I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs

> The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors.

In other words, people not only click share buttons, but do it quite often?

0.21% sounds low but my initial thought is "I don't know if they are making the point they think they are". Conversion rates are always pretty low.

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.

    "Text that you copied"
    
    - From XYZ Times (httx://abc123.tld/path/to/article)

I've added a button that just triggers `navigator.share()`[1]. I know most users do the copy-paste dance, but I find this is a good middle ground. Adding functionality for my users, but not adding special social media share buttons.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...

I don't click share buttons because I don't know what it's going to do. I don't want something copied that says "Check out this Thing on this Site! <url>" because then I have to delete half of it at which point it's slower than copying the URL. If every share button had the same behaviour then maybe I would.

0.2 %is quite significant, isn't it? My small website (www.makonea.com) gets about 90,000 visitors a month on average. (That's about 300 per day?) So that means a post gets shared about once every two days. Maybe I should seriously consider making my posts more shareable. And if I promote it on HN, I'd hope there's a 0.2 %chance that people would check out my site.

Reddit is full of YouTube links with the `si=` param which indicates they clicked the "Share" button. All indicators are this article's premise is not true.

Most people don't have an audience they would share it to if we're being honest.

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.

Amen! Plus those share buttons leak data with third party cookies and such, they're mostly a scam to skim user data from your web site.

Of course, but the real purpose for those buttons is to allow Google, Meta et al to build a marketing dossier of the websites you visit. Made a little less effective with cookie partitioning, but that's where browser fingerprinting kicks in.

Cynical exploitation of publishers who are desperate for any revenue stream or virality in a collapsing ad market.

This is something Wordle got completely correct, it just allows you to copy an emoji version of your game into any social media you like. Giving people agency to edit rather than mild fear of how will sharing actually work is much more likely to work!

Always assumed the SoMe sharing buttons was primarily motivated by the social sites to get their pixel on as many sites as possible to track behavior across sites

Nobody clicks share buttons to "just share links"

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>."

The point of share buttons in most cases is the tracking pixel that comes with it, not the share feature itself.

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 use share buttons all the time on social platforms, and apps like Amazon that don't have any other way of deep linking.

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.

Getting a user to do _anything_ on your site is difficult.

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.

From our experience at listennotes.com over past ~10 years - people do click share buttons. For us, it's still worth the screen real estate to place share buttons.

User behavior shifts over time. When I was at The New Yorker you’d see that a tiny but meaningful % of users used share tools. Even with that decline the % in this story is ‘good’ especially if you assume 40% of their traffic are probably bots.

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.

The user has to have an extra reason to use it. Share buttons or stateful URLs are great when user input is embedded. You have to add that extra user generated sauce or it's not worth it.

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.

Who tf uses a government website to judge sharing metrics... "look at this awesome new regulation, buddy!"

I click on the share button to get the link, that I copy and share myself.

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..

In the same vein, nobody subscribes to a channel no matter how many times they remind them in the middle of the stream. I never understood why content creators keep using that cheap trick looking like beggars.

The tapestry of share buttons were certainly novel and interesting like 20 years ago. They may be lame and 99+% ignored now but it's been a slide to this state of affairs.

I didn't even bother adding them to miserablyunemployed.com. I asked a bunch of our users and zero said they wanted them. I built other stuff instead.

Big shoutout to porn website share buttons, for all the crazy bastards out there and the developers who thought they should get the love they deserve.

Are the 14,078 share events from unique users? If not, the usage rate would be even lower (<0.21% of users share but sometimes share multiple times).

I remember back when Wordle was popular, people said the "Share result" feature was so effective, it was the reason for the game's viral success. I can't think of any other example though.

The only time I ever use the share function, is in apps - and I want to share something with a chat. Outside apps, never.

0.2% can be an OK conversion rate for some things.

It only matters if it's ruining the actual experience of the reader. Kind of an odd article if im being honest.

running my own experiment and the chatgpt button by now gets more clicks than the share buttons ie https://www.veganblatt.com/a/hafermilch-edeka (german)

as someone who runs a small competitor to ga4 - yeah a lot of traffic shows up as direct cz sometimes utm params get stripped out by the OS / browser.

if people copy link - they also try manually remove the extra fluff.

fun fact, I originally came up with this idea for the “save to delicious” button. i think there was even a patent filed.

Usage-wise, nobody used them at all.

Sure the idea isn't that every page should be shared equally?

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.

Yes they do.

See the rest of this comment to learn what dlcarrier thought of the article! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48561332#:~:text=Of%20c...

Of course no one wants to use a feature that creates a huge link and throws in a bunch of disingenuous text.

> That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors.

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.

It's sort of cargo-cult behavior to add them to non big corporate websites. Just like adding superfluous chat bots now.