Have a fucking website
otherstrangeness.com
otherstrangeness.com
> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?
This is an all too common thought process among technologists, so:
Where to even start? Well, let's start that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping everything to try to avoid any unfortunate realizations about the emperor's clothes regarding their CapEx and finances. Yes, even your favorite one.
The very short version: running a small business like a restaraunt takes all your resources and then 20% more. Long hours, hard work, all your time. You do not have 2 hours to learn about LLMs or to pick which company to pay. From there:
* Most people don't know what they want
* Most people don't know the words for what they want
* Even if you say "I want a website", what do you want it do look like? To say? These people aren't experts in web UX nor should they be.
* You have some HTML and images. Where do they go now? Again people literally don't know what they want or need. If you realize you need a "web host", how do you pick a trustworthy one? How do you know if it's a good price? How do you get a domain name? How do you get the files onto the server?
* Do you want people to be able to buy things? Now you're taking payment methods and have security concerns.
* Your site is live. You want to change something on it. How do you do that? Where are the original files? How do you change them? How do you get the changes on the server?
It's not "Hey, write me a website". There are lots of steps that assume a lot of knowledge, and it is easier, faster, and better for people to focus on their expertise and just pay some service for their web shop.
Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.
Just like the government finances roads, etc.
Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.
Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.
Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.
Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.
Oh my! Mic drop! You got me! Corporate owned sites would have to be unbiased, right? It's not like a business would ever do something as disreputable favoring a restaurant that paid for the favored treatment, or try to steer you to affiliated businesses. Inconceivable!
But seriously now: a government-run site would be way better and have less biases. In the US, there's a good chance it'd be run by civically-minded people, and there's about zero chance that conflict of interest would be baked into its "business" model.
Such a weird comparison. Just so we are tuned in, can you list some things that are of less value to you than a single bomb on a stranger?
I just really don't like my government killing people far away that pose no threat to me.
Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
But you're right, having a ton of good images on your website is one of the most important things for restaurants and most other businesses. And most fail in this aspect.
I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.
And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
The conversational context did not involve anyone making any claims about the viability of businesses operating sans info. You can check—nowhere does the person who you're responding to (or any of the ancestor comments in this thread) write in their comment that companies are losing business because of the lack of up-to-date information, whether on their own site on through Google Maps.
The context is people, very reasonably, making a plea that that info be published on the open web.
It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:
"Can you tell me if the food is good?"
"Can you tell me are the staff great?"
"Can you tell me what does it cost?"
and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.
You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.
If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.
> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"
> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"
> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.
To be fair the Google maps restaurant side of the operation is quite possibly the largest ratio I've ever seen between "amount of capital and engineering skill available" and "quality (lack thereof) of UX." You have to access your restaurant profile through the Google search portal. It's a nightmare.
The restaurant is closed now, permanently.
You can see we updated it fairly regularly https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot/commits/main/
If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.
Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.
Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.
Potential customers want to see the menu (or product range or similar), location, a couple of pictures. It's supposed to give useful and necessary information. The intended purpose is:
Before: your cafe does not have a website.
After: your cafe has a simple website where people can see the menu, hours, and location.
This tool accomplishes that, and looks fine.
It's not supposed to give the viewer an aesthetic experience so novel and surprising, subverting the entire paradigm of cafe menus, to leave the viewer questioning reality and rethinking their entire approach to life.
I’m aiming for a mix of dazzle and simplicity.
Wix is at least $10 more per month. The intention is to keep the price low without making it impossible to afford to operate on a smaller scale.
Many small businesses have nothing approaching what tech businesses consider a low budget.
They opened the homepage and heard and/or felt their fans rev up, which didn't leave a good impression. They don't have confidence that your product/service is worth paying for (perhaps not worth using even if it were free).
There's nothing else to figure out.
You'd probably have better luck if you gave them an actual dotcom address, and you managed all of their online presence for them (Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). But even then it's hard to compete with free, especially when your prospective customers are stingy.
Edit: I suppose you're also competing with Uber Eats. You can already see menus there, whether you want delivery or not.
You and I know how to build and host websites, ok, but it had likely taken us dozens if not hundreds of hours of learning everything between TCP/IP to ARIA attributes to get here. The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.
Yeah, like I said, it costs close to $0.
> The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.
My point is, SquareSpace could charge a fraction of what they do and still be rolling in cash. Instead they charge ridiculous fees that simply go to pay for more ads.
If squarespace following free market 101 upsets you so much, maybe you should start a squarespace competitor and charge whatever you think is a fair price. If what you said is true then you should be able to undercut squarespace by a huge margin and still make a profit. Give it a try and tell us how it goes.
You're posing the question like there's an obvious answer, and that that answer is "no". In reality, all kinds of people do this all the time.
> My point is, SquareSpace could charge a fraction of what they do and still be rolling in cash. Instead they charge ridiculous fees that simply go to pay for more ads.
This is the classic sentiment by which one can tell that the person has no idea how businesses/markets work.[1]
The only relationship between the cost and the price is that the former is a floor for the latter. The price is determined by the value it brings to the one paying for it. If it is less than the cost to build, you don't have a business. If it's 1000x the cost to build, then you charge 1000x. Why would you charge less?
If the cost was so close to $0, and they charge $20/month, all that means is that there's an opening for you to set up the same business and charge, say, $15/mo.
I thought SS charged a lot more. Frankly, $20/mo is a steal. If a restaurant can't afford to pay $20/mo to acquire customers, they're not in good shape at all.
[1] I used to be that guy.
If you think I'm talking nonsense, make sure you know what the term actually means: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginalcostofproductio... There's a common misuse (unless it has become so common that it's just another definition, if you're a descriptivist grammarian) to use it to mean "small, negligible", but I'm using it in the real business/accounting sense. Of all the industries, tech is among the worst in terms of being unable to charge based on marginal costs; so often our marginal costs are effectively $0 but the fixed costs of what we have are millions to billions of dollars.
