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Food Trucks and Enshittification (lemm.ee)
submitted 6 days ago by gronjo45@lemm.ee to c/autism@lemmy.world
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Happy Friday Everyone,

tldr: What times has the modern web frustrated you by forcing you to create an account or use a platform you don’t want to?

A food truck that I love, and learned by serendipity that it serves the public more than once a week… Has thrown me into a fit of rage. But not the truck itself.

Coming to Lemmy has been an overall benefit for my psyche and has helped me overcome some executive function issues I’ve dealt with throughout my life. I have enjoyed chatting with many of you, and am glad that corporate social media platforms are now all gone from my life.

Less algorithmic ensnarement, more thoughtful interactions with community members among other positives. I’m sure that many of us are also the Linux weirdo of our respective spheres of influence. It has also helped me encourage others to be more mindful of the technologies they use and has resulted in deeper friendships.

However, living in today’s world, it is impossible to go more than 2 feet or several links without being met with a Linktree, Facebook page, Instagram, or some larger company to gatekeep.

I’d imagine this food truck would not get nearly the publicity they do without utilizing the most common ways people interact with their pocket electronic boxes… But when I forgot the password to the Facebook account, the displayed automated message implied I was abusing the reset password feature and that I was blocked from doing so.

It made me wonder, what ever happened to people having their own websites?? I’m in the intermediate age where I didn't grow up with dial-up or less-abstracted computing systems, but remember how ubiquitous personal sites were.

This has made me want to get into spinning up my own website. I have acquired a domain name as well as a server for storage hosted by a provider. I do not want to start with anything complicated, nor do I intend to use a corporate service like Wordpress to host this site. However, because I am new to this, I don’t want to accidentally dox myself or do something idiotic with the server.

Since this is not a technology page, I would like this post to open up discussion about your own frustrations with local businesses being inaccessible without a larger big brother platform like Meta or Google gatekeeping the advertisement and accessibility of a service.

Thanks and stay cool and weird,

-G

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[-] olafurp@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

I'm going to ramble a bit, sorry. I labeled the sections so people can skip to whatever their interested in. Probably made this a bit too long. 😅

Gatekeeping platforms:

I feel you, I'm not on Facebook, twitter, insta and tiktok and I only have WhatsApp which some businesses use. It's absolute garbage the state of the Web.

I wish people would just use the Google maps business account and have a link to their website that they host with WordPress or squarespace.

One thing that's especially bad is when people post their holiday opening hours on Facebook only and don't update Google maps or their website.

With all these drawbacks I still don't want to go back to Facebook, the instant gratification hooks are too strong and it's too easy to get stuck on the app.

Enshittification:

Back when I used Facebook I could see it getting worse fast. It was 50% ads, 40% "another user liked this" which is way too low of a bar for me to see and the rest was actual friends post. I tried tiktok for 4 hours and I felt like it opened a backdoor into my brain. I spent 4 hours watching empty garbage and it was horrifying, it's a very easy way to just waste your life.

There are alternatives, YouTube subscribed feed is really good, you only see whatever people have posted and once you're done you're done.

Lemmy is also really good. It gives you all the shitpost you need for the day.

Website building:

This is how I got into programming and I work as programmer now. I dabbled, realised that this is for me and went to university to get a to do list and a "qualified" label in the form of a degree.

Making a website from scratch is a nice learning experience. The difficulty scaling goes roughly like this.

  • Just content, can be done with HTML and CSS.
  • Functionality like sending emails, subscribing to mailing list with a bit of JS.
  • Storing data like a Todo list by connecting to something like Firebase.
  • Todo list with a login and each user only sees their own todos.
  • Multiple Todo lists each with their own items and name (now you need users, lists and list items working together).
  • If you end up making something with many datatypes and bunch of logic you start needing a backend with an API.

... and it just snowballs from there. The skills come by being able to manage complexity. A backend is nice because you have a walled garden with admin privileges where you can get whatever you want done.

I really like programming, I solve puzzles all day and get paid for it. Starting out is frustrating and hard and nothing works but it gets better.

I have a hot take on using AI though. I think AI is great for learning to program but you have to be wary about how you use it. Essentially you want it to teach you the skills instead of just giving you the code. Whenever you get code from it you should read it and also type it out by hand and try changing it. Once you do and it breaks try figuring out yourself why then ask the AI "I did this, I expected that but now it does this. Why is this happening?"

