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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

It's not that I never share things, I'd just rather ctrl-C/ctrl-V than waste a bunch of screen space on every single webpage.

Looks like Firefox's reader view fixes it, I'll just need to get in the habit of using that instead of the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet as things catch on and circumvent it... https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

I can only assume the thought process of whoever writes these social bars is "People are hiding our share buttons instead of clicking them! MAYBE IF WE SHOVE IT IN THEIR FACES REPEATEDLY THEY'LL LIKE THAT BETTER AND WANT TO SHARE!"

Gruber sums up my feelings nicely: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars

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>Gruber sums up my feelings nicely: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars

Ironically, that site is perhaps more unreadable than a typical medium page. It uses some hardcoded mobile format (?) that shows tiny text in the middle 20% of my 16:9 screen.

And you can't just double tap the text column to fit it to screen? That's odd, since it doesn't appear to set a maximum-scale or user-scalable=no on the viewport:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=500, minimum-scale=0.45" />

#worksonmymachine

Heh, "medium dickbars", hell of a title, and I think that's EXACTLY what the social bar manufacturers are thinking. Unfortunately though, they're super useful :-/

> they're super useful

Useful for whom? The user, or website operator?

Snark aside, do the sharebars actually increase user engagement on your site?

The operator of course. They are definitely useful (at least on our end). We've found that making it easy to share the blogs increases the odds that folks actually boink the button and add a personalized message. Plus the share counting works as "social proof" for posts. If you read a blog post that 3 other people have shared you might abandon it before finishing. If 300 people have shared it, you'll likely be more prone to finish searching for why they thought it was so interesting.

That can be gamed though, but we keep ours "natural".

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