But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"
My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.
People who are non-technical will never have a website, but the barrier of entry is low for anyone who has access to the right information.
Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.
Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.
Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.
It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.
Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?
So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.
That’s less time teaching and innovating.
Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.
Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants
No such privilege is granted to regular customers. Instead, the self-checkout station locks itself up, and the customer has to wait several minutes for the assigned employee (who, most of the time, is also working two other tasks at the store) to show up, analyze the situation, enter service mode, and do the undo steps.
My experience is that the assigned employee is always looking for something to do, because he can't leave the self-checkout area, but there isn't anything to actually do there. And well, the store better not accuse honest customers of anything, or else some stuff they really won't like will happen (and that applies to poor customers too).
Anyway, the experience is still so bad that I tend not to use it. But that's because the machines really suck.
I greatly prefer the single queue in self checkouts rather than betting on which cash register line will get stuck on someone that has a pricing issue or something. Obviously, this has nothing to do with self checkouts, but I find single queues far more ubiquitous after self checkouts came around than before.
For lots of stuff, a cashier is probably quicker. But I almost never have lots of stuff.
It's a classic false-positive problem. Most times when the self-checkout clerk has to give you attention, the problem is stupidly innocuous, so they blindly approve, as they have been trained by the system that it isn't a real problem.
I'm sure plenty of things get by them this way.
If this happens, it’s a problem with the judicial system, not self checkouts. I highly doubt it has ever happened, though.
Travel agents were not outlawed. Most people just prefer to save money and do the work themselves (for most trips) rather than pay a travel agent.
Yes, but they're already one level up, so they can fix the problems in their company's immediate system, and then unlike the customer, they're a trusted party in the network of all other parties, so they can mail/call other parties directly and get people there to fix issues without too much delay.
Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.
90% of travel is probably happening where mobile networks are available. Also, since most travel seems to happen without travel agents today, it appears that "luck" is not that necessary, otherwise people wouldn't be choosing to forego travel agents.
And you can enjoy overpaying for a lower quality vacation if your travel agent is unscrupulous and getting kickbacks from vendors.
That is the actual optimization that happened, I can do more research and communicate directly with vendors.
Those that don’t want to are still free to pay extra for a travel agent.
Only if your time is worthless.
Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.
Otherwise, totally agree.
When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.
Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table.
I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above.
>Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.
Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.
Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
And restaurants very commonly have events, either private events closing the place for other guests, or public events with a lot of people wanting to book. In these cases an online platform is even more useful. Then you remove a whole lot of calls.
What makes you think old school restaurants care about that levels of efficiency and optimisations? If they did, they'd all optimize everything till they all become become mcdonalds.
Taking online orders helps them ease a bit of a burden without having any negative effect for the customer experience.
Would you like to have your work interrupted all the time by phone calls?
Today I consult for restaurants and help them get their web presence and the reservation systems they need on their websites. They are very happy for this.
A restaurant usually has their booking calendar open on a display that all the chefs and waiters can check when they walk by. The system doesn't need any human to "apply" reservations or cancellations.
And there is a big difference between being interrupted to take bookings, or checking bookings when you have down-time. But thank you for your hacker sarcasm.
Guests usually call during the day to book tables for the evening or for another evening. In the afternoon between lunch and dinner, there is more time for staff to check bookings. Instead of answering the phone in the middle of morning prep or lunch service.
Then there's events. A venue can have public events with hundreds or thousands of participants. Usually during high season. So now you'd have that additional burden of phone calls, which becomes completely impossible unless you hire additional staff to only take calls. Or you have your own online system which is available 24/7 for customers to make and even pay for their bookings.
Third party reservation systems take anything from 15%-25% to do it for you, which is not really great for the restaurant, compared to buying their own system.
Or if it's an online system for take-away orders or deliveries, these get sent directly to the kitchen ticket printer.
And it's the same for the other small business category: accommodation. The best thing they can do is have their own online booking systems. To increase sales, reduce burden on staff, and reduce expenses to third party providers. And give customers a better experience.
They already do.
e.g. our landscaper's website is something like:
bobslandscaping.landscaper.com
It handles the invoices and hosts his basic contact information etc. Sounds like a great business to be in to be the hosting company for this.
Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering section since delivery apps cover that too.
I rarely see Squarespace or Wix.
Honestly, this is a solved problem - the actual problem, if you talk to folks who maintain only a FB page, is that they don’t want to pay.
The administration and billing side can also be confusing for a lot of non-technical business owners.
- Get a domain name
- Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed
- Write a plain text file with the info you want shown (hours, contact info, etc...)
Yeah it's not sexy, but it's a start and it can be changed when time and interest allows.
You probably already lost 90% of 'normies'.
Most people won't be able to or willing to do that on their own. They could learn it of course, but they don't bother.
"Normies" are people who are not sure whether the photos they took today with their phone are "on the phone" or "in the cloud" or maybe on the laptop also? Or what?
Go from there to "nginx", I'll wait and don't hold my breath.
>will take your credit card
I expected you will go on with a joke how they will get scammed out of their money.
But then you went on and it made me think: people in question also trust these big name platforms. If they have just enough grit to try something on their own, they have, usually, enough of healthy view on themselves to know that they aren't sure how can they make this safely.
Even WIX needs some level of tech savviness, usually beyond 90% small business owners. And Instagram? Well, one of the main points of having a restaurant is to tell your friends about it, so the Instagram profile is more important than actually having a real restaurant.
- "What the heck is a domain name"
- "What the heck is a vps"
Probably going to doze off by the time you get to explaining an http server.
Don't get me started on the "plain text file". A website that looks like notepad.exe from '95?
