
Why I'm Done With Social Media Buttons - jenniferDewalt
http://solomon.io/why-im-done-with-social-media-buttons/
======
luigi
The last time there was a rant like this, I did an analysis using real-world
data:

[http://luigimontanez.com/2012/actually-social-media-
buttons-...](http://luigimontanez.com/2012/actually-social-media-buttons-work-
really-well/)

The Nieman Journalism Lab followed up a few months ago:

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/tweet-buttons-are-less-
of-a...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/tweet-buttons-are-less-of-a-big-
deal-than-they-used-to-be-for-your-twitter-strategy/)

~~~
sixQuarks
That's the problem with an audience like HN. We are not average internet
users.

Oftentimes an ugly site with ads and popups everywhere will perform better
than a beautiful, minimalist site. Sorry, but that's just reality.

~~~
knieveltech
[citation needed]

~~~
apunic
I can confirm this. All web projects I worked on which were minimalistic,
clean and well designed had less stickiness (page impression count to visits)
compared to sites stuffed with content, pics, links, extra widgets here and
there.

~~~
justincormack
That could just mean people found what they wanted.

------
minimaxir
It's also possible to make your own social media buttons if you're concerned
about the privacy/performance impact. I've done that for my own site and it's
worked well so far. (although theoretically the tradeoff is that it leads to
less sharing conversions)

~~~
udfalkso
This. I made my own for FB & Twitter. No external loading dependencies. Pages
load so much faster. Feel free to view-source/copy: iknow.io/labs/

------
Houshalter
Social media buttons are annoying and useless as well as a major privacy
concern. Block them with adblock and the filter "Fanboy's Annoyance List"
which can be found on this page:
[https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/](https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/)

~~~
devindotcom
Ghostery does it well too.

~~~
quadrangle
Still use it _as well_ myself but
[http://disconnect.me/](http://disconnect.me/) is similar and fully FLOSS
whereas Ghostery is sorta weird and proprietary and actually helps the ad
tracking biz

~~~
fixanoid
Ughh, Ghostery isn't FLOSS, but that does not make the code invisible, many
places where you can see it like: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/ghostery/vers...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/ghostery/versions/) or ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/

And there is this:
[http://www.areweprivateyet.com](http://www.areweprivateyet.com)

~~~
mp3geek
Would be interesting if
[http://www.areweprivateyet.com](http://www.areweprivateyet.com) would test
against more Adblock lists.. rather than a select few.

------
lazyjones
Sharing on social media is functionality that should be built into browsers or
implemented with browser plugins (it should be a single click on some browser
toolbar). There's no point in replicating it on every web site in a
performance-hampering and intrusive way.

~~~
dredmorbius
Interesting point. The default Android browser (at least the one on my
increasingly dated Droid device) has a "share" menu item. The only things I
use it for are to email myself articles or to post links to Readability.

The whole "Social" thing is .... largely annoying.

~~~
SyneRyder
Yup, Chrome on my Nexus 5 also has the Share menu, and with the Facebook &
Twitter apps installed (and also some App.Net clients), they all appear in the
Share menu. It works well. On the desktop I use the Pocket & Buffer extensions
instead.

Of course, out of sight, out of mind - if your audience isn't tech savvy,
perhaps they need that visible reminder to share something.

------
Theodores
I have always hated social media buttons. What surprised me about them was how
everyone thought you needed them. There is also poor metrics for them, on your
own site (or a client's site) there is really poor visibility on who has
clicked those links. You would think that if they were that valuable people
would at least know who clicked them but they don't.

Also the craft of redesigning the buttons annoys me. How many designer-years
have been spent redesigning the Twitter bird? This activity completely goes
against basic UX principles but you cannot tell designers the truth about
that.

Remember page counters? I think a 'Predator vs Aliens' style sequel to social
network buttons is needed where you can see x million people have viewed this
page but 0 people have shared it on StumbleUpon...

------
adwf
I think an often overlooked issue is the _type_ of social media button used on
a site. All too frequently, you'll see every single media button at the end of
a blog post or article, with no consideration as to whether it's appropriate
or not.

For example, take a technical blog post about something to do with computers.
Facebook-wise, why on earth would most people share this? It's technical, and
only a few of my friends out of about 150 (the average is ~130 I'm told) are
actually techies. The kind of post that goes on FB is mostly personal or
funny, never work.

Whereas Twitter, I might have followers who have 10,000+ followers of their
own, ready for retweeting. This is more like a public broadcast, therefore I
will be reaching the demographic I want, regardless of whether I know these
people or not. It's an entirely different marketing strategy and yet you'll
almost always see the whole cluster of buttons, without any consideration to
their appropriateness.

~~~
mathattack
I agree with your point. Buttons facilitate sharing at the expense of poorer
design. You can mitigate this somewhat by nudging people towards sharing it
where you want them to put it.

