Google wills it so. Why? IDK, ask them. Probably yet another case of something net-harmful making them more money.
Luckily it's also one of the only cases where a microformat is actually nigh-universally used. Outside a few sites where the "fluff" isn't fluff and is actually good content itself (e.g. Serious Eats) I just throw the URL into Paprika 3 (no affiliation, and there are tons of other programs and probably some browser plugins to do the same thing) and let it strip it down to the ingredients and instructions by reading the microformat markup. Works flawlessly nearly every time.
[EDIT] Credit where it's due, I'm also pretty sure the microformat is only popular because of Google. I think they downrank sites in recipe searches if Google can't "see" the recipe, using the microformat. They may be both the cause of, and solution to, the problem.
Finding a result on Google, clicking on it, then leaving and clicking something else on Google means you probably didn't find the thing you were looking for. Staying on one site for a while probably means you found what you were using for. Presumably Google uses this information to try to determine if you engaged with the site, and then it ranks sites that you stay on longer higher in search results.
This works great for things like StackOverflow posts where you can quickly judge if the answer is correct, and if it's not, you can quickly bounce. It's not great for recipes, which are almost always "correct" (in that they are a recipe of the type you're looking for), so spending longer probably just means you scrolled for longer.
Trying to mentally parse these long winded recipes = takes longer to read = "greater engagement". These crappy recipes are all about seo and add placement as you'll notice these recipes are loaded with Google ads. So it is a self fulfilling prophecy that the pages where users spend more time and see more ads are ranked highest.
Yes. I think Google deserves a ton of credit for microformats, and you can just use a browser extension like Repibox that shows you only the recipe when you go to a recipe site.
I think the reason Google wanted microformats is for Google Assistant recipe answers.
I have no direct knowledge, but Google is known to penalize duplicate pages. Without the lead in, one bread recipe is pretty much the same page as 1,000 others.
Google presents what its customers (people doing searches) want to see, so shouldn't we ask the people who click the results that make it to the top (whether they leave the page dissatisfied or not is a different story, right?) over and over?
What incentive does Google have for prioritizing succinct quality posts versus blogspam posts? What incentive does Google have for prioritizing blogspam posts over succinct quality posts? Why is it the way it is if we're talking about the unsponsored (not paid) organic results?
As a blogspam author, why do you want people on your page? To get more AdSense views/impressions? You typically aren't selling anything on a website that gives away free long-winded recipes (so conversion rate/cost per click/paid advertising isn't really a concern?)
I've heard this explanation before but it sounds like one of those "it sounds plausible, so people will keep repeating it" explanations.
I suspect the real reason is what the author of the post claims – Google sends more readers to articles with lots of fluff.
> This food blogger wrote about an experiment she conducted. She listened to some of her readers and actually tried just putting the recipe up top before everything else. All of the articles in her experiment went lower in the rankings.
I don't see how this explains the situation. Your link states that even in a cookbook, which itself is copyrightable as a whole, the individual recipes are still not copyrightable even when part of the larger whole.
> Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property
The reason the site exists in the first place is for the recipes, and that intellectual content is not defendable.
Recipes on the internet are the worst mess, thousands of recipes for yellow cake that differ in ingredients and quantities for no discernable reason, someone's recipe for spanish rice made with taco bell sauce packets, macaroni and cheese with more mayonnaise then macaroni and cheese combined, and now the bloggers where you have to read through six pages of how the author used to make the recipe with their departed grandmother before getting to anything of substance.
Instead I bought a used 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook from a used book store, beats Google every time.
The problem with old cookbooks is that ingredients and tastes change dramatically over the years.
Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork.
Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity.
Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.
Recipes are not just algorithms for cooking food, despite also being a sequence of steps. They can vary by culture and personal preference. The most experienced chefs cook by sense, don't follow precise measurements, and often experiment by changing ingredients or amounts in different ways. This makes dishes interesting, and you learn what works and what doesn't in the process.
