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Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

Sad state of affairs. One alternative could be to create a dummy account for this purpose, turn-off every notification, add no friends and use it only for the purpose of accessing pages for businesses (I don't use Facebook at all personally but the way things are going, I may have to resort to such shenanigans).

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creating a dummy account might alleviate the immediate issue, but it doesn't really fix the root cause of the problem - which is that the restaurant thinks it's ok to only post on facebook, and assume everyone has access.

Indeed but I think (hopefully wrongly) that we can't put that genie back in the bottle. Business are most influenced by shareholders/customers and the vast majority of these groups are quite ok interacting on Facebook despite what the HN minority thinks.

It is OK, though. It’s not that they’re assuming everyone has access, it’s that they’ve made the business decision that it isn’t worth going the extra mile to cater to a minority of customers that aren’t on Facebook.

It annoys me too but I’m not blaming my local restaurants for following market forces.

"Made a business decision" is not the same as "it's ok", and it's dangerous to conflate these. I'm not sure where posting on Facebook falls, but for a relatively clear-cut case consider "made a business decision to not bother with wheelchair accessibility".

There are laws preventing you from ignoring wheelchair accessibility. As a society we have decided it is important. We’ve done no such thing for keeping information on Facebook only.

That's not a counterargument since maybe we should.

We have those laws because we had already decided that was a Not Ok business decision. That was true before the laws came into effect, and would hold even if we didn't manage to pass the laws at all. Moreover passing laws is not the only way to express a shared moral judgment. Anyway, I was very explicit about it not being exactly the same situation.

> made the business decision

IF they made the decision. There is more and more people there who doesn't even understand the concept of a website.

To them 'being on the Internet' equals being on Facebook/Instagram.

It is hard to make a decision about something you don't even know.

while i would give these businesses the benefit of the doubt, i would also say that the responsibility is on them to know. Ignorance isn't a real defense imho.

It's true that making an independent site to host your updates and info isn't as easy as just posting to facebook/twitter. I understand why a lot of businesses, esp. small ones, don't bother. Each rain drop also don't hold themselves responsible for the flood.

There are some kind of Facebook settings that will let people access your page with only a frequent pop-up telling you to log in. The "extra mile" is enabling that rather than leaving on whatever setting requires someone to be logged in to see your page.

I'd still be annoyed I have to use Facebook, but it wouldn't impact my decision to visit the store. I'm not going to a store when I can't tell if it's open.

Dummy account didn't work for me. It just asks for a selfie verification after a day or so and images you find online, ml generated photos etc. gets rejected.

Out of curiosity, can Facebook do something more with a dummy account presumably linked to you IP than they can with any other unregistered person tracked over Facebook Connects, friend's contact syncs, etc.?

They will connect it to you sooner or later. Then it doesn't matter if it's dummy or "real". [rant start] Similar thing happened to me recently (not restaurants, but language schools), I decided I would rather continue without services I need (even if it was e.g. kindergarten for a kid) than make (dummy) FB account (Whatsapp, Instagram included). I am more annoyed by big tech practices by each day (Google and Paypal even more). I really hate them all :| The only bigtech service I'm still using is LinkedIn (also hate it) and only because it remained as only connection to some old friends and acquaintances. They all really suck in any possible way [end of rant]

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