Aspiring dystopias, library souls and Gen Alpha's "first mainstream meme"
Aspiring dystopias, library souls and Gen Alpha's "first mainstream meme"
Plus: the arcane and deeply misleading science of Google recipe ratings
This week marks the start of a stressful, expensive and more-or-less beloved tradition in my house: It’s when I cue up British Bake Off, bust out my trusted cookie spreadsheet and start baking like this shortbread will see us through a blizzard.
To celebrate, I’ve updated a version of an essay I first published here in November 2020, and later expanded into an article for Slate. It addresses a meaningless, manipulative scrap of online data that has VEXED me for ages: namely, Google’s recipe ratings.
The Fault in Google’s Stars
It was a tweak to the interface so small, so benign, that only search-engine marketers noticed, at first. In June 2013, Google rolled out an update to its “rich snippets” program that let food sites boast their recipes’ ratings right within search.
No more clicking through infinite variations of mushroom lasagna, hoping to find the most popular one. No more squinting over author names and publication titles, debating the comparative deliciousness of Ina Garten vs. Sarah Jampel vs. Martha Rose Schulman. Now, when you search “one-pot easy vegan gluten-free paleo pasta” — a search that does, somehow, surface results? — you immediately see the dish the internet rates highest. Looks like this intriguing thing. Five stars!!
The problem with Google’s star system, however, is that these ratings don’t actually tell you anything about the relative quality of the recipe in question. I find myself thinking about this every year around this time, when my mom and I begin the time-honored ritual of fiercely debating what new holiday recipes to try before … defaulting to my dad’s favorites.
There’s no standard, no central rubric, no rules to Google stars; the ratings don’t even come through Google — they’re supplied by the sites themselves. Recipe sites “live and die” by rich snippets; often, those stars are the only reason anybody clicks. In the first year Food.com added ratings to its Google recipe results, they boosted the site’s recipe traffic more than 40%.
It follows, then, that some recipe sites might want to game the great Google traffic-getting system. Or if not game it, at least optimize their presentation. For years, I’ve wondered which sites have their fingers on the ratings scale, and whether that represents anything nefarious.
You figure that, seedy SEO hacks aside, some variation inevitably comes down to the culture of the comment section itself. Martha Stewart’s recipes, for instance, rarely score higher than a 4 out of 5, but I think that’s because her readers are exacting critics.
Food.com ratings, in my experience, also skew far higher than they objectively merit: You should be automatically disqualified from earning five stars if your dish contains only three ingredients. But I put that down less to trickery and more to my (condescending, possibly wrong?) belief that Food.com ranks mainly with the Midwest casserole crowd. A New York 6 is a Scranton 7, etc., etc.
There is one trend that seems telling, however: Cooking blogs regularly out-rate legacy media. I first noticed this phenomenon three years ago, when I scraped hundreds, and then thousands, of Google-ranked recipe ratings from a dozen popular cooking blogs and publications. This week, I repeated the experiment and got much the same results I always have.
Bon Appétit averaged 4.2 stars across my sample. NYT Cooking earned 4.5. But How Sweet Eats — “for people who, like, totally love food” — absolutely cleaned house with a perfect 5.
Our Baking Addiction, Sally’s Baking Addition and Simply Recipes also averaged at or very near perfect across the dozens of recipes I pulled. These bloggers could be better cooks than the elite teams at the Times et al. … or it could come down to moderation norms.
Sites that don’t actively moderate their comments sections, it turns out, tend to have far lower recipe ratings than those that do. And there’s a wide range of moderation practices. Bloggers range from the tyrannical (deleting bad reviews) to the reasonable (deleting ratings from reviewers who “tweaked” a recipe beyond recognition). Then you have the merely manipulative middle-ground: requiring readers to log-in or comment to leave any score below perfect.
Generative search will probably upend all of this before long. In recent months, Google has begun surfacing AI-generated recipe descriptions in its experimental, SGE search results. These new recipe cards de-emphasize ratings in favor of larger images and (admittedly vague, but maybe more useful?) one-sentence write-ups.
Until then, however — and even then — bakers should beware. The fault is not in Google’s stars, maybe, but in our choice to trust them.
