I keep wondering: Does anyone actually use these social buttons?

I tried a few times but the experience has always been so terrible and inconsistent that I've long reverted to simply sharing the good old copy/paste way.

> I keep wondering: Does anyone actually use these social buttons?

The suppliers of said social buttons do; every time you see one while you're logged into FB / G+ / Twitter, a hit of you visiting that site is registered at said parties, and they can all, thanks to the prevalence of these sharing buttons, track your internet usage.

This should be regulated somehow (yeah, I know, I sound like an 19th century guy). But probably lobbyist won't give up on that easily. I have disabled all that crap in my adblock, but there are millions of people who are not that savvy / aware etc.

My friend from Germany told me that in some (but not all) the pages, there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them. Try any article at [1]. It actually displays grayed placeholders only [2], and things are fetched from G/T/FB only when you click it - you can see in HTTP console.

[1] http://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de [2] http://i.imgur.com/hkQXEiX.png

This is actually being used to comply with data privacy laws here in Germany, in a way. Right now it's not entirely clear whether it's legal to use these social buttons, so to be on the safe side, many sites opted for this "click to enable" system.

That's actually a really nice solution to that. Done correctly I bet it helps the page load faster too.

Learn to block Javascript selectively, for instance using NoScript you can block JS from Facebook unless you actually are on a facebook.com domain. This gets rid of the annoying social button functionality.

You can do pretty much the same with Adblock's rules like:

||facebook.com^$third-party

and a couple of others (fbcdn, facebook.net etc.).

May the Ghostery extension be with you.

Disable 3rd party cookies, tracking woes averted.

As a simple example, the hit gives them your IP address. Often, this is all they need in order to identify you. (My IP address is technically dynamic, but remains fixed for weeks at a time. And... even if I use a different browser to sign into Facebook, they still have that IP address as well as the relevant timeframe for my possession of it.

I could spin up a VM and route the FB or non-FB traffic through a proxy, but I haven't reached that point, yet. (Probably, foolishly and to my detriment...)

P.S. In other words, state is already stored on their servers, not (or rather, in addition to) your browser.

Unless they use any other tracking system, like ETags[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags

Disable fetching any third party resources of all sorts, problem solved.

Obviously, rulesets should be tuples of (source pattern, resource type, destination pattern), not silly lists ("allow google.com", huh?) like most browser extensions do.

I am using Ghostery, which does a pretty good job of intelligently blocking (and also notifying me) of trackers.

However, there are some sites that stupidly execute JS that is vital to the running of the page after attempting to initialize Google Analytics or other services. The end result is that they get a "Cannot call method 'bleh' of undefined" error which prevents the rest of their JS executing, hence broken page. If I'm really interested in actually loading the page, then I have to resort to allowing the trackers to run. sigh.

Unfortunately, I can't see how this could be averted, stopping short of an extension which catches all uncaught exceptions, then tries to forcefully remove all JS which is meant to interact with 3rd parties. It could be done either via pattern matching, because Google Analytics code looks much the same on most peoples sites, or it could be through something more fun, like https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs (who would of thought there would actually be a proper use case for something like that??)

For some of the bigger ones the extension could try to keep some dummy scripts that match the api properly. e.g. make it look like GA started but not actually send them anything at all. Though that sounds like a cat and mouse game.

I do this using the RequestPolicy addon for Firefox.

that could break a lot of sites that use a cdn for speed :-(

>there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them

Neat. This looks like a very reasonable way to go if you decide to have social buttons.

Is there a ready-made solution for this?

Heise implemented and opensourced just this week sth very similar to what I've posted: http://www.h-online.com/features/Two-clicks-for-more-privacy...

> Is there a ready-made solution for this?

https://github.com/filamentgroup/SocialCount

I'd be interested in learning about good alternatives.

Another is https://github.com/mischat/shareNice. They look like they do pretty much the same thing: Serve the icons themselves, and just make them a link to the respective services.

For example:

- https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=[Url to share]

SocialCount looks like it also cares about how many times a link has been shared, and uses a server-side script to figure that out. That seems like a nice approach if you really want that info, because it doesn't let the social service track the end user.

shareNice seems to have a wider range of services that it supports.

