I am sometimes asked, “What happened to Dine at Joe’s?”
Well–as you can see, it is still here. In retrospect, it was really a great blog project, and my first semi-successful attempt at blogging, though as one can see, it is mostly a digital record of some of the great places I got to eat.
The blog started while I was in field sales and I got to eat at many exciting places, as it was a large part of my job to entertain customers while dining out. And what a great time I had building Dine at Joe’s!
During the tenure of “Dine at Joe’s” (9/2011 – 7/2017), so many wonderful things have happened to me–much of which has been reflected here on this crazy food photo blog. Everything from getting married, to switching jobs twice, changing my entire career once, to my first overseas trip, to having the world’s most awesome kid. Many of these things have been more time consuming and are at a higher priority in my life than developing this blog.
With some of the good reasons that I haven’t been continuing to develop this blog, there has admittedly been some negative and sad reasons as well. I know that on a few occasions certain competitors, corporations, and people who didn’t have my best interests in mind used this blog to figure out where I was and what I was doing and would use it against me–sometimes successfully. I tried my best to turn a blind eye to this.
As time went on, with the rise in the trend of doxxing of people on the Internet, the ongoing privacy violations of people by major companies in Silicon Valley, and the biased targeting of those who create and share their opinions (which are sometimes critical) online, I became more and more concerned about sharing my honest opinions with the world. More and more people become absurdly offended with dumber and dumber things, and this behavior seems to be embraced more and more by society.
The “straw that broke the camel’s back” with me was when Yelp.com took down a review that had been written and viewable by the public on their website for almost a decade, suddenly stating that it addressed “culturally sensitive subjects in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes.” This was after they had made me one of their “elite” members for 8 years.
The result of all of this was that I stopped posting my opinions publicly here or anywhere else. I ultimately took down every Yelp review that I wrote (except for one that their crappy website won’t let me take down due to some cryptic “error.”) I ended up closing my Facebook account, and made decidedly less of the content that I create though my adventures publicly available. I’ve made my Tweets invisible to most of the public and tend to remove them all periodically. It’s remarkable that I even have an Instagram or Twitter account at all, any more.
For a most part–I haven’t looked back. The risks of being honest and transparent here or anywhere online has never ended up being worth the “reward.” Sadly, the result is that I’ve lost touch with a number of friends. (If you are one of those friends, I apologize–nothing personal.) But, such is life.
So–is Dine at Joe’s dead? No–certainly not. It’s more of a museum piece now, but it is still here. It is still a great database, and even is a bit of a time capsule in some ways. I may elect to update it from time to time, but there won’t be regular updates.
Though it can be expensive to pay for the upkeep of this website (I’ve never had any advertising on this or any of my sites, and though I have “donations” listed on this site as a joke, I’ve never taken any…) I’ll keep it up.
I do want to say thank you to those who have viewed this blog. If you enjoy my content, come join me over at joesbucketlist.com. I hope that my new blog will provide even more opportunity to create content that the world will find enjoyable, all while rising above some of the more unfortunate parts of the world we live in today. Hey–I’d rather write about things I love anyway than things that I don’t. I hope that Joe’s Bucket List will give me that opportunity more and more.
Thanks again, everyone!