[HN Gopher] Have a fucking website
___________________________________________________________________
Have a fucking website
Author : asukachikaru
Score : 829 points
Date : 2026-03-18 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.otherstrangeness.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.otherstrangeness.com)
| blinkbat wrote:
| Agree but most small biz don't conceive or care about the
| internet this way
| kulahan wrote:
| What makes you say that? It's rare that a store I'm going to,
| even local only, doesn't have a website.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It is not RARE.
| mrhyyyyde wrote:
| It's very common, almost 1 in 3, to _not_ have a website or
| online presence (~10mm+ small businesses have no online
| presence or site) in 2025.
| konart wrote:
| I guess it depends on the type of business on your geography.
| blinkbat wrote:
| I got voted down for this? "Why are you booing me, I'm right"
| protocolture wrote:
| Lots of businesses never get beyond a mobile number lmao
| 0_____0 wrote:
| In MX and elsewhere lots of them are just mobile number through
| Whatsapp specifically. Like they have a phone number but it may
| be data-only.
| ghayes wrote:
| Instead of focusing on why having a website is better for
| customers (100% it is), the article is really an attack on...
| developers at Meta and tech other companies? I love a good
| profanity laced rant, but the entire article reads unfocused and
| unpersuasive.
| system2 wrote:
| I agree, the reasons were skipped, except for business hours
| and rates. People really need a reason to spend countless hours
| on something digital.
| kulahan wrote:
| Countless hours? Get someone to make you a webpage, they can
| use Wix or Shopify or something like this. It's never been
| easier or cheaper. In the grand scheme of running a business,
| it's one of the best effort:return ratios you can find.
| system2 wrote:
| He is talking about a website that involves creating and
| designing individual pages. If each page takes 2-3 hours,
| including content writing, research, and photographing, you
| are looking at 15-50 hours for a company site. That's a lot
| of investment for some people.
| vivid242 wrote:
| I disagree. It is not an attack on the developers, but the
| platforms' mechanics.
| einr wrote:
| _the entire article reads unfocused and unpersuasive._
|
| Nice, a human wrote it! Thanks for the recommendation!
| rdevilla wrote:
| Well fucking said. JavaScript was a fucking scourge upon the web
| as it convinced everybody that you need to know how to write an
| "app" to share text and jpegs, which we have been doing with the
| Document Object Model for literally decades.
|
| 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.
| misswaterfairy wrote:
| I wonder if Microsoft FrontPage was still a thing HTML/CSS
| websites might be a little more common?
|
| Those were the days...
| 1dom wrote:
| I agree.
|
| 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.
| stackghost wrote:
| Random pho restaurants (or whatever) are usually literal mom-and-
| pop shops and asking these people to put up (and maintain!) a
| website is usually too daunting for them. These are the places
| that tend to end up with only a facebook page or an insta.
|
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| You just described Wix and Squarespace.
| stackghost wrote:
| I've admittedly never heard of wix, but I was under the
| impression squarespace was selling "e-commerce solutions" and
| stuff.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| "and stuff" damnnnn
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Really, it's 2026 and you don't think that there are website
| builders for small businesses? I'm sorry, but are you kidding
| me?
| Arainach wrote:
| Someone wrote and deleted a comment saying
|
| > 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.
| squirrellous wrote:
| Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free
| service from the government or non-profit.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Do you have any justification in mind for the "free service"
| being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the
| people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely
| disagree.
|
| Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part
| of a communications infrastructure.
|
| Just like the government finances roads, etc.
| ghurtado wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet
| access come before that?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We _should_ be making sure everyone has internet access,
| but hosting some basic pages is about 1000x cheaper, so
| no I don 't think free internet access should come before
| that.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Internet access doesn't seem to be an issue.
|
| Politics is also about making practical choices to
| advance humanity.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Do you have any justification in mind for the "free
| service" being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free
| for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund
| it?
|
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Alright cool.
|
| Your assuming the local government employed webmaster
| won't favor his friends restaurants.
|
| Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.
| xmprt wrote:
| Forgive me for assuming that the government owned service
| would be more transparent/serve the people better than a
| privately owned, closed source, platform that's
| explicitly funded by ads and so is transparently corrupt.
| Even your worst case scenario for this would be
| equivalent to what we already have.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Your assuming the local government employed webmaster
| won't favor his friends restaurants.
|
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the
| cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a
| threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone
| can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the
| bailouts, the...
| mlrtime wrote:
| >the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb
| dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me
|
| 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?
| komali2 wrote:
| My point is I don't want bombs dropped on strangers, so,
| in terms of things the government spends money on,
| there's nothing of less value to me that a single bomb on
| a stranger. Of all things the government spends its money
| on, I'd rather any one of those things to take 100% of
| the budget, than even a penny to go to dropping a bomb on
| a stranger, even if that significantly decreases my
| quality of life.
|
| I just really don't like my government killing people far
| away that pose no threat to me.
| lneves wrote:
| Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow
| Pages"! :-)
| komali2 wrote:
| I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by
| private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a
| way Facebook is an apt comparison!
| xigoi wrote:
| Did you need an account to read the Yellow Pages?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Wouldnt ISPs give you a bit of web space with your internet
| plan back in the day? (I'm too young to have been around for
| that but I've heard it used to be a thing)
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And
| you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP.
| Also expectations on websites were different. They were
| allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different
| kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things.
|
| Back in the day(tm) 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Ah, fair enough
| janalsncm wrote:
| Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.
|
| 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.
| miramba wrote:
| Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing
| handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours
| change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on
| IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses
| phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like
| everyone else does. Disclaimer: Don't use IG. But if I want
| to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to
| football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.
| LtWorf wrote:
| IG is only for the regular customers.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Not really. I don't have an IG account, but when picking
| a place ein an area I don't know, it is the place to get
| an impression of the place. The visual part tells a lot
| about the place, while many websites maybe got a photo
| from the outside, if at all.
| kakacik wrote:
| Google maps works the same way, thats the default in most
| of the world. I don't even know anyone who has IG
| account, myself including. Everybody has google account,
| not that you need one to browse (more or less)
| categorized photos on maps.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| How do you even know that a restaurant exists in an area
| you don't know? Not through Instagram, but through a web
| search or Google Maps.
|
| 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.
| bandrami wrote:
| It's a trend in Sri Lanka for some reason to put your menu
| on Instagram... as a reel. Because you don't want your
| customers to have more than 15 seconds to view what you
| serve.
| Gigachad wrote:
| People put that stuff up on Google maps, Facebook, and
| Instagram now.
|
| 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.
| xmprt wrote:
| Yes and no. I find the restaurant on Google maps but 9/10
| times the menu is either outdated or not properly
| structured and having a link to the menu website is better.
| So Google maps is the top of the funnel but I still
| appreciate a website.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Really the previous comment should have mentioned Yelp,
| and perhaps Tripadvisor for non-American customers.
| avhception wrote:
| For many local places here, the only way to get the menu
| online is if a customer posted a photo of the menu on
| Google maps or something.
|
| And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-
| angle and whatnot to even read properly.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I can't help but think what this means is just that the
| menu isn't that's important as a marketing tool. If
| having an up to date website and menu resulted in a
| noticeable boost in business, every restaurant would have
| it.
|
| 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.
| ruszki wrote:
| Or it's good for customers and bad for restaurants. There
| are such things, and menu can be easily one. Especially
| tourist focused restaurants infested with such tactics,
| and you can avoid most of them just looking on their
| menu.
| avhception wrote:
| Maybe that is the case for some places, but this is
| rather rural Germany. Not sure when I've last seen a
| tourist here.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Yeah that context matters significantly. What's the
| turnover rate for restaurants in your area? What's the
| variance in menu? "Success" in my neck of the woods is
| staying open more than 2 years, and menu availability
| plays a significant role.
| avhception wrote:
| We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the
| food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually
| to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But
| that's a chicken-and-egg problem!
| soco wrote:
| Is that a "restaurant" then? Your use case means a
| kitchen which indeed needs a menu. But dining is
| something else, so we cannot compare.
| avhception wrote:
| Many of them offer that option, so there is a grey zone.
| But you're right - should have been more clear about
| that.
| cxr wrote:
| You are moving the goalposts, subtly.
|
| 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.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I think it's important for customers and they usuallly
| post the menu in google maps thing, basically the
| customers are doing the labor of the business owner and
| the business owner as he still gets the results he
| doesn't do it
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| What makes you think that the menu in the website is not
| going to be outdated.
| baud147258 wrote:
| I think the parent is making the assumption that a
| business owner would be able (and willing) to update the
| menu on their own website, whereas random pictures on
| Google Maps/Instagram might not have the most recent
| menu.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Google maps makes sense at least, but you're straight
| losing money if all you have is an instagram page. I can't
| tell if the facebook mention is a joke or not.
