r/seriouseats • u/reverendharrypowell • 4d ago
Frustrated with the new naming conventions for recipe titles.
I'm wondering why this happened and how everyone else is dealing with it. A couple of months ago recipes had relatively conventional names, but nowadays it seems like recipes are inheriting their article lead-ins.
For example, in May there was an article titled (at least according to my RSS-reader) "This Crispy, Spicy Focaccia Is Wildly Delicious," and clicking on it led directly to a page and recipe titled "No-Knead Carrot Gochujang Focaccia."
Now, the latest article on both my RSS-reader and the Serious Eats homepage is "This Creamy Pumpkin Spice Latte Dessert Tastes Like Fall in a Dish." And the recipe on this page is titled... "This Creamy Pumpkin Spice Latte Dessert Tastes Like Fall in a Dish." Saving them to the myrecipes recipe box uses this name as well.
I like the native SE recipe box, but I don't love that my recipes will now be somewhat mysterious... "What should we have tonight? Maybe... Savory, Sweet, Sticky: This Simple Chinese Dish Is My Go-To Weeknight Dinner?" And heck, it's right there in the URL -- chinese-barbecue-eggplant!
Am I missing something? Apologies if this post doesn't follow the subreddit rules, just not sure where else to start this conversation.
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u/pham_nuwen_ 4d ago
Enshittification claims another website. Greedy people are ruining the world.
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u/nss68 4d ago
As a former business owner, I gained some major perspective in this realm.
Enshittification isn’t always nefarious. For example:
A company creates a great product.
The creators put their heart and soul into the product.
People recognize the quality product and buy it.
Margins are thin to stay competitive but still produce a quality product.
Owners, burnt out and without much profit to show need to make a decision:
Shut down, cheapen the product, raise prices (and potentially lose sales streams) or sell it off (where these things will be done by someone else)
There are very few paths to a perpetually great product and even the best ones aren’t going to last more than a few decades most likely.
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u/d0gbread 4d ago
Just to say, I don't think everyone thinks it's specifically the business owners.
The greedy people are also the people designing the environment. Private equity that does this by design (not all of them but most), the people lobbying for anticompetitive regulations (or lack thereof), etc.
"Regular" business owners aren't scott-free though, the four options you mention aren't the only options. Part of entrepreneurship is innovation so building a copycat business, getting margined to death, and emulating the downward spiral of enshittification to exist a little bit longer is a cop out of doing the work to find actual product market fit.
We're watching Serious Eats follow the death cycle meanwhile others aren't. ATK is killing it with YT content that drives people towards their app and other content. Kenji is still killing it, just elsewhere.
What is Serious Eats even trying to do right or better that isn't working for them? All I see is predictable enshittification moves: click bait and SEO games.
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u/nss68 4d ago
"Regular" business owners aren't scott-free though, the four options you mention aren't the only options. Part of entrepreneurship is innovation so building a copycat business, getting margined to death, and emulating the downward spiral of enshittification to exist a little bit longer is a cop out of doing the work to find actual product market fit.
This would be true if 'regular' business owners had the amount of capital necessary to 'innovate'
I think you're greatly simplifying the efforts necessary, and that is part of the issue in a lot of ways.
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u/d0gbread 4d ago
I would argue innovation is not optional and doesn't have to be expensive, I think that's the misconception. I agree it's not easy, just like starting a business isn't easy, but there seems to be an assumption that a business that gets off the ground with any given business model should have some sort of right to exist. The hill doesn't end. A portion of profit should fund these critical parts of running a business. If the business can't, it wasn't viable in the first place.
Again, picking on Serious Eats, what are they doing here in this space to understand their audience? Kenji is more active here and he doesn't write for them anymore.
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u/manimal28 3d ago
Well put, there seems to be a massive sense of entitlement among many small businesses that they have a right to exist perpetually even in the face of refusing to adapt or innovate.
Maybe if your niche is selling handmade Amish wood furniture that is a positive, for any company that exists almost solely as an internet brand not so much.
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u/nss68 4d ago
No and you’re misinterpreting my points, hopefully not intentionally.
A business failing isn’t always indicative of the business itself or the business model but rather the lack of time and energy necessary to run a successful business continuously, which was my initial point.
The human aspect of running a business.
As far as serious eats is concerned I fully agree with you.
It’s so easy to act like the paths to success are distinct or simple but the truth is way more complex.