It's worse than not sexy, most users would think the website got hacked or something. And I'm not teaching my hair stylist CSS
In college I was a TA a course that (among other things) was the first place students would usually encounter C and the CLI. To standardize how things were compiled and run, we would test everything from the assignments on the school's Linux server that everyone had ssh access to. In order to teach the students how to connect to and use it, we'd have a seminar going over the basics of the Unix shell, sshing, text editing, etc. Because every year there would inevitably be some students who got confused about the idea that Word wasn't a text editor, I started demoing during the seminar opening Word, saving a .docx file (the default by the time I was doing this), and then changing the extension to .zip and double clicking it to show that it was full of XML files under the hood.
I'm not sure whether it was fully clear how that worked to all of them, but it did at least seem to cut down on the number of students in office hours who were trying to write their C code in Word, maybe just because they remembered "oh that's the TA who was really adamant that I don't use Word for this".
- Pay for a shared hosting plan on one of the big players like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostinger.
- Install wordpress in one click
- Do everything in Wordpress.
- Pray that no one ever hacks their Wordpress installation
Or
- Pay for an agency
- Have an IT professional — like you and me — make the website, and put a link in the website footer saying "website designed by XYZ Inc."
From my personal experience I'd add a lot Director/Sr Director in relatively technical companies who manage scores of web application developers. So when you say most, it could literally be almost everyone.
Uploading the web site could be a discovered Samba or NFS share.
Hopefully IPv6 can make self hosting viable again.
However, anybody can easily get a website: Just send an e-mail or make a call to any of the myriad web design people in your local area.
I have a web app that is a html document with an [edit] button at the end. It points at edit.html which has a textarea, a password field and a submit button. (Below is a list of links to all pages in the folder starting with index-) The textarea shows the middle chunk of the html document. You edit it, fill out the password (the browser will do it) and press the save button. It posts to save.php which constructs a new index.html and save a copy as index-2026-03-18.html The link to the copy shows up on edit.html The edit link there points to edit.html?file=index-2026-03-18.html if you save it that will become the new index.html (it refuses to edit anything that isn't "index-\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\.html")
If each menu entry is: `<tr><td>Beer</td><td>$3.50</td></tr>` They can just edit, delete or copy and paste it. Simply: `<br>Beer $3.50` Would work just as well. If they screw up they can put back an older version.
Put your phone number on the edit page. Write some html tags on a napkin. `<br> <b> <i> <h3> <img> <a>`
They want more pages? make the /about folder drop index edit and save.php into it, remind them to make a link to it on the front page and they will figure it out.
Why? A website is a standard business expense. Should their accountant work for free also? And their waiters and kitchen staff?
Although, I suppose if they (the proprietors) had up-to-date creds and such, maybe offering to remove the one item from the menu as favor would be a nice way to become a favorite customer. The rest is clearly their problem. And I'm pretty sure from the description that they won't have all the necessary documentation.
Like, if I have a skill, why shouldn't I use that skill in service of those around me? Especially when it's barely an inconvenience for me.
The western culture of individualism runs contrary to our biology.
> Should their accountant work for free also?
If they did, do you think they get good service? Would they be allowed to pay for their food/drinks?
> And their waiters and kitchen staff?
Thats hard work man. Shit pay too usually. Ill fill it under almost free.
Secondly, I no longer work near there and haven't gone to that cafe in about 5 years. I keep up with old colleagues who say the cafe is doing well, but now if I had taken on that work now I'm their contact.
Lastly, this is all ignoring the maintenance cost. What version of PHP? What version of Apache/NGINX/Traefik? Any security vulnerability in Ubuntu in the past half decade? Now we have to play the security cat & mouse game.
At the end of the day, while I don't want to go to Instagram/Facebook to find menus/opening hours, the truth is that it is significantly easier for the average person to just make a social media post.
Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need (as evidenced by the fact that they use social media in exactly that way)
I disagree with this popular notion. A website should be a fully functioning sales system, so that it helps ease the admin burden of a small business, and also helps them get more sales.
Take the most common small businesses: Restaurants and accommodation. Both of these can save/make thousands of dollars per year by having their own ordering systems on their websites.
As for the other small business which perform more bespoke services, it's good to have offerings for set prices on the website, just so that customers know what they can expect when contacting for a bespoke solution.
The website being static is the real failure mode, not the absence of one.
Doing those things doesn't add enough value beyond what Facebook offers to be worth the cost and maintenance burden. You keep trying to sell these people a fancy Mercedes station wagon when what they want is a Dodge Journey.
"AI is so cool, I asked ChatGPT to combine a card game with a flight simulator and it did it!"
"Yeah, that is pretty cool I guess."
"My question for you is, what do I do with the code it gave me?"
"What?"
"Where do I put the code to make a game?"
Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol
I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far.
I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.
The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.
I had a similar experience showing her Skyrim. She never quite figured out how to walk and look at the same time. Made for an absolute berserker of a barbarian.
In any field, when you're surrounded by competent people, you'll begin to take that baseline competence for granted. I think especially so in ours due to virtual forums. I can work with my peers all day, go home, and talk with more online. It's enlightening to walk a curious outsider through your day (and probably also a great test of the systems you have in place).
This has been a serious regression in the industry for a while: popular operating systems (I'm looking at you, Windows) don't encourage and are not set up for their users to program or even do the bare minimum of random automation unless it's embedded in an application and meant for automating just that application (excel macros).
You are encouraged and directed to install and use "apps" which are either a one-size-fits-all lowest common denominator or a tries-do-everything dog's breakfast frustration.
The Commodore 64 turned on instantly and said "READY." and effectively gave you a blank canvas to poke (no pun intended) at. It was BASIC, but it was a real (if simple and limited) programming language and you could get immediate feedback and satisfaction from playing with it to learn what it could do. The syntax of BASIC is simple, the stdlib is comprehensive and unopinionated. There was nothing to download to get started to try to get that initial dopamine hit and to start to realize the true power of what computers can do and what you could make them do.
