[Dgrin]

It may be. But it is first and foremost a touching personal story about meeting an author’s hero and becoming friends with them. And in today’s ad-ridden Internet this is one type of promotion I hope to see more often. Not algorithmic garbage thrown in your face by a big corporation after sucking up every last bit of your personal data, but a story written by the people for the people. Is it wrong to mention a book about the person described at the end of the story?

[jafo1989]

> But it is first and foremost a touching personal story

Does any recipe, cookbook, or general article about food on the internet NOT fall into this category??

[skyyler]

Serious Eats has articles before the recipe that are usually full of technical information from the development of the recipe.

Sometimes there's a bit of the "touching personal story" but I'm a lot more used to seeing failures and tests in the before-recipe section there. As a random example, check out this page on poached chicken:

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-poach-chicken-recipe-8641...

[Dgrin]

Most of the cookbooks I’ve read were relatively straightforward, but those were mostly older books not written in English. That may be just me not reading a lot of recipes in general.

On topic — I would say that this article not being a recipe is important in that case. The story is not something detracting from the main point, it is the point.

Also when I was saying that I’d like to see more of this type of promotional content, I meant that just mentioning you are writing the book on the topic at the end of the article (without even linking to it) is vastly superior to pop-up videos tracking you across websites. I did not mean that the Internet somehow needs even more advertising in it.

[creshal]

It's a very common psychological trap to fall into, so all recipe sites have turned into "fake touching personal story" content mills over the past decade or so, yes.

[lbotos]

I don’t think it’s a “trap”.

Recipes are not copyrightable (in the US not sure about elsewhere)

But a story with a recipe is. Creators are trying to protect their income first and foremost

[creshal]

LLM generates stories aren't copyrightable either, and I doubt ad-financed clickbait farms would care about suing each other anyway, this is just SEO and audience manipulation.