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Comment by HugThem | Hacker News Reader

Has anybody ever measured the impact of share buttons? Do users really share the page more often when those buttons are present? And if so, how much more often?

To me it seems like this function is not something the page should provide buttons for. Just like it offers no buttons for saving, bookmarking, printing, resizing, scaling, scrolling etc. That is stuff you do with the page. Not something the page does.

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I did click tracking on major Canadian websites such as Sportsnet.ca on these buttons (and everything else); we found that they're very rarely clicked and removing them would mean a completely insignificant change in the number of shares.

People do of course share those articles, but they don't seem to look for or trust web page share buttons. Even I rather copy/paste the URL into Facebook myself while on a desktop/laptop, or use my browser's built-in sharing functionality on a mobile device. This is all anecdotal but also based on data from hundreds of millions of page views.

Me neither! Especially when it's a Like button, it's not at all clear to me what that will actually do. That post doesn't actually exist on Facebook; perhaps it's linked to from there? So it'll have me "like" some unknown Facebook post that's associated with the article I'm reading? Which Facebook page will have posted that actual post? Etc. Uncertainty about what a button will actually do is a huge deterrent for users.

Did you look at the impact the buttons have on overall sharing? That is, might simply seeing the share buttons act as a trigger?

You're right! If current phones that had a persistent share prominently in the UI came first then this trend might not have happened. But it started with desktop browsers where this concept didn't really exist.

> But it started with desktop browsers where this concept didn't really exist.

Correct, mainly because "normal" users didn't know how to copy/paste URLs or didn't bother to, supposedly. If desktop browsers had gone in the right direction, they'd have added a "share:" scheme (similar to "mailto:").

Even then the browser would still need to know to which websites the user could share. The user would first need to select websites and services they want to use.

In the past, desktop browsers kind of tried to provide such features with the concept of the bookmarklet [1]. The idea was that users would drag&drop a link to their bookmark toolbar to add functionality to their browser. I think it is still used by some Read-It-Later style collection services, but mostly has been replaced with browser extensions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet

> Even then the browser would still need to know to which websites the user could share. The user would first need to select websites and services they want to use.

They managed multiple search engine options just fine and mobile browsers implemented sharing without issues. I don't see a pressing need for user configuration (websites with share buttons don't allow this either), it would have meant potential additional revenue also for Mozilla & Co.

OTOH, they failed to fix "mailto:" for webmail ...

AFAIR toolbars added sharing buttons early on.

GOV.UK did after they introduced them (non-privacy-violating ones of course): https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sha...

I measure them and they do work. Email is clicked the most by users, but Facebook provides the most traffic back to the site. The native sharrow (on iOS) doesn't mean anything to older users, but a Facebook/Twitter/Email icon does.

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