If you want a better chance at getting someone excited about programming, there are much better places to start than VSCode. pico8, scratch, even the browser's developer toolbar is more accessible than VSCode.
>> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?
as less sincere and more facetious, calling out that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping their capabilities and use-cases. You did the same thing in a more detailed fashion, enumerating all the constraints that AI can't address, and others that speak to the reasons that small businesses don't have websites independently of the tooling/services that are ostensibly able too make it easier or remove barriers.
Send any of them a list of 5 questions, the likelihood that you get 5 answers is close to nil.
These people might be good at what they do, but a website might as well be city planning to them.
It's just like with any other process. Want to get a visa to x country? Seems like an easy thing, but in many cases it isn't. That's why you contact a visa company. They do things for you to make it happen. It's not that what they do is too hard for you to do, it's about time.
That being said, if they have a strong presence on Google Maps with plenty of positive reviews, photos, menus, hours, etc., then that's usually good enough for me. At least the info on Google Maps is publicly visible without logging in, and reasonably well organized. But even then, I do often find myself looking for the "Website" link on Google Maps and feeling frustrated when there isn't one.
Relying solely on Facebook or Instagram feels a bit to me like having an @aol.com email address back in the day.
I haven't built a basic website in years, so I'm a bit out of the loop, but I would probably go with Google Sites if I wanted to set up a simple business page. It's got a WYSIWYG editor, it's free, it has support for custom domains, and presumably it will play nicely with Google SEO.
For a restaurant, as long as I can see a menu, I'm satisfied. Even if it's a menu on DoorDash or whatever other menu apps there are. Also I look for reviews on both Google and yelp. I know they can be gamed but I look for low reviews as well. Zero low reviews is a red flag imo.
For a professional business (dentist, lawyer, etc), I look for reviews and services provided. Sometimes this does necessitate a website, like I don't expect a Google map entry to delineate all services a lawyer provides. But if I'm just looking for a filling or a crown, then I can be fairly confident that every dentist provides that service.
If I'm looking for an auto mechanic, I just need to know that they service my car. I don't know much about cars but some places advertise that they work on Japanese cars and some that they work on European. I imagine most of them can work on everything though. I can usually glean this from their Yelp page.
I suppose my point is that not every business necessarily needs a website. Some could certainly benefit from one, but not every one.
If you don’t have an Instagram account, you can’t find anything on an Instagram profile.
Menu (with accurate prices - the ones on Google Maps is usually higher than the in-store prices).
I don't have an Instagram account. I can barely see anything on someone's profile.
> Even if it's a menu on DoorDash or whatever other menu apps there are.
No - these are horrible! Often incomplete/out of date, and with really marked up prices!
I recall going to a food cart one day. I asked for the menu. He said "Scan the QR code." And then added "Oh, but ignore the prices. That's for online orders and the actual prices are lower."
OK, so now I have to whip out my phone to view the menu in a sub-par format, and ask you about the prices for each one?
No thanks.
from the article:
> If you’re a hair salon, or a tattoo artist, or a restaurant
these services definitely do not need a website
a luddite user just needs a way of getting basic information from where its already posted online. so this is a user experience problem, easily solved by an ai agent that takes whats posted on instagram, yelp, and google maps, and presents it to luddites in a way they are familiar with
Ah yeah enjoy that while it lasts. https://9to5google.com/2026/02/18/google-maps-limited-view-s... found via https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244948/google-test-beperking-inf...
Websites are all independent and controlled by the owners of the restaurant or shop. They'll do what's in the interest of getting customers.
Google has a tangential set of goals: tying you to their product. Since they also own this gateway to the web, they can put their product at the top of every web search results page and slowly push the independent web farther and farther down. Nowadays, gee, business owners update their google maps entry more than their actual website. How strange that nobody was able to get a competitor off the ground either
It's so sad to me when we let this happen. That my mom doesn't know any better, yeah okay, but us hackers, whatever it is that 'hacker' stands for anymore
They don't need their own domain, it's all just subdomains or subpages like barber.businesshost.com or businesshost.com/barber
And nothing complicated, just an easy way to edit a single page, maybe change the colours and add a few images. Hell, drop any Markdown editor in there.
Specifically don't allow sub-pages, internal links, any kind of booking systems or webshops etc. Just a basic plain page with address, opening times, menu/prices if it's a place where that matters.
If they want anything more complex, they can go to Squarespace or something with all the bells and whistles.
You can host a service like this on a $5 VPS for a zillion companies, bill them $5/month and you'll be net-neutral on your first customer (- dev costs of course)
fuck this i'll learn mandarin instead
Seems odd to complain about the kitschy menu item names after walking into BURGERSLUT intent on ordering
How is 'bitch' any worse than ordering a Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity? Is anyone really focing you? Point and grunt if it makes you feel better. Odds are good that the wage slave taking your order doesn't care what you call it. Whatever indignity you feel you're suffering in the ordering process is nothing compared to what the employees have to endure.
Sounds like a website is not your biggest problem then. Pick better friends or stop complaining, you sound like a whiner.
I'm not going to ditch the friends who let me sleep on their couch for weeks at a time during periods when I was homeless and jobless just because they occasionally want me to accompany them to a stupid restaurant.
- restructure my relationships
- say something psychotic like “let’s go to a different neighborhood so I don’t have to say two words for dessert”
But you are all misreading this as a cry for help or advice. It is a bit. I even say the goddamn fucking words! I just think they’re cringey and I was commenting on my distaste for that feeling. I don’t have a cellarful of champagne either. I have bad news about the Easter bunny.
“You sound like a whiner”. Get a sense of humor maybe? Or failing that at least display the self composure and grace I so lack and pound sand.
irony, much?
https://www.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/ceecki/book_t...
No, that's missing the emphasis. "I Strongly Encourage Businesses to Have a Website"? There we go. That sounds bland enough to be regurgitated by your LLM of the week.