There's no optimal way to prepare food. Once you've found a recipe that you enjoy, save it, remix it, and share it with someone else. If a 1950s cookbook works for you, that's great, but you'd be missing out on a lot of good food if you only follow recipes from a single, static source. Maybe even that meandering blogger is worth reading; otherwise there are many tools out there that could extract just the gist for you.
Pro Tip: The 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the one you want. It's the closest thing to a "reference manual for food" that anyone has ever done.
When I was in my 20's I was able to teach myself how to roast a turkey by looking it up in the index and then doing exactly what the book said. Ditto for the Candied Yams, which I still get compliments on. Every single recipe was tested in a kitchen similar to what an average household would have had at that time.
ChatGPT can be a nice alternative to googling. It will just give you the recipe without the nonsense, and you can ask it to convert the units, suggest replacements for ingredients if you don't have / can't eat them etc.
They bake hundreds of cookies with different quantities of ingredient to show the effect that each ingredient has in the baking process. So now not only do you know what somebody's recipe is, but you also know exactly how to modify it to suit your own tastes.
I think you mean "why is everything online so long-winded". Geez, look up any video on nearly anything simple, they all follow the same format:
* 10 mins of nonsense and irrelevant background into how great you are
* 10 mins of setup
* 10 mins of drama build-up
* 1 min of the actual event
* 10 mins of closing comments
Oh, wait, I forgot, it is not about the content, it is all about how long I can get you to watch so I get more nickels. Dang, now I made myself sad...
I recently had an issue with my water softener. I searched and Google identified some videos and the time stamp in the videos. When I clicked the link, the video started right at the relevant part.
Also applies to self help books. There's 10 pages of content, but people won't pay $40 for 10 pages so you gotta fill it with 190 pages of nonsense and spread the content around to the point of making it useless.
This extends to many academic papers and other expository as well. Repeat the same thing multiple times with a slight twist and use of different terms. So much communication could be more succinctly stated, but the incentives of reader retention, web seo and other marketing techniques, appealing to the lowest mental common denominator, following “good” communication practices, etc. are too strong for most content creators to fight.
Furthermore, the structure of what is considered good writing feeds into this: state your point in the introduction, state your point in the body, and restate your point in the conclusion of the article. Reminds me of television shows that recap what you saw prior to the 2 minute commercial, just in case you forgot what you were watching 2 minutes ago.
Nearly everything online today is long-winded. Hell, most media is long-winded. You can't just know what happened, where, and why; you've got to read a creative-writing thesis to "put you in the shoes" of the subject du jour. You can't simply watch a lecture; you need fancy graphics and fast cuts with memes woven in. Want a compelling story? You better watch all 6 seasons, including the remaining 4 without the original writers, and be prepared to be disappointed. How about learning to fix your car? In that case, be prepared for 3 minutes worth of info in 20 minutes of some schmo complaining about why Hyundais suck while he constantly jiggles the camera and gloats about much more clever he is than other mechanics.
News, blogs, recipes, shows, instructional videos... all pretty much blow chunks. Any time I simply want straight forward information it becomes a matter of frequent fast-forwarding and combining of info from disparate sources when it shouldn't be necessary. Get. To. The. Point.
You can try plainoldrecipe.com[0] for de-cluttering recipes. It doesn't work for a lot of the bloggy recipe sites, but when it does[1], it's great. And it works for all the popular sites like AllRecipes.
There's also the app CopyMeThat, which will capture recipes from darn near anything, let you tag and otherwise organize them, let you make a mealplan, and more. We have 3000+ recipes in it now (of which we've made probably a couple hundred lol).
Opposite opinion here: Internet recipes are generally terrible. It's almost impossible to make any determination as to whether recipes have ever been tested or optimized or anything, and I just don't trust them. But if I go to seriouseats.com (for example) and they show me all of the work they went through to get to the recipe, I trust them.
