I always copy/paste the URL when I want to share a website. That's what the URL is meant for. Heck, it's easier to copy the URL (using the keyboard) than it is to use the mouse to click on some button.

Sharing buttons are a nuisance more than anything. at best, I'd say they're a tool to enable spying on users and should be categorically blocked (as standard uBlock₀ filter rules let you do with a single click).

> Sharing buttons are a nuisance more than anything.

They're actually most often used as a quick way for people to support a site. I've seen it at every company I've worked for - they're easily the most common way that our site is distributed socially.

It's easier to copy the URL, but it's still faster to share by clicking than it is to do by copying the URL, navigating to the site you want to share to, pasting in the URL, adding some descriptive text, and clicking the share button.

Besides, sharing buttons which are just links (as in this post) don't aren't really that intrusive.

I can't believe Amazon doesn't have a "copy link" button. I guess they don't want too many "amzn.to" links floating around, but I hate to need to use bitly or an extension just to get the compressed link.

I think the ideal solution should be very similar to Android's sharing setup: One unified share button that can be sent to different apps or copied to clipboard. http://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/nexu...

I don't understand what you mean by this. Do you mean a button that grabs the current URL you're at? Do other websites have this?

I'm not challenging you, I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about.

A button to generate a shortened link. For example, when you click share on YouTube, you get a youtu.be link.

Why do you still need shortened links? For text messages, aesthetics, or ease of analog communication? Twitter, previously the main use case, no longer counts link length in tweets.

While I don't think the URL shortening matters too much, there's still another important attribute of using these shortlinks that manifests itself on youtube: They also omit irrelevant metadata like URL parameters that were specific to your session or the way you arrived at the site.

For example, youtube will often include extra garbage parameters for stuff like playlists - which the youtu.be shorturls omit, making them perfect for sharing videos.

These parameters are not apparent to those with whom you share the shortlink, but I'd wager that the site stores a mapping from the shortlink to the session in which it was generated. Which may be OK for you; I don't know.

the youtu.be link contains nothing but the video's identifier, so I don't see how they could store a mapping

Is the identifier unique? Does it have to be? Without switching to a different browser on a different IP addr and finding the same video again through a different search, would you even know?

Yes, the format is youtu.be/<video id> where <video id> matches the one in the long URL (youtube.com/watch?v=<video id>&extra patameters...) and is unique to the video.

Basically aesthetics. Especially with amazon, if I'm on mobile and copy a link (https://www.amazon.com/Haribo-Gummi-Candy-Gold-Bears-5-Pound...), it's got a bunch of excess weight. I can just cut it down to https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000EVOSE4/ without any loss of data. Alternatively, you can use bit.ly or an extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/native-url-shorten...) to shorten it to http://amzn.to/2aTrW7v. However, this is a pain on mobile. The share buttons should just work. I think they might do it this way for increased analytics or referral links, however they should be able to do that with bit.ly too.

This feature already exists and you don't need a button for it. It's part of HTML metadata, specifically the <link rel="shortlink"> tag.

You could either provide some sort of button to your browser to place this into the clipboard, or use an extension like pentadactyl to add a keyboard shortcut for it. (It's simply “y” by default - so copying URLs works like yanking in vim)

From the context, it sounds like getting a product URL from within the native Android app.

As mentioned, they do have a shortened link option. Also, where do you need shortened links, now that Twitter has excluded them from character counts (and used their own link shortener before then)? Facebook truncates URLs, etc.

They do. Click "Share" when you're on a product page. The shortened link is right there.

In my experience, it's less than 0.5% on average, and in some cases, far less. However, I've found you can get better than average share rates by bluntly asking users to do so - with a lightbox after they've scrolled to the bottom of the page (indicating they've actually read the entire article), for instance. You can do the same if a user watches a video to the end, etc. You're not allowed to directly incentivize Facebook sharing, however you're free to strongly encourage it.

As with many things in life, it turns out that you won't get what you want unless you ask for it.

Lightboxes for this are terrible. Please don't do it.

I'm sure lightboxes drive up shares per view, but I wonder if there's data on how they impact views in the long-term.

This is cynical, and arguably (probably) a net negative, but in nearly all cases, intrusive stuff like lightboxes, modals, and exit intent stuff works. It increases time on site, conversions, whatever metric you want to measure.

This is the part I don't understand

> It increases time on site,

My interpretation is that they increases time-on-site by pushing away people that aren't committed enough to wade through bloatware... and I don't understand how that works in the long-run.

Is it more profitable to push away customers so you get high-quality data on the core customers, and increasingly targeted advertising? How does that work out in the long-run when you need to replace lost customers?

More shares per view translate to more views, period. While sites certainly need to balance user experience with their need to grow, aggressively asking for shares works, and sites that do it will always do better traffic-wise than those that don't. I realize that ultra-white hat developers don't like this fact, and many would like to see it cause some sort of detrimental effect on the sites that do it. But unless the implementation is egregiously bad, most users simply don't care.

I've learned to intentionally stop all videos before they finish so that you don't get another unrelated video auto-started, you don't get some weird ad or other overlay that makes scrubbing back in the video impossible, and so you don't have to see a bunch of "subscribe to my other thing and here's a video preview of it that makes no sense without sound!"

I'd personally never use them since they only annoy me on other websites, but clients (or even designers sometimes… ugh) often want them because "We're Web 2.0". That's kinda why sharingbuttons.io exists!

I think about this often, and honestly, they don't seem to be worth it; I think if we got rid of all the share/like/tweet buttons the web would be pretty much the same (except with maybe less clutter).

The UK Gov has done great work about this: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sha...

People absolutely use them. Moving them around on the page by itself has a significant impact on sharing, as does adding more buttons.

I'm always afraid that the link will be borked somehow (for example: a link that opens the app or requests an app install -- it happens on the facebooks, man).