Ask HN: Am I the only one outraged by Twitter shutting down share counts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I the only one outraged by Twitter shutting down share counts?

28 pointstkfx29 comments

Even Mashable is broken: http://i.imgur.com/utjkzuh.png

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Ask yourself what emotions you are feeling when you think about Twitter shutting down share counts.

Really feel these feelings, don't let them go away, don't try to hide the outrage.

Now clear your mind of the negative feeling. Take several deep breaths and clear your mind.

Now think of something important in your life.

Now think of something important in the lives of another person.

Mediate on what a sense of perspective means.

I think you're being insincere here. OP obviously (I assume) is not that devastated by this change like a death in the family. But he's unhappy about it, similar to as if your client changed their spec overnight, or if their database got wiped out of data, and they had no backups. He's trying to start a conversation about this.

Your comment doesn't add anything to this because HN revolves around developer/tech issues. By nature, almost ALL conversations/complaints here are 1st world problems

Many HN posts are about sharing cool things. Expressing outrage a commercial product changed a feature? Seems a waste of hot air and lowers the quality of this site.

The word outrage fully implies otherwise. It's a hyperbole? Then this is how others will respond. QED.

Please keep this condescending tone off of HN.

let me take several deep breaths before I reply

Unless you know the original poster personally, in which case this message would have been considerably better delivered offline rather than trying to publicly humiliate him/her with a lecture about perspective, you have no idea if Twitter share counts are genuinely important to her/his life or not.

If the original poster is, for example, involved in launching a startup that he/she hopes will change the world, and his/her primary expected marketing vector is social media, then Twitter share counts are genuinely important in his/her life, and those of the people around him/her.

Disappointed? Sure. Annoyed? Perhaps. Outraged? Over twitter canceling a free feature I never paid them to provide? Meh.

It just came in as a total surprise for me (and I guess for Mashable too, although they did write something about it: http://mashable.com/2015/09/23/twitter-share-counts/)

Twitter announced it about 7 weeks ago, here is my post on background and links to their announcements http://buzzsumo.com/blog/twitter-share-counts-in-your-browse...

It finally went away. I'm hoping the same for all counters because from a reader's perspective they are pointless. so I have only positive feelings about this :).

Yeah, I am torn about caring or not caring.

On the one hand, it is a decent way to show readers how popular a post is and maybe feel more encouraged to share. On the other, now that I don't receive that count portion of the service, keeping the button installed means Twitter gets to still track my users.

People do use the buttons though to share. Before I added a LinkedIn button I received a number of emails from people asking for one so they could more easily share links.

I may just remove it though because when Facebook and LinkedIn have a good amount of shares or likes, it looks strange to have a button with no shares.

People don't trust themselves as much as we should, which is why people are more likely to share something if it looks like it is "safe" to do - if others are doing it. I agree though that it would be better that if people shared something because they were compelled enough to do it on their own.

I find value in the popularity of a comment because it gives me some insight to how a community thinks, collectively.

I've observed a number of times that the most popular web sites and the most popular news sites (as ranked by web traffic) are the most controversial (eg. sexist) and least informative. Hence, trusting the average person is like trusting populist politics.. The Kardadhians rule. Aka race to the bottom, aka McDonalds journalism.

That type of thinking may not be able to pool together as easily then, and therefore that thinking may not be reenforced as much.

And I agree, it is interesting to see it - and obviously Twitter would have that data, so they could make it available to researchers as well. On a daily basis I wonder how it impacts everything.

Someone outraged by something on twitter? Better call CNN, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, Salon...

Honestly, no. I'm actually really frustrated by the impact twitter has had on news.

How hard is it to find five stupid people on twitter? It isn't. Yet somehow we have to read articles about "people are outraged by Starbucks' red coffee cup" and "Trump weighs in on the coffee cup issue"

No. I'm not outraged that twitter is changing their layout.

I'm frustrated that twitter is somehow the LOIC of stupid outrage that seems entirely out of control.

What are "share counts"? I guess that's my short answer.

The only feeling I have about Twitter is mild irritation at the amount of attention it gets. It's not very useful to the vast majority of its users.

Twitter is extremely useful if you have some measure of celebrity, of course, which is why well-known journalists prattle on and on about it.

I don't have unbridled hatred toward Twitter. It just gets tired constantly hearing the MSM blabbing hashtags, and wading through a bunch of "share" buttons (that nobody uses anyway) whenever I want to read an article.

If these "share counts" are some means of letting users see how many people (didn't) retweet them, it's probably a healthy thing for Twitter. Since the average count for the average user will be either zero, or near zero, most of the time, it doesn't seem like it's good for customer retention.

I do not use social networking like Twitter, Facebook, linked in, etc. however, of all of these systems, I prefer Twitter because it's the least invasive. If I want to hear what a particular person has to say, I opt in. I find that an appealing concept. It's almost the antithesis of Facebook.

I'm mostly confused why they said "this isn't working" and decided to just shut it down rather than fix it. Seems a little bizarre for a company that would presumably benefit from having accurate counts.

I'm annoyed because now I have an ugly looking button on my site and need to replace it. I liked those vertical count boxes.

Twitter is going to suffer death by paper cut.

https://twittercommunity.com/t/clarification-about-share-cou...

The only reason for them to remove this is that the tweet counts were always embarrassingly lower than the fb share counts.

Why are you outraged?

In their blog post announcing it, they state that one of the main reasons is because it's meaningless and doesn't reflect the actual engagement around that link. I'm inclined to agree, I don't care about how many people clicked a button to share it, I care more about a discussion around something.

Yes.

Outraged? You are outraged for something that was announced almost 2 months ago? Really? Outraged?

I hadn't heard about it till now. I'm not affected because I didn't invest in the feature in any way, or know anyone who did. Yet I can appreciate the "outrage" from the perspective of people who invest in features that are later taken away, with apparently no regard or care for the impact to users who put their time and loyalty into the service because of what it offered. It's just a fact in user land, we accept the TOS and throw our time into the furnace.

One more step towards Twitters untimely irrelevancy.

Shame, if they implemented features instead of removing them they could be huge. Still can in my opinion.

Documented anywhere?

Announced on: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainab...

And went live this weekend. Surprised it didn't make any headlines.

It was always a metric easy to inflate.

Just like Ashley Madison's male to female and bot to human ratio, we'll never get honest stats on this - but it's really easy to bot twitter. There is no mobile phone verification. The amount of computerized accounts on twitter is huge.

From Twitter's SEC filing [1]:

In a new filing, the company said that “up to approximately 8.5%” of the accounts it considers active are automatically updated “without any discernible additional user-initiated action.”

Even that is quite a qualifier. You could have a discernible user-initiated action, then leave it to a bot.

I won't deny that twitter is a great way to get inbound traffic, and lots of it. But your followers, shares, etc. are still hugely inflated. It's really easy to game Twitter. The signal:noise ratio on there is critical.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000156459014...

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