| onion2k wrote:
| _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._
|
| 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.
| bandrami wrote:
| No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves,
| and how much it costs. The quality conversation is
| completely separate.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| > 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.
| deaux wrote:
| > "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.
|
| 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.
| rapnie wrote:
| Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to
| pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork
| and others, that most people use to find restaurants and
| reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer
| reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them
| higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the
| restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the
| customer base that flows in through these aggregators.
| Having their own website is of lower concern than doing
| this well.
| oblio wrote:
| I imagine location matters even more? A well placed
| restaurant with adequate food probably does good
| business, still?
| rapnie wrote:
| Sure is. I was contrasting 'merits' of being listed at
| aggregator sites vs. having ones own website.
| bandrami wrote:
| I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three
| months when you change to the summer menu?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it
| over for mistakes, paste content into your website.
| bandrami wrote:
| How do you "paste content into your website"? Did
| somebody build them a CMS?
| slifin wrote:
| Most people should put in a Google maps entry
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| Your menu? Can't. Your open hours? They already know it.
| komali2 wrote:
| You can put your menu on Google maps, we did it for our
| restaurant. https://maps.app.goo.gl/YdbSHd7hewkXQeMz8 see
| "menu" tab
|
| 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.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| That's one way to do it. The links are broken though.
| cxr wrote:
| The words you're looking for are, "Oh! My mistake.
| Sorry." Or, "Thanks! I stand corrected."
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I followed the links and got www.thejispot.com's server
| IP address could not be found.
| komali2 wrote:
| Yes, we used to have a website:
| https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot
|
| The restaurant is closed now, permanently.
|
| You can see we updated it fairly regularly
| https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot/commits/main/
| baxtr wrote:
| The issue is priorities.
|
| If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put
| building a website in the top 10?
| lleu wrote:
| I specifically tracked this problem and built
| https://lleu.site to try and get businesses in my city off of
| social media.
|
| 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.
| shlip wrote:
| "lleu.site" might not be the clearest in regards to what
| the service offers. It reads too nerd. Something like
| "easyweb.site" or "yourown.site" might better describe it.
| lleu wrote:
| Thanks. I am definitely injecting too much nerd. I just
| couldn't help myself. I do have alternate urls available
| but point taken. I should probably redo the branding.
| I-M-S wrote:
| IMO the four designs that I saw as examples are not
| attractive enough. Especially coming from the editor's
| builder, they should make a stronger showcase.
| chihuahua wrote:
| The examples look fine to me.
|
| 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.
| shimman wrote:
| Why use this tool that looks vibe coded when you can also
| use wix (which sadly also looks vibe coded nowadays)?
| lleu wrote:
| I appreciate everyone's feedback, but it wasn't "vibe-
| coded". I've been in software over ten years and am
| targeting non-technical users.
|
| 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.
| chihuahua wrote:
| If your product works as described, I think it would be
| great for a lot of small businesses. The only problem is
| that your potential customers don't know about it, and
| there's no easy way to discover it.
| nnf wrote:
| I noticed users in the United States can't sign up.
| ("United States" is not in the list of countries in the
| required Country field, and it's also excluded from "18.
| Regional Service" is the Terms of Service.) Is that
| intentional? It could be part of the reason for the slow
| uptake.
| lleu wrote:
| Yes, my primary concern is serving the Canadian market at
| present.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I wouldn't have the highest confidence in the results if I
| open up the homepage and my fans rev up tbh.
| lleu wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I've tested it
| personally out on some real clunkers. Maybe the
| animations on the landing page don't play nice with every
| browser... Hard to know without more details, but I guess
| I appreciate you checking it out either way.
| cxr wrote:
| It doesn't look like they're "trying to say" anything.
| They said it.
|
| 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 (possibly not worth using even if it were free).
|
| There's nothing else to figure out.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| My first reaction was that it was visually intimidating for
| a non-computer person. I went through the workflow of the
| demo and it was pretty easy, but I suspect most people
| wouldn't make it that far.
| lleu wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback. Would you mind highlighting
| anything in particular? I can take it. My main efforts
| went into the platform. I admittedly stumbled through the
| landing pages. Wasn't sure how far to take it. Most of my
| designs end up rather simple but I was concerned it
| wouldn't attract people. Its terrible if its having the
| opposite effect lol
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yeah, you could even just serve a pdf at the root path, that
| wouldn't even require any HTML.
| pigeons wrote:
| And security
| dd8601fn wrote:
| Most of these people just need like two or three static pages
| and a domain name. Same as it ever was.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's
| expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.
| eastbound wrote:
| It is expensive. Add to this: On this audience, people will
| lose their passwords, leave outdated information, transfer
| their business, and not connect often -- I bet the security
| is more costly that a technical audience.
| markdown wrote:
| Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop
| website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or
| something like that.
| esseph wrote:
| You're not paying for the hosting, not why would they try
| to sell you that, really? People pay them for everything
| else _around_ the hosting.
| pibaker wrote:
| Except Squarespace does not just sell hosting. Their main
| business is selling a CMS and website builder that is
| supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use.
|
| 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.
| markdown wrote:
| > Their main business is selling a CMS and website
| builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete
| noobs to use.
|
| 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.
| pibaker wrote:
| To think about this from another angle, imagine yourself
| as a worker selling your labor in exchange for money.
| Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because
| you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim
| in cash, or would you take as much your company is
| willing to pay you to work there? If your answer is no,
| then why should a company selling a product act any
| differently?
|
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| > Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because
| you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim
| in cash
|
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Yeah, like I said, it costs close to $0.
|
| > 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.
| jerf wrote:
| I think you're thinking marginal costs. Only charging for
| marginal costs will put you out of business almost
| immediately. There are plenty of non-marginal costs that
| need to be covered, which will make it "not close to $0".
|
| If you think I'm talking nonsense, make sure you know
| what the term actually means: https://www.investopedia.co
| m/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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It's not ridiculously expensive. It's ridiculously cheap.
| $20 per month is nothing for a small business to spend on
| something that solves a problem.
| hoppp wrote:
| I prompted claude and it wrote me a pretty good landingpage.
| Thats all I needed and its never been more easy to have that
| html file. The hard thing for users is to host it and configure
| DNS, but that is free with cloudflare, just need to buy a
| domain name.
|
| But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people
| as facebook is "free"
| Muller20 wrote:
| I think you are overestimating the knowledge of the average
| person. You still need to have an idea of what is html, DNS,
| cludflare. Most people wouldn't even know where to start
| looking. But I agree that once you know how to create a
| website, generating a landing page with Claude is painless.
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean I made a website for my mum's store probably 10
| years ago, just a landing page, contact details and a map
| showing where it is + some pictures, put it on Digital
| Ocean on a basic Linux instance and I haven't touched it
| since. I don't think I even have the passwords for it
| anymore - but it just lives there for over a decade without
| any trouble, the DI host costs like $5 a month and that's
| the only thing we ever really had to worry about. The
| website is a basic HTML, it doesn't need to be anything
| more than that.
|
| 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.
| hoppp wrote:
| Overestimating? I did comment that even buying a name is
| too much.
|
| 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.
| ehnto wrote:
| I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots".
| Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The
| agency of action needs to be delegated.
|
| 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.
| jstanley wrote:
| If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think.
|
| The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The richest people I know talk to a range of people like
| personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for
| getting things done reliably and in the real world with any
| needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of
| course they may indeed talk to an AI too
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| argee wrote:
| I don't think John Carmack likes to tell people what to
| do, regardless of wealth.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I'm not sure that he doesn't like to, so much as that the
| position he ended up in as a result of the Oculus
| acquisition had no actual authority attached to it. He
| was functionally a glorifier adviser, to trot out at
| trade shows (and reading between the lines, this was a
| pretty frustrating position to end up in - he'd rather
| have had a real job, even if it was to build something he
| didn't fully agree with)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the
| biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a
| society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over
| everyone.
|
| 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_ ).
