Chowhound Staff: Which of you have voluntarily chosen to no longer collapse previously read posts?

Question

I'd like to know which (and how many) of you have chosen to take advantage of the new "feature", along with your reasons for why you have chosen this, and what benefits you have observed.

Win me over.

Mr Taster

Answer

What do you really expect them to say?

Answer

How about surveying this community instead of fulfilling your own personal needs? Wouldn't that be more appropriate?

Answer

Not me. I won't use this site on a mobile device at least until I can find a good ad blocker, and maybe not even then.

This place is basically a bulletin board, and without a way to see only unread posts would be a huge time suck.

I'd even like there to be a way to opt-out of the annoying pagination.

Answer

One additional thought. The non-collapsing threads seem to be in line with other site designs that have rolled out over the years, in that engineering seems to be pulling site design ideas from other sites and implementing them in Chowhound.

A lot of Chowhounds, in particular the ones who are better informed and have been around a long time, don't necessarily use other types of boards. 

Speaking from personal experience as one of the senior hounds, Chowhound is the only board I read/use on a regular basis. I remember when you rolled out the "tool drawer" on the mobile site (the three horizonal lines), making me click into a drawer before clicking into my profile (whereas before my profile was on the main screen), it seemed ridiculous to me. Why add the extra taps/time? And why are 3 lines a "toolbox"? Turns out, that's what Facebook does, and I don't use Facebook, so that convention was lost on me. All I saw was the practical upshot of something that used to take me one tap, now takes two, or three. That means my user experience became longer, slower.

When I research other (non-Chowhound) forums on other topics, the board reader software (that most everyone else seems to use) feels clunky and unintuitive. I never liked the pagination on those boards, either. However, generally threads on other BBS's add replies to the very end (not threading them throughout the conversation, like Chowhound). So in those boards, it's easy to click once and jump to the last page, and read all the new updates. If you've been away for a while, you can jump back 2 pages to read the even earlier replies. 

That setup doesn't work (at all) with Chowhound, since the nature of the software encourages stream-of-thought tangents woven throughout, as opposed to a bunch of new posts clumped to the end, which is why the pagination-as-timesaver theory makes no practical sense.

It feels as if Chowhound is taking site design cues from other boards and implementing them into Chowhound, without taking into account the unique nature of the site. Chowhound is special specifically because its structure encourages a natural conversation flow. It appears the current changes are meant to shoehorn Chowhound into a more conventional box, and that's a great loss for old time Chowhounds like me, and a shame for the new ones who will never know what they're missing. In food terms, it's like Jim Leff handed you an imported Kobe steak, with all that gorgeous marbling and marshmallow-tender texture, and you're grinding it into Kobe sliders (because that's what's popular), and ruining the exquisite texture that was the whole point of the thing to begin with. 

In my opinion, that is a very big mistake.

Mr Taster

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