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Comment by resoluteteeth | Hacker News Reader

The site isn't loading right now, but regarding your description here:

> - Most recipe websites are what I call "mommy blogs", and the principal problem is that the recipe ingredient list and instructions are buried in a SEO-laden essay that we don't care about. We were sharing links to our favorite recipes, but links don't allow you to skip past the unnecessary essay prefacing the recipe. We knew we wanted a way to have recipes uncompromised by unrelated essays.

1) You may not want to advertise the site this way based on what happened to Recipeasly: https://www.today.com/food/recipeasly-recipe-website-taken-d...

2) While lots of people will doubtless be able to relate to this issue, you might want to find a more neutral phrase than "mommy blogs" which could potentially sound insulting or sexist to some users.

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  1) Thanks, I'll keep this in mind. I don't understand the rage people have against not wanting to read the blog text. Maybe they should blog about something that makes me want to read the whole post instead of scrolling to the bottom past 1000 ads.
  2) I'll stop calling them mommy blogs.

Eh, I'd ignore the critics related to 1.

Facts are not copyrightable. (IANAL) Strip out the prose, API/schema/DDL it all away.

Your tool sounds orders of magnitudes more valuable to humanity than bloggers' random ramblings with a surprise recipe at the bottom.

Anyone who wants that, can literally and easily ignore your product and continue using the existing internet. SEO spam will only get worse.

1) These people are not adding value by padding their recipes with self-absorbed prose. There will always be tools to strip away the superfluous ramblings, the bloggers should adapt to what people want, rather than lament the fact that no-one wants to hear about their faux-Proust recipe genesis stories.

With that out of the way, I’ve thought of the same website model as OP. I came to the conclusion that recipes would have to be contributed by users. It’s not right to scrape recipes from others blogs.

It sounds like the blogging portions are usually added for SEO purposes since a lot of those people use their blogs as their job so they need to optimize for clicks, I don't view that as an issue even if the quality is debatable. Regardless of their reasoning, the concern isn't that it won't be as good without the blogging content, it's that the recipes people will add here will inevitably include some from other sites just missing their extra stuff, which means it's drawing away traffic from their original work without them getting any credit/ad revenue for it.

Yes! OP is being super condescending. And thus far, this amazing new paradigm in stealing recipes and posting them elsewhere on the internet isn't working as well as any of the "mommy blogs" OP complains about.

As much as I hate mommy blogs, these recipe aggregators are absolutely ignoring copyright. I would love to have an option other than mommy blogs. I would more than love this. If a recipe site that just presented the recipe and avoided the blog part was created for people to submit recipes, I'd be a huge fan. But all of these scrapers are just absolutely not something I can support based on the fact they are stealing other people's information.

I just want to clarify that CookTime is not an aggregator, it is exactly what you are asking for: a recipe website where people submit recipes, no blogs.

The issue is it's still going to end up doing some aggregating second hand as users copy recipes they've found on other websites to CookTime, it won't be the website itself doing it but I'd imagine they're still liable to legal action for serving those recipes, and could be asked to take them down under a threat of fines.

I'd expect they'd receive Section 230 protection from user generated content if it is truly user submitted versus raw web scraping.

The "fun" thing would be to growth hack your site by web scraping and then having that data posted under fake/bot accounts. Even more protection if you actually have bots from outside the company do it so there's some reasonable deniability. This is my level of pessimism from startup websites now.

Looks like that today.com site has also been taken down.

Counter-anecdote, it loads for me just fine.

> And many food bloggers expressed concerns that a website like Recipeasly could be hugely detrimental to this business model.

The horse carriage industry said the same thing about cars...

You don't just get a grey box on a white background?

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