this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Those are put there for SEO purposes. Google favors sites with these big stories. The copyright issue alone doesn't justify what's there; you could do a quick blurb of a few sentences and it would be enough. Plenty of cookbooks do that.
This is why a lot of those sites have a button that says "skip to recipe". It's a bunch of text that's meant to be for robots, not you, and they really don't care if you read it.
Now that it's being created by LLMs, we may have the first known example of human language written by robots and intended for robots. Welcome to a cyberpunk dystopia.
SEO is part of it, but it's also literally just more physical real estate for ads. Recipe sites, including personal recipe blogs, are infamous for the sheer volume of ads placed on them. Yes, everyone just scrolls to the recipe so it kind of doesn't matter, but longer text means more space for ads.
So why not put the recipe first, and the bullshit after?
Search engines favor text earlier in the site. Text "above the fold" (the area where you wouldn't have to scroll to see it) is scored higher.
https://www.pedalo.co.uk/seo-experiment-text-position-keyword-rankings/
Ahh, that explains it then. Cheers!
That actually sucks. Googles SEO algorithms force websites to homogenize.
Because that's what computers used to be for. Now we drive engagement.
But OP stated that, the text only being there to manipulate SEO, the authors don't really care of you read it. So out it at thd bottom, after the recipe!
Yeah, I think I live in a dreamworld like in the old show Computer Chronicles when computers were presented by scientists and used by engineers to do actual work. It was easy (for me) to grasp.
Now we have every sector of human activity, including those I consider at best useless, at worst harmful, like endless advertising, merchandising, propagandizing, misinforming, etc boosted exponentially because of essentially free computer power.
Not building a leisure society and using our tools for good, instead we just amplify the worst aspects of humanity.
There's so much "work" done in our capitalist society that is actively creating a drag on our lives, all to extract more money from us to the billionaire class. It will never be enough for them. Bezos and Fuckerberg would own slaves if the state allowed them to.
But I was told capitalism was the most efficient system.
Most efficient for what?
Don't worry about it, it's just more efficient.
I've had to explain that to people soooo many times. All those words, all those pics (with alt text), it's just to make the site higher on the search results...