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Have you ever noticed that it's becoming more difficult to find recipes without a six page blog entry on top of it? This is kind of like that. I love the word
by jcims 7y ago
Have you ever noticed that it's becoming more difficult to find recipes without a six page blog entry on top of it? This is kind of like that.
I love the word bloviating for times like this. It's not really an onomatopoeia but something like it. It's also somehow clearly an insult.
Edit: jrockway has actually changed my perspective on recipe thing...if people want to put a six page backstory and photos on top of a recipe that's completely their right and I would never suggest that more quality (?) content is a bad thing. My problem, it seems, is with Google putting that as the top result when I'm searching for a recipe. Esp when I'm on my phone in a store getting spammed by some captive portal while trying to figure out if the damn cookies I'm making need baking soda or baking powder.
- ljm 7y agoI used to write a lot of blog posts and, when it was to do with work, there was always some professional writer or marketing guy who said it was better to begin the post with some barely relevant fluff. I didn’t agree, and it didn’t fit my own writing style. But they insisted I do it, or they’d edit it in themselves. Same with this post. The ‘context’ wasn’t particularly enlightening. I thought I’d be reading a programming war story but there wasn’t any pay off.
- combatentropy 7y agoI've studied writing all my life, and most of the classics on writing would agree with you, such as The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well and a newspaper editor, talks about this very thing, saying that articles are often improved by cutting the first three paragraphs.
- cpach 7y agoYeah what’s up with all these new long-winded recipe sites? Is it a SEO thing?
- redis_mlc 7y agoIt's a "two-part greeting" thing. But this is HN, so nobody knows what that is here. :)
- cpach 7y agoHadn’t heard that term before. Feel free to explain :) Is it a sales thing?
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoEasily googled. Hi, welcome to hacker news. May I offer you some articles to read?
- mark-r 7y agoWhy does anybody come to HN, except to find articles to read? How would you know something is easily googled if you've never heard the term before?
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoIt is simply an observation. There was apparently no overlapping term from say, network engineering, or dramaturgy, to confuse the search. Contrast with "Go (programming language) - Wikipedia" which led to the invention of "golang" as a keyword so that programmers could search out programming articles for that language efficiently. BTW I did enjoy reading the article I found on "two-part greeting." [1] [1] https://www.qsrmagazine.com/ordering/100-ways-improve-your-drive-thru https://www.qsrmagazine.com/ordering/100-ways-improve-your-d...
- tedunangst 7y agoWhy does anybody go to McDonald's except to place an order?
- 7y ago
- vharuck 7y agoFor recipes, it's possibly a way to qualify for copyright protection[0]. Recipes themselves aren't considered original enough, so authors can encase them in a copyrightable shell of narrative. There might be other reasons for this on the net. And I wouldn't be surprised if new recipe bloggers write narrative because "that's how it's always been done." [0]https://info.legalzoom.com/recipe-copyright-laws-20049.html https://info.legalzoom.com/recipe-copyright-laws-20049.html
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago... but wouldn't you just copy the recipe part anyways? If the narrative part is the copyrighted part, just don't copy that, thus ensuring that you're legally okay AND you only keep the part that's actually useful.
- vharuck 7y agoThe "trick" is that the recipe is now part of a larger copyrighted work, so it's covered by the copyright. Of course, I doubt it'd be easy to win a trial if somebody did this unless it was literally copied verbatim.
- beerandt 7y agoNot an extracted recipe. Only as a part of the whole work. So if you copy the page, it's copyright-able, but not if you copy and paste just the recipe.
- weaksauce 7y agoI think a more likely reason is they are doing it for SEO
- jjeaff 7y agoIf you are trying to learn how to code, do you just want to find blocks of code to copy paste or do you want some explanation? I realize sometimes the articles are pure fluff, but if you are passionate about what you are making, you want to read the how and why, the trial and error, and maybe even the history and backstory of the dish.
- bgrainger 7y agoInstall the Recipe Filter Chrome extension to fix this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... > This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
- jonplackett 7y agoIt’s almost as annoying as most news sites that have the headline, which is the same headline you already clicked on from google news or their homepage, then the subtitle which reiterates the headline. Then an image with a caption that is pretty much the same as the headline. Then the first line of the story which is also mostly the headline and then usually another repetition in the first paragraph. Followed by a story which contradicts the headline, revealing the whole thing to just be click bait.
- bena 7y agoSounds like a way to thwart services and sites that clip the first N lines of an article. You can't get the gist of the article until you've actually clicked through.
- jonplackett 7y agoI think it’s just click-driven lazy journalism.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoI would get autoplay video after the headline about irrelevant topic, ads, a lot of subjective and biased analysis, then the last sentence us what I was looking for.
- jonplackett 7y agoVideos on news articles are the worst. I think it’s the evening standard that has a video at the top and when you scroll past trying to avoid it they pin it to the top right side and hide the close and mute buttons until it’s started playing. So annoying!
- jrockway 7y agoI think humans naturally enjoy storytelling. So they tell stories on their blogs.
- jcims 7y agoExcellent point, the problem isn’t with the content. It’s with google showing it as a top result for ‘meatloaf recipe’.
- recursivecaveat 7y agoI have heard also that this is done as an anti-scraping tactic. If your recipes are all nicely and consistently formatted, someone can steal all your content. If on the other hand you write it all in prose or at least intermixed with prose, any competitor will have to do each recipe by hand.
- idunno246 7y agoThe recipe thing, there's two different people that read these. People coming in from search only care about the recipe, and in that situation the story is mildly annoying. But even if I don't read it, I do find it at least a mild indicator that there's a human being that actually tried the recipe. But I've subscribed to some food blogs because the recipes are decent and the stories make it interesting - otherwise, a series of recipes in my rss would just be incredibly boring. In this case it's closer to a tv personality you'd watch on tv than a recipe book.
- jcims 7y agoYep your second case is very legit and is why I softened my disdain with the edit. I love Bon Appetit's youtube channel for example, and (ironically?) usually tune out at the end of their video when they get to the recipe at the end. Great point, thank you.
- solarkraft 7y agoOh wow. I was briefly confused by the other comments not being about recipes because of this thread.
- adrianmonk 7y agoQuick and dirty solution to jump past the rambling and straight to the recipe: ctrl-F "print". People love to ramble, but they also love being able to print a recipe to use in the kitchen.