Accurate, up-to-date information for many businesses seems to be about 90% on Instagram and 10% on Facebook. The website, if there is a website, has no information, or old information.

This is frustrating (among other reasons) because Instagram has become much more aggressive in not allowing you to even see their content without logging in. Sometimes you can see the gallery but not an individual posts, sometimes no individual posts, sometimes you can't see anything at all.

Even worse, you cannot use a browser from mobile woth cookies deactivated, at least thta's what Instagram claimed the last time I tried accessing it using DDGs browser. I'm sure that overall nbers improved, I stopped bothering that very day. That leaves WhatsApp from Meta's apps, which seems to become Facebook's Excel: The only reason to use anything from that vendor in the first place.

This is particularly acute in countries that skipped the desktop internet and jumped straight to mobile internet. For much of this userbase, their first and primary interaction with the web is through apps. They never bothered creating blogs or web pages and now all their content is behind the walled gardens of Facebook and Instagram.

I'm not having much trouble finding this type of content on the search engine I built that does exactly this. Not everything is available of course, but 20 years ago, you'd probably have to call someone for that information, so not much difference.

At some point it would probably become useful to teach “internet/tech literacy” to educate people on why this is a problem. But we’re a few decades from something like this.

When I was a kid we had "computer class" that taught how to type, how to use Microsoft office (and open office) applications for different use cases, and this was then mixed in with understanding different sources of information taught by the school library and english classes.

As kids are now raised on smartphones instead of the family desktop, I think they need MORE of this, not less, for at least the very important skill of typing. I wonder how many 12 year olds in america can type using the "standard" method, instead of hunt and peck.

I don't want computing to be something only known by the children of turbo nerds. I want young adults to be able to solve their own problems with computers, ie build some spreadsheets for home finance or even just be able to graph the data from one of their science classes.

True technical literacy is at an all time low, IMO. Whilst more people than ever are "online", the barrier for admission is so low and very few people ever seem to learn more than they absolutely need to.

As you can't develop software on phones and tablets, very few people are tinkering with software. The Pi and iOS app craze brought a momentary change, but it seems to have gone back to how it was—and worse.

Kids of today are mostly out of their depth when put in front of a computer of any description if it is beyond basic website usage. Complex program? Forget it. Decent typing skills? Forget it. Networking know-how they'd have picked up from doing LAN gaming with consoles or PCs? No chance. Change a drive? LOL.

For the handful of kids that game on PCs, they're generally not very clued up and they're just copying builds they've seen on YouTube to the word. It's a sad state of affairs.

And yes—of course, there are the kids or us turbo nerds, because of course there are, but they are so few and far between.

That is probably because the farmers hired somebody one time to make a website which they don't have the skill to maintain, but they know how to use Instagram.

Well, yeah, I know why they do it and it's a rational decision for them. It's really a condemnation of our own evolution as an industry and the incentives involved that it ended up that way.

On the other hand, 20 years ago such farm would not have any internet presence at all, not to mention detailed and up to date inventory info. Instagram et al made it possible.

20 years ago there was no need for any of this. You went to tje farm, dod your groccery shopping and tgat was it. Or you didn't go there. Either way, farms did exist back then just fine.

Who on earth would expect a local farm shop to be on par with Amazon when it comes to inventory and availability data online?

My local farm does already have that information, like, "blueberry picking suspended, waiting a week for ripening". Like, I don't have to expect them to add inventory information, they're already doing it because that's how they communicate with their customers. It's just only available behind the garden walls. It's an indictment of us as an industry that it turned out that way because that was the convenient way to do it instead of a more open and user friendly way like a website.

Twenty years ago you just called them for the information, and it's way better for them to broadcast it than have a hundred 1:1 conversations.