8 ms·

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

129 points by rpgbr 3y ago

throwaway8877 3y ago
Apples and oranges.
moravak1984 3y ago
I'd argue that Mastodon and Telegram hardly count as social media (and 450 contacts on WhatsApp... come on) If someone with a site on X/WhatsApp/Instagram/FB repeats the experiment, then we might see something interesting.
- rpgbr 3y ago
  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-how-much-new-research-from-datos-sparktoro/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-...
  - Hakkin 3y ago
    I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that pretty much any semi-major company had a support presence on Twitter. Often just tweeting anything with the name of the company in it would get you a response from a support rep in a few minutes. It was one of the best ways to get in direct contact with support for many companies. The API limitations probably severely hampered this avenue of support for most companies, I imagine.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    I think things like this also depend on the site itself. A personal blog might fare different from a commercial website. I follow a few (niche) companies on Twitter who post new parts/products sometimes. I often click through to the link to see it. It is highly unlikely for me to visit their website out of the blue.
  - esrauch 3y ago
    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?
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      I had Wikileaks/Assange link to an article I wrote on Twitter. The clickthrough rate was like 500 readers or something. Quite underwelming.
    - rpgbr 3y ago
      WHen I left, it was ~1k. Subscribers are another increasingly meaningless metric — people left, people die, and their account remains there forever.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    LinkedIn still matters quite a bit for commercial/professional stuff. X still matters some. But anecdotally, X is far less relevant and used in my circles post-Musk. (And Mastodon hasn't replaced it for most people.) I think Musk was the impetus for a lot of people to dial down their social media use.
    - slimsag 3y ago
      Anecdotally, a majority of people I used to see on Twitter I now see only in Discord.
    - 0ckpuppet 3y ago
      honest question, does that say more about your circles or about X?
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I don't know. Hence my qualification. I suspect the political angle of Twitter/X could be as active as ever. But there's been a huge dropoff in use across tech as far as I can see.
  - flurdy 3y ago
    Pre and post Elon is a big difference for Twitter. Before I would post a tweet with links to my blog and would see an increase in both metrics and responses to it. Post Elon I don't think anyone even sees the tweet as I am not a paying twitter subscriber, and most people that would respond etc have left. And about 2 people see my Mastadon post.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  If you shout into a void on Mastodon or a loud crowded space on X where no one hears you makes hardly a difference for almost everyone.
blueboo 3y ago
Depends on your goals. People are beginning to shop primarily on TikTok and Instagram. Social media seems to be enshittify-evolving to be the new e-commerce. Meanwhile, summarising posts in video on Shorts/Reels/TikTok might be quite a traffic bump. I’m seeing big numbers from channels that typically offer thoughtful, long-form content
- fuzzy_biscuit 3y ago
  I have no basis to agree or disagree, but the social engines involved are incentivized to do so: they can cash out the data they are constantly farming. It's scary to me to get shopping recommendations from platforms that have no interest in making anything better at all. It's scarier to me that the generational gap has widened enough where that seems reasonable. I guess the recos are just that good?
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  even google is being eaten by ecommerce, video games are often piles of micro transactions… everything is a store
philippz 3y ago
* "Stopped Sharing on Social Media and no one cares" * Was only posting on Mastodon ...yeah, surprise
setgree 3y ago
Not to be a pedant but the relevant variable has not been manipulated here. We would need sites of (more or less) equal-in-expectation popularity to be assigned to use social media or not. The metrics the author provides are capturing effects of past social media distribution.
burrish 3y ago
Here something funny about X/Twitter, if you dare post a link in your main tweet, this will significantly decrease the reach of this one. (you have to post it in the comments) Because X/Twitter want people to stay in their platform, link outside X isn't great for them.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  This is one of those post-acquisition changes that made Twitter a lot less useful. I don't really get the logic, Twitter is optimized for a certain kind of content - short text - and anything longer needs to go on another platform. Instead of embracing that the current ownership wants to compete with TikTok and Youtube and Instagram and substack at the same time.
  - Veuxdo 3y ago
    Twitter: "But why do you need anything longer, human...?"
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    And anything longer needs to be posted as a screenshot of the text. There fixed that for you.
sph 3y ago
