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this idea is awesome. The "forking" idea is great for recipes, but you need almost something like a difftool to be able to tell what's different and why? I think with a better UI and way's for users to interact with each other this could be extremely cool. Stick with it and good luck :)

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+1 on a diff-tool. Its very hard to tell what's different between the forked recipes. Some sort of short commit-style message on the change would be helpful. (Something like "Added potatoes and carrots" or "Smoked the chicken instead of grilling it")

I really like the idea, but as others have mentioned, it does need some design help.

There actually is a really basic diff tool right now (Click on revisions on the recipe page). I'm working on creating a more advanced one now. Any ideas on what a good interface might be?

A diff visualization for ingredients should be pretty easy, you could show left and right and the delta between them as three distinct columns.

As for other distinctions, such as "mince" instead of "dice", that would be tricker, but you could probably do that with a human-friendly strikethrough coupled with a handwriting typeface to indicate what was changed.

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