Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media
notes.ghed.in
notes.ghed.in
I avoid social media, and have never gone near Facebook, Linked-In or that stuff. But I do recognise and respect the audience out there who should not be ignored. So Helen does the "social media". I do the old fashioned web, email reaching out to other bloggers, publishers etc.
We see practically no correlation between these worlds. Helen will say "We're trending on platform X" and I look and see nothing in the web stats. Maybe 2 out of 2000 hits cross over from Facebook or Twitter. Conversely, we can get on the front page of a big website, but have no activity on social media.
I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links and that everyone on the web has given up on "sharing" to social media.
They're literally two separate worlds now, right?
This isn’t really true in general: You can post all the links you want on most social media, though there are tenuous theories that including links will get you less promotion on certain platforms.
What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to click on links. They read the headline, look at the included image (if any), and assume they understand the whole story from that context. They jump to the discussion to comment about it or see what others are saying without leaving the site.
For people who just want to scroll and see a lot of different things, leaving the site to go in depth on 1 or 2 links doesn’t really fit their preferred social media operating style.
This holds even on sites like Reddit or HN, where you can some times jump into a comment section and immediately recognize that half the commenters haven’t read the article at all.
Ah ha, As a cybersec person I can totally understand why.
Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more?
Just twitter
It's not only what naravara points out, that Web 2.0 trained us to avoid clicking links (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942472), especially when it's the "central link", it's also simply that I want to start in a forum-thread.
That's what motivates the initial engagement. The discussion thread is the compelling thing, the original bait. Then, once I've gleaned context from the discussion, there rarely seems to be any mystery left in the link worth the effort to scroll back to the top and click.
So a problem is that HN assumes you want to start with the link. What if it didn't? I'm willing to bet that if all HN frontpage links just took you directly to the comments (like an old phpBB forum) and then the OP had to post the link as a comment, I'd click it a lot more often. Psychology be funny.
I also have been trained to avoid clicking on links if I can avoid it. It’s not that I don’t like it in principle or even that I want to stay in my social media wall. It’s that any time I click on a link to a website now I am all but guaranteed to A.) Endure multiple seconds-long waits to load the page despite a gigabit connection B.) See a modal asking me to sign up for a newsletter, often using annoying gimmicks to make me look to find the dismiss button C.) Have the content I’m trying to read skip and jump all over the screen as random bits of external content load in D.) Cookie banner
The web has turned into a user-hostile clusterfuck and ad-blockers only staunch a fraction of the problem. Bad design practices have led to a tragedy of the commons where everyone has contributed minor annoyances everywhere. It has sapped away all of people’s willingness to explore by introducing immeasurable amounts of cognitive friction to “surfing” the internet. And that’s all BEFORE we get to the floods of garbage content, SEO spam, and clickbait headlines that have made the upside potential of visiting a site or clicking a link lower than ever before.
The experience of text-only is that I click on loads of links! It's very liberating. Highly recommend it for sites like HN that are high on content and low on silly eye-candy.
I just never see the belly-dancing models selling me stuff, or the entire page bugging-out like I did a whole bag of speed. Maybe I'm missing out!
The links load instantly in a new tab or they don't load at all. I set the timeout to 12 seconds. About half the time the page doesn't load at all because it wants to run javascript or some nonsense. I just move on without thinking about it.
Honestly it's really changed my psychology. Instead of getting annoyed that half the web is user-hostile, I just take the attitude that it's great that 50% of things do still load and contain real information like its 1990! Because text-only browsing is so fast and effortless it's no overhead. The "shit web" just slides past like water off a ducks back.
btw our cybershow [0] is designed to quite Suckless [1], minimalist standards.
Also places like YouTube hide most content below the click/tap for 'more description' -
I also believe that when twitter/X published it's code it was made clear that posting anything with outside links / content made your post/tweet get less reach.. and similar has been suggested for the other social portals such as FB - that posting links to other portals gets your stuff downranked / less reach..
So links I would say are semi-allowed and restricted and use of them gets them seen less, so sharing them gets them less shared, even if not banned/shadow-banned.. although reducing the reach without explicitly telling people is a partial/mostly shadow ban imho.
Also with X walling off it's data from search engines. certainly has also caused a chilling effect of less people promoting with links - and we would see the same elsewhere as the places try to wall off more and more I believe.
