles, the oft-loaded hub for every hound, routed through Chow.com), but CHOW never caught on, and just annoyed the chowhounds, who didn't appreciate the ceaseless cross-promotion of obnoxious, crass, fake-edgy articles like "Craptails", "Does Your Ice Cream Truck Sell Heroin?", or "12 Alt-Milks for Today’s Alt-Bros" as they tried to finess the fine points of Japanese curry.

It was a catastrophic waste of money, so budgets kept slashing and workers kept shedding until CHOW had retracted into a skeleton operation. I'm not an "I told you so" kind of guy, but, sheesh, at least they could have listened to my idea; the plan I'd conceived during the lean years while hell-bent on finding a route to Chowhound profitability. The plan I'd have implemented if I was actually in charge of the brand after CNET acquired both it and me.

They didn't listen, because they'd decided I had nothing valuable to say about monetizing Chowhound since I'd failed to do so on my watch. My having built, grown, and run the operation with zero funding and zero assets did not mitigate this apparent failure. Neither did the fact that it had never been my original goal to monetize it. My aim was to create something useful and beloved, and it succeeded beyond all expectation. But that success was on my terms, not their's. So I was the kooky, food-obsessed founder, and they, the grown-ups, knew better.

The following is the plan this kooky founder implored his genius corporate overlords to consider:

During the last years of my reign, we'd built a system for encapsulating the best tips from the message boards, adding fact-checked address/phone information and map links for restaurants, and organizing it all into sleek weekly executive summaries. We'd email this to subscribers, who felt relieved of the obligation to follow a zillion busy, digressive discussions. They could relax without ever missing hot tips or news. And more casual users, unwilling to devote hours to surfing the forum, could receive primo chow tips - the crème de la crème - like chocolates neatly left on their pillows.

Great editors (serious hounds who'd have been reading every posting every day, anyway) churned this out for three geographical regions, and it was a very low-cost and high-value operation. Though the backlog of forum discussion was a dense morass of terrabytes of impenetrable chat, our process of steadily culling this data and normalizing it into database-readable format would, over time, tame the beast of messy, digressive discussion into a sleek info trove, easily available for all sorts of re-use. We'd already sold a book series built from this content to Penguin, and we could syndicate it, just for starters, to local newspapers and web sites nationwide. Great fresh nearby food discoveries weekly! Who wouldn't want that?

We'd also created CHEW, the Chowhound Editing Wizard. Searching through years of backlogged discussion was a nightmare suitable only for fanatical hounds. But as CHEW digested the weekly newsletters, it build up a database that could be searched for orderly information about a given restaurant. Or to find recommended restaurants near you. Or any of the other modern functions modern web sites are expected to offer (and which, to this day, Chowhound does not).

With just a dozen part-time editors, we could have ordered data chaos and created a never-ending stream of food news, tips, and information in polished, ready-to-publish format (while leaving the hounds alone to happily do their thing). Chowhound was an engine for aggregating great, smart content, and my scheme harnessed that power; winnowing, organizing, and polishing a gusher of content into valuable media product.

And Chowhound wasn't just about restaurants. Our Home Cooking discussion overflowed with ingenious recipes. Our General Topics discussion was a fountain of smart opinions on food brands and cuisine info. Our Trader Joe's coverage, alone, was unprecedentedly deep, smart, and current; the essential resource for all TJs customers. The best of it all could be edited and polished to stock the site's front end with glossy editorial content. New cooking or dining trends? Check. Clever workarounds for old kitchen problems? Check. Frying secrets of Malaysian grandmas? Check. Rice cooker tips from fanatics who've tried every model? Check. All this and more, to infinity.

The immense fire hose of Chowhound's data, massaged by smart editors, could supply far more, better, smarter, timelier, sexier content than any cubicle jungle of scrubbed English majors, at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it's all intrinsically focus-grouped to ensure interestingness. Dull topics wouldn't have caught on!

For a couple hundred thousand dollars per year, we could have jump-started a media brand no one could have touched, taking advantage of Chowhound's new-media efficiencies by harvesting the crowd-sourced savvy of its huge community, which, within any five minute span, spewed great information about every topic under the gastronomic sun. A dozen people, working from home, could have empowered something boffo - the ultimate expression of everything Chowhound was about. Like Chinese chefs and their proverbial pigs, we'd make best use of every part of the Hound (except the bark?)

Instead, millions were spent creating and maintaining a stale, inflexible, inefficient old-media source for perky/ditzy junk, while the perpetual outflow of smart, juicy content from Chowhound was left to molder on the floor.

No one listened. And with each subsequent regime change, as the failure of Clay's brainstorm began to register and anxious execs began to rejigger, I repeated the suggestion, and was ignored by a succession of visionary geniuses, none of whom, in the end, was able to effectuate anything more than short-sighted, cheap ploys for traffic.


As I write this, in Summer 2015, the latest regime at CBS is poised to reveal an all-new Chowhound site. Apparently, CHOW has been jettisoned (no big secret; the current brand manager announced this in, of all places, his LinkedIn profile at least three weeks ago, long before any announcement, but apparently none too soon to bolster his tally of bold professional accomplishments).

I suppose this means Chowhound will bear the blame for the backlog of editorial atrocities perpetrated under the CHOW brand - which previously were segregated.

Dilution!

Plus, the forum will no longer be shielded by an editorial front end.

More dilution!

Plus, there will likely be a new round of marketing, drawing hordes of Olive Garden fans - and their breadstick raves - directly to the forum's door.

Big dilution.

Most of the hardcore hounds have already bolted. I imagine we'll say goodbye to many more as Chowhound completes its devolution into a technically stunted version of Yelp. Personally, I'm delighted and astounded that it's lasted even this long (having originally been conceived as a three hour tour; a three hour tour). But I don't, alas, see a way to reverse the dilution, even if the powers that be were suddenly to become clueful. As I wrote way back in Installment #3:

Running a site like Chowhound is like gardening, in that keeping it up requires the deflection of all sorts of entropy...[Chowhound was] a polished oasis, which self-reinforced by attracting great, discerning users - folks who valued intelligence, authenticity, and focus. If Chowhound were permitted to suck, even just a little, the spell would be broken, finicky experts would leave in droves, and in would flood the Olive Garden People, who, no longer intimidated by the high prevalent savvy, would let loose en masse with ditzy opinions. Entropy would jeopardize the precious climate of passionate expertise that made our data irresistible. The essential issue - the issue that kept me glued in front of my computer for most of a decade - is that entropy can't be undone. When online forums degrade, they do so irreversibly.

...and, returning to the same metaphor in Installment #8:

Chowhound has two unusual points of value: 1. the premium quality of its data, and 2. its tightly-focused audience, which is uniquely discriminating and knowledgable. The data and the audience, the audience and the data, are like chicken and egg. Dilution of one would result in immediate dilution of the other, and entropy can never be reversed.

Read the next installment (#25)