7 ms·

This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades. Any successful brand will see counterfeits and, indeed

This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades. Any successful brand will see counterfeits and, indeed, sometimes before the quality brand even launches. A prestige brand’s logo will be thrown on some cheap, low-quality anonymous thing, and ordering online you are just as likely to get a counterfeit as the real thing. Now it goes beyond physical products to media too; another example is blogs these days. Someone finds a successful blog, pays some developing-world person on a freelancer platform to rewrite every post just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown, and then puts the counterfeit site up with a heavy load of SEO and advertising. This started with recipe blogs – that cajun cooking site that claims to be by a born and bred Louisianan has grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast Asian author – but is now spreading through all kinds of other hobbies and interests. With recipe blogs, this phenomenon is now so mature that counterfeiters are copying from previous counterfeits.

thaeli 6y ago
I've never understood why recipe blogs have so much extra text, unless it's an SEO thing to start with. The text all feels useless fluff to me anyway; all I'm there for is the actual recipe card itself. And from a user's perspective, it's impossible to tell the difference between the original and a "counterfeit", both are full of borderline malware ads, too much scrolling, and infuriating modal popups wanting my email address. I don't want your newsletter. I don't want your life story. I don't want intrusive ads. I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. /rant
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  It’s an SEO thing.
- watwut 6y ago
  It is google algorithm. It pushes doen pure receipts in result, so they add fluff to go up in search. The text is useless fluff. They gotta have something that looks like ranking worthy text to google and takes as little effort as possible (since humans will skip it).
- maccard 6y ago
  Most of the "decent" blog recipe sites have a "jump-to-recipe" button at the top.
- klyrs 6y ago
  > I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. There's the rub. You can copyright your story. It's easy to scrape recipes from webpages. It's harder to translate a story into a recipe. If you post a plain & simple recipe to the internet, it will be copied and folks (and the bots behind search engines) won't have a clear incentive to visit/link your recipe over the numerous copies. If you've got a clear copyright violation, there's a chance you can get the copies taken down, or at least hidden by search engines. If it's just the functional, non-copyrightable recipe itself, no such luck. And then, with all the expense of creating and hosting the content, plus fighting the deluge of spammers, how do you monetize? The easy way: the borderline malware ads, modal popups, dickbars, etc. Blech. I'm with you, it sucks. But it's not just "an SEO thing"; it's also a case study on how "information wants to be free" meets the gritty reality of the internet economy.
- akiselev 6y ago
  Google tracks your behavior during searches so the longer it takes you to press the back button to return to the results, the higher that page scores. All the recipe sites seem to have figured out that score weighs heavily in Google's rankings.
- arp242 6y ago
  I worked on a better recipe site/product last year out of frustration with the existing options. I also wanted something I could earn some money with though, and doing that with a recipe website is rather tricky without resorting to this sort of bullshit, so I ended up shelving it for the time being (I still want to finish it at some point though, as it has some nice ideas IMO). I could use a subscription model, I suppose, but I'm less than confident this will actually succeed. There's so much free content out there and I found that a lot of people are willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid paying.
- wyclif 6y ago
  This is why I never use recipe blogs, they're garbage. I recommend this instead: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/
stefan_ 6y ago
It's everywhere. DIY sites are full with trash tutorials written by people with no clue what they are doing, but $1 more in their pocket for writing the trash. Quora, that wretched hell hole, is full of nobodies giving the most ridiculous answers since being paid pennies for it. Medium since their monetization push has lots of people who decided their place in the world is pushing out badly copied useless tech tutorials. There are whole SaaS AI sites helping you expand a few keywords into more trash writing. Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well. (Oh, and there are a lot of these people on HN who think writing garbage blogspam for their latest project is a great "growth hack". A hearty fuck you to you, too.)
- ecshafer 6y ago