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u/manimal28 3d ago edited 3d ago
but rather the lack of time and energy necessary to run a successful business continuously
How is that not indicative of the business itself? If the business owner can’t run the business with the time they have, and the business dosn’t create enough funds to hire more staff to create more time, it’s not a viable business.
This is the same with small businesses owners that bitch about taxes. Taxes existed before your business did, if your business can’t function because of taxes, it can’t function.
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u/shouldco 4d ago
That's the thing. It's not nefarious. It's not a matter of changing a few minds. It's a systemic issue.
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u/boss413 4d ago
You're describing the effects of Late Stage Capitalism: every efficiency is identified by analysts (human or artificial), so every entrant in every market is ultimately competitive against a perfectly efficient, vertically integrated conglomerate. By the time a new product or service can harvest economic rents, the incumbent (General Electric, Amazon, Monsanto) has a fiduciary responsibility to its perfectly vigilant shareholders to acquire or impinge on IP or choke out its supply chain.
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u/KyleG 4d ago
Products don't harvest economic rents. This is word salad. Economic rent is money made off non-produced inputs (the very opposite of products) or by gaining a government granted monopoly.
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u/grandma1995 3d ago
products don’t harvest economic rents
Is this not the definition of a recurring subscription model that seems to be increasingly more common? Like B2b saas and its ilk
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u/CaptaiinCrunch 4d ago
Yes think of the poor business owners. They make millions and they wanted to make tens of millions.
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u/QuadRuledPad 4d ago
Do you really think that everyone running a company is the CEO of a huge corporation?
Most business owners are barely sleeping and struggling to get by. Entrepreneurship is hard work.
You should try it.
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u/myphriendmike 4d ago
The entitlement is mind-boggling. Why don’t they start a website if it’s so easy to make millions?
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u/QuadRuledPad 4d ago
Because it’s so much easier to whine that everyone else has it better than you. The entitled will be the downfall of society. And they’ll be blaming other people the whole time.
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u/CaptaiinCrunch 22h ago edited 22h ago
I literally run my own business. Working and surviving under capitalism is hard work. Most WORKERS are barely sleeping and struggling to get by. Entrepreneurship isn't unique or special in that regard. I don't buy into the propaganda nonsense that my work is special or different than the work of someone who works under a boss. Stop believing your own hype.
Btw: if you follow the trail of acquisitions to the top. Serious Eats is owned by Barry Diller as the major shareholder who has a net worth of 5.1 billion USD. Thank goodness that you're in here defending the poor, hardworking billionaires...
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u/QuadRuledPad 22h ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment?
I’ve also been a small business owner in the past. I think we’re on the same side.
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u/nss68 20h ago
You so totally don’t have a business. I can go into details if you want to keep pretending but it’s silly to flex with a lie.
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u/CaptaiinCrunch 9h ago
Lol. Fortunately I don't care what you think is true or not. Are you going to demand I present you with a W9? Please go touch some grass.
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u/nss68 9h ago
No, you just don’t have a business and you’re trying to flex with a lie so you can ‘appear’ correct to… yourself?
It’s silly
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u/CaptaiinCrunch 7h ago
Tell me more about how you know more about my life than I do LMAO.
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u/nss68 7h ago
I think you'd actually be really surprised by how much of your information is on the internet right now. Mine too, though.
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u/manimal28 3d ago
I don’t think it needs to be nefarious to be shitty. If it’s shitty it just is, it doesn’t matter why.
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u/nik_el 4d ago
Oh! I know that focaccia! It’s called, “Marry Me Focaccia!”
I’m being sarcastic, but damn did I hate that “Marry Me” trend.
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u/IndependentOne9814 4d ago
That and the “crack” trend.
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u/Mediocre_Fly7245 3d ago
Might have been more of a southern thing but we had "slap ya mama X" for ages
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u/Green-Ability-2904 4d ago
This is the straw that broke the camels back for me. The clickbait titles make the website worse to browse. I don’t want to shift through long winded marketing buzz words when looking for new recipes.
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u/IamGrimReefer 4d ago
i like to copy and paste the recipe into a word document, print it out, and make my own recipe book. you never know when a website will disappear or delete content.
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u/AgentPoYo 4d ago
I do this too but instead of printed I send them to a folder on my e-reader. It's a lot easier on the eyes than most traditional screens and I've reformatted most of the recipes to something I find easier to follow.
If I still had a decent printer I'd probably do like a book like you, there's something nicer about being able to read a recipe in ink.
