alt Hacker NewsHave a fucking website
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Most businesses do have a web site. Although for too many small businesses, it's generated by Place or Instacart or somebody.
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.
Most people dont have anything interesting to share.
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.
Also have a HTTP only website.
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.
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.
Ring them up?
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.
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.
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.
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
Well articulated!
So true!!!
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.
Lots of businesses never get beyond a mobile number lmao
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).
And start a fucking webring!
good read. thanks for sharing
> 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. :(
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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.
> 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.
So edgy, is this person older than 14 years old? Who brags about deleting a Facebook account as if it's an accomplishment?
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.
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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
Agree but most small biz don't conceive or care about the internet this way
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.