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Correct.
|
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not
| to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if
| you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-
| skill engineering work, but spending most of their time
| doing their own task management, calendar management,
| memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip
| expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the
| proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or
| _whatever-ops_ , lauded as breaking down siloses, is just
| using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of
| headcount reduction.
| danny_codes wrote:
| My company won't backfill product management in timely
| fashion.
|
| 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.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yeah, the bit where there are 10x as many administrators
| in higher education, but professors now all have to do
| their own admin, always drove me up the wall
| whatever1 wrote:
| That is more money for the baseball team
| threetonesun wrote:
| All of the demos of booking travel using AI are hilarious
| to me. This used to be a job a travel agent did, and
| planning a trip was either a fun conversation or you
| could be like "send me somewhere warm" and let them do
| it.
|
| 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!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Just buy insurance! Oh, it's up to you to understand what
| it actually covers, and it's about as much as the
| room/flight costs but won't you feel better about your
| choice?
| whatever1 wrote:
| Similar example in the grocery stores with the self
| checkout. In the past if the employee did a scanning
| mistake, worst case the manager / customer would be mad.
|
| 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
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, even without exaggeration - if the employee made a
| scanning mistake, most of the time they (or the customer)
| would notice during or immediately afterwards, so the
| employee would just _hit undo_ or scan a negative or
| such, and carry on.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Some times I'm curious to see how stores work at the US
| nowadays.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Between Costco/Target/Winco/Walmart/Home
| Depot/Lowes/Kroger/Uniqlo, my experience is that I can
| check out quicker than before. I rarely have to wait for
| assistance, which itself is rarely needed.
|
| 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.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Do they ever actually analyze the situation? In my
| experience they just ignore any issues and hit "approve"
| and on you go. I could have done that myself.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic
| tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to
| jail.
|
| If this happens, it's a problem with the judicial system,
| not self checkouts. I highly doubt it has ever happened,
| though.
| skybrian wrote:
| What did travel agents do when they made a mistake? I
| don't think they reimbursed people?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They were in a position to notice and correct most
| mistakes near-immediately, or at least shortly after
| making it. For most other cases, apologies and/or
| reimbursements backed by insurance if needed, transparent
| to the customer. In self-service, all that is
| responsibility of the user, but it's all built on
| requests to third parties, so the user is not in a
| position to unilaterally fix a bad request.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The travel agent is also not in a position to
| "unilaterally" fix a bad request, they are also
| requesting other parties to do things.
|
| 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.
| threetonesun wrote:
| There's multiple levels missing when you do it yourself.
| Usually they would do their best to sort things out. At
| the very least it was a single call to deal with the
| issue to someone who knew how to rebook flights, find new
| hotels, whatever, not you struggling to figure things out
| on your phone. For a full mistake, yes, they'd usually
| reimburse you, if not there are regulations around
| refunds and things like small claims court.
|
| Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good
| service on your phone where ever you happen to be when
| things go wrong.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| type0 wrote:
| So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it
| doesn't make it good.
| jt2190 wrote:
| By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that
| they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate
| whatever they're talking to AI about and never talk of it
| further.
| ehnto wrote:
| Oh I am not speaking from experience here, I'll clear that
| up.
|
| Also the original saying used rich people but I think it
| better pertains to busy people in general.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| "Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot
| more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading.
|
| Otherwise, totally agree.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as
| "time poor" is interesting because poorer people working
| 12+ hour shifts who don't get paid time off or holidays
| would consider themselves "time poor".
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the
| GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for
| whom time is their _most scarce_ resource.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the
| GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for
| whom time is their most scarce resource.
|
| 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.
| 20shampoo wrote:
| When you purchase something from a company you are buying
| the commodity not the labor used in its making. A
| commodity has many costs wrapped into it, including
| labor. The profit a commodity brings to a company doesn't
| have a 1-1 relationship with the wage of a laborer, so a
| consumer buying a coffee isn't buying the labor of
| someone else, they are buying a product. "Buying human
| labor" means you are an employer paying a wage or rate.
| Generally employers are people or entities that have
| accumulated wealth through profit. It's fair to say these
| people skew towards wealthy, hardly a silly statement at
| all.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Both rich and poor people can be time-poor. Depends a lot
| on priority and values. I value spending time with my
| family and I will often trade money for time to enable
| that.
|
| 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.
| ehnto wrote:
| Agreed to be fair, the saying better pertains to time-
| poor people but I didn't want to misrepresent the
| original idiom.
| ehnto wrote:
| I can see that when reading it back, I'll keep it in mind.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Why can't people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt
| websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create
| spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting
| firm really need that?
| d-us-vb wrote:
| Instructions unclear: my website is now advertising the
| logic of spaghetti for an Italian restaurant.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really
| need that?_
|
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| With a website that has a table reservation system you
| don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the
| fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions
| or set tables.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side
| sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but
| phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a
| real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in
| terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash
| based, tech adverse, etc)
| threatofrain wrote:
| Ordering apps handle that nowadays, it seems routine for
| restaurants have have multiple apps on multiple devices
| as their intake.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're only seeing this in the perspective of a customer.
| Ordering apps take a huge chunk of the tiny margin
| restaurants have. Smart owners put up their own ordering
| system instead.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Table reservations are only for fancy restsurants.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| And non-fancy restaurants have take-away orders or
| delivery orders, which also benefit from online bookings.
| alexpotato wrote:
| > Why can't people just ask for simpler, less custom,
| prebuilt websites?
|
| 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.
| duckmysick wrote:
| From what I've observed in different parts of the world,
| small restaurants, hair salons, beauty salons, boutiques,
| etc. all go straight to Facebook/Instagram. Opening hours
| and driving directions are already there, menus/offers are
| in the gallery - together with pictures of the meals or
| whatever they are selling. Contact forms are replaced with
| a WhatsApp number. Testimonials are the customers comments.
| If there are negative ones, either respond for bonus points
| or just outright delete them.
|
| Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering
| section since delivery apps cover that too.
|
| I rarely see Squarespace or Wix.
| techpression wrote:
| Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a
| business actually entails for many.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| I miss Geocities so much. It was so simple, open an account,
| drag some files and done you have a website. What happened? Why
| is it so hard to have a static website now?
| fsflover wrote:
| You may like this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772
| vaylian wrote:
| Neocities is picking up the slack: https://neocities.org/
| arc-in-space wrote:
| God damn those featured pages load so fast.
| brap wrote:
| Doesn't something like Wix take care of all of this?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yes. It's also idiot-proof enough that I sent a tech
| illiterate estate agent friend there with instructions to ask
| ChatGPT if he had any questions. He was up and running, with
| property listings, three days later.
|
| 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.
| ArlenBales wrote:
| It's not that they don't want to pay, but they don't want
| to pay outrageously. Squarespace, etc. are stupid expensive
| for most websites. $5/mo is the limit for a lot of
| businesses, especially when they can't tell if having a
| website will even improve their traffic over just having a
| social media page.
|
| The administration and billing side can also be confusing
| for a lot of non-technical business owners.
| happyraul wrote:
| I accept that as a software developer, I have a myopic view on
| it, but it doesn't have to be hard.
|
| - 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.
| emaro wrote:
| > Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed
|
| 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.
|
| https://xkcd.com/2501/
| Torwald wrote:
| Make it 100%. I consider myself relatively "geeky", but I
| couldn't explain neither what a VPS or an nginx image is.
|
| "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.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Or delete old photos because their phone is slow. Techies
| really overestimate the correctness of the mental models
| non-techies walk around with.
| silvestrov wrote:
| closer to 99.9%
| autoexec wrote:
| The reality is much much easier. You just google "I want a
| website" or "give me a .com" and click links until you get
| some free website builder or a webhosting company who will
| take your credit card and give you very easy to follow
| directions to choose a domain name and then takes you right
| into their online builder where everything is super user
| friendly and not much different than leaving a post on a
| social media platform. Most people would absolutely be able
| to get a website. It might be the best way to do it, but it
| would get done.
| 3form wrote:
| after
|
| >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.
| wink wrote:
| Also lost 1/3 of developers who have no interest in self-
| hosting on the open net.
| rembal wrote:
| For a normal person, the only real words in this sentence
| are "get", "with", and "image", but the last one does not
| mean what they would think it means.
|
| 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.
| psini wrote:
| How are you going to convince your ie hair salon? Being
| cheeky but I imagine the conversation is going to go like:
|
| - "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
| c1sc0 wrote:
| How do I get a domain name? What is a VPS? What the hell is
| nginx? How do I write a plain text file in Word? I don't have
| time for this ...
| JCattheATM wrote:
| That's why Squarespace and Wix exist. You have 30 minutes.
| saghm wrote:
| > How do I write a plain text file in Word?
|
| 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".
| pibaker wrote:
| Realistically, most people don't have the expertise of
| setting up HTTPS enabled web hosting on nginx (maybe Caddy
| will be easier.) There is just so much prerequisite knowledge
| for a non technical person to know. What they do instead is
| either
|
| - 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."
| geodel wrote:
| Agree.
|
| 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.
| wasting_time wrote:
| The VPS should just be their home router, and then have the
| ISP provide the domain name.
|
| Uploading the web site could be a discovered Samba or NFS
| share.
|
| Hopefully IPv6 can make self hosting viable again.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's not realistic for non-developers.
|
| 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.