I'd say that well over half of the random Internet recipes I try aren't very good, have been developed with bad techniques, use the wrong flavors, try to fix flavor issues by adding more flavors and so on. Using a vetted site (the America's Test Kitchen recipes are also quite good) gets me ~98% success.
I'd rather take the extra 5 minutes of time to look through how the recipe was created and tested to make sure it's a good recipe than spend a couple of hours making an unknown recipe with a 50/50 shot to not be terrible. YMMV.
The conventional wisdom for SEO is that "good content" ranges between 2,000-4,000 words. Most recipes are but a fraction of that, so the rest is filler to meet the aforementioned SEO wisdom. I'm not sure whether Google actually does or doesn't reward content fitting with that arbitrary range, or why it might, but all the SEO Youtubers are saying it does, so all the people cargo culting SEO wisdom are doing it, so it doesn't really matter.
More practically, the longer a piece of content appears to be, the more opportunities to stuff ads into it without appearing like a cash grab.
Google does definitely reward users for including micro-slash-schema based content though, so the recipes themselves are likely included on the page in a parsable json+ld format, which is great for ingestion by apps like Paprika (which many others have mentioned.)
The good news is that there are rumors that Google is moving away from whatever content-based system they may or may not have been using before, and towards a "helpfulness" system for ranking pages -- basically, how directly did this article address the search question that took you to it as the answer.
This should prefer direct, concise answers (e.g., "2+2 = 4" vs "2+2 starts with the history of numbers, which are of course ciphered numeral systems originating with the Egyptians")
Time will tell how accurately that can be measured, or what wild gamesmanship will occur as the result of it.
SEO may be the reason for many of the bigger blogs, but I think we shouldn't default to cynicism here. People who are passionate about a given topic often love to ramble on about it. And if you aren't very passionate about food, you aren't likely to start a food blog.
And most people don't start blogging as a purely educational activity, but rather as a way of expressing themselves. As a result, they aren't necessarily thinking about optimal user experience like a software business would.
I had a coworker who had a food blog and she would fill each post with ramblings like all the rest do, but it is because she wanted to tell her story of why that particular meal was important to her. And if you were to ask her in person about a meal or what she likes to cook, she would talk in as much detail since that was her passion.
The default of assuming everyone is a bad actor is growing rather tiresome. Not to mention, these people didn't need to share their recipes at all. And we aren't compensating them for their work. We just complain.
Plain recipes have no copyright protection[1]. The other surrounding text does have copyright protection, so any recipe publisher needs to have additional text and to be able to detect if someone else has copied it.
Bullet point #1 here doesn't get enough credit either in this article or generally here on HN comments, but is a major factor.
A lot of the recipe blogs that originated this form of long-winded stories leading into the eventual recipe have regular readers. Many of those readers aren't looking for specific recipes at any given time they are looking for the stories first. Those stories are the real content to those regular readers. (And regular readers with their recurring ad revenue/demographics are the ones that pay the bills, ultimately, not "went searching for a specific recipe" utilitarian users.)
This isn't even a new phenomenon in recipes pop culture, because food TV shows learned this decades ago. Most cooking shows break down into two categories: competitions (which mostly never even give recipes) and "lifestyle" shows that may include recipes but just as much include the "celebrity chefs" chatting as much about who they are and what is going on in their lives and storytelling why the recipes in question were of interest in that moment as much as the details of the recipes themselves.
This isn't even an isolated phenomenon to recipes. It is common, modern parasocial behavior. You could look at something like Twitch as a utilitarian resource to see gameplay or learn tips/tricks, but obviously nearly every stream is full of streamers chatting about their day while they wait for game lobbies or in between other parts of gameplay and whatever tips/tricks they may have to impart. It's the parasocial "human interest" that builds the biggest and most reliable parts of their audiences (and in turn most of their revenue).
There are a lot of reasons people complain about it a lot more with recipe bloggers than Twitch streamers.