Of course not. Social media is shouting at the void at best, but usual self-contained rage bait. People open Twitter/Mastodon to doomscroll and post their thoughts, and could not care less about linked content. I have seen the same exact pattern with trying to mention my latest blog posts on Mastodon or other social media: no one cares. I had much more engagement posting on Linkedin, though one would believe that with all the spam there no one would have time to check out your post. You'd be very wrong. Though the downside of this strategy is having to use Linkedin.
- criddell 3y ago
  > Social media is shouting at the void at best At best, social media is an additional way of keeping in touch with people you know and care about.
  - Retric 3y ago
    For a very loose definition of keep in touch with. I’ve found it easier to stay connected after dropping social media, but I value direct communication far more than status updates. Time spent on social media is time not spent directly talking to someone, and it’s really tempting to send a message rather than call.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    That's what a social network was supposed to be. We changed the name because it's not that anymore. It's people you never knew and never will producing content in exchange for advertisement.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      If I had to build a visionOS version of Twitter, it would be Times Square. Then a potentiometer as a control to move the timeline.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    No it isn't, unless you define down "keeping in touch" to be so trivial it loses all meaning
richrichie 3y ago
Mastadon is too small to matter as social media. Tight knit, walled echo chamber though.
- internetter 3y ago
  Mastodon was the epicenter of the XZ discourse. The original discoverer uses it. Krebs uses it. I attribute my success to it. Maybe this was true a few months ago, but it's very quickly establishing itself for tech discussion
weinzierl 3y ago
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 blurred more and more and we will probably end up with different apps differing only in a single dimension from left to right.
- flurdy 3y ago
  With the addition of TikTok, Instagram, Shorts as the top row? And Email at the bottom?
- outime 3y ago
  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).
  - dezsiszabi 3y ago
    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...
    - boringg 3y ago
      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
      - themoonisachees 3y ago
Haventrus 3y ago
Thank you sharing this post!!!!
- Haventrus 3y ago
  [dead]
tambourine_man 3y ago
> Like any authoritarian entity, Google… Let's all calm down a little bit. I'm not a fan of last-decade's Google, but it is just a company and the open web still exists. And always will. It's relevance may shrink, but maybe it was always supposed to be a niche thing all along. I have mourned the rise of social media and enshitification of Google, but perhaps the outcome is not as bleak. Technically inclined people self hosting their blogs and keeping their web-rings, while the rest of the world mindlessly scrolls Instagram. I'm happy to help anyone that wants to join Mastodon or set up a blog, but I'm tired of trying to convince them they should.
jcutrell 3y ago
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.
- rpgbr 3y ago
  Nice catch! (English isn't my native language.) Changed it. Thanks!
begueradj 3y ago
If you are too present on social media, there is no mystery left about you. You become too familiar to trigger the curiosity of a follower to click on another link you posted. The economy of attention doesn't lead far.
- acureau 3y ago
  I'd disagree with that. Most people I know that use social media for marketing are just following the eyes, making as many people as possible aware that they exist and have done something. If you don't try to put your work out there nobody will know you've done it. If the economy of attention didn't lead far there would be no advertisements.
  - yndoendo 3y ago
    Marketing on Facebook or Twitter is a horizontal landscape. Those on the platform are your only traffic. Having a website outside of these types of platforms is a vertical market because one does not have become a platform tribal member to engage. A number of restaurants and brick and mortar shops only use platforms to promote events and products. This means I have no idea of the soup of the day or when special trivia night is. It is less expensive to just engage on a platform than maintain a non-tribal website. Those in the tribe do not see the exclusion they created with their horizontal market. Irony is that a number of social media posts reference other sites. So the non-tribal website is scooped up by media platforms, creating a tilted vertical market.
guhcampos 3y ago
I have the sense social media is really bad for written content in particular. It's likely the best broadcasting mechanism for YouTube channels, shops, some types of services. But the audience in social media in its majority is looking for quick dopamine pills, not long form articles, so conversion on those is really really low. I'm a programmer, not a marketer though, so take this with a grain of salt and maybe some chili pepper too.
altdataseller 3y ago
Nobody would care if you own just a personal site, but if you’re a company (and not well know ) I sometimes check to see if you’re on LinkedIn, or have posted recently on Twitter. Because if you haven’t, that might be a sign you might be going out of business Maybe that’s unfair. But I would think twice before relying on your product for anything important