| chrysoprace wrote:
| To add onto this, I used to frequent a cafe near my old work
| and had quite a good rapport with the owner. One day I was
| going for lunch and wanted to check their menu, pick something
| new and then go order. When I went and ordered it she said she
| they no longer serve that and couldn't get onto the developer
| to change their menu on the site. They were a couple working 7
| days a week, only taking public holidays off, so it was easily
| the least of their concerns.
| 6510 wrote:
| I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the
| project and do it for free.
|
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the
| project and do it for free.
|
| Why? A website is a standard business expense. Should their
| accountant work for free also? And their waiters and
| kitchen staff?
| alsetmusic wrote:
| At first, I agreed with the sentiment that the earlier
| poster ought to do them a favor. But you're right.
| Business expense.
|
| 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| Good question, I do such things because 1) web design is
| full of con artists 2) there is no money in restaurants,
| it is a horrible sector to be. I want as much of the
| business expenses on my plate. 3) I want a simple snappy
| website with a phone number, what time they are open and
| the menu. 4) I can do this in less than 10 minutes. 5) I
| love to code specially if the project isn't complicated.
| 6) It is hilarious to look at once every 3rd month. Some
| leave it in sterile perfection, some turn it into a
| geocities/myspace page, some go crazy with youtube
| videos. 7) I've never seen downtime, no one ever calls.
|
| > 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.
| chrysoprace wrote:
| Firstly, I think you missed that they are small business-
| owners and simply do not have the time to manage this. Even
| if I volunteered to do charity work for a local business,
| they would still need to spend the time to get onto the old
| developer to transfer domain access, host access, billing
| info, etc.
|
| 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.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Part of the problem is that there's no accepted standards for
| the minimum website worth making. This is very much a fault of
| the "website people" because they don't want to sell you a five
| page static site with the most complex feature being a php
| script that runs a couple for loops to put formatting around
| images and text.
|
| 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)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| >Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99%
| of small businesses need
|
| 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.
| tarekabi wrote:
| This is exactly the problem we kept running into. The
| website exists, the traffic comes, and then it does
| nothing. A visitor at 11pm has a question and leaves
| because there's no one to answer it. The "Book a Demo"
| button assumes they're already sold enough to commit to a
| 45-minute call with a stranger. Most aren't.
|
| The website being static is the real failure mode, not the
| absence of one.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm complaining about. Your average
| small business website doesn't need to do any of that. It
| needs to "be Facebook" as in provide a place to post
| static details, contact information and content updated
| on a limited basis.
|
| 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.
| Mercuriusdream wrote:
| I miss those cheap something-middle-in-webhosts-and-microblogs
| hosts
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I saw a meme one time that went something like this:
|
| "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?"
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Just ask ChatGPT for that too, it'll happily walk you through
| standing up Unity or whatever.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I just wanted to see what was possible with Codex and
| Claude Code. Without my ever getting involved with the
| actual work, both were able to create rudimentary weather
| apps and load them on my phone. I think I had to follow
| instructions for what it couldn't access, but I fed it
| error messages any time something didn't work and was
| pretty impressed what could be accomplished.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by
| offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good
| amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon.
| Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their
| plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are,
| they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable
| price, they'll pay you.
|
| 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
| tmtvl wrote:
| The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be
| having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza
| and a six pack as payment for setting it up.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to
| build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up,
| asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in
| seconds.
|
| 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.
| ArlenBales wrote:
| Once he creates the website, does he also host it and handle
| the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder
| like Square space or hosting on AWS?
|
| 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.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I recently stood up a personal and a business site using
| Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from
| the Claude subscription, it's all free.
|
| 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.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| It might just be static site hosting for businesses that
| want a real website, and not just a Facebook page. Static
| site hosting is so simple, I believe a 12 year old could do
| it.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| So, he's non-technical. He hasn't written a line of code. I
| don't know the details of how he hosts or deploys the
| sites, but I'd likely guarantee that he asked whatever AI
| he uses and it just walked him through the process of
| getting one hosted, then he has replicated that.
| saghm wrote:
| I mean, for a 12 year old, $200 and not having to do any
| more work in the future might be a good deal, and for a
| business, a $200 one-time probably seems like a steal. I
| agree that there might be long-term issues for them if they
| don't know how to maintain them, but what are they going to
| do, sue the 12 year old?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| There is now platforms that make it as easy as social media
| sites. wordpress shopify etc
| calepayson wrote:
| My partner is an outdoor ed teacher at a no-screens school. I
| tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was
| hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never
| made it to another step.
|
| 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).
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Literally perfectly relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
| calepayson wrote:
| Brilliant hahaha
| thwarted wrote:
| > _I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was
| hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never
| made it to another step._
|
| 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.
| thwarted wrote:
| I read comments such as:
|
| >> _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.
| brycewray wrote:
| Reminds me a little of something I wrote once:
|
| https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've built websites for clients. Some of those clients were
| restaurants and small businesses. Often professionals.
|
| 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.
| vivid242 wrote:
| You're absolutely right. (I'm not an LLM ;-)) And the fact that
| (I'm looking at you, LinkedIn!) platforms actively block people
| from using external links is a good warning sign.
|
| Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet,
| too.
| asukachikaru wrote:
| On one hand, I totally agree, as I'm all for indie small web.
| Haven't used Facebook and Instagram for years. On the other hand,
| it's not (small) business owners deliberately choose to not have
| a website, it's customers saying it's too much friction for
| anything outside of FB or IG. For some people if you are not on
| IG you do not exist, no matter how nice your website is.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I don't think he's saying don't have social media and replace
| it with a website but also have a basic website in addition to
| what ever else your doing
| asukachikaru wrote:
| Then it's twice the work. For a mom-and-pop restaurant,
| putting food on the table (pun intended) probably already
| cost them 24 hours a day.
| zjp wrote:
| Millennials delenda est. Or maybe Gen X. But definitely
| millennials. I am stockpiling champagne for when performative
| profanity goes to the grave with the silent generation against
| which it is still rebelling 70 years later. I do not want to
| order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a
| cheeseburger. But yes, you should build a website.
| typon wrote:
| You will be forced to watch Firefly for eternity. Millenials
| will rule the internet for a 1000 years (a millenia).
| Gigachad wrote:
| Only because the internet for the next thousand years will
| only be bots, which stopped getting new training material
| after everyone else went outside.
| zjp wrote:
| Firefly, Dr. Who, Sherlock, on repeat. My own personal circle
| of hell.
| replooda wrote:
| "Millenniales delendi sunt." Now, write it out a hundred times.
| If it's not done by sunrise...
| dickiedyce wrote:
| I daren't ask "What have Millennials ever done for us?"
| because I have a suspicion that it would be a surprisingly
| unfunny answer.
| techterrier wrote:
| they gave us doggo
| zjp wrote:
| Cheems will be to millennials what the Grateful Dead logo
| was to Boomers.
| achenet wrote:
| Google and Facebook? Minecraft? Most recent music?
| rpdillon wrote:
| That's Gen X. Google's founders were both born in 1973
| and Notch was born in 1979. Zuckerberg was born in '84,
| so he's solidly a millennial.
| bix6 wrote:
| Zuck was birthed in the pits of Isengard so he's actually
| Gen I. That's why it's all about him!
| 0_____0 wrote:
| _looks up latin conjugation chart_
|
| fuck this i'll learn mandarin instead
| replooda wrote:
| https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=9jtiw721RAg
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Thanks, I was actually trying to find this the other day.
| By trying, I mean I thought about it but wasn't near my
| phone so I forgot to do it.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| It's not the conjugations that scare most people, it's the
| declensions (ok, well, at least anglophones).
| jrflowers wrote:
| > I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT.
| Just give me a cheeseburger.
|
| Seems odd to complain about the kitschy menu item names after
| walking into BURGERSLUT intent on ordering
| zjp wrote:
| You don't always get to choose the restaurant. Sometimes your
| friends drag you places. Sometimes your sister in law wants
| to go take a photo of the Castro Theater and then get a
| cookie, and you find yourself in Hot Cookie calling a
| chocolate chip a Basic Bitch. I just think that these kinds
| of "perfect agency" gotchas ignore the tradeoffs of living an
| actual life.
| jrflowers wrote:
| What is the tradeoff in the scenario you described? You
| were enjoying time with your sister in law, you called a
| cookie a bitch, and then...? You weren't having fun with
| your sister in law after that?
| zjp wrote:
| I think the cost of having to say something humiliating
| is at least equal to the cost of the cookie, so I want it
| for free. Of course I had fun with my sister in law, even
| if I rolled my eyes at the business. That's beside the
| point. Making you say this stuff is a tiny, petty act of
| domination. Say it or you don't get the cookie, or you
| look unfun. Anyway, it's the same argument people have
| been having forever about not wanting to say 'grande' at
| Starbucks. A war we won. And we will win this one.
| chillfox wrote:
| pointing at the menu and saying "that one" works just
| fine.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Do your friends and family know that calling a cookie a
| bitch is humiliating to you? That's a pretty strong
| feeling, so I would be pretty mad if I communicated that
| and people close to me still dragged me to those places
| anyway. I wouldn't be mad at the business, though, I'd be
| mad at the people that are knowingly disrespecting my
| boundaries.