  Tech blogs and sites are mostly useless. There are good places MDN, official docs sites (when they aren't written by Google that is). But there is so much just machine generated, or amateur 3rd world generated trash out there that its difficult. Front end development is much worse than other areas with this. This summer I had a lot of trouble finding information for something specific in Angular on how to do some specific thing, where the official docs didn't cover it in depth enough, and then searching for it online was impossible as it was thousands of "blogs" with the same copy pasted tutorial with a few key words changed around that show the same hello world example.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    This is one striking thing about Go. The signal to noise ratio for online resources is excellent. The resources you turn up in a Google search feel professional and practical. When I search Java problems there is a lot more blog-spam, half-assed / misguided copypasta, and a very high ad:information ratio. We often talk about size of the community as an important consideration when adopting programming tools. But really there is a sweet spot, where a community has enough serious people to produce the right information but not enough unserious people (yet) to bury it. Communities at this stage can be better than those for universal standards.
    - 6y ago
mrtksn 6y ago
Do you see any other way for it? Google and FB created an eyeball economy by supplying both the marketplace and the serving platforms, which created unsolicited Mechanical Turk army for content creation that runs on exceptionally thin margins, burning through humanity attention span. It's no longer possible to find organic high quality ad supported content(except maybe on YouTube, it still has some great stuff). Places like HN have other motivations to keep running high quality forum but the vast majority of the content out there is made with lowest possible quality. This even goes for the news. Lately I live in Turkey and trying to follow the Turkish media but it is so lazy or so politically motivated that I cannot take it. Turkish mainstream media outlets no longer create articles for human consumption but for bot consumption, so the articles are unreadable due to keyword spamming. The news part is one sentence but they manage to multiply it to a wall of text through repeating the same thing using synonyms etc, it doesn't even make sense grammatically. They also do SEO spam by generating articles from the exact same template for each popular topic. For example, if you search for opening times of a supermarket, you will have the first few pages of results filled with mainstream newspaper pages that start with "Recently people start showing interest to market opening times but is it safe to search for shop opening times? Besides, what does 'opening times' really mean? To find out about opening times continue reading". Yo Have the same format for all kind of stuff. The incentives of the current content economy are perverse. You ether want to make it cheap as possible, just enough to lure someone to it and send them somewhere else through ad click or you want to influence someone to do something after consuming your content.
- sn_master 6y ago
  Even YouTube isn't immune. Many times I search and the top result is text-to-speech trash with a stock image. Countless channels exist that just do text-to-speech and auto-upload of news articles found online, without even citing them.
  - lrem 6y ago
    I literally never got a result like this. Are you searching for something too niche to actually have quality content on YouTube? Or is your search buble such a sad place? Disclaimer: I work in Google, but nowhere near any of this.
irrational 6y ago
Review sites are the worst. Recently I was looking for reviews for a nail gun. It was impossible to find a legitimate review site.
- bombcar 6y ago
  I trust very few, but toolguyd.com is one of them. Don't know if he's reviewed your nail gun, however.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
Yep... On aliexpress, pretty much every thing is now "xiaomi"... from towels, toothbrushes to manicure sets..... Sometimes looking at review photos and trying to look for bad-quality marks helps... sometimes, sadly... not.
baybal2 6y ago
A reverse scam scheme exists too: somebody buy an OEM product, and markets it as its own development. I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter. A slightly less egregious variation of this is when such is done with OEM's knowledge, and/or some customisation is done specifically to conceal an OEM origin of the product. I believe this kind of op makes a double digit of all Kickstarter hardware projects. I myself encountered such in Vancouver once. A woman was claiming a CEO of a medical start-up doing "deep machine learning" bluetooth pulse oximeter of own design, and was pitching on HackerNest Vancouver at around 2013-2014. I cannot imagine that she somehow managed to get few millions in funding for that. I sent a photo with with an RFQ to Alibaba, and got quotes from trade companies in minutes, and then posted a screenshot on the HackerNest's meetup page. Then, I ran onto a trio claiming the idea, and design of a flexible silicone keyboard as their own on either Kickstarter, or Indigogo. After sending emails to the platform few times over few months, they quietly deleted the project page without much public comment to either me, or the public.
- wyclif 6y ago
  I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter. The classic example of this that I keep seeing over and over again is the standard kayak bag that gets rebranded as an exercise weight filled with sand. The ad copy makes it sound like some innovative new exercise product, but it's just a kayak bag with branding.
gumby 6y ago
> This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades. "For decades" is right. When I was a kid in the 60s we always picked up all sorts of clones when in HK, TW, SG, MY, ID etc (didn't go to mainland China in those days but doubt this would have been true there at that time...)
dzolob 6y ago
Kudos on starting your nice little racist thread. If it’s counterfeit, must be a cheap developing world persons work.

