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Comment by joobus | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of a simple recipe site generally, but I also like reading the user feedback on recipe sites. Is a recipe any good? Are there improvements? There is no way to tell on this site.

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Simple- just fork the repo, add a paragraph on the recipe page, and submit a pull request!

With this method, you can be sure there won't be any low-effort comments.

IMO it's not worth the hassle to add user feedback, because A) it takes a lot of work from the website admin B) it's usually extremely low (maybe negative) value.

For a lot of sites I might agree, but I think individual user experiences and variations provide a lot of value on a cooking site

A friend of mine who frequents recipe sites pointed out to me once how often the comments are some variation of "I made this except I didn't have any X, Y, or Z so I used M, N, and O", which is great for them but it doesn't really tell you if the recipe, as written, is any good.

But is great for exploring the “solution space” of what variants people have tried and preferred.

I suspect the recipe sites care about comments and other user-generate stuff because that's how they track "engagement" and collect data to feed into their SEO/ad targeting/sales pipeline.

Yes, unless the recipe called for sugar and the "chef" who tried it was clueless and subbed something dumb like sweet curry powder and then complained the recipe sucked.

having read through them all i’d say the recipes range from ‘fine’ to ‘probably not that great but if you’ve just moved out of your parents home its not a bad place to start’. most of the recipes seem robust and would be hard to really mess up. the salt thing as others have pointed out is nonsense.

having spent many hours scrolling through ad laden recipe sites though i really do appreciate the straight forward approach.

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