About Maya
Maya starts from a simple observation: most of what we throw away has a use, and the obstacle is not goodwill — it is finding the tip at the moment you need it, hands full of peelings, standing over the bin.
Two ways into one collection
People rarely look for “a recipe”. They look either for what to do with what they are holding, or for what to make the missing thing from. Those are two distinct questions, and Maya gives them two search bars of equal weight.
These are not two catalogues: a recipe links one or more kinds of waste to one or more uses. Searching for “coffee grounds” and searching for “scouring paste” lead to the same page, from opposite ends.
- By waste: “I have this on my hands, what can I do with it?” — carrot peelings, coffee grounds, stale bread.
- By use: “I need this, what can I make it from?” — glass cleaner, fertiliser, cat litter.
Four categories, and no more
Every recipe belongs to one category: household, food, animals or garden. The list is closed. A fifth value added carelessly would make the filter unreadable and retroactively wrong, since recipes already posted do not reclassify themselves.
Ratings decide — but not crudely
Anyone can rate out of five stars and leave a comment. A recipe we are statistically confident is bad drops out of search results — it is archived.
The threshold is not a fixed number of reviews. A unanimously bad recipe never reaches fifty reviews: people stop consulting it long before. Maya archives when the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval on the rating falls below 2 out of 5 — that is, when we know enough. In practice: twelve reviews at 1/5, forty-seven at 1.5/5, never at 2/5.
Archiving is not deletion. The page stays readable by direct link, its author can fix it, and it comes back on its own if later reviews are better.
Why the vocabulary is curated
Waste and uses are not free text: they are terms with synonyms. With free text, “carrot peel”, “carrot peelings” and “carrot skins” become three entries each holding a third of the recipes, and both search bars quietly empty out.
Search itself stays forgiving: accents, plurals, case, word order and typos. It is storage that is disciplined, not typing.
Cautions are not a formality
Maya mixes household products, cooking and animal feeding. Every page carries a cautions field, separate from the steps and shown before them — a warning at the bottom of a page is read once the deed is done.
Some pages say no outright. “Coffee grounds for dogs” exists because the tip circulates and is dangerous: refuting it where people look for it beats saying nothing, which leaves the field to the rest of the web.
Who writes it
The starting collection was written for Maya from common-knowledge techniques. Everything else comes from the community: people post their tips, people rate them. Moderators review suggested vocabulary and handle reports.