thaeli 6y ago

I've never understood why recipe blogs have so much extra text, unless it's an SEO thing to start with. The text all feels useless fluff to me anyway; all I'm there for is the actual recipe card itself. And from a user's perspective, it's impossible to tell the difference between the original and a "counterfeit", both are full of borderline malware ads, too much scrolling, and infuriating modal popups wanting my email address. I don't want your newsletter. I don't want your life story. I don't want intrusive ads. I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. /rant

wodenokoto 6y ago
It’s an SEO thing.
watwut 6y ago
It is google algorithm. It pushes doen pure receipts in result, so they add fluff to go up in search. The text is useless fluff. They gotta have something that looks like ranking worthy text to google and takes as little effort as possible (since humans will skip it).
maccard 6y ago
Most of the "decent" blog recipe sites have a "jump-to-recipe" button at the top.
klyrs 6y ago
> I just want the (functional, non-copyrightable) recipe itself. There's the rub. You can copyright your story. It's easy to scrape recipes from webpages. It's harder to translate a story into a recipe. If you post a plain & simple recipe to the internet, it will be copied and folks (and the bots behind search engines) won't have a clear incentive to visit/link your recipe over the numerous copies. If you've got a clear copyright violation, there's a chance you can get the copies taken down, or at least hidden by search engines. If it's just the functional, non-copyrightable recipe itself, no such luck. And then, with all the expense of creating and hosting the content, plus fighting the deluge of spammers, how do you monetize? The easy way: the borderline malware ads, modal popups, dickbars, etc. Blech. I'm with you, it sucks. But it's not just "an SEO thing"; it's also a case study on how "information wants to be free" meets the gritty reality of the internet economy.
akiselev 6y ago
Google tracks your behavior during searches so the longer it takes you to press the back button to return to the results, the higher that page scores. All the recipe sites seem to have figured out that score weighs heavily in Google's rankings.
arp242 6y ago
I worked on a better recipe site/product last year out of frustration with the existing options. I also wanted something I could earn some money with though, and doing that with a recipe website is rather tricky without resorting to this sort of bullshit, so I ended up shelving it for the time being (I still want to finish it at some point though, as it has some nice ideas IMO). I could use a subscription model, I suppose, but I'm less than confident this will actually succeed. There's so much free content out there and I found that a lot of people are willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid paying.
wyclif 6y ago
This is why I never use recipe blogs, they're garbage. I recommend this instead: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/

stefan_ 6y ago

It's everywhere. DIY sites are full with trash tutorials written by people with no clue what they are doing, but $1 more in their pocket for writing the trash. Quora, that wretched hell hole, is full of nobodies giving the most ridiculous answers since being paid pennies for it. Medium since their monetization push has lots of people who decided their place in the world is pushing out badly copied useless tech tutorials. There are whole SaaS AI sites helping you expand a few keywords into more trash writing. Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well. (Oh, and there are a lot of these people on HN who think writing garbage blogspam for their latest project is a great "growth hack". A hearty fuck you to you, too.)

ecshafer 6y ago
Tech blogs and sites are mostly useless. There are good places MDN, official docs sites (when they aren't written by Google that is). But there is so much just machine generated, or amateur 3rd world generated trash out there that its difficult. Front end development is much worse than other areas with this. This summer I had a lot of trouble finding information for something specific in Angular on how to do some specific thing, where the official docs didn't cover it in depth enough, and then searching for it online was impossible as it was thousands of "blogs" with the same copy pasted tutorial with a few key words changed around that show the same hello world example.
- closeparen 6y ago
  This is one striking thing about Go. The signal to noise ratio for online resources is excellent. The resources you turn up in a Google search feel professional and practical. When I search Java problems there is a lot more blog-spam, half-assed / misguided copypasta, and a very high ad:information ratio. We often talk about size of the community as an important consideration when adopting programming tools. But really there is a sweet spot, where a community has enough serious people to produce the right information but not enough unserious people (yet) to bury it. Communities at this stage can be better than those for universal standards.
  - 6y ago

