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 thought about using navigator.share myself, but decided to go with the basic "Copy URL" button instead, as navigator.share is pretty useless on desktops and not supported across browsers on phones either (Android's Webview being the big one for my use case).

Why not both? A small button with "Copy link" text to, well, copy the current URL and another that calls "native" share, if available. I don't find it to be too many options, but I would guess that perhaps "Copy link" would have more clicks than `navigator.share`.

You could switch between them depending on the browser. Desktop users are more likely to want an URL anyway, IMHO. FWIW: iOS has a "copy" option in the share popup.

Oh is this what that is, I saw a few sites use it recently but for whatever reason on my desktop pc (windows 10) the only options I have are copilot, another copilot (for some reason), one-note and discord, which claims to also be a copy to clipboard option but it doesn't work. So in the end for sites that don't show the raw string I have no way to copy something.

navigator.share is limited and the share intent breaks UX, adding more clicks to a funnel than I want

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

I wish Apple would mandate this in their apps. Many apps open their own share-sheet and you need to tap another button to open the native one.

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.

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

At a previous job an "infinite scroll" experience was tested against many paginated pages and 0.2% is roughly the conversion rate of someone clicking through to the 4th or 5th page of results IIRC. They decided to not go true "infinite scoll" but rather add a "See More" button instead of pagination.

Anyway just interesting data points for what "0.2% conversion" looked like in my experience.

Sounds about like the number of times I accidentally clicked the link

I also use it like that, last time it filled whatsapp with an entire story about the greatness of the company and the wonderfulness of the product. I tried to remove everything not part of the giant link made from tracking info which is done though an UI so annoying it seems like you are not suppose to. Overall it made a memorable experience worth not repeating.

I'm writing this so that others don't have to repeat my mistake.

Indeed, that seemed surprisingly high to me and kind of countered the argument.

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

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.

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.

I have a hunch that amazon links do track somehow based on timing. Does anybody do that?

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.

The article is discussing "share on [Facebook,Twitter,etc...]" type buttons on websites, not share via [OS functionality or other native app] buttons inside native apps.

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.

You prefer to browse amazon using a mobile web browser over the native Amazon app? Why?

I'll give the straight answer to what I think is a rhetorical question.

Firefox for Android syncs with Firefox desktop so there's a shared history and I can easily send tabs from one to the other. It's also easy to copy proper URLs instead of shady shortlinks that often contain affiliate codes and trip spam filters. Finally, I don't want to give Amazon a foothold on my devices; the browser has a stronger sandbox than native apps do.

it was preinstalled on my phone

Because using Amazon, one of the most popular e-commerce sites and an example of an app that doesn't expose a URL of content makes a great example of a wide class of applications and conveys the message I was trying to express.

Why do you, as someone with enough technical sophistication to be posting on HN, not understand the words? This is sarcasm, you don't need to answer.

That is one of the reasons any publisher wants you to install yet another app in your phone. Be it fb, ig, goog, tk... Edit: Reddit :/

> 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?

Yeah I think the author needs a dose of reality about how many users do anything on a site. Something that 1 in 476 visitors do isn't that bad. Especially when there's no real ongoing cost to doing so.

I didn't see any statement about normalizing the share click as bot or human.

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.

Especially on government websites like gov.uk serve. It's not a website with cute beanie hats you'd want to share on your socials.

Share buttons got a 5-7% CTR on the last social media project I built and were responsible for a huge number of inbound referrals. Lots of long tail SEO too.

If the trillion dollar tech companies have them, there's a reason.

Yeah I find this article hilarious. Especially since maybe less than 1 in 10 visitors will actually want to share the article? So 1 in 476 is actually pretty decent usage.

For which the other 475 get saddled with a bunch of extraneous downloads and invasive tracking.

The cohort that is concerned about this almost certainly runs some sort of a blocker.

That's beside the point. I block plenty of things personally but am no less concerned about mass tracking.

No, that's beside the point. The vast majority of users do not care about this at all, while those that do care never see it due to their blockers. From the point of someone carelessly offering a convenience feature with tracking capabilities, this is a no-brainer.

"The people who care enough about the quality of the water do tend to test it, and will refrain from drinking it if it's polluted. But the vast majority of people do not care enough to go through the hassle. So polluting that drinking water for our own interest is a no-brainer."

Yes, that’s pretty much literally what’s happening with a lot of industrial plants or pig farms, for example.

Note that I didn’t endorse this stance, but it’s very much the calculation made in many cases.

What about the cohort that would care about it if they were aware of it? Or the cohort that cares about it but doesn't know such things can be blocked?

I think it's best to leave these educational matters to tech journalists or Internet commentariat. UX is the priority.

It seems like the number isn't very useful unless we have a baseline for how often the site is shared at all.

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.

If you assume the that half wouldn't also share it through it other means if needed. It'd need an A/B test.

For example, mobile Chrome has built-in share buttons, no copy-paste of URLs needed, no in-page button needed.