Google measures the amount of time you spend on a webpage before you go back to the search page (if you dont open in a new tab) and it’s used as an important ranking signal. That’s pretty much it.
All the long winded recipe bullshit just keeps you on the page longer before you realize the recipe is crap.
Oh hey, something I have first hand experience with working with fairly large food / recipe focused sites.
It's primarily driven by ads. I know, huge shock there. A lot of people might assume it's purely an SEO play and while that's true to an extent, it's mostly for the ads.
So let us imagine an ideal situation from a recipe consumer point of view. You go to Google, type "best chili recipe", and Google would immediately show the best recipe directly into its UI, based on all the data is has on you and some sophisticated recommendation algorithm. Further, you have a set of standardized actions like "print", "send to iPad", "favorite", etc.
You no longer have to read the author's diary entry and this entire hyper-optimized workflow doesn't cost you a cent. Perfect, right?
Well, I suppose that in these AI times ultimately the effort of even asking the question would be redundant, obviously Google knows Wednesday is your chili day, and your fridge had already ordered the ingredient.
There's just one problem: what about the recipe writers? What about artists? What about anybody ever producing any content of monetizable value?
What incentive is there to produce content when users never pay directly and middlemen aggregate it, removing you from the equation? You, the person that created the bloody thing. It's like you don't even exist.
This isn't just big tech, we have an active role in this. When users do not have to pay, they generally won't. Digital content has no value yet we obviously have the natural born right to consume it anyway.
Speaking as someone who likes to cook, and hates wading through pages of SEO bait to find the actual recipe, it seems like in principle it wouldn't be too hard to write a search engine specialized for recipes that heavily penalizes longwindedness.
Nice lightweight site, but I don't tend to trust recipes that don't have any feedback from people who've attempted it. Which, of course, leads to the review-spam problem.
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
Luckily it's also one of the only cases where a microformat is actually nigh-universally used. Outside a few sites where the "fluff" isn't fluff and is actually good content itself (e.g. Serious Eats) I just throw the URL into Paprika 3 (no affiliation, and there are tons of other programs and probably some browser plugins to do the same thing) and let it strip it down to the ingredients and instructions by reading the microformat markup. Works flawlessly nearly every time.
[EDIT] Credit where it's due, I'm also pretty sure the microformat is only popular because of Google. I think they downrank sites in recipe searches if Google can't "see" the recipe, using the microformat. They may be both the cause of, and solution to, the problem.
[+] [-] johnfn|3 years ago|reply
This works great for things like StackOverflow posts where you can quickly judge if the answer is correct, and if it's not, you can quickly bounce. It's not great for recipes, which are almost always "correct" (in that they are a recipe of the type you're looking for), so spending longer probably just means you scrolled for longer.
[+] [-] Justin_K|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebricklayr|3 years ago|reply
Umami has Chrome/Firefox extensions that you can use while on desktop, which will sync your recipes to the app. Disclaimer: I built it :)
[+] [-] jxdxbx|3 years ago|reply
I think the reason Google wanted microformats is for Google Assistant recipe answers.
[+] [-] unixlikeposting|3 years ago|reply
longer times on a page means longer enagement == more ads revenue.
is it possible that google is incentivizing longer engagements via adwords by using search priority that ranks by average time spent on page?
[+] [-] _tom_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cobaltoxide|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coding123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] looseyesterday|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|3 years ago|reply
Google presents what its customers (people doing searches) want to see, so shouldn't we ask the people who click the results that make it to the top (whether they leave the page dissatisfied or not is a different story, right?) over and over?
What incentive does Google have for prioritizing succinct quality posts versus blogspam posts? What incentive does Google have for prioritizing blogspam posts over succinct quality posts? Why is it the way it is if we're talking about the unsponsored (not paid) organic results?
As a blogspam author, why do you want people on your page? To get more AdSense views/impressions? You typically aren't selling anything on a website that gives away free long-winded recipes (so conversion rate/cost per click/paid advertising isn't really a concern?)
