• frezik@midwest.social
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    8 days ago

    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.

    • Vespair@lemm.ee
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      8 days ago

      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.

    • selkiesidhe@lemm.ee
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      8 days ago

      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…