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Comment by OoTheNigerian | Hacker News Reader

Theoretically, frictionless sharing makes a lot of sense if the user gives the app explicit permission.

There is an app my friend Joel showd me called If This Then That http://ifttt.com/ that allows apps to trigger frictionless sharing when certain actions are taken. For instance, I might want to only share songs I rate or those I 'star/favorite without the extra "are you sure" dialog.

The app maker/content owner should make it easy for me to set it up. They can create defaults but must allow me to opt out.

Because of this guardian stalking sharing app, I have deliberately never clicked any on the shared links that flooded my FB wall (past tense because I am on a FB break)

It is unfortunate that facebook actions put 'social graph' and page views before their customers. I do not blame them though, when you have 500 million people logging in almost everyday, you tend to believe you can get away with almost anything.

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No. No, it doesn't make sense. I don't care what my friends read - I only care what they think was good out of that. You can't just open up everybody's browser logs and call that viral.

There was a good article a while back about how oversharing is killing staste - http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/09/...

Basically, we're caring more about volume of information rather than curation of good information, and when that happens - taste dies.

If you re read what I said I was referring to the frictionlessness (is there a word like that) when you want to do the sharing.

I do not want to see any pop ups when I want to share. Maybe we should differentiate between frictionless sharing and automated frictionless sharing.

I'm sorry, I simply don't see how you expect to be able to share selectively without UI. And unless that sharing UI is embedded in every possible page, you're kind of stuck with a popup. Unless it were a browser feature, I guess. Which doesn't make it not pop up, but makes the popup a little more trustworthy.

Think I get your point. For example, I used to have an app on facebook that shared the songs I loved on Last.fm. Those where very few, maybe 5* a year, so it made sense to auto-share them on facebook.

Edit: *Looked it up and it's more like 30 each year, ops.

Ah! Now I think I see, then - if I have a curated collection somewhere else and want it to share onto Facebook, sure - that makes sense. But you have to curate somewhere; just because some guy I went to high school read an article or listened to a song doesn't mean I want to hear about it.

I believe OoTheNigerian's point is that he likes it when the sharing functionality is rolled up into another thing that you do. Say, every time you rate a song 5 stars, or mark one as your favorite. He'd rather not get a popup asking if he also wants to share it on facebook (but have a config option which says "share my liked songs")

Or if the default was that things were private, and that only specific things become public.

But then you have the same problem of "If nobody sets things to be public, there's nothing to read, so no incentive to be a user".

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