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Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

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Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#111

Post by pixelmonkey »

naravara wrote: post #105
pixelmonkey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed. As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are: A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar) B) direct and group…

> D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor) I sort of struggle to think of the utility of these being installed apps. I feel like just doing a better job of designing web pages to run on mobile would be fine for booking a hotel. Notifications and location tracking is all you’d be missing, but that’s not THAT big of a deal. Those are both doable with PWAs now, and even before they were you could have just done…

Yea, I agree. Part of the reason I used "episodic" as a category was to uninstall 100% of my episodic apps and only reinstall when/if needed.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#112

Post by nonrandomstring »

naravara wrote: post #103
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links This isn’t really true in general: You can post all the links you want on most social media, though there are tenuous theories that including links will get you less promotion on certain platforms. What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to click on links. They read the headline, look at the included image (if any), and assume…

> What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to click on links. They read the headline, look at the included image (if any), and assume they understand the whole story from that context. They jump to the discussion to comment about it or see what others are saying without leaving the site. I also have been trained to avoid clicking on links if I can avoid it. It’s not that I don’t like it in princip…

Just to add my 2c on this; I browse with a sandboxed text-only Links or W3M for 99% of all web interactions. I've got into Qubes, and for those 1% of times they hold a gun to my head I can create a single use Firefox routed through Tor.

The experience of text-only is that I click on loads of links! It's very liberating. Highly recommend it for sites like HN that are high on content and low on silly eye-candy.

I just never see the belly-dancing models selling me stuff, or the entire page bugging-out like I did a whole bag of speed. Maybe I'm missing out!

The links load instantly in a new tab or they don't load at all. I set the timeout to 12 seconds. About half the time the page doesn't load at all because it wants to run javascript or some nonsense. I just move on without thinking about it.

Honestly it's really changed my psychology. Instead of getting annoyed that half the web is user-hostile, I just take the attitude that it's great that 50% of things do still load and contain real information like its 1990! Because text-only browsing is so fast and effortless it's no overhead. The "shit web" just slides past like water off a ducks back.

btw our cybershow [0] is designed to quite Suckless [1], minimalist standards.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/

[1] https://suckless.org/

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#113

Post by gryn »

ihaveajob wrote: post #63
weinzierl wrote: post #16

I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon - Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix - Zoom, Teams, Jitsi With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right). It seems these distinctions get blur…

I have a similar mental model, but Teams the way we use it is more of a replacement of Slack than Zoom. It's a huge app in terms of features, and it covers both segments, so it's not really a clean divide there.

True, the problem with it though is that it kinda half ass everything, and the design for it is kinda mediocre.

The only reason it's so ubiquitous is the office/outlook bundling sold to most companies.

It a chimera that's the outcome of multiple grafting procedures And no matter how much makeup it still show when you use it long enough.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#114

Post by skybrian »

I think this goes against common sense. We often see articles shared on social media or on link aggregators like Hacker News. Sometimes we read them. Sharing links on the Internet is easy and works well. Surely that matters?

But other times, you share a link and nothing happens. And it might not be a lot of traffic compared to what Google or some other large website can deliver randomly. And you might not benefit at all from a lot of strangers reading your article for some random reason.

So why post anything in public at all? For me, since I just write short comments, a little bit of feedback is enough. I wrote about something I’m interested in, someone upvoted it, so it was worthwhile. I don’t care about reach. More users, more problems.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#115

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #112
naravara wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to click on links. They read the headline, look at the included image (if any), and assume they understand the whole story from that context. They jump to the discussion to comment about it or see what others are saying without leaving the site. I also have been trained to avoid clicking on links if I can avoid it. It’s not that I don’t like it in princip…

Just to add my 2c on this; I browse with a sandboxed text-only Links or W3M for 99% of all web interactions. I've got into Qubes, and for those 1% of times they hold a gun to my head I can create a single use Firefox routed through Tor. The experience of text-only is that I click on loads of links! It's very liberating. Highly recommend it for sites like HN that are high on content and low on silly eye-candy. I just…

Where's the transcript then? :P

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#116

Post by brightball »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #50

What I've noticed from working on the Cybershow over the past year is that the digital world is split cleanly into two realms that never touch each other. I avoid social media, and have never gone near Facebook, Linked-In or that stuff. But I do recognise and respect the audience out there who should not be ignored. So Helen does the "social media". I do the old fashioned web, email reaching out to other bloggers, pu…

I’ve been running a conference for the past year and got to dive head first into this world.

The social platforms seem to deprioritize linked content that would bring traffic to the site. Comments on other posts or fully original posts on those platforms do much better.

Email and the website is where the vast majority of the traffic comes from and that’s because I have reliable readership with Substack. We get a 40% open rate over the last year.

Social traffic is a mixed bag. Twitter is a great place to meet other programmers and find out what they are doing, but most of what I post directly gets very little traffic even after paying for the checks.

LinkedIn is doing great though. Followers just surpassed the mailing list for the first time.

Instagram does well. Facebook was really sad. Threads was awful. Blue sky is too new to judge. Mastodon has a smaller audience but good engagement.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#117

Post by themoonisachees »

boringg wrote: post #62
dezsiszabi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From these I barely heard about Bluesky and never used it. I have no clue about what Jitsi is, first time even reading this combination of letters :) The rest I know. And I do read Hacker News...

Second this Jitsi is unknown to me. Bluesky I only heard about because they did marketing push with limited spots to drive demand and it got good press coverage being an investment/board seat of Jack

Jitsi is a video calling platform (that you can self host also), it's mostly used for business-related video calls.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#118

Post by Contortion »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #82
weinzierl wrote: post #16

I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon - Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix - Zoom, Teams, Jitsi With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right). It seems these distinctions get blur…

I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed. As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are: A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar) B) direct and group…

I had a very similar experience when changing my email address. I went through my password manager to update my accounts and ended up liberally deleting all the accounts I don't use regularly. I honestly found it to be very 'freeing' and therapeutic.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#119

Post by ALittleLight »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #50

What I've noticed from working on the Cybershow over the past year is that the digital world is split cleanly into two realms that never touch each other. I avoid social media, and have never gone near Facebook, Linked-In or that stuff. But I do recognise and respect the audience out there who should not be ignored. So Helen does the "social media". I do the old fashioned web, email reaching out to other bloggers, pu…

I have a TikTok account with ~100k followers and average 57k views a day. My TikTok profile is just a link to my website (a notion page). The notion analytics tell me that I get about 1 visitor a day - I'm not certain how notion analytics work, but I think I count as a visitor when I edit the site - so I might be averaging below 1 daily average actual visitor from TikTok.

My point with the above is to to emphasize the idea from the parent comment. Social media traffic, especially on a place like TikTok, stays in that garden. Very difficult to move viewers off-platform.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#120

Post by [deleted] »

skydhash wrote: post #86
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links This isn’t really true in general: You can post all the links you want on most social media, though there are tenuous theories that including links will get you less promotion on certain platforms. What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to click on links. They read the headline, look at the included image (if any), and assume…

I rarely click link here, because I come for the discussion on the subject, not the article. And most of them especially news and business sites are hostile from my POV (trackers, popups). I’m more likely to click if it’s a personal blog.

[deleted]
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