- deleted 3y ago
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- elondaits 3y ago
  100%. I recently had to research scuba diving centers in a city I’ll visit soon, and part of my criteria was to check how recent their Google Maps comments were, and how active their Instagram was. Some diving centers are the center of a community of divers, who will follow and comment on their pictures… while other are more commercial endeavors for tourists that just post on a schedule and no one cares about it. Social media activity is also a good way to deduce if they’re active, positive and growing their business or if they’ve checked out and entered “maintenance mode”.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mrtksn 3y ago
I don't know if views are a good measure of anything anymore. I find that narrative control from position of authority is much more interesting. So, on Twitter I have a very small following(~470 followers) and rarely anyone interacts with me but I also have a large-ish account on a prominent but relatively obscure Turkish social media website Eksi Sozluk with even less followers but that website has strict account creation procedures(it can take years to have your account accepted and your posts becoming public) and as a result it is viewed as a "reference" since spam floods are harder to organise as you will lose your hard earned account and I'm able to stir public discussions in Twitter and Reddit by posting on this relatively obscure website because people will often check what are the opinions and arguments on the matter in Eksi Sozluk. It's known that ad agencies are astroturfing the place and offering people money to post but because it's a "prestige" place you don't see blatant spam. They will have to construct a compelling argument even if it's an ad or political campaign position, so it's still a valuable content. A well structured discussion on Eksi Sozluk is capable to stir quite an engagement on other social media platforms and people will fight their flamewars using the arguments taken straight from Eksi Sozluk.
- Lucasoato 3y ago
  > [...] that website has strict account creation procedures(it can take years to have your account accepted and your posts becoming public) and as a result it is viewed as a "reference" since spam floods are harder to organise as you will lose your hard earned account [...] It's curious that making a social network harder to access can (apparently) boost the quality of its posts.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Private trackers are a good examples of that. And Subreddits with karma rules. If your users have an attribute that is tied to credibility and status, and moderation can remove it, people will usually be civil.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
I flat reject any business (for personal business - landscaper, contractor, etc) who doesn't have a site that is NOT facebook. I'm just not dealing with that.
- toss1 3y ago
  Yup, I don't touch any Meta properties, avoid them like the plague that they are. If your page is on FaceBook/Insta, or you require login to FB Messenger for your sales/customer service chat, I just NOPE right outta there... IDK if I've managed to avoid having a shadow profile created about me, but it seems worthwhile to starve it. If anyone has any 'inside' info about FB's data harvesting and/or further clues on minimizing or foiling it, I'm all ears.
internetter 3y ago
Last month, I had ~100 daily views. This month (rolling), I've had 23k a day. In the past week, I've had 700k views. What caused this? Social media did... Specifically, Mastodon. I had 150 mastodon followers. I'm not famous, I'm still not. I have 1/5th the followers of this guy. Around the 15th, someone posted my article[0], which got me a good 30k views and a hundred followers, which set the scene for what happened next: When I heard about XZ, I posted about it[1] on Mastodon. I did no promotion other than that, aside from posting to HN (the HN post was killed, presumably dang wanted to have only one article about it on the home page). Now my article is linked to by NYT, Wired, Ars, NIST, The Verge, and a whole plethoria of other outlets. I'm convinced Mastodon was the catalyst. Maybe, I got lucky twice this month, and I'll never get lucky again. Maybe though, there's something else to social media. [0]: https://hachyderm.io/@cvennevik/112100333787925276 https://hachyderm.io/@cvennevik/112100333787925276 [1]: https://social.coop/@eb/112180540086255196 https://social.coop/@eb/112180540086255196
nonrandomstring 3y ago
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, publishers etc. We see practically no correlation between these worlds. Helen will say "We're trending on platform X" and I look and see nothing in the web stats. Maybe 2 out of 2000 hits cross over from Facebook or Twitter. Conversely, we can get on the front page of a big website, but have no activity on social media. I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links and that everyone on the web has given up on "sharing" to social media. They're literally two separate worlds now, right?
