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

notes.ghed.in

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

#81

Post by weinzierl »

dagw wrote: post #60
weinzierl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I agree so much, but I am not sure about your examples either: Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It had its time, but personally I don't know anyone still there. Same with Facebook Messenger, which has completely been replaced by WhatsApp in my (non-nerd) circles. I thought about including TikTok but it would be more in the - YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, PeerTube category. To me, these are borderline social media…

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.

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

#82

Post by pixelmonkey »

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 messaging (e.g. Signal, Element, Telegram, WhatsApp)

C) social media, time wasting, distraction (serves no other real purpose other than to kill time, e.g. Facebook, Instagram)

D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor)

E) always-on utilities (e.g. Venmo, Uber)

When you do this categorization, with a strong will, you can uninstall everything in categories C and D and end up with a much more utilitarian phone, primarily using the stuff in A and B.

I find that when you work on companies or projects, Slack and Discord are the tricky ones, because of how noisy they are but also how much people expect to be able to reach you there, especially via their DMs feature, which many use in lieu of email. I'm experimenting with the Texts.com app to work around this edge case. That is, keep Slack/Discord DMs visible via Texts.com app, but only use full Slack/Discord channels when on desktop when I am in a "channel skimming mood," via the desktop apps only. Haven't tried this fully yet on mobile since their Android app is still under development.

Anyway, I wrote up my personal experience with a smartphone app audit here:

https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

outime wrote: post #79
ziddoap wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I was wrong, 40M MAU is peanuts and shouldn't even be considered an app really.

Compared to the other examples, it's rarely used. For instance, Messenger has 3B MAU whereas Signal has 40M, which is just a bit over 1% of Messenger's user base, yet Messenger wasn't mentioned in OP among others which is my point.

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by nonrandomstring »

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…

> What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to click on links.

Ah ha, As a cybersec person I can totally understand why.

Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more?

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

#85

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

Social media activity seems to be really bad for certain kinds of content. On Twitter I frequently see art posts with thousands of likes and less than 10 comments. And inevitably a few of those replies will be pussy-in-bio spam bots. Even on Threads, accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers often end up getting between 10 and 20 comments as well.

It seems like if you want engagement you have to post some sort of bait content to encourage people to reply. This is often controversial stuff which gets people fired up, or some culture war nonsense.

The Internet was supposed to make us feel more connected than ever but it increasingly feels like whatever you create ends up being a shout into the void.

If you're sharing content that's primarily outside of the main platform, it often won't get as much reach as platform-native content. That's why every big creator always ends up making their own newsletter, in order to have a way to directly connect with people.

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

#86

Post by skydhash »

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…

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.

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

#87

Post by outime »

Dalewyn wrote: post #57
outime wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).

IRC is not a website. Speaks a lot as to the changing sands of time.

Yeah, you're right, even though we could say the same about Signal and others. In my defense, I know [1] very well - it's not a website!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796

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

#88

Post by gumby »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #84
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. Ah ha, As a cybersec person I can totally understand why. Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more?

> Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more?

Just twitter

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

#89

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

They are separate in terms of behavior but not necessarily separate audiences. That is, some of the same people who follow you on social media may also visit your website and subscribe to your newsletter. But attribution between the channels is difficult to measure.

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

#90

Post by jasonlotito »

Your number one article is "4 maneiras de burlar paywalls de sites de jornais" which is "4 ways to bypass newspaper website paywalls". Seems like an easy way to bring users in from Google. There is nothing wrong with that, but that skews the results.

I don't think the lesson here is no one cares if your site is not on social media. Rather, if you create content in a language that is underserved, Google is your friend.

Couple that with the fact that you have had/have a social media presence, I wonder how much of the work was already done. You've acquired a large number of users already from social media. You've already benefited from it.

Further, you are posting this here. If Telegram and WhatsApp are social media, so is HN.

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