Enjoy your war on adjectives, I guess. It's certainly going to make the world more interesting. Jesus fucking christ.
I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.
Many ways exist to cover all ranges of emotions without resorting to a purely cosmetic "fuck"
have a fkin boring substack, write abt your car (whimsy typo, not cringe like "doggo")
While I'm perfectly capable of writing professionally, I have a mouth like a sailor when I'm speaking with people who are close to me. I sometimes choose to write the way I speak and I appreciate when others do so as well, assuming it comes off as genuine.
I think this person cares that much and wanted to convey their frustration. It worked for me. I thought it was excellent.
I don't do business with them because I can't access their hours, menu, services, etc... I've had this happen a few times. I'm not avoiding these businesses because I'm a snob. It's because I literally can't access the information. So, I go back to google and find a business that provides the information I need to decide if the business meets my needs before traveling to their location.
This is the opposite of old man yelling at clouds, it's young people complaining about the dumbest shit.
If the article writer is reading this, I feel the opposite. No, I don't want 1000 different websites. I like to use consolidated feeds.
No More Websites!
You want to find an antique book store in another state. How do you find it? You search the web. And what information bubbles to the top of the search results? Answer: businesses with websites.
If you are a business owner, you will lose customers without a website, because that is how most people will find you.
You might not like it... but that is the reality.
I honestly would not expect an antique bookstore to have a website, unless they let you buy their books online.
Ah yes... I'm sure that is what 99% of people do. /s
You don't like reality... and that's fine. You do you. But, most businesses do need a web presence if they want be be discovered by the majority of potential customers.
In 2026, companies who want their customers to easily find them will have some type of web presence. I'm sorry that it is such a hardship for you.
A website also works, I'm not anti-website. But the tone of the article is absurd IMO.
There was another place which was on the brink of closing and kept shifting its opening hours and days. I went there on occasion but because there was no official web presence I couldn’t trust the hours online (photographs of the schedule). So I called. Sometimes they picked up, sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, sometimes they were closed but other times were just busy and couldn’t come to the phone.
So no, you can’t always find a phone number, and you can’t always call and ask. Having a roughly up-to-date web presence is very useful. It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.
> It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.
Wait what? How does he contact the website if he can't find contact info?
I don't disagree with your point BTW — not everyone needs a website. But at the same time, a business often needs to meet customers where they are. If they're OK with losing a small subset of customers because their business info is only on <insert platform here> and some people don't use said platform, then I don't see what's wrong with that. But if they're not OK with that, then they'll have a presence on more platforms which could include their own websites.
At the end of the day I don't really understand why anyone's arguing about any of this. If a business finds value in a website and it serves their business interests, they'll probably have one. If not, then they won't have one. No amount of philosophizing over democratizing the web will make my local café make a website.
The same way you find the website, you google it. I have never had a problem getting a phone number of a business that doesn't have a website. Am I living in bizarro world? Why does a small business need a website just to provide a phone #?
There is no revolution to be had, the people have made (and are continuing to make) their choice.
This is technology at scale, for better or worse.
They've done amazingly well on just Instagram with the groups they are targeting. I doubt that a website would have any impact on their business. In fact Instagram gives them something much easier, more visual, and with a built in social feed (no need to setup a mailing list, just use Instagram).
"But it's a walled garden..." - Most people don't really care. And also, it's a coffee shop. If Instagram shutdown, they'd be on the next platform in a week and rebuilding the same following.
It's annoying to people like me, but don't see it changing anytime soon, and I can't really blame the business.
You don't. Only a relatively small minority will care, most will happily take what they're given (even if, paradoxically, they spend time complaining about the thing).
It's not a matter of logic/reason/rationality. It all comes down to "I don't want to think; just give me the good feeling."
It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.
Even if they have the tech from an existing SaaS solution or from vibe coding, they still gotta diligently update the source data from staff. You can't blame anyone for giving up, posting their phone number and a few pictures on social media, and just writing reservations down on paper.
A hair salon needs a presence on Google maps with a bunch of reviews and their rates and that's it. Sure they don't own it but until that works it works.
> But still, please, if you are a business or an individual artist or creator, have a fucking website.
The preferred methods today seems to be Facebook for your average builder, Instagram if they feel like they do more upscale work. I'm on neither platform, so I have to resort to taking pictures of vans when I'm out and about.
I think the problem is that having a website is a bit complicated for a carpenter, but not enough business for a webdesign company to deal with.
Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.
I still have an account or two elsewhere, but all photos get posted here then linked there with decent open graph previews.
I have it earmarked to get around to a generic OG preview for the root of photos.rymc.io, it's just a time issue - been pretty busy lately with racing.
That 600mm Sony lens must be fun to carry around. I used to have a Tamron 150-600mm lens for my Nikon, but my wife said it looked ridiculous, so I got rid of it. So now I'm mostly on M43 for portability.
Yes the OM-System stuff is awesome, i think its the only thing that would tempt me away from Sony
the camera data is all in the EXIF so it was pretty easy to do. Good olde CRUD apps are a joy to build now!
Can I ask what you do wrt the photo storage for your site? I'm looking to get back into photography and don't use Instagram etc, so want somewhere to post. Wondering how I might set up my own site for this purpose. Thanks
I use google cloud buckets for the raw storage, and then Imagekit as a CDN / transform layer (to prevent direct access and to crop/resize etc).
the rest of if it is a nextjs app router jobby. All your regular LLM's will be able to generate one of these for you quite straightfowardly
If you're at all interested in feedback:
- When scrolling through a gallery grid, the multiple fixed-position headers eat up an awful lot of screen real estate. On my MacBook Air (effectively 1280x800), I can only see one full row of photos at a time. Feels very cramped.