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > 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 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. For people who just want to scroll and see a lot of different things, leaving the site to go in depth on 1 or 2 links doesn’t really fit their preferred social media operating style. This holds even on sites like Reddit or HN, where you can some times jump into a comment section and immediately recognize that half the commenters haven’t read the article at all.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    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.
kull 3y ago
Agree. Yet, I find myself checking social media to see if the company is still alive/active. When seeing a lot of activity on social media, I assume they do well or at least they are still in business.
m3kw9 3y ago
Links on social media depend on heavily on the algorithm, same as what he said about google, the reach a fraction of googles so unless your post went viral and gets retweeted/reposted it will have the OPs observation. Or you have a lot of followers and they their primary way to know of new articles is from the X for ex. Daring fireball, I only click into the site if Gruber posts it. Ever since he stop posting, I’ve never went back to check. I wouldn’t give up on it but I would try some minimum effort to build up an audience
dpkirchner 3y ago
When I use social media apps, without ad blocking, links that expand into share cards look an awful lot like ads, which I never (intentionally) tap. I wonder if OP is seeing click-through rates similar to those seen by advertisers.
calrain 3y ago
I feel that posting on Social Media is flexing with people you think are important. But your customers and those people that are truly important probably aren't in your Social Medial circles. Social Media is becoming so overloaded with noise from so many sources, it will be interesting to see when there are basically no important contacts to be made there.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
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.
- skydhash 3y ago
  SM platforms like Twitter and Facebook are Time Squares. People ignore most of the posts, stare at something for 2 seconds if it catches their attention in some way (bait usually), and point to what really interests them (retweet,…). And sometimes you stumble on an active discussion (in the analogy, it would be like pointing a camera to those involved and showing them on the big screen with speakers blaring) Then you have forums which are like lecture halls, IRC like apps (Discord, Slack) which feels more like classroom (without the teacher) and finally, the direct conversations in Whatsapp, Messenger and Telegram.
- acureau 3y ago
  I also notice that some content like art and music only pull passive engagement. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have platforms like Twitch, where a creator's success is almost entirely dependent on their ability to build an actively engaged following. I think the key to it all is that the creator has to encourage and participate in interactions with their following.
- ravelfan 3y ago
  What can one really comment about art though? "That is beautiful" or "That is shit". I love art but could care less about the field of art criticism. I use to have a geocities personal site on the old internet and it is not like anyone ever looked at that either. The real difference is I don't remember anyone caring about the number of myspace followers a person had. It only mattered who was in your top 6 or however many it was in your top list. Obviously, that is because there was no money to be made with having connections to people you didn't know.
jasonlotito 3y ago
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.
rchaud 3y ago
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 like posting links on HN from your personal site only.
- rpgbr 3y ago
  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.
dimask 3y ago
> This created tragicomic situations, such as people posting anonymous reports of toxic companies in the comments of the blog and one that threatened to sue me if I didn’t take down the spreadsheet. In the old times, I briefly worked in some industry and was co-admin in a blog about working-related issues in that field. It was a rather small, obscure blog, that did not have any real traction outside a certain political niche, until a post where we shared one of our readers' experience working in a certain company. That post totally blew up and it received insane amount of views and comments by people talking about their experience working there and elsewhere. The comment thread below was going on years after the blog was practically abandoned. I still enter from time to time to approve comments. I miss the blog era, because a blog post like that is not ephemeral like social media or other similar modern platforms like reddit or this very site. This creates a more protracted, sustained and imo healthy engagement profile. It still needs to be discoverable, but it was no problem back then once of community of blogs was formed linking to each other. Social media, on the other hand, are a black hole, as it is much harder to find and even more engage with posts that are more than a few days at most old. And while everything is always hosted somewhere and nobody ensures that stuff like with geocities will never happen, platforms like wordpress blogs allow at least one to backup and scrap a site more easily, and the control of the hosting providers on the content is much less than that of the social media platforms.
skybrian 3y ago
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.
DonnyV 3y ago
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!!