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| When strangers do that it's disrespecting boundaries.
| When family does it it's giving you a hard time /
| teasing.
| jrflowers wrote:
| When a stranger drags you to a place that you don't want
| to go that is kidnapping.
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| Not if you consent to it first. But you should probably
| agree on a safe word.
| jowsie wrote:
| What makes it humiliating? To me, it's just words, a
| little childish but still. I'm a Brit though, and I feel
| we have a much more lax attitude to swearing over here.
| zjp wrote:
| "A little childish"; Bob's your uncle.
| antihero wrote:
| If OP feels "humiliated" reading a silly item from a menu
| their dominatrix must have the easiest job in the fucking
| world.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I think the cost of having to say something humiliating
| is at least equal to the cost of the cookie,
|
| 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.
| zjp wrote:
| They're exactly as cringy as each other actually, but
| your self-righteous point is well taken. Sure, agreed. I
| have class consciousness now. I am awakened. As if I
| would ever make this some random cashier's problem.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Well, many would have done it the other way - had fun
| with the cookie and called the SIL a bitch :-)
| mlrtime wrote:
| >Sometimes your friends drag you places.
|
| Sounds like a website is not your biggest problem then.
| Pick better friends or stop complaining, you sound like a
| whiner.
| achenet wrote:
| with all due respect - just because your friends
| occasionally want to go someplace with questionable names
| doesn't mean they aren't good friends.
|
| 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.
| zjp wrote:
| I don't really think that's a proportionate solution to a
| minor annoyance. So far the advice I've gotten has been:
|
| - 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Ironically, this kind of performative outrage (over a
| performative thing or not) is also very Gen X or millennial-
| coded. I can't even. Take a chill pill.
| zjp wrote:
| No.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| You're so Julia
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > is also very Gen X or millennial-coded. I can't even.
|
| irony, much?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Don't have a cow, man
| tryauuum wrote:
| what is a "performative profanity"? A profanity which only goal
| is to be performed, said out loud? What other goals does a
| profanity have? I guess to hurt feelings of another person?
| zjp wrote:
| Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous
| and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know
| I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It's not fucking
| musical. It doesn't fucking enhance the fucking thought or
| it's the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the
| fucking material. It's just fucking there.
| pickleglitch wrote:
| Ironic that the original post is not actually written like
| this.
| rchaud wrote:
| Basically to get the attention of others and distinguish
| oneself from the stiff formality of previous generations.
| It's a very common trope in the titles of self-help books
| written by millennials:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/ceecki/book_t.
| ..
| bix6 wrote:
| Well all the assets are with the old asses so the only thing
| left for the younger gens is creativity and humor. I'd make you
| eat a sloppy toppy burger too you little burger slut boomer
| bitch <3
| zjp wrote:
| This is clever but it's self defeating because it's tasteful.
| It's a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to
| me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.
| gamerdonkey wrote:
| What do you want the title to be? "Have a Website"?
|
| 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.
| zjp wrote:
| 'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it
| doesn't mean anything.
|
| 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'.
| dqv wrote:
| cringe >>> performative blandness
|
| have a fkin boring substack, write abt your car (whimsy typo,
| not cringe like "doggo")
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > performative profanity
|
| 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.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| You have a _what_ website? A website that does _what_!?
| shmeeed wrote:
| Some argue the internet was made for that.
| mlrtime wrote:
| isn't maps.google.com or facebook.com also a website? The
| internet wasn't made for them?
| capncleaver wrote:
| The aside about mailing lists is well made: with the exception of
| SMS, email is the one method of customer contact not mediated by
| big tech networks (save arguably Gmail) and portable across
| service providers. In games it's the best way to keep in touch
| with players, much better than discord where the dots accumulate
| and most members ignore most server updates and notifs.
|
| Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses'
| customers don't have enough to talk about for a forum.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| What techies are missing is that AI doesn't make it possible for
| mom and pop shops to create and manage a website but it levels
| the playing field for enterprenuers. We can't expect plumbers and
| restaurant owners to spend 12+ hours fighting with AI website
| builders just to get a cookie cutter-website that is nothing more
| than a brochure. Nor can they fork thousands of dollars for web
| design agencies and spend months in mindless meetings. Thanks to
| AI now there is a way: small mom and pop local website builders
| can offer a white-gloves solution that scales and drives revenue
| for the SMBs.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| They have already been doing that for 10-15 years via page
| builders and themes in Wordpress. It is easier now, but small
| players have had relatively decent tools for quite some time.
| kraai wrote:
| Exactly this. It was already very easy. Just choose a local
| hosting company, most of them have free ssl and one click
| installs for wordpress etc.
|
| People are overthinking it.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Most people hired someone for handling WordPress. Rally, most
| people are overwhelmed with that complexity.
| dazc wrote:
| Most people are indeed. Many of these people will also be
| able to complete very difficult tasks that you can't.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Set up a website
|
| 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.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i don't see how that's more of a hurdle than running an always-
| accessible web server -- for the average normie (plus managing
| dns in the first place etcetc)
|
| 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
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| Most deployment platforms will do this for you for free. You're
| talking about specifically unmanaged Wordpress hosting I think.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| +1 I can't even delete my old stuff on HN. I don't own my
| comments here. In contrast, I can go ahead and delete any of my
| Facebook posts or comments from 10 years ago. In a way, HN is
| more hostile than Facebook.
| vasco wrote:
| I'm sure I've read they support this if you email them. It's a
| manual action but if you're based in Europe they will have to
| do it by law.
| unmole wrote:
| > Europe they will have to do it by law.
|
| Realistically, they can simply ignore it with no
| consequences.
| vasco wrote:
| Well I've read comments by dang saying they support it so
| that is besides the point. Just email and find out.
| desas wrote:
| HN is owned by Y Combinator. Two of the founders live in
| the UK.
| tartoran wrote:
| Do you think that by deleting facebook posts anything gets
| deleted on Facebook's servers?
| andreygrehov wrote:
| It likely gets physically deleted after 3-5 years, whereas on
| HN I can neither delete nor archive a comment or post I made
| yesterday.
| tartoran wrote:
| That's the nature of HN though, there's nothign hidden
| taking place behind scenes, cookies, etc.. Everything is in
| plain sight. That's one of the reasons many people have
| anonymous handles on HN, they just don't disclose personal
| and stay anonymous. There are some people who do not care
| at all and post thier real identity as well as links to
| their personal websites, and such. There's a way to track
| someone using stylometry but that's an entire different
| story though...
| askmike wrote:
| I think most comments miss the point on why many small businesses
| don't have websites:
|
| 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.
| zhivota wrote:
| So how do I do that? I can't host it easily on the machine in the
| office because NAT and dynamic IPs have trained us that this is
| not really possible (it is, buty you have to know what you're
| doing).
|
| 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.
| flomo wrote:
| Irrelevant nerd myopia. They mostly just paid someone to do it
| (until they decided "wordpress guy" was not worth the marketing
| budget). If anything DYI is easier than ever.
| kraai wrote:
| I think many people here are overthinking it. OP is mostly
| talking about simple business website not huge platforms to
| host. Ddos protection is kind of irrelvant for such small
| projects. But anyhow there are so many local hosting companies
| (europe) for at least the last 10 years that provide a free ssl
| cert, one-click options for wordpress etc. It's really not that
| complicated.
| vasco wrote:
| So edgy, is this person older than 14 years old? Who brags about
| deleting a Facebook account as if it's an accomplishment?
| gigabyte9592 wrote:
| Sure, right after DNS, hosting, SSL, and convincing Google I
| exist.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| For the last bit - nothing wrong with the same Insta account
| with a link to your webpage. Agreed on the first bit.
| mocheeze wrote:
| I don't understand this. There are super cheap shared-hosting
| plans the allow you to just do a couple clicks to install
| WordPress with full control. Then about $13/yr for a .com with
| no trouble with SSL or Google.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| Plenty of free tier options like Cloudflare pages, etc too.
| scosman wrote:
| Is there a way to view IG pages without logging in? I would love
| to delete the app and setup privacy redirect.
