The fact that this app is stealing content (that mostly makes money by ads) and monetizing it with ads is horrible. Right up the entitlement-alley of HN.
I agree, I think it's unethical and also wrong when looking from the angle of supporting (or at least not damaging) smaller websites owners and Internet where they are creating and maintaining own websites.
Unfortunately open nature of non-walled internet makes it easy target for such predatory disgusting practices like this app is promoting.
They've been mass-spamming this on Reddit using multiple accounts and sockpuppeting to promote it too. They also promoted this in a Show-HN 5 days ago as well and it flopped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733982
See otrahuevada's top-level comment. The life story included in most recipes is not some blogger's attempt to spam you or sell you something. It's a copyright requirement - the only way they can protect their content.
I take it most of these recipes are hosted on low effort spam sites that stole the content in the first place. Are they also entitled to your righteous defense?
But I wasn’t sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I just want to cook something, it’s fair use. If I am setting out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site, that’s not cool obviously. Please consider more angles here.
