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> Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I don't trust the platforms you cited, so when I want to call

> Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I don't trust the platforms you cited, so when I want to call a restaurant and they want my business, they must have a website. Besides, I don't want a third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.

jason0597 6y ago
Does that mean you won't eat at restaurants who don't have a website?
- ht_th 6y ago
  Possibly, yes. If I am unfamiliar with the restaurant, or I have a question regarding their menu or my dietary restrictions, if they do not have a website with an email address or contact form AND they do not react in reasonable time, I will not eat at that restaurant.
- npongratz 6y ago
  There are a multitude of restaurants. I am personally familiar with many of them, some with websites, others without. That's not the situation I'm writing about. If I am considering patronizing an unfamiliar restaurant, and my only source of information about it is some untrustworthy third party platform, I'm moving on. Like I said, many restaurants exist, I'm losing nothing by going somewhere trustworthy. And again, I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not want some third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.
  - malodyets 6y ago
    With regard to restaurants, this perspective doesn’t make sense to me, primarily because reviews are found on third party services and not on the restaurant’s website. If I’m going to a new area, I rely on ratings and reviews to know if I want to try the restaurant.
    - hirako2000 6y ago
      Then you don't really know what has been going on with reviews. Some are legits of course. But more and more the bulk is paid humans from the other side of the world mastering their art for writing a review, with the tone of a local.
- purple-again 6y ago
  Without question if I can’t find a menu online I will not visit the restaurant. Doesn’t mean they need their own website though, just need to show up on some aggregator when I google food near me and peruse the results to pick something.
lucasverra 6y ago
When you call you are using telcos as 3rd parties asserting itself into your relationship with the restaurant.
- npongratz 6y ago
  Why stop there? Please allow me to note others with technical middleman status: speaker/microphone manufacturers, cable manufacturers, chip foundries, silicon and copper smelters, the people who make the machines that make the smelters, on and on until we get to the first fusion of hydrogen to create helium soon after the Big Bang. Neutral carriers and infrastructure providers have shown decades of tolerable neutrality [0], and are obviously a much different (and lower) threat model for contacting restaurants than the "Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app}" third party platforms to which I referred. These platforms have proven, year after year, to perform despicable acts of surveillance and experiments in psychological manipulation. They're called out for it, and they sometimes apologize and promise to "do better" in the future. Then they immediately go back to performing their creepy shit without remorse, and the cycle repeats. "Fool me once..." [0] Carriers and infrastructure providers certainly have unacceptable problems selling data+metadata to third party platforms, and I also note with righteous fury their enabling of illegal, unethical, and creepy-as-fuck government wiretapping and eavesdropping. They do not, for example, intercept my orders by showing some phone number other than the restaurant's. They don't disguise their call center as a restaurant's phone line. Their creepy psychological profile on me is less granular. Someone might claim, "Oh, but Facebook has never done anything like that." Neither did Yelp or GrubHub or the others, until they did. These platforms have shown, over and over, they cannot be trusted. I'm not going to trust these middlemen. I can have a relationship directly with my food providers, and it benefits the provider and me, without worry that some asshole will someday decide they will manipulate me or the restaurant, simply because they possess that dubious ability.

jason0597 6y ago

Does that mean you won't eat at restaurants who don't have a website?

ht_th 6y ago
Possibly, yes. If I am unfamiliar with the restaurant, or I have a question regarding their menu or my dietary restrictions, if they do not have a website with an email address or contact form AND they do not react in reasonable time, I will not eat at that restaurant.
npongratz 6y ago
There are a multitude of restaurants. I am personally familiar with many of them, some with websites, others without. That's not the situation I'm writing about. If I am considering patronizing an unfamiliar restaurant, and my only source of information about it is some untrustworthy third party platform, I'm moving on. Like I said, many restaurants exist, I'm losing nothing by going somewhere trustworthy. And again, I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not want some third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.
- malodyets 6y ago
  With regard to restaurants, this perspective doesn’t make sense to me, primarily because reviews are found on third party services and not on the restaurant’s website. If I’m going to a new area, I rely on ratings and reviews to know if I want to try the restaurant.
  - hirako2000 6y ago
    Then you don't really know what has been going on with reviews. Some are legits of course. But more and more the bulk is paid humans from the other side of the world mastering their art for writing a review, with the tone of a local.
purple-again 6y ago
Without question if I can’t find a menu online I will not visit the restaurant. Doesn’t mean they need their own website though, just need to show up on some aggregator when I google food near me and peruse the results to pick something.

lucasverra 6y ago

When you call you are using telcos as 3rd parties asserting itself into your relationship with the restaurant.

npongratz 6y ago
Why stop there? Please allow me to note others with technical middleman status: speaker/microphone manufacturers, cable manufacturers, chip foundries, silicon and copper smelters, the people who make the machines that make the smelters, on and on until we get to the first fusion of hydrogen to create helium soon after the Big Bang. Neutral carriers and infrastructure providers have shown decades of tolerable neutrality [0], and are obviously a much different (and lower) threat model for contacting restaurants than the "Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app}" third party platforms to which I referred. These platforms have proven, year after year, to perform despicable acts of surveillance and experiments in psychological manipulation. They're called out for it, and they sometimes apologize and promise to "do better" in the future. Then they immediately go back to performing their creepy shit without remorse, and the cycle repeats. "Fool me once..." [0] Carriers and infrastructure providers certainly have unacceptable problems selling data+metadata to third party platforms, and I also note with righteous fury their enabling of illegal, unethical, and creepy-as-fuck government wiretapping and eavesdropping. They do not, for example, intercept my orders by showing some phone number other than the restaurant's. They don't disguise their call center as a restaurant's phone line. Their creepy psychological profile on me is less granular. Someone might claim, "Oh, but Facebook has never done anything like that." Neither did Yelp or GrubHub or the others, until they did. These platforms have shown, over and over, they cannot be trusted. I'm not going to trust these middlemen. I can have a relationship directly with my food providers, and it benefits the provider and me, without worry that some asshole will someday decide they will manipulate me or the restaurant, simply because they possess that dubious ability.