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Comment by mirthturtle | Hacker News Reader

Someone tried this a while back and it didn't go so well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/03/02/recipeasly-fo...

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From the WP article:

But it’s even more complex than that. The stories are personal. They’re cultural. They’re often told from the perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the creators that their stories have no value. It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women for centuries, now just in electronic form.

I think that may be taking it too far, particularly since Google effectively created this entire syndrome.

I’ve got to be honest: those stories hold no value to me. That’s the truth. I don’t know why the WaPo wants those us who are like me to pretend otherwise.

It's weird how you go from "to me" to "wants us." Surely you can imagine that people might be interested in history and stories around food.

I personally don't give a shit about mathematicians and scientists personal lives, but I don't have a problem imagining those who do. I think the numbers say it all. Others think that the examination of every detail of the person who wrote the numbers first might give them some insight into how to create more numbers.

In my experience, traditional English usage there would use context to replace "us" with "those of us like me". But since clearly that is not the case, I have replaced it so it is no longer 'weird' to you.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you polled recipe searchers, the vast majority (>66%) would say that they don't want the story. In fact, I'll back that. If you're in San Francisco, I will bet $1000 against your $1000 that this will be the case and we can equally bear the price of running this. An associate will contact you if you're up for it.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_algorithm#Newton%E2%8... is interesting but I wouldn’t want Google Sheets to display it in a modal every time I hit the “/” key. A recipe needs a very high signal:noise ratio when it’s going to be followed in real time while food is cooking.

That's why it's all in one place on the screen at the bottom of the post, so that when you have decided you should cook it, you can just leave it there to look at.

Same. If you're only telling the story to fill time then write a blog post, keep it separate from the recipe.

Same. Usual routine is, "Hmm I think I'll make some buttermilk biscuits". I google it because I want to make them. I zero in on how basic the ingredients are (simpler the better for some things), maybe how many "stars" it has, or if the site is reputable.

But rarely do I go on a narrative stroll where I happened to stumble on a recipe that I decide I might make some day.

Yeah.

> It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women for centuries

I certainly won't deny this point conceptually, but it assumes that the stories are even true in the first place.

I don't think it is taking it too far honestly. Even if it can be a bit jarring to see it written out like that. Part of trying food from other cultures/countries/families is getting to see how their history is reflected in the food they prepare. I read cookbooks to get a feel for a place, even if I don't plan to cook everything in the book. Or more correctly couldn't.

For example I enjoy pad Thai, but I didn't know it was created by the Thai government in the 1930s until I saw a small comment and did some reading. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/no...

Or the history of Lebanese immigration into Mexico that led to Al Pastor. https://theeyehuatulco.com/2020/07/29/al-pastor-and-the-leba...

The complexity is imagined. It's not complex at all. People using Google for a free recipe are looking for...the recipe. If they were looking for stories from immigrants, they would have googled that.

That guy had absolutely no conviction once he started getting called out. He did a complete 180 in the weakest way.

I mean, this is true. But it’s weird being in the center of that raging fire. We were worried about getting sued personally (there were lots of threats) and or having our family or work brought it into it. Lots of people tried to get me fired. In the moment, it just wasn’t a fight we wanted to fight.

Maybe keep ads so that the bloggers can keep their current revenue stream. As someone who loves this idea, all I care about is easy access to the recipe. Its ok with me to have not too intrusive ads.

Or just move the recipe to the top and keep all the other content/ads below.

The site is back up, although it now seems to contain exclusively "free" recipes (i.e. coming from CC sites and old books).

IMHO there are ways to make recipe-scraping resistant to copyright claims.

1. hide all scraping actions behind a login page; that makes content private, hence uninfringing.

2. every time a user "publishes" or shares content, present only an extract of the recipe, like the ingredients and first few steps; expanding the extract sends you to the original site (ideally to the specific anchor of the procedure).

> private, hence uninfringing

let me know how this goes for private torrent tracker sites

Private as in a single user getting stuff and saving it in their own account, not resharing anything. That's not infringement, or rss feed aggregators would be infringing too.

This is an app, though, not a website. If I understand correctly, it’s just parsing the page for you.

Edit: Oh, there is also a website.

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