If you read anything else this weekend
“This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want,” by Amanda Mull for The Atlantic ($). “Reverse logistics” is a phrase that sounds dull as hell on its face, but trust me when I tell you this is a fascinating tour through the ballooning, $1-trillion industry. Consumers now return as much as 30% of the stuff they buy online; entire systems have developed to process that stuff. But reverse logistics firms don’t just suck your unwanted shirts and toys and electronics back up the supply chain — they also disguise the real-world inefficiencies and harms of cheap, abundant and globalized online shopping.
“Goodbye to All That Harassment,” by Sarah Jeong for The Verge. I loved every piece in The Verge’s year-end eulogy for Twitter, from their comprehensive round-up of iconic tweets to Zoë Schiffer’s oddly humanizing, affecting look at what Twitter was like for its employees. But I keep returning to Sarah Jeong’s essay on her 2018 “cancellation,” maybe because I remember that incident well (and wondered what happened when the trolls moved on). Or maybe because Jeong does such a good job explaining, in hindsight, how the things that made Twitter terrible also, paradoxically, made it awesome.
“Who Would Give This Guy Millions to Build His Own Utopia?,” by Joseph Bernstein for The New York Times (gift link). Pegged this as an amusing send-up on the endless, unjustified confidence of white male tech bros; actually found it both revealing and extremely disturbing, so … that’s an eye-opener. “Praxis, a real-life partnership between puffed-up subcultures that mix mostly online, has pulled together those in the tech world who seek alternatives to liberal democracy, members of an ascendant right that rejects the premise of human equality, and a band of downtown New York scenesters.” They plan to build some kind of neo-Nazi, neo-colonial, neo-something (??) “paradise,” but fortunately appear to lack both the funds and skill set to actually do so.
“How a Toilet-Themed YouTube Series Became the Biggest Thing Online,” by Taylor Lorenz for The Washington Post (gift link). “Biggest thing online” is clearly relative, and also a headline convention I hate, but hoo boy — this one’s a doozy, on Generation Alpha’s “first major mainstream meme.” Said meme involves toilets with human heads … battling humans with electronic heads (speakers, TVs.) FYI, the oldest Alphas will enter the workforce in about 10 years, and I … fear there’s no place in that future for me.
“Time, Online,” by various authors for Slate. In 2011, I got a fascinating email about an essay I’d written from a guy who was incarcerated. This man, who I exchanged a couple messages with, read a lot of newspaper articles in prison, and he sometimes wrote letters to the authors that a friend on the outside would type up and send. Even more amazing, he kept a really good blog — and I so wish I remembered what it was — though he had to write it through this intermediary, and had never really used social media or read a blog himself.
This is all a long and VERY self-referential (welp, sorry) way of explaining why I gravitated to this excellent series on inmates’ experiences with technology and the internet (though, needless to say, a lot has changed — in often bad, exploitative ways — since 2011.) As an entry point, I’d suggest this essay on the arrival of personal tablets in one North Carolina prison, or this one on the complex, interpersonal struggle of accessing Google. These are written almost entirely by currently or formerly incarcerated people.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this Atlantic conversation about (among other things!) the link between productivity hacks and … death.
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Postscripts
Skimpflation. Anxiety content. The 13 best memes of 2023. How social media changed stand-up and what you need to know about chatbot therapy. Inside the World Excel Championships. Outside Zuck’s secret Hawaii compound. A Catholic retiree in Pennsylvania runs “the website that’s more popular than the BBC right now.”
Car confessionals are the new bedroom vlogs. Discord is the new Telegram. The middle-aged musicians getting second tries on TikTok and the catfishing victims who know they’re being scammed. The latest and greatest Goodreads scandal. What a ransomeware attack on the British Library says about the “complex soul” of libraries in general. “The regime has plans to weaponize [Taylor Swift] for 2024” … but “the regime” is also scared to use TikTok to get out the vote.
That’s it for this week! Next week will mark our VERY LAST 2023 edition. I’m rounding up the best reads of the year for that one, so please reply or comment with your nominations!
— Caitlin
Thank you for linking to the WP piece about Skibidi Toilet! I'm a Gen Xer who has two Gen Z teens and three Gen Alpha kids. It has been so amusing to listen to my younger kids recap every single Skibidi episode in detail while my teens look on with annoyance and concern. They don't remember as well as I do the hours that THEY spent telling me every single thing DanDTM said or did in his Minecraft videos circa 2012. As an older parent, it's funny to observe how the cycles repeat ...