[+] [-] graeme|3 years ago|reply
1. You can’t copyright a recipe
2. You can copyright the text of a long winded story which contains a recipe
Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property
https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...
[+] [-] TehShrike|3 years ago|reply
I suspect the real reason is what the author of the post claims – Google sends more readers to articles with lots of fluff.
> This food blogger wrote about an experiment she conducted. She listened to some of her readers and actually tried just putting the recipe up top before everything else. All of the articles in her experiment went lower in the rankings.
[+] [-] _aavaa_|3 years ago|reply
> Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property
The reason the site exists in the first place is for the recipes, and that intellectual content is not defendable.
[+] [-] noworld|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|3 years ago|reply
Instead I bought a used 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook from a used book store, beats Google every time.
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|3 years ago|reply
Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork.
Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity.
Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.
[+] [-] h2odragon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imiric|3 years ago|reply
There's no optimal way to prepare food. Once you've found a recipe that you enjoy, save it, remix it, and share it with someone else. If a 1950s cookbook works for you, that's great, but you'd be missing out on a lot of good food if you only follow recipes from a single, static source. Maybe even that meandering blogger is worth reading; otherwise there are many tools out there that could extract just the gist for you.
[+] [-] RichardCA|3 years ago|reply
When I was in my 20's I was able to teach myself how to roast a turkey by looking it up in the index and then doing exactly what the book said. Ditto for the Candied Yams, which I still get compliments on. Every single recipe was tested in a kitchen similar to what an average household would have had at that time.
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vintage-joy-of-cooking-cook...
[+] [-] sharperguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|3 years ago|reply
No ingredient list, no measurements, no temperatures, no times. Good luck.
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|3 years ago|reply
This is why I really like Food Labs. This cookie recipe is the most famous example: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip...
They bake hundreds of cookies with different quantities of ingredient to show the effect that each ingredient has in the baking process. So now not only do you know what somebody's recipe is, but you also know exactly how to modify it to suit your own tastes.
[+] [-] andrewjmg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readingnews|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximus-decimus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cudgy|3 years ago|reply
Furthermore, the structure of what is considered good writing feeds into this: state your point in the introduction, state your point in the body, and restate your point in the conclusion of the article. Reminds me of television shows that recap what you saw prior to the 2 minute commercial, just in case you forgot what you were watching 2 minutes ago.
[+] [-] ravenstine|3 years ago|reply
News, blogs, recipes, shows, instructional videos... all pretty much blow chunks. Any time I simply want straight forward information it becomes a matter of frequent fast-forwarding and combining of info from disparate sources when it shouldn't be necessary. Get. To. The. Point.
[+] [-] kspacewalk2|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://plainoldrecipe.com/
[1] https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spen...
[+] [-] gaudat|3 years ago|reply
https://based.cooking/
[+] [-] twh270|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraussvonespy|3 years ago|reply
I'd say that well over half of the random Internet recipes I try aren't very good, have been developed with bad techniques, use the wrong flavors, try to fix flavor issues by adding more flavors and so on. Using a vetted site (the America's Test Kitchen recipes are also quite good) gets me ~98% success.
I'd rather take the extra 5 minutes of time to look through how the recipe was created and tested to make sure it's a good recipe than spend a couple of hours making an unknown recipe with a 50/50 shot to not be terrible. YMMV.
[+] [-] bmelton|3 years ago|reply
More practically, the longer a piece of content appears to be, the more opportunities to stuff ads into it without appearing like a cash grab.
Google does definitely reward users for including micro-slash-schema based content though, so the recipes themselves are likely included on the page in a parsable json+ld format, which is great for ingestion by apps like Paprika (which many others have mentioned.)
The good news is that there are rumors that Google is moving away from whatever content-based system they may or may not have been using before, and towards a "helpfulness" system for ranking pages -- basically, how directly did this article address the search question that took you to it as the answer.