129 points by rpgbr 3y ago

Apples and oranges.

moravak1984 3y ago

I'd argue that Mastodon and Telegram hardly count as social media (and 450 contacts on WhatsApp... come on) If someone with a site on X/WhatsApp/Instagram/FB repeats the experiment, then we might see something interesting.

rpgbr 3y ago
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-how-much-new-research-from-datos-sparktoro/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-...
- Hakkin 3y ago
  I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that pretty much any semi-major company had a support presence on Twitter. Often just tweeting anything with the name of the company in it would get you a response from a support rep in a few minutes. It was one of the best ways to get in direct contact with support for many companies. The API limitations probably severely hampered this avenue of support for most companies, I imagine.
- user_7832 3y ago
  I think things like this also depend on the site itself. A personal blog might fare different from a commercial website. I follow a few (niche) companies on Twitter who post new parts/products sometimes. I often click through to the link to see it. It is highly unlikely for me to visit their website out of the blue.
- esrauch 3y ago
  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?
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    I had Wikileaks/Assange link to an article I wrote on Twitter. The clickthrough rate was like 500 readers or something. Quite underwelming.
  - rpgbr 3y ago
    WHen I left, it was ~1k. Subscribers are another increasingly meaningless metric — people left, people die, and their account remains there forever.
- ghaff 3y ago
  LinkedIn still matters quite a bit for commercial/professional stuff. X still matters some. But anecdotally, X is far less relevant and used in my circles post-Musk. (And Mastodon hasn't replaced it for most people.) I think Musk was the impetus for a lot of people to dial down their social media use.
  - slimsag 3y ago
    Anecdotally, a majority of people I used to see on Twitter I now see only in Discord.
  - 0ckpuppet 3y ago
    honest question, does that say more about your circles or about X?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I don't know. Hence my qualification. I suspect the political angle of Twitter/X could be as active as ever. But there's been a huge dropoff in use across tech as far as I can see.
- flurdy 3y ago
  Pre and post Elon is a big difference for Twitter. Before I would post a tweet with links to my blog and would see an increase in both metrics and responses to it. Post Elon I don't think anyone even sees the tweet as I am not a paying twitter subscriber, and most people that would respond etc have left. And about 2 people see my Mastadon post.
weinzierl 3y ago
If you shout into a void on Mastodon or a loud crowded space on X where no one hears you makes hardly a difference for almost everyone.

blueboo 3y ago

Depends on your goals. People are beginning to shop primarily on TikTok and Instagram. Social media seems to be enshittify-evolving to be the new e-commerce. Meanwhile, summarising posts in video on Shorts/Reels/TikTok might be quite a traffic bump. I’m seeing big numbers from channels that typically offer thoughtful, long-form content

fuzzy_biscuit 3y ago
I have no basis to agree or disagree, but the social engines involved are incentivized to do so: they can cash out the data they are constantly farming. It's scary to me to get shopping recommendations from platforms that have no interest in making anything better at all. It's scarier to me that the generational gap has widened enough where that seems reasonable. I guess the recos are just that good?
micromacrofoot 3y ago
even google is being eaten by ecommerce, video games are often piles of micro transactions… everything is a store

philippz 3y ago

* "Stopped Sharing on Social Media and no one cares" * Was only posting on Mastodon ...yeah, surprise

setgree 3y ago

Not to be a pedant but the relevant variable has not been manipulated here. We would need sites of (more or less) equal-in-expectation popularity to be assigned to use social media or not. The metrics the author provides are capturing effects of past social media distribution.

burrish 3y ago

Here something funny about X/Twitter, if you dare post a link in your main tweet, this will significantly decrease the reach of this one. (you have to post it in the comments) Because X/Twitter want people to stay in their platform, link outside X isn't great for them.