- Navigating to a photo from a gallery and then hitting my browser's “Back” button takes me back to the “Report” tab on the galley, not the photo grid. Makes gallery browsing pretty difficult.
- Maybe both of these problems could be ameliorated by making gallery photos open in the lightbox, rather than shunting you directly to their pages. Although...
- Items in a gallery's slideshow/lightbox display don't have a link to their photo pages. Maybe the name of the photo could link to its page?
- gallery photos now open in lightbox
- gallery lightbox has view photo button
todo: make fixed header a bit shorter
I'm not sure if selling prints is a priority for you, but it would be rad if you could do on-demand prints. In the meantime, I'll e-mail you about a couple :)
I didnt want to have it so that all photos can be printed, some just dont have the image quality that you need so I just curated a handful to start.
But yeah, any you like you have my email, i do a lot of home printing fwiw
I think photography is one of the things that better to have website than use social media like Instagram. You can display your photos however you like and not to worry about platform limitations.
Edit: Do you use CMS?
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...
Government agency websites should host their own content on their own servers (why do so many cities use google drive sharing? my own even uses facebook links). No, I do not think I should have to participate in private companies' walledgardens... for basic citizen services/information.
This is as simple as (e.g.) in Chattanooga you cannot find out your trash/recycling schedule without using Google services. It shouldn't be necessary to whitelist private companies for government services.
It's just too hard for normies to DIY, and local "web dev firms" are usually predatory in their insistence on making decisions that require ongoing maintenance, because recurring revenue.
Just try to get your local web design firm to build you a static html-only site and hand you the creds for all the hosting, etc.
What random hair salons or coffee shops need is basically github pages with bring-your-own-domain, WYSIWG editing that works on mobile, and zero git. but AFAICT no such service exists.
People are overthinking it.
They ask how to "get their name out there" in industries or domains where they either don't have a lot of experience or want to grow their career.
My first response is always: "Do you use social media? and do your socials point back to a blog or website showing your work?"
THEIR response is almost always "social media is toxic!"
To which I reply: "Some of social media is toxic. However, there are a LOT of smart folks online and the lifetime value of going from zero to even a single post about what you are into is enormous. This is especially true if what you put out there is niche and also highlights your value to the right people."
It's actually kind of sad that the needle against social media/websites has gone so far that the positives are being ignored by the younger generation.
Especially so as many people of my generation (Late Gen X/Early Millenials) have stories about how social media helped them get a job, make a great contact or join some group that benefited their life that they wouldn't have been a part of otherwise etc
Did she do it? No.
People like this are never going to get around to having a website, let alone actually maintain and promote it.
But it is both simple and complicated to setup a website these days.
For a technical audience there are great tools/options to choose from. You can build a rock solid website serving tons of traffic using 3rd party hosting for cheap. But, there are lots of options and as a geek it's easy to get rabbit-holed in the process.
For non-technical users it's similar, many solutions that require minimal technical knowledge. But the technical knowledge is very leaky and most providers border on landlords seeking to extract their rent while holding users hostage.
I'm working on something small in a specific niche aimed at non-technical users. I worry a lot that I don't fully understand what keeps people from building their own site?
But websites are not everything. Everything would include updating the website with hours, menus, etc. And since way too many businesses in my part of the world (rural Virginia, though not sure that matters) can't update their hours, email, menus, etc. on socials, there is no way they can manage a website.
Lately, I've been trying to get restaurants, in particular, to share their news in text in addition to the graphic. They can't/won't do that. Why? Not sure and I don't care enough to ask. But I am not following them anymore and telling them why. Not sure they care, which is fine.
Websites and HTML/CSS are documents. If you can write a Word document you can write a website. Death to walled gardens which have been the main locus of enshittification of the web.
If the CG-NAT problem can be solved one day I look forward to a rebirth of true P2P networking and information sharing with no central authority.
Those were the days...
I think modern overlay networks can navigate CG-NAT fine now. Other options include free cloudflare, or just a wireguard tunnel to a free tier VPS. On a similar point, I don't think enough people talk about how most western home internet connections now also have similar bandwidth as entire datacentres had in the 2000's too.
We still take for granted how hard basic web technology is for people who don't consider themselves technology people though.
I've picked up hobbies since then that lend themselves well to sharing online, but right now, with the amount of LLM-related scraping happening, I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.
These bots make their own ground rules -- "just put up this special robots.txt thing" -- and then ignore them, requiring tools like Anubis to be created, maintained, and kept constantly up to date, and for what? So the plagiarism machine can plagiarise more? Copyright courts have apparently just checked out on this, so I'm not at all confident they'll do anything about this.
To be clear: my ego isn't so huge that I want my name plastered everywhere, on everything I've ever touched. I believe strongly in the principle of not getting your shit scraped online and then churned out into something that these LLM companies can (eventually? presumably?) profit off of (or at least turn into investment, in the short-term). These companies have done terrible things to the state of public discourse and I do what I can to avoid feeding the beast.
Do you publish any such items on platforms you don't own (you specifically said you "have no intention of... hosting anything")?
A few friends and I have a small handful of self-hosted services that we all run on a VPN between our places with stuff like a recipe sharing app, etc., but the number of people with access to that is single digits.
In terms of "hosting anything," I still have my own homelab, and my self-hosting will be limited to this sort of stuff for the foreseeable. A cluster of limited-scope apps that helps me and a handful of friends keep in touch after moving out of our hometown, beyond just chatting in Signal groups.
I won't be putting up my own public website (or portfolio, or whatever; be it hosted on my own infra or not).
- server (AWS? 10 optional services to config etc etc, config, updates etc)
- domain
- SSL cert
Are there solid providers who do it all-in-one? I pay one bill, get a domain, SSL certificate, renewed, and a managed, pre-configured Linux box, or even static hosting? Thinking of setting up a webpage for my consulting business and I'd rather not spend weeks fiddling with all this, or (shudder) use Wix.