| ptek wrote:
| Try switching to desktop mode
| asimovDev wrote:
| it still forces you to log in when you scroll and you can't
| view any post iirc. Maybe solvable with ublock filters or
| some console commands but I haven't bothered
| usea wrote:
| You can view posts by opening them in a new tab.
| sofixa wrote:
| It depends. If there's a share id (?igsh=xxc) in the link
| usually no, but if you remove it _usually_ yes. Opening more
| than a few posts /stories will result in a popup to sign in,
| but at least the core page and introduction should be visible.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Change the URL from instagram.com to imginn.com. There are
| browser extensions which will do it automatically.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Doesn't work..
| ptek wrote:
| Www.neocities.org is waiting. It's a small fun site to practice
| with :)
| rich_sasha wrote:
| A few comments point out, and I agree, that setting up, never
| mind maintaining a webpage, has become a PITA:
|
| - 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.
| pprotas wrote:
| This has always been the case, not sure why you'd frame it as a
| recent development. Not that long ago you even had to PAY for
| an SSL cert. Domains are nothing new. You always needed a
| server.
| nake89 wrote:
| It hasn't. TLS was not needed until recently. Non-TLS sites
| used to show up in search results. TLS was not mandatory at
| all. Also ISPs often provided users with a free webspace. So
| I could just send 1 html file to my host without much
| technical knowledge and I had a website that people could
| visit.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| NearlyFreeSpeech might be what you want. Been using them for
| over a decade and still love them. They handle domains/DNS,
| hosting (static and other), mysql hosting, email forwarding,
| and much more. They also have great content policies, ie they
| only kick you off if you're breaking the law.
| sofixa wrote:
| Providers like Netlify, Firebase Hosting, CloudFlare are much
| better value for money for features for maintenance. Static
| hosting means you don't need to update the server because there
| isn't one, and there are even free tiers below a certain usage.
|
| 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.
| hvb2 wrote:
| I have actually been experimenting with this. And it's real
| simple.
|
| 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.
| pu_pe wrote:
| It's not that hard for you... the process you just described
| is unintelligible for 99% of the population I would say. And
| then you have to produce the content on top of that.
| hvb2 wrote:
| The article isn't about general population.
|
| > 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?
| 1dom wrote:
| Sorry, just confirming, this is sarcasm, right?
| tasuki wrote:
| You can use GitHub pages. Or just set up one virtual server and
| host everything on it - I do that and it's pretty painless. The
| "10 services on AWS" is definitely the most painful way there
| is.
| ctmlr wrote:
| Backblaze offers 10 GB of free storage and CloudFlare offers
| free data transfer from B2, with these two you can host a
| static site for free. I have a worker script that routes
| requests to the index page and sets cache headers for my site.
| 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; }, };
| Gigachad wrote:
| You can do it a lot easier with GitHub pages, but no business
| owner is going to be able to do either of these.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Netcup, Hetzner, Strato, OVH, Ionos, ...
| jorams wrote:
| Literally type "webhosting" into a search engine and every
| single provider that comes up will do that all-in-one. They'll
| also throw in a database and PHP, probably with an automatic
| installer for things like WordPress. There's a good chance your
| registrar will even try to upsell you the whole package.
|
| These things are not the hard part.
| jcgl wrote:
| Static hosting is amazing for toooons of use-cases. Especially
| those where You Just Need A Website (business hours, contact
| info, general info).
| rkagerer wrote:
| IMO it comes down to making your stuff available without it being
| behind a login-wall, pay-wall, ad-wall etc. The big platforms
| have made it seductively easy to get started with little effort,
| but you rob yourself of audience by letting them lock up your
| content behind it. I hope we see a larger exodus of users who
| take the author's lead and escape the walled gardens.
| techterrier wrote:
| Good idea, I did just such a thing myself, deleting all my
| socials and only posting my photos to my own website:
| https://dombarker.co.uk/
|
| Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.
| tristanMatthias wrote:
| Great photos! Thanks for sharing!
| Klonoar wrote:
| I run something similar, ish: https://photos.rymc.io/
|
| I still have an account or two elsewhere, but all photos get
| posted here then linked there with decent open graph previews.
| zuzuleinen wrote:
| Your photos are amazing!
| frogulis wrote:
| Gorgeous photos. One point of feedback: I went to your shop to
| view prints, and while it was nice to see them "in situ", I
| couldn't see the actual images because of how they small they
| were in frame!
| techterrier wrote:
| oh wow! thanks for checking at letting me know, i think you
| are the first vistior to a shop page in GA!
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I have done the same, but your website is really nice! And your
| photos are lovely. I like how you've indicated which cameras
| and gear you use for certain trips.
|
| 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.
| techterrier wrote:
| I dont think its too bad! I have it on a peak design strap
| and have it on my back diagonally. It probably does look
| ridiculous, but im sure them camo outfit is just as bad as
| the camera!
|
| 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!
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| Beautiful photos! And the site is very nice looking too .
|
| 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
| techterrier wrote:
| thank you very much :)
|
| 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
| timedude wrote:
| Excellent photography
| MrDOS wrote:
| Great photos. I love your Norfolk robins. I also love that
| you've taken the time to set up browsing by species!
|
| 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?
| johnfn wrote:
| > The concept of congregating in walled gardens owned by
| pedophilic fascist speed freaks
|
| 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. :(
| speedgoose wrote:
| I thought it was pretty factual.
| johnfn wrote:
| If you think that everyone who works on a website that is a
| walled garden is a "pedophile fascist", I don't know what to
| say to you -- I don't think we live in the same reality.
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's not what is written?
| johnfn wrote:
| You should tell me your interpretation of the quote I
| excerpted then.
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's about the common and popular walled garden American
| social medias owned by people that are close and
| supporting their current elected government.
| johnfn wrote:
| The quote says "walled gardens owned by pedophilic
| fascist speed freaks". Not "owned by people close to",
| "owned by".
| speedgoose wrote:
| If one supports pedophiles and promote fascist
| speeches...
| johnfn wrote:
| It is not "factual" to call these people pedophiles.
| Maybe you think they are bad for society. Maybe you think
| their websites are terrible. Maybe you don't like them.
| Those are all fine things, and you are free to say them!
| But to say they are factually a pedophile without
| evidence is not true. It only diminishes the quality of
| conversation.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I'm reading this line of conversations and I can tell
| you, you're wasting your time.
|
| 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.
| pacifika wrote:
| A bad apple spoils the bunch
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| So which walled garden owner regularly has sex with
| prepubescent children and is a heavy meth user?
| rkachowski wrote:
| Sometimes I get inspired to write something publicly, but then
| the fact that I'm providing another point of data to ChatGPTs
| training corpus which helps the american Department of War make
| shit memes about killing people - stifles that impulse pretty
| quickly.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| The same could be said about posting anything publicly though,
| including our comments.
| dsab wrote:
| I have the same feeling paying for LLMs, it sucks we are
| financing genocide tools used by guys who are blackmailed with
| Epstein movies.
| Peritract wrote:
| I do think that's a factor now; Continual scraping to train
| LLMs means that even having your own website essentially just
| makes you another 'digital sharecropper'. The arguments about
| 'owning your own content' no longer have as much force.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| The comment you just made will also be scraped and added to
| LLM training corpora.
|
| 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.
| JCharante wrote:
| your (or anyone's) pre-training data isn't really useful so
| don't worry, people overestimate the utility of unstructured
| data
| alastairr wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. Worth pointing out that sites owned by Meta
| and Twitter in particular have become much more hostile to signed
| out users - often impossible to view a business' listing without
| a signed in account. Walled gardens are going to wall, of course.
| But I'm not sure how much small business owners realise that a
| proportion of traffic / interest has much more difficulty in
| finding them.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Well articulated!
| raincole wrote:
| It's great in principle. However, in the past decade I've never
| visited even one single restaurant's website. I just check menus
| and phone numbers on google map. I trust google map photos (not
| saying they're 100% reliable) much more than a site owned by the
| restaurant's owner anyway.
| LtWorf wrote:
| In the past decade I haven't been to the dentist, but I'm not
| arguing to shut them all down.
| raincole wrote:
| When and where exactly did I suggest shut all restaurant
| websites down?
| pacifika wrote:
| And where does Google map get it's information?
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| A lot of it comes from street view. They literally drive by
| and take pictures of your store.
| raincole wrote:
| Mostly uploaded from users.
| Animats wrote:
| Most businesses _do_ have a web site. Although for too many small
| businesses, it 's generated by Place or Instacart or somebody.
| bbor wrote:
| 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.
|
| I love the energy but this is incredibly myopic. The vast
| majority of people on the internet don't want to blog!
