This was too hard to resist posting.
Here is an excerpt of an asinine post from Eater.com:
Part of the point of Eater National is to parse, aggregate and save you from the massive amount of noise generated by the digital food universe, which brings us to the matter of the beautiful yellow sticker you see here. Given that the internet is about 1,000,000 cutesy food blogs too vast, for a limited time only, Eater is offering $25 to any food blogger who will agree to shut his or her food blog down (and post this yellow notice on the site). What better a way is there to mark this glorious day than with a special offer! Answer: There is no better way. Ladies and gentlemen, You’re welcome.
Here is the complete article if you really want to get offended:
http://eater.com/archives/2009/10/03/with-the-launch-today-of.php
I know one reason for their DICK move is probably to gain more popularity and lure more people (angry, pissed off people) onto their site for their new launch. And it’s an incredibly idiotic move considering the majority of their readers are foodies, ‘mundane’ foodies as they would call them. Noticing the angry comments in response to their post, I think the majority of the readers will cease to read THEIR website from now on.
And $25 to food bloggers to shut down?! Really??? Most bloggers blog because they enjoy it. And $25 sounds so insulting since this is what Eater.com thinks your site is worth. I heard that Eater actually offered Seriouseats.com $1000 to shut down THEIR website as well! Ridiculous.
Maybe they’re afraid of all the competition from people who actually have unique websites with creative ideas. Looking at eater.com’s site, all I see are a bunch of foodnetwork banners, and poorly written articles recapping various food reality tv shows. Who’s mundane now? It looks like a weak version of Seriouseats.com to me. If they focused on improving their website design, writing, editing, and stopped being douchebags, maybe they’ll gain more readers by actually being a good quality website, and not trying to bully other bloggers.
In addition to that, after they expect to buy out blogs for a measly $25, are we suppose to bow down to them and read what THEY think is worthy to be read? How pompous and arrogant of them. I mean, Eater NATIONAL only seems to cover NY, SF and LA. I didn’t realize national meant 3 cities. So like….a bunch of food reality tv show recaps + reviews of overpriced restaurants in 3 cities. Nice. At least Seriouseats has some variety in their posts.
If Eater doesn’t like the ’1,000,000 cutesy food blogs’ on the blogosphere, then they should stop reading and move on. And I’ll move on and never read their website again.
AMEN! SERIOUSLY. THEY BEAUTY OF THE WEB IS THAT YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO WHERE YOU DON’T WANT TO GO. I WENT TO THEIR SITE AND YOU’RE RIGHT. THOUGH MUNDANE MAY HAVE BEEN TOO A KIND OF A WORD TO USE. I THOUGHT, AT LEAST IF THEY HAD A ROCKIN SITE I COULD UNDERSTAND THEIR ELITE-NESS. BUT NOT SO MUCH.
THANKS FOR POSTING THIS… AND I ENJOY YOUR SITE.
DEB
A-frickin’-men!Well said. (My wee rant on this bunch of hacks is
here…).
Sorry that I misspelled ‘ridiculous’ in my post as I was ranting about Eater’s misspellings and grammatical errors. I know that’s the one thing people go after when they rant about misspellings.
What a bunch of bullshit. I had never read Eater.com and, from now on, never will. And the comments by a certain DocChuck made me want to smack him -his holier than thou attitude and belittling of non-professional food writers is almost too much to take. And then I go on his profile and he’s not a professional food writer himself. He’s a retired college professor with a PhD in Higher Education. This is the kind of person that drives professional writers insane with bitchy, useless comments on newspaper websites. This is also the kind of unhappy, grumpy person that should not have been contaminating minds in the educational system for god knows how many years.
No wonder he likes eaters.com move so much. They are the same kind of elitist idiots.
I’m tempted to create a free downloadable sticker that everyone can put on their blog that says “Eaters.com is an elitist, bigot, poor excuse for a website”…
Debbie – Exactly. There could be a trillion food blogs out there, and who cares? That just means there’s more people with the same shared interests, and I think that’s great. It’s a bit selfish to want to trample people down and strive to be one of the few food sites (or sole site) on the internet. There’s enough room for all of us.
Ouzelem – I read your rant and enjoyed it. Glad so many of us are in agreement here :)
Chiara – I think the biggest shocker for me was that there actually are food blog haters. I can understand controversies existing around mommy blogs, political blogs, gossip blogs, etc. but not food. How can you cut someone down who likes to talk about food? Are you THAT miserable? I know the yellow poster was probably just a gimmick, but it was in extremely poor taste.