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#share#button#copy#buttons#don#url#link#users#more#sharing
Discussion (86 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
In other words, people not only click share buttons, but do it quite often?
With the continual passage of laws restricting social media for minors, URL copy and paste will become the standard methods for sharing.
Personally, I would never click the share button because sharing with a person or group of people is often through email, SMS, work chat, or here.
Businesses that use Facebook to communicate events are actively restricting their consumer base because not everyone wants to use it or will. A standard web-site is the only method to communicate openly with users.
If 0.2% of users share the site via a direct link, and 0.2% of your users share the site via a share button, for an overall share rate of 0.4%, that probably means the share button is worth keeping around.
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)
I would have guessed clicking on ads was rare
Most reasonable people will compare usage rate to some minimum effective threshold, under which you could basically say no one clicks the button. Even though that’s not technically true, it becomes a useful rule of thumb for how you should think about the button, and it’s easier to remember.
IMO if less than 5% of people are clicking the share button, then basically no one is clicking it.
Similarly, if more than 95% of people are clicking the button, then everyone clicks it!
It's a crazy take and honestly just lack of sense over numbers. 5% is really high for something that the users have to actively do, even it's just a single button.
MrBeast's videos have a like:view ratio less than 5%. Your take is saying that basically no one is clicking likes on MrBeast's videos.
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 and send it however I want to send it. People aren't stupid when it comes to sharing, they understand how to accomplish what they want, we don't need a dedicated share button.
What we don't have, and hopefully never will, is the number of people who click the share button verses the people that copy/paste the URL which I assume 90% of people who want to share do. It's universal, it "just works".
Clicking the share button means I'm at the mercy of the site operator, copying the URL puts me in control.
> a 2023 peer-reviewed survey of 124 geriatric computer users, mean age about 80.6, found that 59% were unfamiliar with the copy/paste function. That is among older adults who were already computer users, so it probably understates the issue for all elderly people.
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.
I'm sure there are browser extensions to tame but this thankfully there aren't many website that do this that I care to visit often.
> Then one time I noticed the URL was shortened and added a lot of tracking.
Ugh, yeah, this is really annoying as well. When a dedicated share button is my only option (like in a mobile app) I often open an incognito/private browsers window and paste it in so I can get redirected and then rip off all the tracking crap. Back when I used TikTok I had an iOS shortcut that I would "share" to which would rip off all the tracking for me. I always would feel gross when someone "anonymous" would share a TikTok or similar link and there would be a banner at the top of the page "Real Name shared this with you, follow them?".
I fear it’s all futile because even if we are privacy focused, if our friends and families are sharing links like this, Google knows how all of us are connected to each other in the real world.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...
I leave it as an option for the users that really want it though, but surface other things like just the copy icon to put something directly on the clipboard
the articles best stats are from 2012, I’m sorry to inform that was 14 years ago, people are even more acclimated to direct linking
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)
I don’t necessarily want the people I share the link with to know my potentially pseudonymous user.
If there's a article/site I'd be interested in sharing, it might be to a slack channel or a text message, in which case I just copy/paste the URL.
What it also misses is: even if someone doesn’t use share tools, they do act as an call-to-action that can inspire people to share - though they may copy the url and not use the button.
It’s a tough game.
But ... make it share something more useful and they might use it more.
I author a Caltrain app, and if you are viewing the time schedule, the share button pops up the iOS share sheet pre-filled with "I'm taking train XX leaving <location> at <time> and arriving at <location> at <time>. Track my train <link>."
Also when you work with real users, not developers who remove tracking parameters you quickly realize that share buttons are used and people complain about them if they don’t work, can confirm from my own experience.
I run a SaaS product that has closed sign ups. I get inbound email asking (sometimes begging) for access to the service. I follow up with their usecase (make sure they are a good fit, I get a lot of abuse). They respond with a seemingly good fit. I generate the account and give them access and they never log in. This happens way more often than I would like.
It's so bad, I started to wonder if there's some kind of underground market for selling accounts. In the end, people are finicky and you can't predict anything they will do.
Cynical exploitation of publishers who are desperate for any revenue stream or virality in a collapsing ad market.
Lot's of people use apps that don't expose a link, share buttons are great and even better when they use standards like your OS's share functionality.
That said, I'm curious as to why someone with enough technical sophistication to be posting on HN browses Amazon with a native mobile app instead of a web browser.
There are so many products on amazon sharing a link to one specific product and having someone else open it shortly after sounds like a high enough confidence.
Again just a hunch.
Web games (like my redactle.net) will typically have a share button that allows players to share their score. Calculator tools often include a way to share a URL with all the fields filled. Youtube does it with timestamp links.
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..
if people copy link - they also try manually remove the extra fluff.
Could vegan eye sight be that good? I have a theory about higher alertness from turning into prey from eating plants but that is not important right now :=)
Anyway just interesting data points for what "0.2% conversion" looked like in my experience.
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.
Of course no one wants to use a feature that creates a huge link and throws in a bunch of disingenuous text.
That's actually not low at all, and much higher than I would have expected for government website pages.
Not to mention the _actual_ social sharing of mentioning pages to people you know who need the information on those pages.