[kixiQu]

Bloggers who are putting care into their work typically write more for the people who follow them than for the randos who drop in from a Google search. What do people who subscribe to foodie Patreons care about? The people who have a list of bookmarked recipe blogs? What about people coming from Instagram posts who are drawn in by a beautiful photo, what are they hoping to see? Why are we establishing a framing that the people who should be most catered to are the people who care the least about the cook and their work?

[renewiltord]

I don't think we are establishing a framing where the randos (folks like me) are of prime importance - merely establishing a framework where they exist. The WaPo piece speaks against recipe aggregators who simply strip the recipe down to ingredients and algorithm. i.e. I am fairly comfortable with recipe websites writing long-winded stories for their audience while alternative apps strip those down to ingredients and algorithm. It appears that the WaPo writer opposes the existence of the latter.

The story writers don't have to write for randos, but I (a rando) rather enjoy the stripping tool. So I think I'm going to install OnlyRecipe.app and if OR's author is pressured by WaPo-like folks to shut down, I'll probably write my own since parsing that schema is trivial.

And I have a day job in HFT so I can't be shut down. After all, no one can boycott me or my products.

[kixiQu]

> while alternative apps strip those down to ingredients and algorithm.

So what you want is for recipe developers to have their work scraped, stripped, and presented outside of its intended creative context and revenue generation mechanism, and while other people may think this is unethical, they can't stop you so that makes it fine.

[criddell]

If Google changed their algorithm to rank recipe sites by efficiency (ie less narrative is rewarded), I bet the recipe developers would change their sites overnight. I suspect the main audience for the stories is the GoogleBot.

[renewiltord]

No. What makes it fine is that the user agent is my tool to read content that servers send me so it is free to display or not display sections of the content using whatever formatting I desire.

[butwhywhyoh]

I agree with this. These app don't take anything from the experience of people who want to read these asinine stories -- it just helps the folks that are there for the ingredients.

If this gets shut down I would love if a general, open-source solution could be developed to spread the capability. A generic Python recipe parser that anyone could hook up to a front-end. If the apps proliferate at a high enough rate they can't all be shut down.