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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

One interesting footnote about a specific type of longform content; recipes are categorically not under copyright in US law, but specific collections of them (like a specific cookbook formatting) can be, and recipes are also theoretically copyrightable if they contain "substantial literary expression." Which is why most food blogs usually have a longform essay of some personal anecdote right before the actual recipe you're looking for.

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https://based.cooking/

Just recipes; no stories, no bloat.

The context behind why and how the site was created should be in Luke Smith's videos which are linked at the bottom of the page, in case anyone missed it:

> About this site

> Founded to provide a simple online cookbook without ads and obese web design. See the story of this site unfold in three videos:

> https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/a-demonstration-of-modern-web-blo...

> https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/the-war-against-web-bloat-continu...

> https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/soydevs-destroyed-epic-style-by-b...

I'm not sure i agree with Luke on everything, or even that his tone is always conductive to productive discussion, but there is definitely a lot of merit in creating small and fast websites without any unnecessary bloat nowadays.

The "Website Obesity Crisis" presentation also has stuck with me ever since i ran into it: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

First video I watched on Odysee.

I like the look and feel except for the Gay Spa Asian video suggestions lol

I found it sort of funny, given that those links are apparently talking about modern web bloat, that I see a blank page when I visit them in a browser with JS disabled.

Oh no, the page in your last link seems to have linkrotted images. An arbitrarily grabbed version from the Internet Archive looks ok: http://web.archive.org/web/20180316071757/https://idlewords....

The first recipe I clicked on was this (WARNING - looks scary and gross):

https://based.cooking/fried-anglerfish-fillet.html

This fish does look like someone who regularly uses the word "based" in the meme meaning.

Looks like a murloc.

Few pictures = no go for me. I want to see what the dish is supposed to look like before I start

https://cookpad.com is a pretty good site for recipes. Unfortunately it's mostly only popular in Japan. IIRC, they want you to pay if you want to be able to sort results by rating

I hate to be that guy, but...

- Cookpad has infinite scrolling

- The only way to change the site language is a link in the footer

- As a result, just when you're about to click this essential link so you can read the site, more content loads in and it disappears

Took me five or six tries to finally scroll+click fast enough and defeat the infinite scrolling boss, thus unlocking the epic "now I can read this website" loot. Stupid beyond belief and I will never visit Cookpad again because of this.

The first time I scroll to the bottom it doesn't actually keeps the footer in the view, with a little bit of extra space to scroll. If I scroll further it starts infinite scrolling. So it seems they sort of tried to deal with this, but it should really be on top. Also when I first got to the site it was the Japanese version, which doesn't have intite scrolling for some reason

Another (my favourite) recipe site:

https://clovegarden.com/

Not just recipes, but in-depth articles about utensils and above all, ingredients, too. And tips on where to buy them in Los Angeles ("Koreatown", mainly, as I recall).

Also some stories, about occasions (mostly gatherings of the site owner's music club) where the dishes have been served. But they're on separate pages; you needn't see them unless you want to.

Dunno about any RSS feed though.

I always thought that was simply for SEO

I always thought it was to push the useful information as far down the page as possible so you have to scroll by a bunch of ads to get to it.

It's also a sales tactic. Mary Jo Rose is selling you her story so that you will buy the idea that you should subscribe and keep reading her posts even if you have nothing to cook, and eventually use her Amazon link to get 10% off paper towels.

This is worse with web but is old as time.

It used to be common for ingredient sellers to issue recipe books that would extoll the value of their goods, trash their competitors', and the recipes would usually include the ingredient even if it didn't do anything for the particular food you were trying to make. (E.g. "our flour is pure, unadulterated, and not bleached using toxic ingredients unlike our competitors who also eat babies", which was a more effective marketing tactic before the existence of food regulatory authorities curbed the worst excesses.)

The recipe on the side of the box is a much smaller-scale version of this.

yes, that would also serve SEO - longer on the web page + more content viewed = greater "engagement"

Even regular cookbooks these days will have a bit of fluff before the recipe for this purpose. Though in a cookbook pictures of food also serve this purpose.

Some examples from cookbooks: https://www.maangchi.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mul-naen...

https://www.cookbookdivas.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Cel...

I don't mind that so much because it's easy to skip the fluff - you can find the ingredients and method in under a second since no scrolling is involved

I also wouldn't be surprised if the fluff is there because it was originally written for web and chanced upon finding a publisher

I bought a $5 keto recipes book at my big-chain grocery store's checkout.

It's a lot easier to just try a new recipe when it's not tied up inside a 100-comment Reddit thread debating its nutritional value.

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