Have a fucking website
otherstrangeness.com549 points by asukachikaru 9 hours ago
549 points by asukachikaru 9 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.
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.
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
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).
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.
> 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.
I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe that is the case for some places, but this is rather rural Germany. Not sure when I've last seen a tourist here.
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.
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!
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.
Many of them offer that option, so there is a grey zone. But you're right - should have been more clear about that.
What makes you think that the menu in the website is not going to be outdated.
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.
Really the previous comment should have mentioned Yelp, and perhaps Tripadvisor for non-American customers.
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.
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.
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.
IG is only for the regular customers.
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.
Most people should put in a Google maps entry
Your menu? Can't. Your open hours? They already know it.
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.
I followed the links and got www.thejispot.com’s server IP address could not be found.
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/
I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three months when you change to the summer menu?
Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it over for mistakes, paste content into your website.
The issue is priorities.
If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
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.
> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.
> "Can you tell me 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.
No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.
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.
I imagine location matters even more? A well placed restaurant with adequate food probably does good business, still?
Sure is. I was contrasting 'merits' of being listed at aggregator sites vs. having ones own website.
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.
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 ...
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
Also lost 1/3 of developers who have no interest in self-hosting on the open net.
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.
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
Doesn’t something like Wix take care of all of this?
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.
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?
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)
Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a business actually entails for many.
Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.
Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or something like that.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
And security
Most of these people just need like two or three static pages and a domain name. Same as it ever was.
Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.
Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)
I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!
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)
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™ 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.
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?
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.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet access come before that?
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.
Internet access doesn't seem to be an issue.
Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.
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...
>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Millenniales delendi sunt." Now, write it out a hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise...
I daren’t ask “What have Millennials ever done for us?” because I have a suspicion that it would be a surprisingly unfunny answer.
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?
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.
You will be forced to watch Firefly for eternity. Millenials will rule the internet for a 1000 years (a millenia).
Only because the internet for the next thousand years will only be bots, which stopped getting new training material after everyone else went outside.
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.
> 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
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.
>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.
How am I the rigid one here when people are telling me my proper course of action is to either
- 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”
I even say the goddamn fucking words! I just think they’re cringey and I was commenting on my distaste for that feeling. Get a sense of humor maybe?
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.
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?
Well, many would have done it the other way - had fun with the cookie and called the SIL a bitch :-)
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.
> 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.
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.
If OP feels "humiliated" reading a silly item from a menu their dominatrix must have the easiest job in the fucking world.
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.
Are you concern trolling? Just copy our thread into Claude and have it explain it to you. In fact, here it is, pre-chewed and ready for your mama bird to throw it up into your mouth: https://claude.ai/share/9b5e6528-4358-458d-a6ca-cfe495ee6cfa
I don’t think that I’m going to read a Claude summary of this very short conversation that I’m currently having, but if you asked a chat bot to write some text about how the act of calling a cookie a bitch is a humiliating display of subjugation, I am sure that it did that.
Anyway I’ll just say that if you haven’t explained to your friends and family that calling a cookie a bitch is humiliating for you, you should do that. If you have done that, you should do it again. Hoping that all of the Eggsluts and Hooters etc. go out of business is a terrible strategy, especially in the latter case because in that scenario all of those places could close tomorrow and you’d still be surrounded by people that will find one way or another to make you call a cookie a bitch.
I think you should and it would be productive for you, because you could learn from Claude’s
A) literacy, and B) social awareness.
Both of which are, terrifyingly, greater than yours. I'm not going to be therapized by someone so obtuse that they read a deep fracture in my personal relationships out of a minor cultural complaint and some exaggerated rhetoric about the phenomenology of experiencing it when a machine that may not even have qualia gets the point.