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Comment by newfonewhodis | Hacker News Reader

The fact that this app is stealing content (that mostly makes money by ads) and monetizing it with ads is horrible. Right up the entitlement-alley of HN.

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I agree, I think it's unethical and also wrong when looking from the angle of supporting (or at least not damaging) smaller websites owners and Internet where they are creating and maintaining own websites. Unfortunately open nature of non-walled internet makes it easy target for such predatory disgusting practices like this app is promoting.

They've been mass-spamming this on Reddit using multiple accounts and sockpuppeting to promote it too. They also promoted this in a Show-HN 5 days ago as well and it flopped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733982

How is this any different than running an ad blocker or using Reader Mode in Safari, for example?

Ad blockers (the good ones) don't make money (other than by donations).

Good, those sites don't deserve money.

See otrahuevada's top-level comment. The life story included in most recipes is not some blogger's attempt to spam you or sell you something. It's a copyright requirement - the only way they can protect their content.

I take it most of these recipes are hosted on low effort spam sites that stole the content in the first place. Are they also entitled to your righteous defense?

That's a very convenient assumption! "People who blog recipes are probably crappy anyway, so I'm morally clean" isn't a successful ethical system.

But I wasn’t sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I just want to cook something, it’s fair use. If I am setting out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site, that’s not cool obviously. Please consider more angles here.

We're considering the angle of an app whose sole purpose is to capture the valuable IP of an author and remove their ability to monetize it.

It's not like they're paying them via some publisher program, just pure scraping and re-organizing.

You may be right, if the sites truly own original content that is then being displayed in the app. It seems that is often not the case though.

> Right up the entitlement-alley of HN

What? HN doesn't encourage its users to bypass ad- and subscription-supported content.

Oh wait, it does. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

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