At that rate I think you can assume most clicks were accidental.

You don't know my mother

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'm pretty confident that my accidental click rate is much higher than one in 476, especially on touch screens, although you'd need to divide that by the total number of links on the page, to get the probability of accidentally clicking on any specific link.

> Visitors were twelve times more likely to click an advertisement.

I would have guessed clicking on ads was rare

I work in digital marketing and I am continually shocked by the amount of people that click my disgusting ads. (nearly all advertisements are morally disgusting)

I will just naively assume that people do it accidentally or are tricked into clicking on that filth. Ignorance is bliss

Im always surprised when i see the significant opens in the promotions tab of the gmail inbox. Looks like a lot of folks want those ads.

I think they want discount codes from "sign up to our mailing list!" emails. If it's in the promotions tab, they probably never have to look at it otherwise or get bugged with notifications, but they could still have it there to check when they happen to be making a purchase anyway.

Depending on the email program, you have to open them to unsubscribe, too. But maybe your stats tool would discount opens immediately followed by unsubscribes?

It depends on whether or not the page finishes loading, and rearranges everything, right as you're trying to click on a link.

And I wonder how many were bots

What definition of “often” includes a 0.21% rate?

The term "often" wouldn't relate to the overall rate, but to the frequency. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, it happened about once every 7 minutes.

Try to affect human behavior at scale in any way and you pray for an effect size like that

If you want to be a pedant, sure, you could say people do click it! But then you always have to speak in disclaimers and technicality, or you will give the wrong impression.

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!

> IMO if less than 5% of people are clicking the share button, then basically no one is clicking 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.

I mean...

https://youtu.be/ISwRd_ee8Z4

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

And thats for gov.uk sites - they're websites where you mostly go to do something rather than browse for interesting content. I'd guess social media, local news and sites with cat videos would get more shares.

No, a 1 in 500 rate is not often at all.

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.

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.

This. It may copy a url or it may automatically send me to my Facebook profile and prepopulate a post. Very rarely do share buttons copy a simple meaningful url to my clipboard.

So true. I too dual as an automatic link cleaner.

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)

They put so much stuff into the URL, usually my user ID, my phone, browser info etc…

I don’t necessarily want the people I share the link with to know my potentially pseudonymous user.

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.

Well, that combined with the expectation that the recipient would also try that daily challenge, then presumably respond with comment/message/reshare comparing how they did.

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>."

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.

Exactly but companies have started hijacking the copy icon button as well. You’d think that would just copy what’s in the text box, but they add tracking and other stuff.

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.

Nothing bugs me more than copy/pasting some text from an article and getting:

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

Apple Books does that nonsense as well and it drives me up a wall.

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?".

It’s even weirder now. When you share a video through the button (which is the only way in the app) and another person opens the link while logged in you will now be linked in YouTube and you can share “directly” to the other’s YouTube. …

Google Maps share button is filled with tracking too, now I just copy the address and send it.

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.

You can copy a shared link and use the browser url bar to open it in a private window, or delete the extra crap at the end of the url (anything after the ? in a lot of cases).

Granted, that doesn't help for the service you're using to communicate with people (phone provider, real time chat service, email provider, whatever) and/or store your contacts. Especially if you're talking to someone who, say, hasn't turned all the creepy Gemini stuff off in their Google account and it's scanning all their emails and learning the names and emails of everyone they talk to.

Or any app that has location permission and can detect that you're in the same place as someone else.

I'd think they can probably figure it out by time too, after enough shared videos. Like, see that when x account opens a video, then y account also opens that same video within such-and-such an amount of time, or vice versa.

There are tools which will strip tracking tags on copy. Firefox includes this, currently "Copy clean link" on the left-click context menu.

What are needed are tools which will discard any tracking automatically on receipt, whether that's email, messaging clients, operating systems (e.g., Android alternatives, iOS ... I have suspicions Android itself won't willingly implement this unless forced by lawsuit or regulation), and/or browsers. It would also be nice to see sharing / social sites and platforms drop this crap as well. The commercially-oriented, advertising-supported ones likely won't (willingly, as per Android above), but I could see Mastodon or other federated noncommercial systems adopting this approach and cleaning submitted links by default.

I agree, I do the same thing, but e.g. my parents still don't understand copy&paste. For all of us who do, there's the other ~half (total guess) of people who don't, and will benefit from the share UI. It's sad but real.

> 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.

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.

Imagine what buying high value visitors costs. 10 bucks is nothing to gain one person who is actually interested. At least 300 free money right there

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.

The link sharing platform is full of people interested in sharing links, that makes sense, similar to how a mall would be full of people interested in shopping

The article is about how people decide to share links, nie whether they share links at all.

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.

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).

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.

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)

16x16 flat icons in an invisible shade of gray?

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 :=)

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.

Yes they do.

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!

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.

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..

it now is the tiny toggle at the right top.

On YouTube ? I don't have that

On android mobile it lives there on desktop it is a check box at the left bottom.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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