Social platforms that send referral traffic often strip the referrer information, so your visitors will show up as 'direct'. [0]
[0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-dark-social-falsely-...
I do have trouble finding where on those platforms it's being shared/talked about though.
The social platforms seem to deprioritize linked content that would bring traffic to the site. Comments on other posts or fully original posts on those platforms do much better.
Email and the website is where the vast majority of the traffic comes from and that’s because I have reliable readership with Substack. We get a 40% open rate over the last year.
Social traffic is a mixed bag. Twitter is a great place to meet other programmers and find out what they are doing, but most of what I post directly gets very little traffic even after paying for the checks.
LinkedIn is doing great though. Followers just surpassed the mailing list for the first time.
Instagram does well. Facebook was really sad. Threads was awful. Blue sky is too new to judge. Mastodon has a smaller audience but good engagement.
My point with the above is to to emphasize the idea from the parent comment. Social media traffic, especially on a place like TikTok, stays in that garden. Very difficult to move viewers off-platform.
My mental model has always been like:
- Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon
- Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC
- WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix
- Zoom, Teams, Jitsi
With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right).
It seems these distinctions get blurred more and more and we will probably end up with different apps differing only in a single dimension from left to right.
The rest I know. And I do read Hacker News...
Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It had its time, but personally I don't know anyone still there.
Same with Facebook Messenger, which has completely been replaced by WhatsApp in my (non-nerd) circles.
I thought about including TikTok but it would be more in the
- YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, PeerTube
category. To me, these are borderline social media and more akin to television - pure consumption, heavily discouraged participation. Just look at the comments on any of these for a proof.
I'd give you Instagram, it seems immensely popular and intensively used as a communication platform.
If we disregard our own bubbles and go strictly by popularity we should have considered WeChat and Douyin too, I guess.
I can't say overall, but my children and their friends use snap as their first line of communication, with iMessage a close second.
It's the primary mode of group communication for my teenage daughter and everybody in her social circles. Second place is probably Discord, but that is heavily skewer towards people she knows via gaming.
None of the other ones that you listed are popular in the US either with the exception of Twitter, Zoom and Slack (and the latter two aren't social media platforms).
Speaks a lot as to the changing sands of time.
Neither is WhatApp, Discord, Slack and many of the other ones mentioned (yes you can interact with them via a website, but the same is true for IRC)
I say this as someone who used it exclusively for 5+ years before giving up and using WhatsApp.
There is hardly even a comparison between Signal and WhatsApp.
Downloads != users.
The only reason it's so ubiquitous is the office/outlook bundling sold to most companies.
It a chimera that's the outcome of multiple grafting procedures And no matter how much makeup it still show when you use it long enough.
As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are:
A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar)
B) direct and group messaging (e.g. Signal, Element, Telegram, WhatsApp)
C) social media, time wasting, distraction (serves no other real purpose other than to kill time, e.g. Facebook, Instagram)
D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor)
E) always-on utilities (e.g. Venmo, Uber)
When you do this categorization, with a strong will, you can uninstall everything in categories C and D and end up with a much more utilitarian phone, primarily using the stuff in A and B.
I find that when you work on companies or projects, Slack and Discord are the tricky ones, because of how noisy they are but also how much people expect to be able to reach you there, especially via their DMs feature, which many use in lieu of email. I'm experimenting with the Texts.com app to work around this edge case. That is, keep Slack/Discord DMs visible via Texts.com app, but only use full Slack/Discord channels when on desktop when I am in a "channel skimming mood," via the desktop apps only. Haven't tried this fully yet on mobile since their Android app is still under development.
Anyway, I wrote up my personal experience with a smartphone app audit here:
I sort of struggle to think of the utility of these being installed apps. I feel like just doing a better job of designing web pages to run on mobile would be fine for booking a hotel. Notifications and location tracking is all you’d be missing, but that’s not THAT big of a deal. Those are both doable with PWAs now, and even before they were you could have just done it through email or SMS if you really had to.
There’s a lot of stuff where I just don’t feel like it needs to be an app and would be better off just a service that runs through a well designed website.
