3 ms·

... this is one of the main points I tried to get across when I spoke at the HN London event! And exclusively because of your talk we changed our blog to http:

by Peroni 14y ago

... this is one of the main points I tried to get across when I spoke at the HN London event! And exclusively because of your talk we changed our blog to http://www.hackerjobs.co.uk/blog http://www.hackerjobs.co.uk/blog As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on having prominent 'Share This' features. Personally, they piss me off. I think they are ugly and I find them a bit 'needy'. If I think your content is worth sharing with my friends, I'll simply copy and paste the URL into Twitter so that I can append it with my own thoughts. I'm not interested in your company deciding what my tweet is going to say on my behalf.

TomGullen 14y ago
The risk with having share boxes is that lots of zero's can look desperate/needy like you say. Getting them to look non-ugly is also sometimes challenging. I agree with you that if someone it motivated to share they probably will, it's a difficult thing to test though.
acangiano 14y ago
I see where you are coming from, and it's certainly a choice up to the individual blogger. However, I wouldn't underestimate the laziness of the average visitor. Making it easier for them to share, definitely means more traffic. For example, this article of mine has 1.2K Facebook Likes and 179 retweets: http://stacktrace.it/2012/01/07/10-consigli-per-interagire-con-il-proprio-geek-di-famiglia/ http://stacktrace.it/2012/01/07/10-consigli-per-interagire-c.... Of these, 400+ were made from the AddThis widget. It's hard to say how many would have bothered otherwise, but it'd probably be a smaller number. Also keep in mind that they can act as social proof. Sure, a series of 0s look needy and desperate. But when you are good at promoting your content on your own, these counters may actually give people more confidence to share the content themselves.

3 ms·

... this is one of the main points I tried to get across when I spoke at the HN London event! And exclusively because of your talk we changed our blog to http:

by Peroni 14y ago

TomGullen 14y ago
The risk with having share boxes is that lots of zero's can look desperate/needy like you say. Getting them to look non-ugly is also sometimes challenging. I agree with you that if someone it motivated to share they probably will, it's a difficult thing to test though.
acangiano 14y ago
I see where you are coming from, and it's certainly a choice up to the individual blogger. However, I wouldn't underestimate the laziness of the average visitor. Making it easier for them to share, definitely means more traffic. For example, this article of mine has 1.2K Facebook Likes and 179 retweets: http://stacktrace.it/2012/01/07/10-consigli-per-interagire-con-il-proprio-geek-di-famiglia/ http://stacktrace.it/2012/01/07/10-consigli-per-interagire-c.... Of these, 400+ were made from the AddThis widget. It's hard to say how many would have bothered otherwise, but it'd probably be a smaller number. Also keep in mind that they can act as social proof. Sure, a series of 0s look needy and desperate. But when you are good at promoting your content on your own, these counters may actually give people more confidence to share the content themselves.