Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

That's one annoying thing with modern articles. You have to wade through paragraphs and paragraphs of "John grew up a taxidermist's son and bla bla bla bla..." before you even get to what the article is supposed to be about.

Then you get a couple of on-topic sentences followed by another deluge of fluff.

Oldschool newspapers were great because space was at such a premium that this kind of garbage wouldn't happen.

View on HN

Try reading a recipe for a simple chocolate cake. You get the author’s deep rooted trauma of being that weird kid shamed in HS for some reason as well as over sharing of political stances on the war in Ukraine ending with promoting penny stocks or some MLM pyramid scheme. FFS just give me ingredients and steps.

"We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe. So, I decided to go to Morganville - which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumble bees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, they'd say. Now where was I... Oh yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones."

- Abe Simpson

> FFS just give me ingredients and steps.

The commonly believed reason is that a simple list of ingredients and steps would not be copyrightable. So they add fluff which can be copyrighted.

I mean it's pretty clearly just to get you to scroll past more ads. You would not need nearly so much text just to qualify for copyright.

I thought it started with the google algorithm rewarding more body text and high linger-time. Sites that just present info concisely are down ranked (then google extracts the concise info from long time-wasting sites and puts it directly on their search page—a whole thriving ecosystem of bullshit jobs, but at least now we can automate every part of that!)

Recipes generally cannot be copyrighted. But the filler text, that definitely can be, and is. So if I wrap my recipe in a pointless anecdote, I make it that much harder for The Unscrupulous Gourmet to use a web scraper to steal my recipe.

Although people are talking about copyright, the real reason is SEO. If you write just the recipe, your site appears lower in the search results than those with all the fluff (or so it was believed).

Ask most of the people who write those recipes - they claim to hate writing all that fluff, and that's why all of them have a "Jump to recipe" link.

See this, for example: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-explains-how-it-r...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com