mrtksn 6y ago

Do you see any other way for it? Google and FB created an eyeball economy by supplying both the marketplace and the serving platforms, which created unsolicited Mechanical Turk army for content creation that runs on exceptionally thin margins, burning through humanity attention span. It's no longer possible to find organic high quality ad supported content(except maybe on YouTube, it still has some great stuff). Places like HN have other motivations to keep running high quality forum but the vast majority of the content out there is made with lowest possible quality. This even goes for the news. Lately I live in Turkey and trying to follow the Turkish media but it is so lazy or so politically motivated that I cannot take it. Turkish mainstream media outlets no longer create articles for human consumption but for bot consumption, so the articles are unreadable due to keyword spamming. The news part is one sentence but they manage to multiply it to a wall of text through repeating the same thing using synonyms etc, it doesn't even make sense grammatically. They also do SEO spam by generating articles from the exact same template for each popular topic. For example, if you search for opening times of a supermarket, you will have the first few pages of results filled with mainstream newspaper pages that start with "Recently people start showing interest to market opening times but is it safe to search for shop opening times? Besides, what does 'opening times' really mean? To find out about opening times continue reading". Yo Have the same format for all kind of stuff. The incentives of the current content economy are perverse. You ether want to make it cheap as possible, just enough to lure someone to it and send them somewhere else through ad click or you want to influence someone to do something after consuming your content.

sn_master 6y ago
Even YouTube isn't immune. Many times I search and the top result is text-to-speech trash with a stock image. Countless channels exist that just do text-to-speech and auto-upload of news articles found online, without even citing them.
- lrem 6y ago
  I literally never got a result like this. Are you searching for something too niche to actually have quality content on YouTube? Or is your search buble such a sad place? Disclaimer: I work in Google, but nowhere near any of this.

irrational 6y ago

Review sites are the worst. Recently I was looking for reviews for a nail gun. It was impossible to find a legitimate review site.

bombcar 6y ago
I trust very few, but toolguyd.com is one of them. Don't know if he's reviewed your nail gun, however.

ajsnigrutin 6y ago

Yep... On aliexpress, pretty much every thing is now "xiaomi"... from towels, toothbrushes to manicure sets..... Sometimes looking at review photos and trying to look for bad-quality marks helps... sometimes, sadly... not.

baybal2 6y ago

A reverse scam scheme exists too: somebody buy an OEM product, and markets it as its own development. I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter. A slightly less egregious variation of this is when such is done with OEM's knowledge, and/or some customisation is done specifically to conceal an OEM origin of the product. I believe this kind of op makes a double digit of all Kickstarter hardware projects. I myself encountered such in Vancouver once. A woman was claiming a CEO of a medical start-up doing "deep machine learning" bluetooth pulse oximeter of own design, and was pitching on HackerNest Vancouver at around 2013-2014. I cannot imagine that she somehow managed to get few millions in funding for that. I sent a photo with with an RFQ to Alibaba, and got quotes from trade companies in minutes, and then posted a screenshot on the HackerNest's meetup page. Then, I ran onto a trio claiming the idea, and design of a flexible silicone keyboard as their own on either Kickstarter, or Indigogo. After sending emails to the platform few times over few months, they quietly deleted the project page without much public comment to either me, or the public.

wyclif 6y ago
I see it being rather common on sites like Kickstarter. The classic example of this that I keep seeing over and over again is the standard kayak bag that gets rebranded as an exercise weight filled with sand. The ad copy makes it sound like some innovative new exercise product, but it's just a kayak bag with branding.

gumby 6y ago

> This is essentially a global expansion of what has been normal everyday life in much of Asia for decades. "For decades" is right. When I was a kid in the 60s we always picked up all sorts of clones when in HK, TW, SG, MY, ID etc (didn't go to mainland China in those days but doubt this would have been true there at that time...)

dzolob 6y ago

Kudos on starting your nice little racist thread. If it’s counterfeit, must be a cheap developing world persons work.