I had 150 mastodon followers. I'm not famous, I'm still not. I have 1/5th the followers of this guy. Around the 15th, someone posted my article[0], which got me a good 30k views and a hundred followers, which set the scene for what happened next:
When I heard about XZ, I posted about it[1] on Mastodon. I did no promotion other than that, aside from posting to HN (the HN post was killed, presumably dang wanted to have only one article about it on the home page). Now my article is linked to by NYT, Wired, Ars, NIST, The Verge, and a whole plethoria of other outlets. I'm convinced Mastodon was the catalyst.
Maybe, I got lucky twice this month, and I'll never get lucky again. Maybe though, there's something else to social media.
I had much more engagement posting on Linkedin, though one would believe that with all the spam there no one would have time to check out your post. You'd be very wrong. Though the downside of this strategy is having to use Linkedin.
At best, social media is an additional way of keeping in touch with people you know and care about.
I’ve found it easier to stay connected after dropping social media, but I value direct communication far more than status updates. Time spent on social media is time not spent directly talking to someone, and it’s really tempting to send a message rather than call.
Not saying that they are not happy, but all the social media stuff feels so staged and unreal.
There are probably thousands of people in the world with the same name as you.
It's insane to me that we're still using social media to mean whatever the fuck we have now.
Today social media, including facebook, is all about a few broadcasting their messages to billions. Mastodon isn't much better.
What happened to the social graph? Everyone is on the feed getting shit shoved down their throats because the algorithm decided they should.
Current closest to that is Whatsapp( and Telegram). Even though Meta just added channels, but at its core, you only get access to your contacts updates. There are also groups which makes it more like IRC without the flexibility.
If they ever try to push the other stuff at the expense of the text-messaging-replacement, I expect we’ll all migrate to something else.
But so did traditional media.
Because X/Twitter want people to stay in their platform, link outside X isn't great for them.
There fixed that for you.
If someone with a site on X/WhatsApp/Instagram/FB repeats the experiment, then we might see something interesting.
Google is the only traffic referrer that still matters. See: https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-...
Then the math for conversion rate on link clicks after that, it seems like you might be talking about on the order of ten hits for 17k followers?
X still matters some. But anecdotally, X is far less relevant and used in my circles post-Musk. (And Mastodon hasn't replaced it for most people.) I think Musk was the impetus for a lot of people to dial down their social media use.
I find that narrative control from position of authority is much more interesting.
So, on Twitter I have a very small following(~470 followers) and rarely anyone interacts with me but I also have a large-ish account on a prominent but relatively obscure Turkish social media website Eksi Sozluk with even less followers but that website has strict account creation procedures(it can take years to have your account accepted and your posts becoming public) and as a result it is viewed as a "reference" since spam floods are harder to organise as you will lose your hard earned account and I'm able to stir public discussions in Twitter and Reddit by posting on this relatively obscure website because people will often check what are the opinions and arguments on the matter in Eksi Sozluk.
It's known that ad agencies are astroturfing the place and offering people money to post but because it's a "prestige" place you don't see blatant spam. They will have to construct a compelling argument even if it's an ad or political campaign position, so it's still a valuable content. A well structured discussion on Eksi Sozluk is capable to stir quite an engagement on other social media platforms and people will fight their flamewars using the arguments taken straight from Eksi Sozluk.
It's curious that making a social network harder to access can (apparently) boost the quality of its posts.
In the old times, I briefly worked in some industry and was co-admin in a blog about working-related issues in that field. It was a rather small, obscure blog, that did not have any real traction outside a certain political niche, until a post where we shared one of our readers' experience working in a certain company. That post totally blew up and it received insane amount of views and comments by people talking about their experience working there and elsewhere. The comment thread below was going on years after the blog was practically abandoned. I still enter from time to time to approve comments.
I miss the blog era, because a blog post like that is not ephemeral like social media or other similar modern platforms like reddit or this very site. This creates a more protracted, sustained and imo healthy engagement profile. It still needs to be discoverable, but it was no problem back then once of community of blogs was formed linking to each other. Social media, on the other hand, are a black hole, as it is much harder to find and even more engage with posts that are more than a few days at most old. And while everything is always hosted somewhere and nobody ensures that stuff like with geocities will never happen, platforms like wordpress blogs allow at least one to backup and scrap a site more easily, and the control of the hosting providers on the content is much less than that of the social media platforms.
