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Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

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Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#201

Post by y04nn »

layer8 wrote: post #114
y04nn wrote: post #110

It is interesting that there is not yet a Wikipedia of recipes. It would be the perfect use case for a wiki. People would love to share their recipes variations and improve/fix existing one. There would be a standard layout, introduction paragraph would explain the history of a recipe and link to other similar recipes. That would be interesting to read. And there would be an endless number of recipes. For-profit site…

The edit wars would be horrible. Everyone has their own recipe for any given food item, plus endless variations.

I'm not sure, is there not one standard, most accepted recipe and then N variations? Also, I would not except edits to be on ingredients, but mostly on the method. If a user would want to modify ingredients, he could create a his "regional" variation.

But I see the wiki more as a reference book on recipes and their well known variations (which is mostly what I'm looking for when searching for a recipe) than a sharing platform/pseudo social network.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#202

Post by giaour »

2bitencryption wrote: post #11

What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - any…

> I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe?

> My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc?

Cookbooks that sell well usually have some introductory text for every recipe. The best cookbooks use this intro to describe unusual techniques or flavor combinations in the recipe, so the intro text in such books can be really helpful and is sometimes critical to getting the recipe right the first time you try to make it. The only cookbook I own that doesn't have intro text for each recipe is a culinary school textbook, so the authors felt safe assuming a certain level of familiarity with the terms and techniques used.

OG food blogs like Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz emulated the classic cookbook style, and, not surprisingly, those authors have gone on to make a lot of money writing traditional cookbooks. Contemporary food blogs tend to try to emulate older, successful blogs (maybe because Google somehow boosted recipes with intro text back when such text was usually helpful?) but mostly come off as AI-generated garbage text, made just long enough to create a couple scroll events and artificially lower a site's bounce rate.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#203

Post by nybble41 »

kuschku wrote: post #154
layer8 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The edit wars would be horrible. Everyone has their own recipe for any given food item, plus endless variations.

Make it a namespaced wiki. Every user can only create and edit recipes in their own namespace, or the namespace of groups they’re a member of (like GitHub treats repos for example). Then you could, as user, follow users you like. Each recipe would be in structured format, but could also have rich text introductions / explanations, if users wish to add such information. You could even let users add custom styling to t…

> (like GitHub treats repos for example)

This is the way. Publicly read-only repos with easy access to forking and pull requests are far superior to wiki pages with no access controls. Compared to current GitHub you would mainly need to add support for structured data, ratings, and indexing.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#206

Post by tiborsaas »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #97
tiborsaas wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to test: "pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent: https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ "lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good: https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ "sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads y…

The lasagne recipe page would be one I count as bad. There's a lot of useless text before the recipe. The other two result pages are good. Interesting enough, the big name recipe sites: Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc. all are short and to the point. But for some reason the crappy recipe sites outperform them on Google.

I don't know how to make it, a list of ingredients wouldn't help me much. That article is a bit too superficial for me.

Actually, video recipes are the best imho: https://www.youtube.com/c/yousuckatcooking :)

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#207

Post by strig »

fancy_pantser wrote: post #155

In the same vein, I made the Recipe Filter extension for browsers: Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter... Source code (there's Safari in there if you don't mind building it yourself): https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter I was spurred into action by a comment here on HN back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.co…

Yo thanks for making that extension! I've actually recommended it to a bunch of friends and family

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#208

Post by SllX »

slingnow wrote: post #200
mtm7 wrote: post #190

> What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? I lived with a food blogger for six years and might be able to provide some more perspective for these types of comments (beyond just SEO). First, there's actuall…

I have yet to meet or read about a single person who has ever said "I really enjoy scrolling through twenty paragraphs of backstory and embedded auto-play videos and advertisements while I browse for recipes." So while I'm sure there exist bloggers who put care into these things, a tiny minority of people seem to find any value there. In fact it now seems that so many people are aggravated by this style that an app t…

As with all things written: the writing is there for the audience who will read it, not the people that will not.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#209

Post by guynamedloren »

danielvaughn wrote: post #152
2bitencryption wrote: post #11

What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - any…

Exactly. I've never been as frustrated with the modern web as I am when I try to find a recipe. It's the most infuriating experience. I'd pay money if I knew I could access a very large database of recipes, where I know I just get the recipe itself.

It's an infuriating experience indeed. I reached my breaking point a few months ago, and decided I was just done with googling recipes. After trying a few different highly regarded paid apps (recipe managers, NYT Cooking) and not finding quite what I was looking for, I caved and started compiling my own recipe database in Notion. My goal is to use this database exclusively for weekly meal planning, as well as for cooking up something on a whim. It's a habit change for sure, and required a bit of upfront work to seed the database, but so far, has proved to be successful. Overall, both meal planning and cooking itself have become more enjoyable!

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#210

Post by nybble41 »

pjerem wrote: post #161
shortformblog wrote: post #132

This is theft that gets around a copyright loophole. Don’t steal recipes.

It's complicated. Where is the limit ? For me it's just a web browser optimized for recipe websites. It's basic scrapping. Google does it, why can't I do it ? Are "reader mode" browser extensions theft ? Are ad blockers theft ? Is using Lynx as a web browser theft ? If your business depends on your content never being scraped, you are screwed.

It's not that complicated. Copyright was simply never intended to apply to recipes. The fact that there is nothing copyrightable about a mere list of ingredients and basic preparation instructions without any creative elements is not in any sense a "loophole".
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