Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

notes.ghed.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 137 posts

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

#121

Post by stevenicr »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
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 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…

"This isn’t really true in general" - I am under the impression some Social Portals only allow one like, like instagram? 'link in bio' is only one, and this is the reason there are many 'linktree' type sites right?

Also places like YouTube hide most content below the click/tap for 'more description' -

I also believe that when twitter/X published it's code it was made clear that posting anything with outside links / content made your post/tweet get less reach.. and similar has been suggested for the other social portals such as FB - that posting links to other portals gets your stuff downranked / less reach..

So links I would say are semi-allowed and restricted and use of them gets them seen less, so sharing them gets them less shared, even if not banned/shadow-banned.. although reducing the reach without explicitly telling people is a partial/mostly shadow ban imho.

Also with X walling off it's data from search engines. certainly has also caused a chilling effect of less people promoting with links - and we would see the same elsewhere as the places try to wall off more and more I believe.

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

#122

Post by poulsbohemian »

weinzierl wrote: post #81
dagw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It's the primary mode of group communication for my teenage daughter and everybody in her social circles. Second place is probably Discord, but that is heavily skewer towards people she knows via gaming.

That is interesting. I have a teenage daughter too and never heard Snapchat mentioned. Some of here friends are on TikTok though, but we don't allow it. Communication is mostly iMessage, old fashioned phone calls and the MS Teams provided by her school.

I get the sense that Snapchat is mostly the current 18-27 crowd, but not necessarily the 13-18 crowd. Would be curious to hear the experiences of other parents in this regard.

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

#123

Post by weinzierl »

weinzierl wrote: post #81
dagw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It's the primary mode of group communication for my teenage daughter and everybody in her social circles. Second place is probably Discord, but that is heavily skewer towards people she knows via gaming.

That is interesting. I have a teenage daughter too and never heard Snapchat mentioned. Some of here friends are on TikTok though, but we don't allow it. Communication is mostly iMessage, old fashioned phone calls and the MS Teams provided by her school.

I checked back, and yes, you are right Snapchat and Instagram are indeed popular with her friends.

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

#124

Post by DonnyV »

I'm going to bet that these social media sites are lying about their user stats because they are dependant on Ad dollars. I still find it crazy that there is no third party checking whether an Ad is getting real users or just bots. Only industry that sells a product based on stats that they also provide. Crazy!!

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

#125

Post by rpgbr »

esrauch wrote: post #11
rpgbr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I dropped an X/Twittter account in the end of 2022 with ~17k followers and… really, nothing changed. Since then, it’s safe to assume that things worsened there and everywhere. Google is the only traffic referrer that still matters. See: https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-...

If you have 17k followers how many actual eyeballs see your posts? I guess it largely depends on how "stale" the account followers are (= how many are still active), but I have to guess it's below 1k? Maybe even below 100? Then the math for conversion rate on link clicks after that, it seems like you might be talking about on the order of ten hits for 17k followers?

WHen I left, it was ~1k. Subscribers are another increasingly meaningless metric — people left, people die, and their account remains there forever.

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

#126

Post by rpgbr »

rchaud wrote: post #96

I'm not surprised OP isn't getting many clicks on social. It's because people don't want to click on links inside automated posts, which is what he uses for Mastodon. Those accounts do not engage in conversations, they just post links to their own site. It looks like every other blogspam post, even if that isn't the intention. You can choose to run your social media account as a syndication channel, but it's sort of…

I run the official WordPress ActivityPub plugin, so my blog is a “instance”. Since sometimes I post longform content and the plugin doesn't let me customize the template accordingly, I opted to post an excerpt plus link on fediverse. Not the ideal scheme, I know.

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

#127

Post by rpgbr »

jcutrell wrote: post #27

Title change recommendation: Almost no one cares whether your site is on social media Current title can be interpreted two ways: "No one cares unless your site is on social media" is the other way.

Nice catch! (English isn't my native language.) Changed it. Thanks!

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

#128

Post by ihaveajob »

gryn wrote: post #113
ihaveajob wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also a very powerful "office OS" type of platform. Nobody else comes near in that dimension AFAIK. Agreed that it's not a designer's wet dream, but it does the job, albeit in a clunky way.

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

#129

Post by medstrom »

r00fus wrote: post #101
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 would agree but I definitely click on links in the comments that seem pertinent to the discussion (at least for high SNR places like HN)

Yea, oddly I click more links in the comments than the original link!

It's not only what naravara points out, that Web 2.0 trained us to avoid clicking links (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942472), especially when it's the "central link", it's also simply that I want to start in a forum-thread.

That's what motivates the initial engagement. The discussion thread is the compelling thing, the original bait. Then, once I've gleaned context from the discussion, there rarely seems to be any mystery left in the link worth the effort to scroll back to the top and click.

So a problem is that HN assumes you want to start with the link. What if it didn't? I'm willing to bet that if all HN frontpage links just took you directly to the comments (like an old phpBB forum) and then the OP had to post the link as a comment, I'd click it a lot more often. Psychology be funny.

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

#130

Post by medstrom »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #111
naravara wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Venmo and Uber are also episodic. Personally I'd lump D and E into a big folder, no need to constantly be reinstalling the same thing.
Post reply on HN