It sucks that we depend on Facebook/Instagram and others to get information about a local business like a restaurant we want to visit.
But years ago if you wanted information about a restaurant on the web... was it even there? If they even had a website it was built by the owner's nephew or maybe used some wix template, then if it does exist you're going all over the place to find contact information, opening hours are probably missing, menu might be anything from another page to a download of a photographed PDF.
I like the fact that I can go to a social network profile and there's a big button with contact information in the same place for all businesses.
Yes, it was. ~10-20 years ago, local restaurants and businesses would pay high school / college kids a pittance set up a simple website for them. No online ordering, but they would usually have a menu, phone number, and hours.
The result was that the pages didn't all look like SquareSpace templates, and a lot of young people got their first leg up into a tech career.
It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.
I frequent Youtube a ton and I noticed there are distinct communities on there like "Car Youtube" or "Gaming Youtube", hell there's entire communities built up around busting scammers on Instagram (those guys posting with stack of cash and a Lambo).
You start watching one channel and realize these guys do colabs with others in that space. Just a few months ago 3-4 Car Youtubers I watch got together and created "CarTrek" which is like a full blown TopGear esque car show.
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.
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.
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.
It's like selling a product on marketplaces: inevitably, that fateful day comes when the platform decides to change the rules – against your best commercial interests – and the only two options you have are: stay, keep your head down and obey... or leave and start almost from scratch.
until they get kicked off
Whatever nice things one can say about platforms (and there are many) people are going to get kicked off. Of course the majority of the time they did something that was not allowed. No one can be mr perfect 24/7 365 days of the year, the rules can be totally idiotic too of course, at the scale the big platforms work false positives are [sadly] impossible to avoid.
But it doesn't matter. The platforms have to do house keeping, its unavoidable. If one deserved to get kicked off is entirely besides the point: It is not your website, you are a guest.
Your own website is an entirely different story. You have to break actual laws and you may deserve your day in court.
Compared to the cyborg-kangaroo court this is the superior deal. You can down vote me all day long, I have not broken any laws. You cant persecute and silence me for stating the obvious. On HN however this is how things work, you feel the statement lacks effort, is off topic or whatever other reason you can think of and then people get silenced.
I sure as hell hope HN doesn't implement an internet kangaroo court room (like wikipedia has, woah the walls of text generated by tiny issues!) but you can expect people not to speak their mind, not share their version of the story, to attempt to live up to your expectations and learn to survive your judgement.
This is why you need your own website.
I am not talking only about teens influencers. Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I think the later. Sadly we have evolved into this.