There's still the usability thing, they're not made for non-techies. There's an assumption you'll use Git, etc. But there's no practical reason why Netlify CMS or similar couldn't handle everything.
I think for these cases everyone should be shooting for a static site. In which case it is: 1. Rent a vps 2. Buy a domain 3. Set up nginx or something else 4. Copy files to the right folder 5. Point a dns record to said server 6. Use certbot to get an ssl cert installed for you
It's not that hard really.
> if you are a business or an individual artist or creator
If you're in any of those categories you're probably already in a small fraction of the population.
And yes this would only work with tech savvy people. I was mostly responding to the idea that AWS would need to be involved.
For the non tech savvy there's WordPress and Wix, no?
export default {
async fetch(req, env, ctx) {
// Cached response
let res = await caches.default.match(req);
if (res) return res;
// Fetch object from origin
let reqPath = new URL(req.url).pathname;
reqPath = reqPath.replace(/\/$/, ''); // Remove trailing slash
if (!reqPath.includes('.')) // Check file extension
reqPath += '/index.html'; // Default to index page
res = await fetch(env.ORIGIN + reqPath);
if (res.status === 404) // Object not found
res = await fetch(env.ORIGIN + '/404.html');
// Configure content cache
res = new Response(res.body, res);
const ttl = res.headers.get('content-type').startsWith('text')
? 14400 : 31536000; // Cache text 4 hours, 1 year default
res.headers.set('cache-control', 'public, max-age=' + ttl);
// Cache and return response
ctx.waitUntil(caches.default.put(req, res.clone()));
return res;
},
};These things are not the hard part.
As for the domain, well, one can also have a website to introduce yourself to the world, the usefulness is marginal for the average person, but yeah, you can have one. It can be used as a sort of business card, an interactive CV, or your own little corner to tell the world what you think; it has many uses and each has implications to consider. But the domain is the essential part. It's about having your own mail even if you use GMail (for domains), so that one day you can switch providers without changing anything for your contacts. It's perhaps hosting XMPP or Matrix for yourself to talk to friends, family, and sometimes even total strangers without depending much on other people's services. It's about serving your own web apps to yourself on the go. The website itself matters less in all of this.
These days, it's pretty demoralising to run a website. Google AI overviews and LLMs have reduced traffic by over 60%, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. These numbers are typical.
At the same time, the cost and difficulty has raised because of misbehaving AI crawlers and bots attacking every moving part. I'm glad I went with static sites and not WordPress.
So you need to work harder and harder for a dwindling audience, and the cost of keeping the lights on keeps going up.
I used to make websites for businesses, a bit over a decade ago. The job feels just as hard now as it was back then. One notable exception is caddy and automatic SSL.
Plumbers and electricians: Maybe not. But lots of other house repairs stuff: Yes.
Things I want to see:
Geographical coverage area: Some are across town and are not willing to come to my property. Others are.
Services rendered: There job title may be very generic, but it often turns out they do only certain types of work.
Minimum fees: Some only do jobs that cost, say, $1000 or more. If my work is small, I shouldn't bother calling them.
> I’d much rather speak on the phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do work
I do so as well, but they rarely pick up the phone. You call them, leave a voicemail, and pray they'll call you back at a time you can pick up. About 50% of them never call back. So every time I need some repairs/work done on the house, I have to get 10 "leads", and call them, leave a voicemail, and a few days later repeat the process because they either didn't call back, or called and said they don't do that type of work.
If I can pre-filter those out based on basic stuff on their website, it'd be great.
If we're going to have any large aggregation or social media businesses where individuals trade data ownership for convenience, being able to put your opening hours and rates on the the internet without having to figure out how to have a website seems like the optimal use case.
I think we should aim for a sensible mid ground where social media provides just the things it provided before around 2011, like updates and communication with people you know and want to interact with already.
An "all personal websites" web that OP is calling for is just pushing the exclusion they feel onto the people they're complaining about.
We should have websites. We should also use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job, and running your own website isn't the best tool if you just want to get your business rates and opening hours on the web.
I dislike how this article handwaves its own recommendation away. The steps required to “have a fucking website” are so much more complex than they used to be. Mandatory† TLS is the biggest hurdle, because now there needs to be software running to renew your certs instead of just tossing some plain files up in a directory on an HTTP server that could run for years unattended. Gone are the days when it was easy for a website to outlive its author, and it's our fault!
† Yes, the fact that the world's most popular browser puts a big red NOT SECURE!!! warning next to any non-TLS website makes it mandatory regardless of the fact that plain HTTP still technically loads. Scareware works on people or they wouldn't do it.
i think the implication is "just use a web host" and i agree
if i was helping someone set up a website i'd either set them up with a WYSIWYG website builder-hoster a la wix (i'd have to google around for a specific one to try though) or if i had faith enough, i'd set them up with a workflow publishing to cloudflare pages; both would handle the domain and ssl for them
if they want to take payments then idk lol
If you're a small business of any kind, like a single person business, you can have tens of thousands of dollars in sales from just a good website and grow it to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years.
If you're an already established medium size business, you can boost your sales immensely, and reduce administration and customer support by 80%.
Yet, everybody is instead working their asses off to produce social media content and get more likes and followers, even though that doesn't translate well to real sales.
Businesses spend thousands to hire "influencers" and keep throwing in casino bets to Meta to "boost" their own posts. But paying for a good website is unthinkable, even in cases where there are guaranteed good returns.
No one is saying that it's impossible to learn all that stuff. But it takes time, has a fairly high entry barrier (despite LLMs and all that), and needs to happen _while_ keeping the business afloat.
Nice, a human wrote it! Thanks for the recommendation!
Realistically, they can simply ignore it with no consequences.
Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.
when you consider that they don't ban stuff only in rare cases of it being illegal content, articles are clean and easy and have real reach if you know what you are doing, no particular ideology is governing the platform other than if you just don't like elon and you refuse to participate. it's far better than it was prior and i have been a user of twitter/x since 2013. i really enjoy talking to the many people around the globe on x (mostly japanese which have a very rich X community).
that all being said, social media is a contagion for the masses, and i still run 3 sites regardless of having an x account(i deleted instagram,facebook, never used tiktok).
i made it so, if something is relevant enough (i.e. it is something i'm actually proud of, or is something with enough quality), it is posted on my site first, and just then reposted to other platforms. i even added a rss feed if anyone wanted.
and last but not least, i optimized it so it loads within less than 512kb (333kb as of writing this, i might add or remove more stuff in the future that might change the total size), and it is fully functional on devices as old as Android 6 (i don't have anything older to test, sorry about that).
Set up a website — and while you’re at it, start a mailing list, because email is basically the only means of reaching your contacts that can’t easily be taken away from you.
It baffles me that everyone has collectively decided it's a great idea to have discussions on a platform which is not indexable, and has no usable search even when you're in it.
Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet, too.
Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.
I can write the html, CSS, JavaScript needed for a website, I can spin up a local web server to serve these files, but setting up an internet facing website, no. No clue how to go about it, how to secure it, and how to maintain it.
Give me a step by step guide that is simple, and can ensure security and privacy, and I'll have a website. But until then I'll use what's convenient.
However, as someone who has had enough experience in the real world to notice how different time and skill constraints lead to different requirements for outsourcing, I think that it sounds elitist. Even an LLM is not sufficient for people who don't even know the difference between backend and frontend or what an API is, and therefore don't stand a chance to craft a proper prompt, let alone properly test the code that the LLM produces.
For context, I could also tell Mr. "Having a fucking website" that they're a hypocrite because they run a blog on Wordpress and have a social media account on mastodon.social. Those who really believe in decentralization run their own stuff, or code their own blogging platform like I did. They don't just brag of how morally superior they are just because they deleted their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Of course I would sound elitist. And that's exactly how their stance sounds to the average bakery shop owner.
It's not about it being hard to create and manage a website, it's that the vast majority of customers use social media platforms (as well as platforms like google maps) to find out about shops and F&B. For many businesses having an Instagram page will draw a lot more people than having a random website.
The path of least resistance is not a good way to do business or provide good service to your customers.
Pay a hosting provider, but who? Do I need to buy an SSL certificate, because we decided we need HTTPS everywhere for some reason? What about if my site gets DDOSed? Do I get charged more?
So I can use something free like Github Pages, but now I'm under a different tech overlord, no?
I can see why people just say screw it and go back to IG/FB. The web is too complicated now.
The products that work are the ones where the merchant never has to think about the technology at all. They just see customers coming back.
The old internet isn’t coming back. Yea you could setup a little old school page but you won’t have visitors. So what’s the point? Better to post a blog post on instagram as pictures where you get more reach, instead of a website where no one really cares.
If running a little website meant you’d actually get an audience, people would do it. But it doesn’t happen, we can see the traffic stats. And so, there’s just better things to do with your time and life than maintain a website no one goes to. That’s just the reality. I’d argue your better off handwriting a little journal, at least then you get the pleasure of holding a physical object you filled with thoughts.
The point is to tell people about your business, not show off your design skills. If you have a blind client on a 30 year old computer, they should still be able to use your website to get information about your business.
although you can look at some of them without an account on those services today, and maybe, but maybe not tomorrow
so just need to boost the information people have posted, into something else
The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business.
A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company.
[0] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/ [1] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/23/the-peoples-web/
It's true there are some businesses that only publish rates and hours on Facebook
But it's probably relatively small number
Given the choice between (a) a business that has a listing accessible via yellowpages.com, Google Maps, etc. and (b) one that has a social media account but no listing in any business directory, it stands to reason that there will be more opportunities to choose (a) than (b)
There are also other reasons to prefer (a) to (b) besides avoiding Facebook of course
The arguments in the article are good but start by telling you what to do. That doesn't work.
Are we really calling everyone we don't like a pedophilic fascist now? I honestly had really hoped that this sort of polarized, low-quality content wouldn't make it onto HN. :(
There is NO convincing these people of anything else, they will move the goal posts every time. I've been in these same conversations and it goes nowhere.
If you continue, it will move all the way to "If you're not out protesting, voting for X, you are in fact a fascist pedo yourself".
Even the mere fact that you question such line of thought... makes you a facist pedo.
Small business wants a presence on the internet for reasons.
Originally, small business would have to pay $$$ to engage an expert, who will assist them in creating a website, hosting it, keeping it secure, keeping it up to date, figuring out the SEO to make it findable, etc.
It's obvious given 3s of thought that this sucks for a non-technical small business owner and can be optimised, so someone creates a platform to enable non-technical small business owners to do most of this without the cost/hassle of dealing with experts and owning the website themselves. This gets you to somewhere like MySpace, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites, even Blogger, etc. But of course, such offerings aren't stable - they change, fail, or enshittify over time.
Facebook also sees an opportunity, and businesses start creating their own Facebook pages. Easy, and maybe even great for a while; except you're even more locked into the platform, only people who use Facebook can engage with you, and then trends move on and Facebook is less popular with your customer base than it once was.
You also want more of a visual presence to show off your cupcakes, or whatever. So an Instagram page.
TL;DR: there's no perfect solution for non-techies with a business. You either have a fucking website with all of the cost, hassle, and friction that comes with that, or you choose one of platforms that simplifies this but comes with unpredictable downsides over time.
and it's mostly just the same walled garden rant we've all heard and even made a variant ourselves
is this the type of content we have devolved into on here? I'd take endless ai slop over endless random cringe political posturing any day
the LLMs have a wider vocabulary, argument range and worldview nuance than whatever the dogma of the month or whatever the fuck this is