> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.

https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...

Government agency websites should host their own content on their own servers (why do so many cities use google drive sharing? my own even uses facebook links). No, I do not think I should have to participate in private companies' walledgardens... for basic citizen services/information.

This is as simple as (e.g.) in Chattanooga you cannot find out your trash/recycling schedule without using Google services. It shouldn't be necessary to whitelist private companies for government services.

It's just too hard for normies to DIY, and local "web dev firms" are usually predatory in their insistence on making decisions that require ongoing maintenance, because recurring revenue.

Just try to get your local web design firm to build you a static html-only site and hand you the creds for all the hosting, etc.

What random hair salons or coffee shops need is basically github pages with bring-your-own-domain, WYSIWG editing that works on mobile, and zero git. but AFAICT no such service exists.

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

But websites are not everything. Everything would include updating the website with hours, menus, etc. And since way too many businesses in my part of the world (rural Virginia, though not sure that matters) can't update their hours, email, menus, etc. on socials, there is no way they can manage a website.

Lately, I've been trying to get restaurants, in particular, to share their news in text in addition to the graphic. They can't/won't do that. Why? Not sure and I don't care enough to ask. But I am not following them anymore and telling them why. Not sure they care, which is fine.

Did she do it? No.

People like this are never going to get around to having a website, let alone actually maintain and promote it.

But it is both simple and complicated to setup a website these days.

For a technical audience there are great tools/options to choose from. You can build a rock solid website serving tons of traffic using 3rd party hosting for cheap. But, there are lots of options and as a geek it's easy to get rabbit-holed in the process.

For non-technical users it's similar, many solutions that require minimal technical knowledge. But the technical knowledge is very leaky and most providers border on landlords seeking to extract their rent while holding users hostage.

I'm working on something small in a specific niche aimed at non-technical users. I worry a lot that I don't fully understand what keeps people from building their own site?

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It baffles me that everyone has collectively decided it's a great idea to have discussions on a platform which is not indexable, and has no usable search even when you're in it.

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).

Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.

i made it so, if something is relevant enough (i.e. it is something i'm actually proud of, or is something with enough quality), it is posted on my site first, and just then reposted to other platforms. i even added a rss feed if anyone wanted.

and last but not least, i optimized it so it loads within less than 512kb (333kb as of writing this, i might add or remove more stuff in the future that might change the total size), and it is fully functional on devices as old as Android 6 (i don't have anything older to test, sorry about that).

  Set up a website — and while you’re at it, start a mailing list, because email is basically the only means of reaching your contacts that can’t easily be taken away from you.

Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.

Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet, too.

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.

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.

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.

Pay a hosting provider, but who? Do I need to buy an SSL certificate, because we decided we need HTTPS everywhere for some reason? What about if my site gets DDOSed? Do I get charged more?

So I can use something free like Github Pages, but now I'm under a different tech overlord, no?

I can see why people just say screw it and go back to IG/FB. The web is too complicated now.

The products that work are the ones where the merchant never has to think about the technology at all. They just see customers coming back.

The old internet isn’t coming back. Yea you could setup a little old school page but you won’t have visitors. So what’s the point? Better to post a blog post on instagram as pictures where you get more reach, instead of a website where no one really cares.

If running a little website meant you’d actually get an audience, people would do it. But it doesn’t happen, we can see the traffic stats. And so, there’s just better things to do with your time and life than maintain a website no one goes to. That’s just the reality. I’d argue your better off handwriting a little journal, at least then you get the pleasure of holding a physical object you filled with thoughts.

although you can look at some of them without an account on those services today, and maybe, but maybe not tomorrow

so just need to boost the information people have posted, into something else

The 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.

The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business.

A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company.

[0] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/ [1] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/23/the-peoples-web/

It's true there are some businesses that only publish rates and hours on Facebook

But it's probably relatively small number

Given the choice between (a) a business that has a listing accessible via yellowpages.com, Google Maps, etc. and (b) one that has a social media account but no listing in any business directory, it stands to reason that there will be more opportunities to choose (a) than (b)

There are also other reasons to prefer (a) to (b) besides avoiding Facebook of course

The arguments in the article are good but start by telling you what to do. That doesn't work.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

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.

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. :(

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