A little meta, but can anybody explain why recipe articles like this (but usually food) spend so long waffling on about tangential "oh we can't afford to bit run the dishwasher 24/7" nonsense, and not just get stuck in?
Is there some technical advantage to padding it out, or do they just like to see their own words?
The explanation I've heard it's that it's an SEO thing -- if your page isn't "unique" it gets nuked in the rankings, so recipe sites need to add a long preamble to distinguish their otherwise-identical recipe.
Another explanation is that longer articles mean more time spent on the site, i.e. it pumps up those "user engagement" metrics. Plus more space for ads.
The saving grace is that most recipe sites have a "Jump to recipe" button. They know people don't want to read their life story, but they can't jeopardize their SEO.
I think for recipes specifically it started with the fact that a recipe cannot be copyrighted, but that flavor text around a recipe can. This is why recipe books do the same thing.
Actually, I thought that was why this article was posted -- to spur a discussion about these types of blogs padding stories with 95% fluff. As another commenter said, it is a SEO thing.
Is there some technical advantage to padding it out, or do they just like to see their own words?