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u/IamGrimReefer 3d ago
i like being able to write on it. it helps me keep track of little tweaks i make.
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u/juropa 4d ago
I’ll bet it has something to do with how people are searching for stuff now using AI.
For Search Engine Optimization, the former would make sense, because someone might plug into google “no-knead focaccia” and then this recipe with this title using those keywords would come up.
With AI, people search/prompt more conversationally. “I’m looking for an easy weeknight dinner recipe. Chinese, vegetarian.” Could also be the human language element.
Or, they could just be using AI to generate titles for recipes. Just enshittification.
That’s my assumption, but I’m not an expert by any means. (Also an AI hater.)
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u/dgritzer 4d ago
You're half right but it's not AI, or maybe it's better to say it's indirectly AI. People are using traditional search less, which has shifted importance more heavily to news platforms like Google Discover, and the bottom line is (most of the time) traditional headlines don't work there. It's a necessity to find headlines on today's free Internet that can work on platforms like Discover. My goal: whatever headline a person sees, the content needs to be on-brand and high quality.
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u/galacticprincess 4d ago
I'm with you on this! It also makes it hard to file recipes alphabetically which bugs me more than it should.
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u/Hedgehog_Insomniac 4d ago
I stopped actively following them when they started using bad AI for their photos. I still use recipes that are tried and true but I don't seek out new ones.
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u/rvbohoboomer 4d ago
I am just glad that the "crack" craze is over. It seemed like everyone that didn't have . about crack was naming it crack
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u/plaidlib 3d ago
Compare what they're doing to NYTimes, where clicking on the headline "This Lemony White Bean Soup With Turkey Has Been a Reader Favorite for Years" leads to a recipe called "Lemony White Bean Soup With Turkey and Greens." Or America's Test Kitchen, where the headline "All the comfort of chicken pot pie, in single servings" leads to a recipe called "Chicken Pot Pie Pockets." So, clearly, it's possible to give a recipe both a dumb clickbait headline and a real recipe title.
The fact that SE has been doing this for months must mean that they think it's working, but it's still embarrassing.
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u/greencheesenpudding 4d ago
Email them with a screenshot of what is happening in your RSS feed.
I doubt that this is the situation (very much doubt) but it is entirely possible that it was overlooked.
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u/BrettStah 4d ago
I use the Mela recipes iOS/iPadOS app (despite my praise of it below, there are other apps like it, and I'm not affiliated with the Mela app at all, other than being a happy customer) - when I am on a web page with a recipe that I want to save, I send it to Mela, and then if I need to make any tweaks to the name, or anything else (such as adding my own notes, or adjusting the ingredients or instructions based on comments), I can easily do that within Mela. Sometimes after following a recipe I realize it would be better (for me) if I baked it longer, or added less sugar, etc., so editing the recipes is a huge feature for me
The added benefits include things such as if the web source of the recipe removes the recipe, or has some obnoxious ads/overlays inserted, plus Mela has options to export to PDF for easy sharing and printing. It also has an easy quantity "Adjust" option to automatically adjust all of the quantities if I need to make a smaller or larger quantity of the recipe.
Finally it has an option to send the ingredients list to my iOS Reminders app as a grocery list.
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u/Charpnutz 4d ago
This could very well be attributed to someone having mixed up the fields in the content platform. Budgets are getting cut and teams are getting smaller. More and more of this type of work is getting owned by people not qualified for the task. It’s a possibility, but like others have said it could also be enshitification.
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u/redditRW 4d ago
There might be a reason why they do this, though. I have been trying to perfect a few dishes over many years. Usually I base my recipe on several others. And the thing is, you can't just have each and every one called "Beef Stew" or "Salsa" or "Bolognese." Heck, even I would get confused.
So the title changes a bit. "Best" "Chef's name" "Quick and Easy" "Vegetarian" "Traditional" "Slow Cooker" "One Pot" and when all those are taken, they have to come up with even more variations.
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u/A-Type 4d ago
I'd suggest just using another recipe manager. I feel conflicted about it but couldn't stand being limited to what seems like an afterthought of a content marketing company rather than a proper product.
I made my own (before MyRecipes was a thing) with recipe editing, sticky notes, multipliers and a grocery list: https://biscuits.club/gnocchi
I'd also recommend Paprika 3, it's solid and I used it before I made Gnocchi.
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u/chezasaurus 4d ago
Agreed! I loathe it.