[nickbauman]

Hi I work for BuzzFeed engineering, but this is just me talking, not my company. The guy that started Tasty uses an empirical technique he devised in-house to come up with recipes people love. Wish I could say more than that. But I believe the "recipe space" he explores can come up with recipes that can at times look like previously published recipes. There are only so many combinations of ingredients that will click with the human palate. I guarantee you he's not directly ripping anyone off.

[objclxt]

> I guarantee you he's not directly ripping anyone off.

You can understand why people might be less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, given that in the past Buzzfeed has extensively plagiarized:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/editors-note-an-apology-to...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/buzzfee...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-vi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Stopera

[nickbauman]

Your citations quite literally mentions two people who wrote for BuzzFeed as far back as 2008, not even for Tasty.

[mustacheemperor]

It must be a truly incredible formula to consistently produce the same results as when serious eats spends multiple iterations researching and developing a recipe and documenting the process.

[DanBC]

Serious Eats just demos techniques from popular molecular gastronomy books. (They do at least mention this when they do it).

[eridius]

Hi Nick,

I get the impulse to defend the company you work for. It's commendable. But if you're embarrassed to see your employer be accused of plagiarism, it would be a lot more effective for you to pressure people internally to start providing proper attribution than to write comments like this. Internal pressure can often accomplish things that external pressure can't.

[nickbauman]

Good point. However, BuzzFeed's record on plagiarism is also being painted here with a very broad brush. The real occurrences of plagiarism at BuzzFeed is not out-of-keeping with normal attrition at major media dailies in the US media. Every news organization has had issues with it at some point or another. BuzzFeed is no different.

That said there's definitely always room for improvement.

[eridius]

I'm familiar with BuzzFeed's other "articles", and I've seen plenty of attribution there (e.g. articles that basically come straight from reddit, with each bullet point attributed to a reddit username, that always amuses me). I haven't actually watched any of the Tasty videos, so I haven't had a chance to see for myself if and when they get attributed, but if Kenji López-Alt is raging about Tasty on Twitter, then I have to assume there's a bit of a problem there.

[nickbauman]

However, when he first saw BuzzFeed’s recipe, published on their food site called Tasty, in May of this year, he said the ingredient list was nearly identical “with a few tweaks”. — Kenji López-Alt

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-ac...

You can't copyright a list of ingredients.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/03/24/recipes-copyright...

[eridius]

And that's why he's not suing them for copyright violation. But just because something isn't a copyright violation doesn't mean it's not plagiarism, and doesn't mean that you shouldn't provide attribution.

[cylinder]

Give me a break.

>empirical technique he devised in-house to come up with recipes people love

This doesn't even mean anything. Empty words.

[huac]

"An empirical technique to come up with recipes people love" includes "picking the most popular recipes from other websites."

[Simon_says]

To be fair, that's my empirical technique.

[leesalminen]

Survivorship bias?