I have wasted hours upon hours on problems that I could have saved had somebody explained to me what I was doing wrong. I heard somewhere a company had a policy "Try solving it for 15m and then you have to ask for help" which you don't need a person to do anymore.

Just the hosting part maybe:

Everything under the sun has been programmed so it can be fun using someone else's code and just hosting it and modifying the content. Here's a blog system that you can host on your own computer. It's as simple as:

  • Get static ip
  • Install the stuff to run the project (hard for beginners)
  • Add a port forwarding rule to your router to make port :80 (http) or :443 (https) point to your computer.
  • Get a domain and using the DNS configuration to point it to your IP.

For more details ask it programming and selfhosted communities.

[-] gronjo45@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

I completely agree that TikTok is a garbage deliverer! Also disappointed that most businesses don’t take the route of looking into how to effectively show information to people on Google…

Will look at the Astro documentation, and for now, am just trying to become literate with HTML and CSS. I’m very Python and MATLAB dependent, as for me, the syntax is readable, unlike Rust. C is more familiar than other lower-level languages (I don’t know if assembly languages are the only languages referred to as LL… But Python is certainly more abstracted than C)

It took me awhile to get used to using only Vim, but I hated having to install a different IDE for every PL. Spyder isn’t a bad IDE in retrospect, but I didn’t know what the console was, how a debugger could be useful, or really even how to navigate a file tree embedded into the application.

When you grow up with too much computer abstraction, you fall into the trap that Microsoft wants people in the education who don’t have relatives with computer literacy to buy into. I get that I’m trading lots of convenience to use barebones tools, but it is AMAZING when I’m forced to use proprietary software, as the understanding that emerges in how the pieces fit together is enormous compared to hitting the equivalent of buttons on a PCB that have already been preprogrammed for you.

I have used inferences to help parse large HTML manuals, and the search functions like CTRL-F are quite useful in some documentation. But unfortunately, not every designer agrees on the amount of depth that should be put into an explanatory medium for their software brainchildren.

Thank you for your comment, I appreciate the community building. It’s very difficult to bring more people into the software sphere because of the elitism and snobbery of knee jerk reactions when people quite literally grew up with abstracted computing paradigms and are unable to break out of that thought because of the equivalent of burning books by controlling what search engines show their user base. The ability to rewrite text automatically with convincing garbage is very disappointing.

[-] faltryka@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago

I haven’t had a Facebook in a very long time. Anytime a business only uses Facebook I just don’t use that business.

[-] Lucien@mander.xyz 14 points 6 days ago

My dog's groomer now requires you to make an account on their website in order to schedule an appointment. Considering switching groomers.

[-] gronjo45@lemm.ee 6 points 6 days ago

Is it through the login with [Corporate] menu?

[-] Lucien@mander.xyz 4 points 6 days ago

So, full disclosure, my wife did it for me since I just can't, and I don't know what it looks like.

[-] Jeraxus@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Once I ordered food online. After I choosed everything and was ready to pay the web page said that I not only need to create an account but also download the app. I don't know what they wanted from my phone, probably notifications or geolocalisation. I ate elsewhere.

The most frustrating experience I had was with brico dépot. To buy a shelve I needed to create an account but it blocked me because my behavior was "abnormal". After an hour trying to reach customer service they told me to call the shop for them to create me an account, they did but when I tried to connect the password were wrong and guess what? When I tried to reset it they blocked me because my behavior was "abnormal". The next day I called my mom who created an account for me, I entered the gmail address and the correct password, no "wrong password" error but "abnormal behavior". I wasted 2 days on this shit.

[-] DaGeek247@fedia.io 4 points 6 days ago

All of the food delivery apps require a login in order to be used.

I have checked them out several times, but never actually ordered anything specifically because of that.

[-] iamdefinitelyoverthirteen@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

I miss proper food delivery that didn't cost an extra 7 dollars or more.

[-] zea_64 2 points 5 days ago

Barber shop wanted my phone number. Took over a minute to convince them no.

[-] dumblederp@aussie.zone 2 points 5 days ago

I give a fake one.

this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
39 points (100.0% liked)

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