[titanomachy]

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day...

[5 pages later]

1. Put rice and water in rice cooker

2. Press "start"

[prawn]

Isn't Google one major reason that recipe sites act like this? They've long favoured sites with a lot of textual content (which authors then break up with images) and also penalised sites that people tend to reverse out of quickly? A long story fits that because the majority of people need to read down for the content rather than get their instant answer and immediately retreat.

I find it annoying too, but it often feels like people ridicule the authors when they wouldn't get any traffic if it weren't for that approach. I don't think I've ever searched for a recipe and come across a barebones Gantt-chart-style engineer-thinking recipe plan.

[loa_in_]

It's not Google per se but a practical impossibility: it has to rank somehow, hopefully as a human knowing the answer would. They could theoretically hire humans to do it but they won't because it's obviously impossible due to how vast the dataset is, so they use software. Software is still far from human level reasoning so they use metrics. Metrics can and will be discovered and gamed, regardless of what kind they are.

[prawn]

As an AdSense user, if you don't use the maximum allowable number of ads (regardless of content length), Google literally emails you to suggest you add more ads. Their documentation encourages you to maintain a reasonable ratio of ads to content at risk of being shutdown, which pushes out page length. They push for unique content (so writers differentiate with personal stories), they measure time on page (longer details, pictures), etc.

[CRConrad]

> I don't think I've ever searched for a recipe and come across a barebones Gantt-chart-style engineer-thinking recipe plan.

https://clovegarden.com/recipes/index.html

[prawn]

Sorry, I might not have been clear enough. I know they exist. I'm saying that I've never searched for a recipe for something and a leading result has been in that sort of format. Google has created the environment in which the maligned 'epic story and photo album finished by actual recipe' formula wins through, yet the recipe creators get the ridicule.

[CRConrad]

> Google has created the environment in which the maligned 'epic story and photo album finished by actual recipe' formula wins through, yet the recipe creators get the ridicule.

They still deserve it, IMO. Willingly making a clown, a pawn of an ad-spamming corporation, out of oneself by doing one's darnedest to "win through" at some perverse game rigged by the aforementioned scourge of the Internet, is neither a natural human right nor a divine command. Not playing that game is still a valid move, and AFAICS the only honourable -- i.e. the only non-ridicule-worthy -- one.

[prawn]

So if you're super-keen on food and trying to establish a career as a recipe creator or food photographer, it's dishonourable to: put in a lot of effort custom-writing supporting material and taking quality photos of the dish you're pitching to people? Sounds like these things traumatise you! :)

I'd agree that misleading made-for-AdSense sites that purport to, but then don't, answer a question, farm out writing to $5/page content squads and intersperse stock photos - that's shoddy. But all the recipe sites I find in my searches and have to scroll down for the content, they always seem like genuine, personal efforts. If I'm getting the content for free, scrolling a little bit as a price isn't too laborious and a stretch to think of it as dishonourable work IMO.

[CRConrad]

> So if you're super-keen on food and trying to establish a career

IOW, you're trying to earn money. Sure, go ahead -- but then you get to pay the price. If the method you're trying to earn money by is going to involve playing along in the game of clickbait, then the price you get to pay is going to be, to be seen as a purveyor of clickbait. Which I, and I suspect quite a few others with me, see as distinctly less than honourable.

It's a free choice: Nobody is forcing anybody to "establish a career as a recipe creator or food photographer" on the ad-financed Internet. If they choose to play the clickbait clown/scum game, they're making themselves into -- so, in the end, are -- clickbait clown/scum. I sure didn't tell them to do that, so I'm perfectly free to see them as such for doing it.

They, OTOH, are perfectly free to try it some other way: publishing printed cookbooks in stead of Internet clickbait; or something adjacent, like run cooking classes, start a restaurant or catering business... Or to do something else altogether.

They could always go into the deeply honourable (/s) business of software engineering, which nowadays seems to consist to about 45% of running ad-spam networks, to about 45% of writing SEO crap to get your ads onto those networks, and about 10% other development... :-( What, me cynic? Bah, geroffmylawn!

[sidewndr46]

Woah now, shouldn't step 1 be broken up into 2 steps. Each with their own heading and a paragraph explaining how to do that?

[AceJohnny2]

What kind of rice? Do you rinse the rice first? How much rice?

How much water? Do you salt the water?

[edeion]

Reminds me of Plain Old Recipe, a website that strips out fluff from big recipe websites. You provide a link to a recipe, it makes it to the point. I thought the site had closed but it's apparently still live!

https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864 (Thank you HN :))

[rhizome]

and "rice cooker" is an affiliate link

[codeisawesome]

Let’s also not forget the 55 auto-playing video ads that I need to vault over to get to Step 1. Each one determined to hijack my mouse as I scroll/hurry past and cause a click! It’s like the world’s least fun platformer game.

[tdeck]

You forgot the part where there's a pseudo-recipe after the story that catches your eye but doesn't have any measured amounts, and then the actual recipe later.

[codeisawesome]

I got instantly annoyed by the first few words of this comment, thinking you’d gone off on some tangent about rice… until I saw the last part. Well played!