------
Nursie
I'm done with them because I don't see a reason that facebook should get to
track my non-facebook browser activity.

I wish more web designers would think of the privacy violations they subject
their users to, rather than just their own page impressions.

~~~
debt
"...privacy violations they subject their users to..."

You lost me. Which privacy policies are they violating?

~~~
dwaltrip
Here, the word privacy is referring to a general concept, not the formal
policy of an organization.

~~~
benched
Rule zero of Hacker News: never make an utterance without some appeal to an
established authority.

------
eknkc
Last month, we had 50,943 facebook likes, 23,935 twitter tweets and 820 G+
shares via that plugins on our website.

For Facebook, it is around 5% of all likes our articles collected. Not bad
actually.

~~~
windsurfer
How much of it were bots?

~~~
mbesto
Categorically speaking, does it matter?

~~~
windsurfer
Yes. Likes can be almost meaningless. Some may say categorically meaningless,
but I am referring to bots farms liking at semi-random.

------
bluthru
A share button in the browser is my favorite solution. Twitter and Facebook
aren't tracking you, there aren't embeds to slow down sites, and the user
knows where the button is every time.

~~~
k-mcgrady
In case you didn't know Safari has this built in.

~~~
dredmorbius
Also the default Android browser (somewhat buried however).

------
zrail
On my site I made my own buttons. They're just a row of icon links that open
in a new tab. No javascript, no loading from a 3rd party site, just a plain
link.

Example: [https://www.petekeen.net/life-of-a-stripe-
charge](https://www.petekeen.net/life-of-a-stripe-charge)

~~~
rom16384
I like it, and I think I'm going to use this in some of my sites. Just a minor
correction though: You should add the tag rel="nofollow" to the links so that
the search engines won't accidentally follow them.

------
bencollier49
I disagree with this strongly. In instances when I've had content from my site
go viral, Twitter and Facebook shares via buttons on the content have
definitely had an impact.

~~~
Theodores
...he says without sharing a single link to one of these anecdotal mega viral
posts...

------
GrinningFool
This is a bit disappointing to read.

I came in hoping to see "because I realize I am making an assumption as to my
readers' willingness to be tracked across multiple web sites". Instead, I got
"it doesn't work because nobody really uses them".

------
dangayle
More articles like this please, because I have to convince other people that
I'm working with that my design isn't broken because it doesn't have social
media buttons slathered all over it.

I have _always_ hated it. From a UX standpoint, it's just one more piece of
distraction. I don't want your eyes looking at buttons, I want your eyes
looking at my content.

(Or clicking on my ad, which I also hate but can't get rid of.)

------
quadrangle
Nobody should even be seeing them anyway.
[http://disconnect.me/](http://disconnect.me/) C'mon folks!

------
donniezazen
Internet is broken in a lot of ways including the Social Media Buttons.
Reading this post made me think how seriously we need, for an example, Android
style social sharing button in Chrome. Also text be kept as text and not
something that is dynamic.

------
dudus
I wish I could +1 this post.

------
adventured
Are there any stats on the number of users that click buttons vs manually
sharing the same link? Are we at a point in the maturity of social networks
and user adoption, where it's no longer worth the annoyance trade-off (ie
users will _mostly_ share what they want to anyway, regardless of buttons)?
I'd be pretty happy if I never used another social media button in a project.

------
apunic
The main reason why they are done:

\- Facebook is not viral anymore and share or likes hardly bring extra traffic

\- Twitter is mixed: in general you do not get decent traffic from them; but
from time to time a +100K follower user either shares or retweets your thing
and you get extra traffic or he/she initiate kind of virality (again this
happens even for high traffic sites not very often)

\- and of course they are just ugly

------
BorisMelnik
For some reason lately I've been thinking what you were able to prove with
analytics. I just know people are sharing my stuff, but they aren't using the
social sharing buttons. Especially in "our" industry (dev, design, marketing,
etc) people would rather craft and curate a post then have it shared in some
type of weird way on one of those buttons.

------
alexchantastic
Here's a pretty lightweight way to include the functionality (and customize
the look): [http://cferdinandi.github.io/social-
sharing/](http://cferdinandi.github.io/social-sharing/)

I created a small JS snippet (still need to put that up on Github) to grab the
counts too which is quite easy.

~~~
riquito
Nice work, your page is really fast. I'll keep an eye on it.

------
ohwp
HN doesn't have a share button. But somehow a lot of stuff is shared on this
site...

------
collyw
I kind of don't trust the ones with a facebook logon. Sometimes I have signed
in and used some stupid app such as "do you make him horny in bed?", then it
gets published to my timeline....

Makes me wary of such things these days.