IDK if I've managed to avoid having a shadow profile created about me, but it seems worthwhile to starve it.
If anyone has any 'inside' info about FB's data harvesting and/or further clues on minimizing or foiling it, I'm all ears.
It seems like if you want engagement you have to post some sort of bait content to encourage people to reply. This is often controversial stuff which gets people fired up, or some culture war nonsense.
The Internet was supposed to make us feel more connected than ever but it increasingly feels like whatever you create ends up being a shout into the void.
If you're sharing content that's primarily outside of the main platform, it often won't get as much reach as platform-native content. That's why every big creator always ends up making their own newsletter, in order to have a way to directly connect with people.
Then you have forums which are like lecture halls, IRC like apps (Discord, Slack) which feels more like classroom (without the teacher) and finally, the direct conversations in Whatsapp, Messenger and Telegram.
I love art but could care less about the field of art criticism.
I use to have a geocities personal site on the old internet and it is not like anyone ever looked at that either.
The real difference is I don't remember anyone caring about the number of myspace followers a person had. It only mattered who was in your top 6 or however many it was in your top list. Obviously, that is because there was no money to be made with having connections to people you didn't know.
Most recently I received a comment from someone asking to buy some of my art and I felt incredibly flattered.
Like we shouldn't be constantly seeking validation from external sources, but we're inherently social creatures so getting a bit of positive feedback is good.
Those accounts do not engage in conversations, they just post links to their own site. It looks like every other blogspam post, even if that isn't the intention. You can choose to run your social media account as a syndication channel, but it's sort of like posting links on HN from your personal site only.
But your customers and those people that are truly important probably aren't in your Social Medial circles.
Social Media is becoming so overloaded with noise from so many sources, it will be interesting to see when there are basically no important contacts to be made there.
But other times, you share a link and nothing happens. And it might not be a lot of traffic compared to what Google or some other large website can deliver randomly. And you might not benefit at all from a lot of strangers reading your article for some random reason.
So why post anything in public at all? For me, since I just write short comments, a little bit of feedback is enough. I wrote about something I’m interested in, someone upvoted it, so it was worthwhile. I don’t care about reach. More users, more problems.
Current title can be interpreted two ways: "No one cares unless your site is on social media" is the other way.
I wouldn’t give up on it but I would try some minimum effort to build up an audience
But the audience in social media in its majority is looking for quick dopamine pills, not long form articles, so conversion on those is really really low.
I'm a programmer, not a marketer though, so take this with a grain of salt and maybe some chili pepper too.
Maybe that’s unfair. But I would think twice before relying on your product for anything important
A number of restaurants and brick and mortar shops only use platforms to promote events and products. This means I have no idea of the soup of the day or when special trivia night is.
It is less expensive to just engage on a platform than maintain a non-tribal website. Those in the tribe do not see the exclusion they created with their horizontal market.
Irony is that a number of social media posts reference other sites. So the non-tribal website is scooped up by media platforms, creating a tilted vertical market.
I don't think the lesson here is no one cares if your site is not on social media. Rather, if you create content in a language that is underserved, Google is your friend.
Couple that with the fact that you have had/have a social media presence, I wonder how much of the work was already done. You've acquired a large number of users already from social media. You've already benefited from it.
Further, you are posting this here. If Telegram and WhatsApp are social media, so is HN.
Let's all calm down a little bit. I'm not a fan of last-decade's Google, but it is just a company and the open web still exists. And always will. It's relevance may shrink, but maybe it was always supposed to be a niche thing all along.
I have mourned the rise of social media and enshitification of Google, but perhaps the outcome is not as bleak. Technically inclined people self hosting their blogs and keeping their web-rings, while the rest of the world mindlessly scrolls Instagram. I'm happy to help anyone that wants to join Mastodon or set up a blog, but I'm tired of trying to convince them they should.
Meanwhile, summarising posts in video on Shorts/Reels/TikTok might be quite a traffic bump. I’m seeing big numbers from channels that typically offer thoughtful, long-form content
It's scary to me to get shopping recommendations from platforms that have no interest in making anything better at all. It's scarier to me that the generational gap has widened enough where that seems reasonable. I guess the recos are just that good?
...yeah, surprise