[nullhole]

It's 299 words (so close to a round number!) of worse-than-useless filler before the recipe. You get two amazon sponsored links and one blog plug for some author with that. There's also an interstitial you have to click through.

I can see why GP was not impressed.

[pb7]

The very first thing on the page is a "Jump to recipe" link. If you too are a victim of dwindling attention spans like the rest of us, you have the option to skip straight past the beautiful photos and background.

[nottorp]

Looks like these spam pages work because some people actually like them...

That would be a major problem for hand curated indexes.

[ruszki]

> So this fall, as I flipped through Michelle Lopez’s new book Weeknight Baking, her recipe for Boxed Mix Brownies, From Scratch caught my eye. Would I finally be able to make homemade brownies that would be just as delicious as the ones from a box?

I can’t even fathom how anybody thinks that this is fine on any level (from the mentioned site, the first result about brownies for me, and one of the first few paragraphs). For a while, I rather pay for cooking and recipe books, because wasted time on these texts would worth way more than that money. Especially that even the recipes themselves are terrible most of the time on the internet.

But after a thread a few months ago here on HN, in which people praised w3schools how it’s really a good site, I’m not surprised on anything. If the people who really should know how these things work, and that there are better free alternatives for all content on that site, even encourage this bullshit, then this won’t improve at all.

[Shog9]

The other advantages of buying a recipe book:

- you can take notes in the margins

- you can find your favorite recipes quickly because the pages are all stained and wrinkled

- you can reward the author for all the time they spent testing and honing those recipes

The real depressing thing here is the amount of whining about "wasted time" from folks looking for free cooking instructions on the 'Net. It's almost as bad as the "gimme teh codez" jerks on forums.

FWIW, I like this brownie recipe (and have purchased the book it comes from, twice): https://www.seriouseats.com/bravetart-glossy-fudge-brownies WARNING: contains even more words than the "love and lemons" page.

[ruszki]

They’re not free, and never were. Tech bros just telling you, that you pay more, if you don’t pay in cash.

[ericbarrett]

I was recently gifted a recipe book via Amazon. I was excited until I opened it up—it was just low quality LLM generated recipes, poorly typeset. There's no escape.

[kiicia]

Actual issue is why "jump to merit of page" link is needed at all, not ones ability (or lack of) toactively filter content while reading