This should prefer direct, concise answers (e.g., "2+2 = 4" vs "2+2 starts with the history of numbers, which are of course ciphered numeral systems originating with the Egyptians")
Time will tell how accurately that can be measured, or what wild gamesmanship will occur as the result of it.
[+] [-] dinkleberg|3 years ago|reply
And most people don't start blogging as a purely educational activity, but rather as a way of expressing themselves. As a result, they aren't necessarily thinking about optimal user experience like a software business would.
I had a coworker who had a food blog and she would fill each post with ramblings like all the rest do, but it is because she wanted to tell her story of why that particular meal was important to her. And if you were to ask her in person about a meal or what she likes to cook, she would talk in as much detail since that was her passion.
The default of assuming everyone is a bad actor is growing rather tiresome. Not to mention, these people didn't need to share their recipes at all. And we aren't compensating them for their work. We just complain.
[+] [-] schnable|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerbinns|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
[+] [-] WorldMaker|3 years ago|reply
A lot of the recipe blogs that originated this form of long-winded stories leading into the eventual recipe have regular readers. Many of those readers aren't looking for specific recipes at any given time they are looking for the stories first. Those stories are the real content to those regular readers. (And regular readers with their recurring ad revenue/demographics are the ones that pay the bills, ultimately, not "went searching for a specific recipe" utilitarian users.)
This isn't even a new phenomenon in recipes pop culture, because food TV shows learned this decades ago. Most cooking shows break down into two categories: competitions (which mostly never even give recipes) and "lifestyle" shows that may include recipes but just as much include the "celebrity chefs" chatting as much about who they are and what is going on in their lives and storytelling why the recipes in question were of interest in that moment as much as the details of the recipes themselves.
This isn't even an isolated phenomenon to recipes. It is common, modern parasocial behavior. You could look at something like Twitch as a utilitarian resource to see gameplay or learn tips/tricks, but obviously nearly every stream is full of streamers chatting about their day while they wait for game lobbies or in between other parts of gameplay and whatever tips/tricks they may have to impart. It's the parasocial "human interest" that builds the biggest and most reliable parts of their audiences (and in turn most of their revenue).
There are a lot of reasons people complain about it a lot more with recipe bloggers than Twitch streamers.
[+] [-] akiselev|3 years ago|reply
All the long winded recipe bullshit just keeps you on the page longer before you realize the recipe is crap.
[+] [-] dawnerd|3 years ago|reply
It's primarily driven by ads. I know, huge shock there. A lot of people might assume it's purely an SEO play and while that's true to an extent, it's mostly for the ads.
[+] [-] daniel-s|3 years ago|reply
The best recipe website on the internet.
Is the best and doesn't rank on Google specifically because it doesn't do what this article talks about.
[+] [-] strig|3 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
You no longer have to read the author's diary entry and this entire hyper-optimized workflow doesn't cost you a cent. Perfect, right?
Well, I suppose that in these AI times ultimately the effort of even asking the question would be redundant, obviously Google knows Wednesday is your chili day, and your fridge had already ordered the ingredient.
There's just one problem: what about the recipe writers? What about artists? What about anybody ever producing any content of monetizable value?
What incentive is there to produce content when users never pay directly and middlemen aggregate it, removing you from the equation? You, the person that created the bloody thing. It's like you don't even exist.
This isn't just big tech, we have an active role in this. When users do not have to pay, they generally won't. Digital content has no value yet we obviously have the natural born right to consume it anyway.
[+] [-] ElfinTrousers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemiller2002|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bottlepalm|3 years ago|reply
Th primary reason being generating long form has become so cheap with AI that it has essentially rendered it worthless.
[+] [-] tuckerpo|3 years ago|reply
https://based.cooking/
Shortform, straight to the point recipes. Just ingredients and steps. No ads. No life stories.
[+] [-] Pxtl|3 years ago|reply