Well, I don't know, I kinda miss the human angle. I'd have loved to first read six paragraphs about how the author's grandmother raised them on home grown threads and greenlets :^)
> I'd have loved to first read six paragraphs about how the author's grandmother raised them on home grown threads and greenlets.
With recipes, often times your problem is you want to learn how to make something where having the steps listed out is the most important thing. The story behind the recipe isn't important to solve your problem but for tech the story around the choice is important. Often times the "why" is really important and I really like hearing about what led someone to use something first. Often times that's more important or equally as important as the implementation details.
It wouldn't make sense for this post given its title but if someone were making a post about why they chose to use async in Python I'd expect and hope that half of the post goes into the gory details of how they tried alternatives and what their shortcomings were for their specific use cases. That would help me as the reader generalize their post to my specific use cases and see if it applies.
For some reason whenever this comes up there'll be one person saying "I bet you didn't know it's for copyright" and another saying "I bet you didn't know it's for SEO". I've yet to see either prove anything beyond that it's a plausible explanation that could fit the minimal known facts.
I can't find the reference atm, but Jeff Jarvis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis) says that this _is_ to get around copyright law; the same technique was being done over a hundred years ago (possibly more, that's why I want to reference!). Instead of blogs, think pamphlets.
I feel alone sometimes as seemingly the one person adding "I bet you didn't know it is because blogs sometimes have regular readers and regular readers drive ad revenue more reliably than SEO or concerns about copyright". I think it fits the facts better, by far, but it's really interesting to see how many HN commenters under-estimate the readership of cooking blogs because they only ever interact with recipes as utilitarian data at the end of a specific web search and aren't often themselves the sorts of people who are the regular audience of recipe blogs so they discount that such audiences exist. (I had my cooking show phase and have friends and loved ones that hooked on the stories of some of the bigger name recipe blogs and I love letting them tell me about the sorts of things they are reading. It's amazing the blinders that the general HN commenter sometimes wears without realizing it.)
I immediately bounce from those Stackoverflow clones that keep appearing up at the top of searches. So, I am wondering how much this is still weighted in the scores.
When is the last time you heard of online recipe blogs enforcing copyright claims on other blogspam? Ridiculous.
The real reason is simple, people who write recipes aren’t robots - they’re expressing their stories and emotions, while explaining how to make food that’s dear to them..
>people who write recipes aren’t robots - they’re expressing their stories and emotions, while explaining how to make food that’s dear to them..
the people who write recipes aren't robots, they're narcissists and various forms of insecure and seek validation in the form of attention and adulation from others. That's not a bad thing, it's all too human and we should embrace, not stigmatize, the needy, but if all you want is a recipe rather than to be an acolyte it can seem like a big ask.
You enjoyed time with your grandparents, and you remember it? Welcome the club! and I remember family as much more complicated than simply being all fun, and I feel like you might be Norman Rockwelling a bit.
yes, but you're cart before horse. The structure of paper newspaper and magazine recipe articles and "prose remembrance" cookbooks is the same. Tweaking that model for online use, very plausible, but it's also the way these "stories" are told anyway.
> they're narcissists and various forms of insecure and seek validation in the form of attention and adulation from others
This is incredibly insensitive and judgemental.
Not sure what I expected from HN, I guess...
Why are these "narcissistic" people obliged to provide you with formulaic recipes for free? If the cost is perusing over their feel-good story, I feel it's a fair trade-off.
It's not about recipes and tech blogs. It's about how American journalists have been taught to write, ever since the days of Capote and Hemingway. Everything else flew from there.
As an European, this is painfully evident every time I read something from a US journalist: I have to fast-forward through several paragraphs of useless "human angle" before I can get to the actual meat of the article.
Unfortunately the rot is spreading further and further every year.
For recipes, it also signals effort and provides a hint about quality. There's a lot of low effort, broken, "would anyone enjoy eating this?" recipes out there dumped on recipe sites. A few pages of text says that the author thought the recipe was at least worth that amount of effort, and usually confirms that the author thinks the recipe is at least as good as X other recipes, etc.