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I thought it will be about
|
| https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
| Meneth wrote:
| That is still a very good template for how a simple website
| should be written.
| cyberrock wrote:
| Maybe we're not going to the same places but "just having a
| website for rates and hours" is a SAT problem for salons/tattoo
| parlors. They need to know what you want and also show flattering
| photos of what they can do (and also comply with the growing
| mountain of privacy regulations), determine if you have any staff
| preferences and when staff is available for whatever you're
| requesting, and compute the available times grid. If you just
| want a speedcut, that's not necessarily what those shops are
| optimizing for.
|
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| I really thought the article was about personal websites like
| in the 90s, not bringing up hair salons as an example.
|
| 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.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| To make it easier for you, this is the third sentence in TFA:
|
| > But still, please, if you are a business or an individual
| artist or creator, have a fucking website.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Locally I have an issue finding builders and electricians,
| because they don't have websites. They may have a listing in
| the phone book, but that's just "Bob's bricklaying", doesn't
| tell me a lot about whether or not Bob is actually a company,
| but I can call and ask. Sometimes they haven't had a company
| for years.
|
| 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.
| pennaMan wrote:
| the sudden left turn into political bullshit really left a sour
| taste
|
| 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
| stahtops wrote:
| If you prefer ai slop, let me introduce you to moltbook! Some
| of the ai agents there were even trained by humans being paid
| by pedophilic fascist speed freaks, so they tend to be more
| amenable to that sort of thing than your typical human.
| pennaMan wrote:
| >pedophilic fascist speed freaks
|
| the LLMs have a wider vocabulary, argument range and
| worldview nuance than whatever the dogma of the month or
| whatever the fuck this is
| avhception wrote:
| Website? Ha, with local restaurants here you're in luck if the
| photos of the menu posted by customers on google maps or FB or
| where ever aren't too fuzzy to read.
| hahawang wrote:
| 1
| bananaflag wrote:
| In case anyone is wondering, the picture is from this book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Easier said than done, and completely ignoring the intricacies of
| "just have a website".
|
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| If you already have your HTML and CSS, just upload it to
| https://surge.sh/ or another one of the bajillions of static
| site hosting services.
| nicbou wrote:
| I have two fucking websites. One I live from.
|
| 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yes but without your efforts, Google shareholders wouldn't be
| able to profit off your content.
| nicbou wrote:
| Well at least they asked nicely
| Aldipower wrote:
| Same here. Even before AI, Google reduced my traffic all the
| time in favor of showing my competitors content, because they
| simply have a much larger footprint in the web as they started
| 5 years earlier. If you think about this twice, it means that
| the web (refereed to as Google search) is getting much less
| diversified, because Google acts as a positive funnel for
| already larger sites.
| dazc wrote:
| Doesn't have to be just larger sites. If someone launched
| their basic website 5 years before you did it's going to be
| difficult to outrank them.
| treenode wrote:
| Fun rant to read, but this is an entitled view. Not everyone has
| to have a website, or has to care about democratising the
| internet. If you don't want to do business with them just because
| you shun platforms, that's up to you. They may be doing just fine
| without your patronage.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| > If you don't want to do business with them just because you
| shun platforms
|
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| You can't even find a phone #? How about calling and asking?
| How do you know this place even exists without any
| information?
|
| 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!
| LatencyKills wrote:
| > How do you know this place even exists without any
| information?
|
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| If I'm looking for a physical place I usually just look
| at Google maps. "Minneapolis antique bookstores." I'll
| look at pics, see if the vibe is cool, etc. Relying on
| Google SEO is a recipe for disaster in my experience
| because there's no guarantee that the bookstore is even
| in or near Minneapolis. Other people probably browse the
| web differently though.
|
| I honestly would not expect an antique bookstore to have
| a website, unless they let you buy their books online.
| LatencyKills wrote:
| > If I'm looking for a physical place I usually just look
| at Google maps.
|
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| They actually don't. Especially one that doesn't do any
| e-commerce.
| LatencyKills wrote:
| I'd literally bet my house that most people do a simple
| google search. No one goes to google maps as the first
| option when trying to find things unless they are in
| their car. (Well, except for you, of course)
|
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| I do a simple Google search, or whatever search happens
| to be default on the browser I happen to be using. Then I
| click on Google maps, or the platforms equivalent. I'm
| not gonna waste time on the sponsored results that may
| not even be nearby what I'm looking for.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I don't think so, for the majority of the world (not HN),
| the first hit will be google maps or equivalent if there
| is no website. It works fine.
|
| A website also works, I'm not anti-website. But the tone
| of the article is absurd IMO.
| latexr wrote:
| There used to be a particular restaurant I ordered from. It
| was a real restaurant, not a ghost kitchen. It was listed
| on Uber Eats and similar, but you could also order from
| them, which was significantly cheaper. We used to have an
| image of the menu and the phone number but eventually lost
| it. Because the restaurant was _only_ listed on Facebook,
| none of us have a Facebook account, and Facebook
| aggressively tries to keep you out without an account, it
| was a royal pain to get the number back. But even after
| getting the phone number, it was WhatsApp only. Which I
| don't use. Some of my friends do, so that was taken care of
| like that.
|
| 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.
| I-M-S wrote:
| From my experience, you can't count on businesses to
| update their website to correctly reflect their working
| hours at all times either (especially if it's a one-off
| change, for example being closed for a day)
| mlrtime wrote:
| If they don't have any of that, how do you think they
| will have a website? This is a solution looking for a
| problem.
| latexr wrote:
| Again:
|
| > 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| > You can't even find a phone #? How about calling and
| asking?
|
| 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 cafe make a website.
| mlrtime wrote:
| >Wait what? How does he contact the website if he can't
| find contact info?
|
| 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 #?
| abustamam wrote:
| You are right that a small business does not need a
| website just to provide a phone number. But I think you
| are underestimating how many people truly do not want to
| make a phone call. Personally, if I see two businesses,
| one has no info but a phone number, and the other one has
| basic info even in their Google map profile, then I'm
| going with the one that doesn't make me pick up the
| phone.
| xigoi wrote:
| How does Google know the phone number if it's not on a
| website?
| gethly wrote:
| well said. nothing more to be added here. have a fucking website.
| especially without dependency on third parties that if blocked it
| won't load - like fonts, cdns, captchas... and better jet, don't
| make it SPA if you don't have to. stick to basic html.
| RandomGerm4n wrote:
| I don't understand why people think it's so difficult to build a
| website. If you let go of the idea that every little site has to
| look 'modern' and have thousands of features, it's really easy.
| Stallman's website would be a good example. It's super
| minimalist, and there's nothing stopping a restaurant from
| building a site like that too. The homepage can simply list the
| opening hours and special offers, and then have a subpage listing
| the regular menu. All you need is HTML and a Server. If you don't
| want to rent one just buy a Raspberry Pi and host it at the
| restaurant or at home. Even if you don't know much about
| technology, you can always ask a computer science student or a
| friend's child to do it for a bit of pocket money.
| freetime2 wrote:
| Or just host it on squarespace (or something similar).
| dazc wrote:
| I think you underestimate how what you just wrote will fly over
| the head of most non technical people?
| tommit wrote:
| Yeah. "put some HTML on a server" may as well say "split a
| few atoms" for people who have never done so.
|
| 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.
| 1dom wrote:
| I'm all for personal website and these sentiments which regularly
| come up here around self hosting. This one seems a bit
| disproportionately confused and angry though.
|
| 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.
| dazc wrote:
| Recently explained to a local service business owner that all she
| needed to do was get listed on Google maps and start asking
| customers for reviews. Literally showed her how competing
| businesses were top of the search results by doing just this.
|
| 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.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I definitely view it as a red flag if a business doesn't have a
| website in 2026. It doesn't need to be a fancy website, but does
| at least need a list of products, business hours, work samples,
| and contact info. If they don't have that, then I view it as an
| indication that other aspects of their business might also be
| lacking in professionality or high friction.
|
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| I'm curious what you're looking for on a website that you can't
| otherwise find on a well organized Google Map page or Instagram
| profile.
|
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| > I'm curious what you're looking for on a website that you
| can't otherwise find on a well organized Google Map page or
| Instagram profile.
|
| If you don't have an Instagram account, you can't find
| anything on an Instagram profile.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > find on a well organized Google Map page or 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Or in my case, I just call them.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > I definitely view it as a red flag if a business doesn't have
| a website in 2026
|
| 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
| kkkou3302242754 wrote:
| good read. thanks for sharing
| maverick74 wrote:
| So true!!!
| ramon156 wrote:
| Excessive swear words are really fucking edgy. It only defuses
| your argument by saying "Because I said so!"
|
| The arguments in the article are good but start by telling you
| what to do. That doesn't work.
| mft_ wrote:
| This is kinda why the (fucking) platforms that you hate exist.
|
| 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.
| Fizz43 wrote:
| Most people dont have anything interesting to share.
| dirkc wrote:
| Yes, you should have a website if you have a business or you wish
| to maintain any public footprint on the internet.
|
| 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?
