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Comment by Kerrick | Hacker News Reader

That sounds to me like a recipe. Recipes their interaction with copyright are well-established, legally speaking, in the United States.

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Their interaction being they are in no way copyrightable because they are functional, not creative expressions. That's part of why every recipe has a dramatic story, so they can have a clear copyright case if copied wholesale.

Is that really the reason for these stories? I only know about them from memes, and looked it up when I first read about it. In my language this trend hasn't caught on yet, thankfully. I always chalked it up to cultural differences (and judged Americans a little bit for it tbh, since the idea of integrating a story into a recipe sounds rather insane).

It is (or used to be) for SEO. Google Search loves walls of "relevant" text and will punish recipe sites that get right to the point.

It’s also to add vertical height so you see more ads on your way to the recipe.

>Is that really the reason for these stories?

No, it's more about ads and SEO and the fact that a lot of people like the touchy feely aspect of the stories and that causes them to engage with the site for longer, leaving their own comments and returning to the site and such.

It's more like a set of numbers since the prompt is just an interface that gets tokenized.

It would be like saying a DJ's equalizer settings are copyrightable.

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