AlexandrB 3y ago
This is one of those post-acquisition changes that made Twitter a lot less useful. I don't really get the logic, Twitter is optimized for a certain kind of content - short text - and anything longer needs to go on another platform. Instead of embracing that the current ownership wants to compete with TikTok and Youtube and Instagram and substack at the same time.
- Veuxdo 3y ago
  Twitter: "But why do you need anything longer, human...?"
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  And anything longer needs to be posted as a screenshot of the text. There fixed that for you.

sph 3y ago

Of course not. Social media is shouting at the void at best, but usual self-contained rage bait. People open Twitter/Mastodon to doomscroll and post their thoughts, and could not care less about linked content. I have seen the same exact pattern with trying to mention my latest blog posts on Mastodon or other social media: no one cares. I had much more engagement posting on Linkedin, though one would believe that with all the spam there no one would have time to check out your post. You'd be very wrong. Though the downside of this strategy is having to use Linkedin.

criddell 3y ago
> Social media is shouting at the void at best At best, social media is an additional way of keeping in touch with people you know and care about.
- Retric 3y ago
  For a very loose definition of keep in touch with. I’ve found it easier to stay connected after dropping social media, but I value direct communication far more than status updates. Time spent on social media is time not spent directly talking to someone, and it’s really tempting to send a message rather than call.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  That's what a social network was supposed to be. We changed the name because it's not that anymore. It's people you never knew and never will producing content in exchange for advertisement.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    If I had to build a visionOS version of Twitter, it would be Times Square. Then a potentiometer as a control to move the timeline.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  No it isn't, unless you define down "keeping in touch" to be so trivial it loses all meaning

richrichie 3y ago

Mastadon is too small to matter as social media. Tight knit, walled echo chamber though.

internetter 3y ago
Mastodon was the epicenter of the XZ discourse. The original discoverer uses it. Krebs uses it. I attribute my success to it. Maybe this was true a few months ago, but it's very quickly establishing itself for tech discussion

weinzierl 3y ago

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 blurred more and more and we will probably end up with different apps differing only in a single dimension from left to right.

flurdy 3y ago
With the addition of TikTok, Instagram, Shorts as the top row? And Email at the bottom?
outime 3y ago
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).
- dezsiszabi 3y ago
  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...
  - boringg 3y ago
    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
    - themoonisachees 3y ago

Haventrus 3y ago

Thank you sharing this post!!!!

Haventrus 3y ago
[dead]

tambourine_man 3y ago

> Like any authoritarian entity, Google… Let's all calm down a little bit. I'm not a fan of last-decade's Google, but it is just a company and the open web still exists. And always will. It's relevance may shrink, but maybe it was always supposed to be a niche thing all along. I have mourned the rise of social media and enshitification of Google, but perhaps the outcome is not as bleak. Technically inclined people self hosting their blogs and keeping their web-rings, while the rest of the world mindlessly scrolls Instagram. I'm happy to help anyone that wants to join Mastodon or set up a blog, but I'm tired of trying to convince them they should.

jcutrell 3y ago

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.

rpgbr 3y ago
Nice catch! (English isn't my native language.) Changed it. Thanks!

begueradj 3y ago

If you are too present on social media, there is no mystery left about you. You become too familiar to trigger the curiosity of a follower to click on another link you posted. The economy of attention doesn't lead far.

acureau 3y ago
I'd disagree with that. Most people I know that use social media for marketing are just following the eyes, making as many people as possible aware that they exist and have done something. If you don't try to put your work out there nobody will know you've done it. If the economy of attention didn't lead far there would be no advertisements.
- yndoendo 3y ago
  Marketing on Facebook or Twitter is a horizontal landscape. Those on the platform are your only traffic. Having a website outside of these types of platforms is a vertical market because one does not have become a platform tribal member to engage. A number of restaurants and brick and mortar shops only use platforms to promote events and products. This means I have no idea of the soup of the day or when special trivia night is. It is less expensive to just engage on a platform than maintain a non-tribal website. Those in the tribe do not see the exclusion they created with their horizontal market. Irony is that a number of social media posts reference other sites. So the non-tribal website is scooped up by media platforms, creating a tilted vertical market.

guhcampos 3y ago

I have the sense social media is really bad for written content in particular. It's likely the best broadcasting mechanism for YouTube channels, shops, some types of services. But the audience in social media in its majority is looking for quick dopamine pills, not long form articles, so conversion on those is really really low. I'm a programmer, not a marketer though, so take this with a grain of salt and maybe some chili pepper too.

