5 ms·

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 av

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 2y 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 2y 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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > 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?
  - gumby 2y ago
    > Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more? Just twitter
- r00fus 2y ago
  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)
  - medstrom 2y ago
    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 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.
- naravara 2y ago
  > 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 principle or even that I want to stay in my social media wall. It’s that any time I click on a link to a website now I am all but guaranteed to A.) Endure multiple seconds-long waits to load the page despite a gigabit connection B.) See a modal asking me to sign up for a newsletter, often using annoying gimmicks to make me look to find the dismiss button C.) Have the content I’m trying to read skip and jump all over the screen as random bits of external content load in D.) Cookie banner The web has turned into a user-hostile clusterfuck and ad-blockers only staunch a fraction of the problem. Bad design practices have led to a tragedy of the commons where everyone has contributed minor annoyances everywhere. It has sapped away all of people’s willingness to explore by introducing immeasurable amounts of cognitive friction to “surfing” the internet. And that’s all BEFORE we get to the floods of garbage content, SEO spam, and clickbait headlines that have made the upside potential of visiting a site or clicking a link lower than ever before.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    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/ https://cybershow.uk/ [1] https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/
- acheron 2y ago
  Clicks are currency. If you follow a link you are implicitly endorsing whatever is at the link, which I'm not going to do unless I'm already really sure of what it says. (Maybe you say "but I hated the article!" They don't care, they already got your hit and eyeballs that they will sell to advertisers.)
- stevenicr 2y ago
  "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.
snowwrestler 2y ago
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.
nickfromseattle 2y ago
> 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. Social platforms that send referral traffic often strip the referrer information, so your visitors will show up as 'direct'. [0] [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-dark-social-falsely-attributes-significant-percentages-of-web-traffic-as-direct/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-dark-social-falsely-...
- crtasm 2y ago
  Why would they do that? My assumption would be they'd want to give you this constant reminder that you have an audience on their platform, so should obviously run a profile there and why not pay for some ads while you're at it etc.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Thanks, good article. I like the experiment of multiplexing unique content to each service to correlate the "direct" returns. Way too much work for my level of care... but a cool technique nonetheless.
dimmke 2y ago
This isn't really my experience. My personal blog gets a lot of traffic from Mastodon and my Umami stats show traffic from social networks and search engines for my startup https://pickwick.app https://pickwick.app I do have trouble finding where on those platforms it's being shared/talked about though. https://imgur.com/a/kwmooNM https://imgur.com/a/kwmooNM
- dawnerd 2y ago
  I have a feeling it’s because mastodon isn’t built to keep your eyes on the platform - people are more willing to click out to read linked pages.
brightball 2y ago
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.
ALittleLight 2y ago
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.

Aurornis 2y 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 2y 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> 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?
- gumby 2y ago
  > Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more? Just twitter
r00fus 2y ago
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)
- medstrom 2y ago
  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 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.
naravara 2y ago
> 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 principle or even that I want to stay in my social media wall. It’s that any time I click on a link to a website now I am all but guaranteed to A.) Endure multiple seconds-long waits to load the page despite a gigabit connection B.) See a modal asking me to sign up for a newsletter, often using annoying gimmicks to make me look to find the dismiss button C.) Have the content I’m trying to read skip and jump all over the screen as random bits of external content load in D.) Cookie banner The web has turned into a user-hostile clusterfuck and ad-blockers only staunch a fraction of the problem. Bad design practices have led to a tragedy of the commons where everyone has contributed minor annoyances everywhere. It has sapped away all of people’s willingness to explore by introducing immeasurable amounts of cognitive friction to “surfing” the internet. And that’s all BEFORE we get to the floods of garbage content, SEO spam, and clickbait headlines that have made the upside potential of visiting a site or clicking a link lower than ever before.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  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/ https://cybershow.uk/ [1] https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/
acheron 2y ago
Clicks are currency. If you follow a link you are implicitly endorsing whatever is at the link, which I'm not going to do unless I'm already really sure of what it says. (Maybe you say "but I hated the article!" They don't care, they already got your hit and eyeballs that they will sell to advertisers.)
stevenicr 2y ago
"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.

snowwrestler 2y ago

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.

nickfromseattle 2y ago

> 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. Social platforms that send referral traffic often strip the referrer information, so your visitors will show up as 'direct'. [0] [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-dark-social-falsely-attributes-significant-percentages-of-web-traffic-as-direct/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-dark-social-falsely-...

crtasm 2y ago
Why would they do that? My assumption would be they'd want to give you this constant reminder that you have an audience on their platform, so should obviously run a profile there and why not pay for some ads while you're at it etc.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Thanks, good article. I like the experiment of multiplexing unique content to each service to correlate the "direct" returns. Way too much work for my level of care... but a cool technique nonetheless.

dimmke 2y ago

This isn't really my experience. My personal blog gets a lot of traffic from Mastodon and my Umami stats show traffic from social networks and search engines for my startup https://pickwick.app https://pickwick.app I do have trouble finding where on those platforms it's being shared/talked about though. https://imgur.com/a/kwmooNM https://imgur.com/a/kwmooNM

dawnerd 2y ago
I have a feeling it’s because mastodon isn’t built to keep your eyes on the platform - people are more willing to click out to read linked pages.

brightball 2y ago

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.

ALittleLight 2y ago

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.