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Comment by redsparrow | Hacker News Reader

Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.

It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...

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> people aren't going to publish recipes

Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.

Some people will. The vast majority won’t. You are not playing for an audience, only for crawlers, so what is the point?

Those who won’t were doing it for the money. Those who continue are those who do it for passion, or those whose recipe is just a way to attract people to their business (e.g. kitchenware company). I don’t think it is necessarily bad, the quantity will decrease but the quality may even improve

I built a passion reference site. A large part of that passion came from knowing and talking to the people I was helping. One person emailing or saying thanks would later help power me through to create more useful articles. Enriching openai/claude/ms/google and no thanks from an individual, has disincentivized me from writing more.

Same here. People knew the website and it was immensely flattering to meet users in the wild. It motivated me to really sweat the small stuff, because people noticed. Now I'm just feeding the slop machine, and it feels pointless.

> Those who continue are those who do it for passion

Nothing kills passion faster than your only audience being an AI crawler.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ

We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.

This is just disruption.

Does the current Google search results indicate that they will be any different?

It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?

> your product relies on the output of the industry it kills

I disagree, Google doesn't rely on a massive amount of recipe websites; they rely on Google and exploit it.

More importantly: These recipes exist from many sources, not just the website that exploited Google to be first in their rankings.

From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

In this instance, the internet is more than top-ranking recipe websites.

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

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