altdataseller 3y ago

Nobody would care if you own just a personal site, but if you’re a company (and not well know ) I sometimes check to see if you’re on LinkedIn, or have posted recently on Twitter. Because if you haven’t, that might be a sign you might be going out of business Maybe that’s unfair. But I would think twice before relying on your product for anything important

deleted 3y ago
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elondaits 3y ago
100%. I recently had to research scuba diving centers in a city I’ll visit soon, and part of my criteria was to check how recent their Google Maps comments were, and how active their Instagram was. Some diving centers are the center of a community of divers, who will follow and comment on their pictures… while other are more commercial endeavors for tourists that just post on a schedule and no one cares about it. Social media activity is also a good way to deduce if they’re active, positive and growing their business or if they’ve checked out and entered “maintenance mode”.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

mrtksn 3y ago

I don't know if views are a good measure of anything anymore. I find that narrative control from position of authority is much more interesting. So, on Twitter I have a very small following(~470 followers) and rarely anyone interacts with me but I also have a large-ish account on a prominent but relatively obscure Turkish social media website Eksi Sozluk with even less followers but that website has strict account creation procedures(it can take years to have your account accepted and your posts becoming public) and as a result it is viewed as a "reference" since spam floods are harder to organise as you will lose your hard earned account and I'm able to stir public discussions in Twitter and Reddit by posting on this relatively obscure website because people will often check what are the opinions and arguments on the matter in Eksi Sozluk. It's known that ad agencies are astroturfing the place and offering people money to post but because it's a "prestige" place you don't see blatant spam. They will have to construct a compelling argument even if it's an ad or political campaign position, so it's still a valuable content. A well structured discussion on Eksi Sozluk is capable to stir quite an engagement on other social media platforms and people will fight their flamewars using the arguments taken straight from Eksi Sozluk.

Lucasoato 3y ago
> [...] that website has strict account creation procedures(it can take years to have your account accepted and your posts becoming public) and as a result it is viewed as a "reference" since spam floods are harder to organise as you will lose your hard earned account [...] It's curious that making a social network harder to access can (apparently) boost the quality of its posts.
- skydhash 3y ago
  Private trackers are a good examples of that. And Subreddits with karma rules. If your users have an attribute that is tied to credibility and status, and moderation can remove it, people will usually be civil.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

I flat reject any business (for personal business - landscaper, contractor, etc) who doesn't have a site that is NOT facebook. I'm just not dealing with that.

toss1 3y ago
Yup, I don't touch any Meta properties, avoid them like the plague that they are. If your page is on FaceBook/Insta, or you require login to FB Messenger for your sales/customer service chat, I just NOPE right outta there... IDK if I've managed to avoid having a shadow profile created about me, but it seems worthwhile to starve it. If anyone has any 'inside' info about FB's data harvesting and/or further clues on minimizing or foiling it, I'm all ears.

internetter 3y ago

Last month, I had ~100 daily views. This month (rolling), I've had 23k a day. In the past week, I've had 700k views. What caused this? Social media did... Specifically, Mastodon. I had 150 mastodon followers. I'm not famous, I'm still not. I have 1/5th the followers of this guy. Around the 15th, someone posted my article[0], which got me a good 30k views and a hundred followers, which set the scene for what happened next: When I heard about XZ, I posted about it[1] on Mastodon. I did no promotion other than that, aside from posting to HN (the HN post was killed, presumably dang wanted to have only one article about it on the home page). Now my article is linked to by NYT, Wired, Ars, NIST, The Verge, and a whole plethoria of other outlets. I'm convinced Mastodon was the catalyst. Maybe, I got lucky twice this month, and I'll never get lucky again. Maybe though, there's something else to social media. [0]: https://hachyderm.io/@cvennevik/112100333787925276 https://hachyderm.io/@cvennevik/112100333787925276 [1]: https://social.coop/@eb/112180540086255196 https://social.coop/@eb/112180540086255196

nonrandomstring 3y ago

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, publishers etc. We see practically no correlation between these worlds. Helen will say "We're trending on platform X" and I look and see nothing in the web stats. Maybe 2 out of 2000 hits cross over from Facebook or Twitter. Conversely, we can get on the front page of a big website, but have no activity on social media. I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links and that everyone on the web has given up on "sharing" to social media. They're literally two separate worlds now, right?