~~~
skelsey
Doesn't Facebook timeline review prevent this?

~~~
collyw
probably, but I really can't see the effort in learning extra features of
facebook. It maybe did ask me after a host of other yes /no type buttons to
the point I wasn't paying attention. Easier not to touch the button when I see
one.

------
bobbygoodlatte
If you're offended by the buttons, why not try a simple line of text w/ a
hyperlink after the article?

"If you found this interesting, I'd love it if you would spread the word [on
Twitter]"

------
justhw
As he said it depends on who the readers are. But regardless including a
static version with just a link is a good idea for users on mobile and tablet.
And also load time won't be affected.

------
snowwrestler
The secret to social media "buttons" is to design your own and implement them
with non-tracking intent URLs. Then they actually will become a tool of
convenience for your visitors.

------
ctrl
If your looking for a great resource for adding custom links with your own
images for social media buttons

[http://atlchris.com/1665/how-to-create-custom-share-
buttons-...](http://atlchris.com/1665/how-to-create-custom-share-buttons-for-
all-the-popular-social-services/)

This solves: load issues, ugliness of buttons (you can style or use images
however you like), social media button visitor tracking

------
Paul_S
I knew about social media buttons because I have been blocking them ever since
they began but I was not aware of how widespread or rather ubiquitous they
have become. What is the point of them? Doesn't facebook already have this
functionality on their own page? Those share buttons seem to me like something
that should be a browser plugin not part of a website.

~~~
cma
The business model is to spy on your browsing/reading habits to build a better
ad profile. Being able to deliver your browsing history upon subpoena is just
a "business" side effect.

------
dredmorbius
For my own personal case, anything tagged "social" or "share" in CSS is among
the first stuff I strip (after anything that moves, slides, pops out, and/or
is statically positioned) when restyling sites' stylesheets. Which I've done
... 980 times now.

If I want to share, the URL's fine and dandy.

------
bhartzer
There's social media buttons, and then there are social media buttons. The
buttons that include actual numbers, like how many have Tweeted, +1d or Liked
the page may prove to be more useful. It shows a user that they're not the
only person that has viewed that page. It's not a 'ghost town'.

------
daphneokeefe
I often wonder how often this happens: Someone becomes frustrated with the
website or its content, and the presence of the social media buttons
encourages them to click and vent about their dissatisfaction. If the button
wasn't just right there, the moment might pass.

------
meerita
I've noticed that my blog didn't have too much changes in terms of use when we
talk social buttons. It didn't matter if they were at the top, bottom. People
consume my blog on several devices and apps and they seem to share stuff with
the apps itselfs.

------
frade33
I was done with them at least 2 years ago. There 're two kind of visitors on a
website, one who would share it, and other who won't. Former would still share
it if there are no buttons. Hence there is no point.

------
dangoldin
Timely post for me. I removed the "ShareThis" plugin from my blog last week
due to the sleaziness and have been thinking of putting together a
replacement. I guess in this case I just won't bother.

------
vespaceballs6
I hate the design of those buttons, but as a content producer, they are great
validators of content. As in, "Wow, this post has 230K Facebook Likes, I guess
I should read it!"

------
mattberg
"WHAT MAJOR WEBSITES DON’T USE SHARING BUTTONS?

The one that immediately comes to mind is Information Architects."

Welp.

~~~
atestu
Haha yeah… since when is this a major website? Not even in the top 100K…
(alexa)

Sharing buttons make it easy for non tech users to interact with your content
on desktop. The alternative for them is to open a new tab with the social
network they use, and paste your link. You lose the people who are too lazy to
do this (a large chunk of your audience, don't fool yourself into thinking
your content is so amazing that people can't wait to share it).

------
piyush_soni
I use DoNotTrackMe for Firefox. It does not sell details to ad agencies like
Ghostery does.

~~~
fixanoid
Heh, it may not sell it to ad agencies, but it sure sends data back to them.

DNTMe is probably the worst choice to use for tracking protection, heres a
study we have on the topic
[http://www.areweprivateyet.com](http://www.areweprivateyet.com)

~~~
piyush_soni
Aah. I see this website is by Ghostery itself. Anyway, what makes you say
DNTMe is probably the worst choice? I use it along with ABP, and in the cases
I have observed so far (few hours), both Disconnect and DNTMe block almost the
same things. Of course, Disconnect.me mentions a very big number but it is
just the number of requests and not the actual number of 'trackers' blocked.
I'm still doing more experiments, but so far both are almost the same. And the
numbers Disconnect shows are buggy - they are sometimes different when you
expand their sections.

And yes, still not going to use Ghostery. :)

------
tomrod
Take them off. Browsing on mobile is broken with these obnoxious buttons.

------
benched
I have never in my life fucked with these things except page-load passively.
Never placed one, never turned one on, never had a reason to click one. But I
don't drink Coca-Cola either. Do these things really make the world go round?
I mean, _really?_ I mean do corporate bottom lines really depend on this shit?
Or is it just that they absolutely have to wring every possible percentage
point?

~~~
bunderbunder
Remember web counters? It's like that.

~~~
benched
In the sense that they're on everything, but serve a real purpose to almost no
one?

