6 ms·

This reminds me of Walmarts squeezing strategy with all the manufacturers. Business with us at the price we say or out of business.

burnte 5mo ago
Yep, this is exactly why some companies simply don't work with Walmart.
augzodia 5mo ago
it's because both google and walmart have too much market power
johnny_canuck 5mo ago
But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me. The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.
- redsparrow 5mo ago
  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...
  - bbondo 5mo ago
    > 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.
    - gwbas1c 5mo ago
      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.
      - nicbou 5mo ago
        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?
        gwbas1c 5mo ago
        > 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.
        nicbou 5mo ago
        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.
        gwbas1c 5mo ago
        "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
    - grantj 5mo ago
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ
    - 5mo ago
- Ar-Curunir 5mo ago
  No, because now Google controls entirely what you see. They could decide to show you the recipe after all. Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.
- mcphage 5mo ago
  > But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
  - itsmek 5mo ago
    It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
- goosejuice 5mo ago
  You can find many ad free recipes in the cookbooks at your local library. They're likely of higher quality as well.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 5mo ago
  > But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
- jasonkester 5mo ago
  But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake. But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    You can buy recipe books at brick and mortar stores, and they're mostly not AI slop yet.
    - acron0 5mo ago
      My partner recently bought a receipe book that was probably 100% slop, from the recipes themselvea to the images for each dish.
      - soco 5mo ago
        Completely unrelated to AI, I buy and always bought recipe books in second hand bookstores. It has this vintage vibe, and not everything has to be kale. Downside is that some ingredients aren't easily reachable, but it doesn't happen that often.
        specproc 5mo ago
        Totally related to AI. You're gonna be able to spot slop whilst browsing. Local bookshops are great, use them or lose them.
        ethbr1 5mo ago
        My favorite are 50s and 60s recipe books. They use modern ingredients where appropriate, but mostly basic ingredients. Later and you start seeing "Use this new processed wunderfood ingredient substitute!" (70s-00s)
- steveBK123 5mo ago
  Not really good for consumers in the long term. Creates a monopsony (monopoly on the buyer side instead of seller side) in the supply chain, with all the same negative externalities to competition. Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.
- tremon 5mo ago
  > But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.
  - brookst 5mo ago
    Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?
    - miltonlost 5mo ago
      Please please please learn the basics of monopolies.
      - brookst 5mo ago
        While I appreciate the condescension, tell me how Walmart is a monopoly?
    - tremon 5mo ago
      It doesn't matter what Walmart's prices would be -- because there'd be nine alternatives offering their products at different price points. Also, you seem to be implying that suppliers are inhuman and deserve to be squeezed (but Walmart somehow deserves all the wealth it extracts as a middle-man, go figure), which is exactly why I said that focusing on consumers only is a myopic view of the world.
- gosub100 5mo ago
  Not even the summary of the recipe, I think a lot of the "value" AI provides is decluttering the interface. All these perverse incentives conspire to make it undesirable for web publishers to simply show you a cake recipe. They need to meet SEO metrics for being higher on googles index, they need to monetize with ad and chum boxes. They need to distract and dazzle your senses. In the end, AI strips all these anti patterns out and shows you the meat. Or the "summary" of what should have been there all along. The "AI" isn't learning about what the words mean, it's stripping out cruft and filler that was deliberately added! I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search). Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.
  - byzantinegene 5mo ago
    except this isn't a solution. taking away sources just creates another problem down the road. there's no information to crawl from if no one is building websites to crawl from.
BurningFrog 5mo ago
This is tough for the manufacturer, but great for the consumer. I think it's a good tradeoff.

burnte 5mo ago

Yep, this is exactly why some companies simply don't work with Walmart.

augzodia 5mo ago

it's because both google and walmart have too much market power

johnny_canuck 5mo ago

But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me. The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.

redsparrow 5mo ago
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...
- bbondo 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - gwbas1c 5mo ago
    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.
    - nicbou 5mo ago
      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?
      - gwbas1c 5mo ago
        > 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.
        nicbou 5mo ago
        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.
        gwbas1c 5mo ago
        "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
  - grantj 5mo ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ
  - 5mo ago
Ar-Curunir 5mo ago
No, because now Google controls entirely what you see. They could decide to show you the recipe after all. Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.
mcphage 5mo ago
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
- itsmek 5mo ago
  It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
goosejuice 5mo ago
You can find many ad free recipes in the cookbooks at your local library. They're likely of higher quality as well.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 5mo ago
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
jasonkester 5mo ago
But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake. But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  You can buy recipe books at brick and mortar stores, and they're mostly not AI slop yet.
  - acron0 5mo ago
    My partner recently bought a receipe book that was probably 100% slop, from the recipes themselvea to the images for each dish.
    - soco 5mo ago
      Completely unrelated to AI, I buy and always bought recipe books in second hand bookstores. It has this vintage vibe, and not everything has to be kale. Downside is that some ingredients aren't easily reachable, but it doesn't happen that often.
      - specproc 5mo ago
        Totally related to AI. You're gonna be able to spot slop whilst browsing. Local bookshops are great, use them or lose them.
      - ethbr1 5mo ago
        My favorite are 50s and 60s recipe books. They use modern ingredients where appropriate, but mostly basic ingredients. Later and you start seeing "Use this new processed wunderfood ingredient substitute!" (70s-00s)
steveBK123 5mo ago
Not really good for consumers in the long term. Creates a monopsony (monopoly on the buyer side instead of seller side) in the supply chain, with all the same negative externalities to competition. Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.
tremon 5mo ago
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.
- brookst 5mo ago
  Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?
  - miltonlost 5mo ago
    Please please please learn the basics of monopolies.
    - brookst 5mo ago
      While I appreciate the condescension, tell me how Walmart is a monopoly?
  - tremon 5mo ago
    It doesn't matter what Walmart's prices would be -- because there'd be nine alternatives offering their products at different price points. Also, you seem to be implying that suppliers are inhuman and deserve to be squeezed (but Walmart somehow deserves all the wealth it extracts as a middle-man, go figure), which is exactly why I said that focusing on consumers only is a myopic view of the world.
gosub100 5mo ago
Not even the summary of the recipe, I think a lot of the "value" AI provides is decluttering the interface. All these perverse incentives conspire to make it undesirable for web publishers to simply show you a cake recipe. They need to meet SEO metrics for being higher on googles index, they need to monetize with ad and chum boxes. They need to distract and dazzle your senses. In the end, AI strips all these anti patterns out and shows you the meat. Or the "summary" of what should have been there all along. The "AI" isn't learning about what the words mean, it's stripping out cruft and filler that was deliberately added! I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search). Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.
- byzantinegene 5mo ago
  except this isn't a solution. taking away sources just creates another problem down the road. there's no information to crawl from if no one is building websites to crawl from.

BurningFrog 5mo ago

This is tough for the manufacturer, but great for the consumer. I think it's a good tradeoff.