Aurornis 3y ago
> 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 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. For people who just want to scroll and see a lot of different things, leaving the site to go in depth on 1 or 2 links doesn’t really fit their preferred social media operating style. This holds even on sites like Reddit or HN, where you can some times jump into a comment section and immediately recognize that half the commenters haven’t read the article at all.
- skydhash 3y ago
  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.

kull 3y ago

Agree. Yet, I find myself checking social media to see if the company is still alive/active. When seeing a lot of activity on social media, I assume they do well or at least they are still in business.

m3kw9 3y ago

Links on social media depend on heavily on the algorithm, same as what he said about google, the reach a fraction of googles so unless your post went viral and gets retweeted/reposted it will have the OPs observation. Or you have a lot of followers and they their primary way to know of new articles is from the X for ex. Daring fireball, I only click into the site if Gruber posts it. Ever since he stop posting, I’ve never went back to check. I wouldn’t give up on it but I would try some minimum effort to build up an audience

dpkirchner 3y ago

When I use social media apps, without ad blocking, links that expand into share cards look an awful lot like ads, which I never (intentionally) tap. I wonder if OP is seeing click-through rates similar to those seen by advertisers.

calrain 3y ago

I feel that posting on Social Media is flexing with people you think are important. But your customers and those people that are truly important probably aren't in your Social Medial circles. Social Media is becoming so overloaded with noise from so many sources, it will be interesting to see when there are basically no important contacts to be made there.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

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.

skydhash 3y ago
SM platforms like Twitter and Facebook are Time Squares. People ignore most of the posts, stare at something for 2 seconds if it catches their attention in some way (bait usually), and point to what really interests them (retweet,…). And sometimes you stumble on an active discussion (in the analogy, it would be like pointing a camera to those involved and showing them on the big screen with speakers blaring) Then you have forums which are like lecture halls, IRC like apps (Discord, Slack) which feels more like classroom (without the teacher) and finally, the direct conversations in Whatsapp, Messenger and Telegram.
acureau 3y ago
I also notice that some content like art and music only pull passive engagement. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have platforms like Twitch, where a creator's success is almost entirely dependent on their ability to build an actively engaged following. I think the key to it all is that the creator has to encourage and participate in interactions with their following.
ravelfan 3y ago
What can one really comment about art though? "That is beautiful" or "That is shit". I love art but could care less about the field of art criticism. I use to have a geocities personal site on the old internet and it is not like anyone ever looked at that either. The real difference is I don't remember anyone caring about the number of myspace followers a person had. It only mattered who was in your top 6 or however many it was in your top list. Obviously, that is because there was no money to be made with having connections to people you didn't know.

jasonlotito 3y ago

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.

rchaud 3y ago

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 like posting links on HN from your personal site only.

rpgbr 3y ago
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.

dimask 3y ago

> This created tragicomic situations, such as people posting anonymous reports of toxic companies in the comments of the blog and one that threatened to sue me if I didn’t take down the spreadsheet. In the old times, I briefly worked in some industry and was co-admin in a blog about working-related issues in that field. It was a rather small, obscure blog, that did not have any real traction outside a certain political niche, until a post where we shared one of our readers' experience working in a certain company. That post totally blew up and it received insane amount of views and comments by people talking about their experience working there and elsewhere. The comment thread below was going on years after the blog was practically abandoned. I still enter from time to time to approve comments. I miss the blog era, because a blog post like that is not ephemeral like social media or other similar modern platforms like reddit or this very site. This creates a more protracted, sustained and imo healthy engagement profile. It still needs to be discoverable, but it was no problem back then once of community of blogs was formed linking to each other. Social media, on the other hand, are a black hole, as it is much harder to find and even more engage with posts that are more than a few days at most old. And while everything is always hosted somewhere and nobody ensures that stuff like with geocities will never happen, platforms like wordpress blogs allow at least one to backup and scrap a site more easily, and the control of the hosting providers on the content is much less than that of the social media platforms.

skybrian 3y ago

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.

DonnyV 3y ago

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!!