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| x is arguable better than twitter ever was and most arguments are
| just political bias or elon hate. i feel like x is just as far-
| right and just as far-left as you make it now because the feed is
| tuned by engagement and followers, people who call it out or
| refuse to participate are just using emotionally politically
| charged points that are mostly untruthworthy because they are not
| objectionable. i find x to be the closest thing to a truly open
| platform now minus the expensive api costs and some other
| annoyances with premium etc(there are ways around it).
|
| 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).
| mark-r wrote:
| One Google feature that I think is killing the internet is
| actually useful in this case - the AI summary. If your vital
| information is on a platform that I will never join, I can't see
| it directly. But Google can, and many times I can find what I
| need in the summary. Of course it's not perfect, like when I'm
| trying to find holiday hours.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Unnecessary vulgarity makes you look stupid.
| pickleglitch wrote:
| I think you mean, "Unnecessary vulgarity makes you look fucking
| stupid."
| timedude wrote:
| Except, this time it is necessary
| temp0826 wrote:
| Maybe I'm just surprised by and not accustomed to the amount
| of anger that has been normalized in many people.
| slantaclaus wrote:
| "pedophilic fascist speed freaks" made me laugh, which made me
| happy
| lunias wrote:
| Every day on instagram I see people post pictures of text w/
| words that are partially or fully obscured from view; presumably
| censoring themselves or others for the sake of the algorithm.
| Make a website, post what you like, be free.
| deadbabe wrote:
| People just don't get it.
|
| 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.
| t14000 wrote:
| Ring them up?
| Paulo75 wrote:
| This is the kind of thing that feels obvious but apparently still
| needs to be said. I've seen businesses run entirely off an
| Instagram page, and when the algorithm changes or the account
| gets flagged, they lose everything overnight. No way to reach
| their customers, no archive of their work, nothing.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I wish this happened much more frequently actually so people
| would realize it's not a reliable platform to build a business
| on.
| tho23i4u234987 wrote:
| > pedophilic fascist speed freaks
|
| What a amazing timeline - turns out all the conspiracy "nuts"
| were right all along.
|
| I can't wait to have alien friends in the coming years, and learn
| how the above freaks have deceived us all these years, lol.
| twodave wrote:
| For some things I get this. Restaurants? Yes. But other things?
| Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers? I'd much rather speak on the
| phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do
| work. I could care less if they have a website because that's
| just marketing for them. I source almost 100% of these types of
| workers via referral from friends/family.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I want the website so I can look up their phone number and
| license.
| dazc wrote:
| I used to work in construction in a previous life and always
| said I could judge how good a tradesman is simply by their
| appearance. The same goes for their website. If they have pride
| in their work it will show; if they do just about enough to get
| paid it will also show.
| twodave wrote:
| Interesting. I'd personally rather them be great at what
| their job actually is and not waste time on a website. I
| think the best tradesmen don't need a website because their
| work (and their happy customers!) speaks for itself.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Yes. But other things? Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers?
|
| 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.
| class3shock wrote:
| Summary: A rant by and entitled techie complaining about non-
| techies taking the path of least resistance which slightly
| inconveniences the author.
| lgl wrote:
| You may see this as a rant but it's in fact a very valuable
| recommendation that apparently people no longer take seriously.
|
| The path of least resistance is not a good way to do business
| or provide good service to your customers.
| rchaud wrote:
| The manifesto of "have a fucking website" or "I'm a fucking
| webmaster"[0] or "The People's Web"[1] is something that in the
| modern age, ends up as a commercialized newsletter or as an e-tip
| jar or blogspam with a thousand Amazon affiliate links.
|
| 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/
| trepaura wrote:
| He specifically says "if your are a business, an individual
| artist or creator". They aren't saying everyone, just people
| who have the potential to benefit from it. Not a blog site,
| basically they're advocating for personal portfolio sites and
| contact points. Having 5 social sites you might be contacted
| through is a pain that often means commission or work requests
| simply get missed.
| bullen wrote:
| Also have a HTTP only website.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| And while we're at it, make sure it works everywhere and is
| accessible. Luckily this is easy to do, just don't clutter it up
| with a bunch of nonsense frontend frameworks.
|
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It is simply nuts how much people and businesses underestimate a
| good website.
|
| 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.
| gammalost wrote:
| Do you suggest small businesses send tattoos and freshly baked
| bread in the mail? I do not how they benefit from it
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You should be able to book your tattoo session directly on
| their website, so that the tattoo artist doesn't have to
| interrupt his work to answer phone calls from people wanting
| to schedule.
| blacklight wrote:
| As an engineer and self-hosting and self-coding enthusiast, I
| would agree with a lot of the points. I have spent most of my
| life in IT advocating for decentralization and democratization.
|
| 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.
| kkfx wrote:
| Well, more than just a website, I'd call it a domain name to be
| used for various personal services, starting with email. A domain
| name is like your home address in the physical world; not having
| one is like not being a citizen of civil society.
|
| 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.
| hackemmy wrote:
| The thing that gets me is how many side projects and indie
| products only exist on Twitter or a GitHub readme. Like you built
| something cool but I have to scroll through your tweet history to
| understand what it does? Even a single page with a clear
| description, maybe a screenshot, and a link to try it would go so
| far. I recently launched a Chrome extension and the number of
| people who told me they almost did not try it because there was
| not enough info upfront was a wake up call.
| lametti wrote:
| What's wrong with a README? It's as close to a website as one
| can get within a self-contained repository, and is most likely
| to be kept up to date with any given version of the project. If
| there is one document available anywhere that describes a
| project, I would hope it is the README.
| rglover wrote:
| If people wanted to have a website, they would. The truth of it
| all is that most people like the walled garden, the sandbox, etc.
| It's predictable, it's knowable with limited effort, and it
| creates the desired illusion for a nominal fee.
|
| 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.
| notlenin wrote:
| not 100% true - I know some friends that would like a website,
| just they haven't found the means to get one. Even WordPress
| can be somewhat complicated to setup sometimes.
| mdp wrote:
| Perfect example is my local coffee shop that is 100% on
| Instagram only.
|
| 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.
| dabbz wrote:
| Nobody cares until the automated trust and safety bot bans an
| account for no apparent reason and you can't contact a human
| for help. Before that happens though, how do you get someone
| to care? I suppose it's risk management at that point. "What
| are the odds that I'll get inconvenienced by Instagram before
| the ROI on establishing on their platform pays out"
| rglover wrote:
| > Before that happens though, how do you get someone to
| care?
|
| 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_. "
| snowwrestler wrote:
| To be fair, Google Search does this to sites too. Small
| sites can see all their traffic disappear within a few days
| if an algorithm update goes against them. And there is zero
| recourse.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Platforms have always been liabilities. First you trade privacy
| for convenience, and soon after, you trade ownership for reach,
| and ultimately you lose both.
|
| Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.
| altairprime wrote:
| And start a fucking webring!
| BTAQA wrote:
| This matches exactly what I see building software for small
| merchants in the GCC. A coffee shop owner in Riyadh is working 14
| hour days. The barrier isn't technical ability or even cost. It's
| that every solution requires context they don't have and time
| they don't have.
|
| 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.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| My two cents: I'd love to have a site. I've been involved with
| web technologies since the early/mid 2000s, when I built my first
| site in elementary school.
|
| 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.
| monooso wrote:
| > I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by
| hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.
|
| Do you publish any such items on platforms you don't own (you
| specifically said you "have no intention of... hosting
| anything")?
| _verandaguy wrote:
| I haven't in a very long time, over a decade at this point.
|
| 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).
| alexpotato wrote:
| I mentor a couple folks that are either in college or just
| graduated.
|
| 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
| yieldcrv wrote:
| what you really need is a service that tunnels information from
| instagram and facebook businesses onto their display
|
| 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
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "If you're a hair salon, or a tattoo artist, or a restaurant, or
| whatever, please just have a fucking website where I can go and
| see your rates and hours."
|
| 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
| erelong wrote:
| A takeaway thought: find orgs you use or know of and suggest they
| get a website if the don't have one or to improve it if they do
| (could even be a simple web dev biz)
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| To further add to this:
|
| 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.
| Jotalea wrote:
| i have my own personal website which i customized to my own
| liking (catppuccin theme, walking pet, music player [with
| animations and iOS-like blur effects], etc.) and even added a
| tiny blog section, where i usually post, well, anything i'd post
| on traditional, centralized social media.
|
| 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).
| silexia wrote:
| Twitter has vastly improved the last couple of years, especially
| with Community Notes.
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