[crocsarecool]

I can’t look up a recipe for boiled eggs without coming upon a 15 paragraph essay with ads in between each paragraph. It’s so obnoxious now. I don’t mind that people want to monetize, but it’s getting off putting when it is so obnoxious.

[Mediterraneo10]

On recipe blogs, you are probably not looking at the actual author monetizing. Rather, someone decided to create a copycat website, hire a minimum-wage content writer off a freelancing platform to rewrite the original text so that no copyright violation is apparent, and then they put the copycat website up with a boatload of advertising and SEO. The 15 paragraphs are an SEO trick, as Google gives higher weight to longform text.

This ecosystem is now so advanced that new copycat recipe sites are based on existing copycat sites. You can easily tell if a recipe website is a copycat by comparing the supposed author bio to the quality of the English. If the author bio claims these are recipes by a born and bred Louisiana native who wants to share Southern cooking with the world, but the actual text is full of grammatical mistakes typical of Eastern Europeans or South/Southeast Asians, it is clearly a rewritten copycat site.

[Gene_Parmesan]

Yeah, exactly. Although in addition to the text acting as SEO, the initial reasoning behind all the "recipes-as-blogs" approaches is that recipes are not in general copyrightable, as they aren't generally considered creative works. (Whether the food itself is a creative work is not the question, it's whether the text qualifies as such.) So cookbook/recipe blog writers add enough text to the recipe to make the content subject to copyright protections.

Then, as you note, when people do inevitably copy the recipe, they churn out new replacement text.

You'll notice, for instance, that a recipe 'database' site like allrecipes doesn't have these massive text blocks associated with user-posted recipes, because there's no need or desire to have those be copyrighted.

[doublejay1999]

Great point.

There are fundamentally 2 types of content, although the line is getting blurred : The hobbyist blog, and the publishers magazine.

The first exists for joy, the second only exists to deliver adverts.

THe blurring occurs because some of the blogs became such hot property the founders sold up.

[vorpalhex]

FF with uBlock is available on android.

Alternatively check out "Paprika" which bills itself as a recipe manager but actually will scrape webpages and extract out recipes for you.

[IronWolve]

And darkreader addon. Addons for firefox mobile is very handy.

[ohyeshedid]

I, too, am tired of reading fanfic murder mysteries to get basic recipe information.

[MacroChip]

I made https://thisfoodblogdoesnotexist.com as satire. It uses GPT2 to generate blog content like those 15 paragraph essays.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Needs more paragraphs. None of them talk about how their kids are doing in school.

[michaelmrose]

2 years from now someone else's AI is generating content based on your content, a year later someone is ripping them off, a year later another script is filtering out the most useful stuff from the second guys stuff and its actually good content.

[PhasmaFelis]

Some of the recipes seem actually plausible, e.g. https://thisfoodblogdoesnotexist.com/30-Minute-Rice-Pudding-...

[MacroChip]

The recipes are real and not generated. Feel free to make it!

[astura]

five cups milk would make rice soup.

[fsflover]

You should add your site to the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25176101.

[bilekas]

The same, I find news articles particularly bad examples. I get advertisments, but news articles with excessive clickbaiity adds (adds not internal links to other articles) really do just make me close the tab down.

If there was some better mobile integration of the extensions or built into the browser itself to be perhaps less intrusive adds allowed it would be appreciated.

From that, are browsers legally allowed to implement an adblock/ublock directly into their browser ? Seems like something that would be considered against fair use or something along those lines.

[SilasX]

>The same, I find news articles particularly bad examples. I get advertisments, but news articles with excessive clickbaiity adds (adds not internal links to other articles) really do just make me close the tab down.

Yeah, they follow every dark pattern in the book, especially on mobile. 90% of the time, I'll see a video at the top that autoplays, and then if I scroll down, it will make the video hover over the 75% of the article I'm trying to read. Who is this supposed to benefit?

[mjevans]

Comcast and other ISPs who have crazy small data-caps and then bill the consumer 5 times over for used bandwidth and "overages" that might have MAYBE made sense 20 years ago.

[doublejay1999]

that's not to mention the first page of results from your query will be from amzon, ebay, & eggsdirect.com trying to sell you the eggs in the first place.

[SV_BubbleTime]

The. Worst.

I don’t care at all about any of this. Give me the time they boil for ffs.

I don’t know if it’s sites paying by the word, or SEO, or some “value added” psychological trick. It is getting worse.

[b112]

I bet they've noticed 'more time spent on the page' since they added interesting stories to those recipes! "When I was little, Grandma did this and that and blah blah blah".

Of course, the time spent is cursing, and skimming and hunting to find useful info. No one is finding the story interesting, but it looks good on metrics?

I wonder if the above is accurate or not.

[jlund-molfese]

I think the idea is that Google allegedly prioritizes pages by user dwell time, the idea being that if someone spends 10 minutes on your page, it's more relevant than another page where the user only spends 5 seconds before closing the tab.

So forcing you to scroll through an essay on the complete history of nutmeg before you can see any of the ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie recipe may improve SEO

[Semaphor]

but every recipe site I've recently encountered, had a "jump to recipe" link right at the top

[Kelamir]

I use https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ for finding recipes, it has scraped over 2M of them. No distractions.

[rightbyte]

I have resorted to buying books after being burnt by just bad receips floating around on the Internet.

[astura]

Wow, it's exactly the opposite for me - bought a few cookbooks at ~19-20 years old and used them for a few years. Now it's been a decade since I last touched any of my cookbooks because the recipes are really limited and just not that great compared to what you find on the internet.

I guess I avoid the junk because I have good instinct, I can usually tell if something is going to be bad based on the ingredients. Also if I'm looking to make something "basic" I'll specifically look for Alton Brown's recipe for it or sometimes Chef John's recipe. I also sometimes just use recipes for "inspiration" too - just to get a basic idea of what the ingredients are.