The tapestry of share buttons were certainly novel and interesting like 20 years ago. They may be lame and 99+% ignored now but it's been a slide to this state of affairs.
I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
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Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#42Yes they do.
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#430.21% sounds low but my initial thought is "I don't know if they are making the point they think they are". Conversion rates are always pretty low. That said, I've never clicked on a share button mostly because: - I don't know what it will do, it's not consistent at all - It might add extra crap "Your friend shared 'Story Title' with you!" - It will probably try/want to add tracking crap I always just copy the URL an…
Exactly but companies have started hijacking the copy icon button as well. You’d think that would just copy what’s in the text box, but they add tracking and other stuff.
The worst is the YouTube share button. You can share the button with the exact second mark in the video and I would do that. Then one time I noticed the URL was shortened and added a lot of tracking.
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#44I don't click share buttons because I don't know what it's going to do. I don't want something copied that says "Check out this Thing on this Site! " because then I have to delete half of it at which point it's slower than copying the URL. If every share button had the same behaviour then maybe I would.
So true. I too dual as an automatic link cleaner. When I receive a link with a 100 character hash attached I gasp and yell at the person who sent me it (my wife normally)
They put so much stuff into the URL, usually my user ID, my phone, browser info etc…
I don’t necessarily want the people I share the link with to know my potentially pseudonymous user.
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#45This is something Wordle got completely correct, it just allows you to copy an emoji version of your game into any social media you like. Giving people agency to edit rather than mild fear of how will sharing actually work is much more likely to work!
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#46Sure the idea isn't that every page should be shared equally?
Is the percentage of sharing based all visited pages and is that a good way measure it?
Imagine if all the very low sharing was from 3 pages, that would be a signal worth investigating.
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#47I click on the share button to get the link, that I copy and share myself.
And it's on my phone only, on my computer I'd just copy the URL since I'm out of an app
The YouTube share feature let you pick the time to share but they removed it for some reason m..
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#48> The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors. In other words, people not only click share buttons, but do it quite often?
At that rate I think you can assume most clicks were accidental.
You don't know my mother
Messages like "Hi I found this podcast episode, you should listen to it!", not fitting her usual or the chat's tone at all. The link goes to the last 19 seconds because she finished listening and the thing tries to be helpful (took me a minute, the first time, to realise she didn't actually mean to share the fragment at that timestamp). At least it matches her native language I guess, looking on the bright side (the message isn't actually in English)
A simple "copy link to episode" button would have been so much more helpful. Not just for me but also any recipients that are as tech-savvy as she is and don't understand why it doesn't show them the whole episode for example, or why it is she's implying it's so important (the template wording is just off because she didn't write it)
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#49In the same vein, nobody subscribes to a channel no matter how many times they remind them in the middle of the stream. I never understood why content creators keep using that cheap trick looking like beggars.
Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
#50I've added a button that just triggers `navigator.share()`[1]. I know most users do the copy-paste dance, but I find this is a good middle ground. Adding functionality for my users, but not adding special social media share buttons. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...
I thought about using navigator.share myself, but decided to go with the basic "Copy URL" button instead, as navigator.share is pretty useless on desktops and not supported across browsers on phones either (Android's Webview being the big one for my use case).
You could switch between them depending on the browser. Desktop users are more likely to want an URL anyway, IMHO. FWIW: iOS has a "copy" option in the share popup.