The RequestPolicy plugin fixes that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

Exactly. I block them. I just hope "the web" continues to be "open" enough to allow me to do so.

I have a big screen and I didn't see any of the social ad's or even the pop up at the bottom. It was only going back and actually opening my eyes that I noticed it.

I think this is why such buttons are so ineffective. They have been used so badly for so long a lot of people just completely ignore them. Its a bit like ad's on the side of pages. A lot of people won't even register they are there.

Whether or not you actually click on them, you are "using" them. Last I checked (admittedly, a couple of years ago), if you've used that browser to log into facebook and haven't cleared your cookies (or configured / installed a privacy add-ons), facebook is able to associate that page view with your account through the like button on that page. They bypass the 3rd party cookie mechanisms that are suppose to be in place to prevent this.

If anybody knows if this is has changed, please chime in. I'd love to know.

edit: whoops, looks like somebody made the same comment before me, so i assume its still something they do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5369214

Emphatically: yes. Those who collect stats on them find that they contribute a substantial portion of shares.[1] People rant against them often, probably because they wish they weren't effective, and they might not personally click them. But others do.

[1] http://www.luigimontanez.com/2012/actually-social-media-butt...

I guess the social buttons are a little bit like ads on Google: we don't use them, we don't know anybody who uses them, but they are somehow used.

As a visitor, no I never use them and I seem to think no one will want to use them. However, as a webmaster, I prove myself wrong, a lot of people do use them and they do seriously become part of your site's daily traffic. So in other words, if the snake oil sells, you better carry them in your store!

The answer is... idk, really, but I do know why the social buttons are often on the left side and are in a "fixed" div:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/amd-360...

I use the tweet buttons but often remove extraneous info or put what I would normally write in my tweet but keep the link. If I like an article enough to tweet it, why not add some social proof by boosting their tweet button count one higher? I think that's fair.

This is exactly what I was thinking after dismissing the gigantic "Join FREE as a bronze member..." popup at the bottom of the screen.

-- snip --:

Lame pop-ups

I’ve never used this site before, so immediately asking me to create a free account is absolutely pointless, and more so when the pop-up does not automatically disappear when I ignore it.

A screenshot of the hypocrisy:

http://i.imgur.com/jDLT5V4.png

I must be completely jaded by this point. I had to go back and look at the site again. My mind had completely blocked out the left sidebar and the footer. This crap is so common that I don't even notice it anymore.

yes !

I looked at the join thing at the bottom and actually felt it slip out of my mind into the bin of stuff to ignore on the web.

I'm being idealistic when saying this, but I really hope over the next few years that bloggers stop adding social links to sites. I don't doubt major sites like CNN will continue to flood pages with links, but it would be nice for the content generators to stop using them.

Social links are anti-social. If you really think about it, these are about taking away the interraction between people as people and instead, they funnel the content toward aggregation and mere consumption. That critical link between content creator and visitor is buffered with other rubbish so meaningful feedback is watered down.

Personally I'd rather look at their "bad" example sites than this crap. "Share", "SIGNUP NOW", "GET A FREE EBOOK" Bullshit they have plastered everywhere. How do they get the nerve to talk about UX?

If you live in a glass house...

I was about to come and mention the same thing. On a 1440x900 monitor I was losing about the bottom 6th of my browser just to an obnoxious signup bar.

Maybe they should take a note from the HTML5 and Javascript revolution and have it auto-hide after a period of time.

"That's ok, we'll just make it up for it with a 12px font-size"

Their "join free" footer at the bottom is a really annoying trend IMHO. It takes up valuable content space and gets in the way. The more intrusive and annoying those popups and bars are, the less likely I am to ever actually join. I guess it must work on other people though, unfortunately...

that's what the firefox nuke anything extension was created for :)

I can think of plenty of websites that are crying out for a "twat" button.

Such as the parent link of this post…

To add to that list, I viewed the page on my (rather slow) phone, and my User Agent wasn't sufficient to get me to a mobile version of the page (assuming one exists.)

That dismissable footer covered half my screen, and the site ran so slowly that I was entirely unable to get it to dismiss.

And here I thought that relying on a browser's User Agent to make a page usable was bad form.