What I've noticed from working on the Cybershow over the past year is
that the digital world is split cleanly into two realms that never
touch each other.
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.
> I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links
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.
> 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.
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.
Just to add my 2c on this; I browse with a sandboxed text-only Links
or W3M for 99% of all web interactions. I've got into Qubes, and for
those 1% of times they hold a gun to my head I can create a single use
Firefox routed through Tor.
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.
I rarely click link here, because I come for the discussion on the subject, not the article. And most of them especially news and business sites are hostile from my POV (trackers, popups). I’m more likely to click if it’s a personal blog.
"This isn’t really true in general" - I am under the impression some Social Portals only allow one like, like instagram? 'link in bio' is only one, and this is the reason there are many 'linktree' type sites right?
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.
Yea, oddly I click more links in the comments than the original link!
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.
Clicks are currency. If you follow a link you are implicitly endorsing whatever is at the link, which I'm not going to do unless I'm already really sure of what it says. (Maybe you say "but I hated the article!" They don't care, they already got your hit and eyeballs that they will sell to advertisers.)
> 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.
Social platforms that send referral traffic often strip the referrer information, so your visitors will show up as 'direct'. [0]
Why would they do that? My assumption would be they'd want to give you this constant reminder that you have an audience on their platform, so should obviously run a profile there and why not pay for some ads while you're at it etc.
Thanks, good article. I like the experiment of multiplexing unique
content to each service to correlate the "direct" returns. Way too
much work for my level of care... but a cool technique nonetheless.
I have a TikTok account with ~100k followers and average 57k views a day. My TikTok profile is just a link to my website (a notion page). The notion analytics tell me that I get about 1 visitor a day - I'm not certain how notion analytics work, but I think I count as a visitor when I edit the site - so I might be averaging below 1 daily average actual visitor from TikTok.
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.
This isn't really my experience. My personal blog gets a lot of traffic from Mastodon and my Umami stats show traffic from social networks and search engines for my startup https://pickwick.app
I do have trouble finding where on those platforms it's being shared/talked about though.
They are separate in terms of behavior but not necessarily separate audiences. That is, some of the same people who follow you on social media may also visit your website and subscribe to your newsletter. But attribution between the channels is difficult to measure.
I’ve been running a conference for the past year and got to dive head first into this world.
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.
I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly.
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.
I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).
Oh, I agree so much, but I am not sure about your examples either:
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.
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.
That is interesting. I have a teenage daughter too and never heard Snapchat mentioned. Some of here friends are on TikTok though, but we don't allow it. Communication is mostly iMessage, old fashioned phone calls and the MS Teams provided by her school.
I get the sense that Snapchat is mostly the current 18-27 crowd, but not necessarily the 13-18 crowd. Would be curious to hear the experiences of other parents in this regard.
Great point about disregarding our own bubbles. Here's a good example re:Snapchat. Slightly more than 5% of the world is on Snapchat daily. That number has been going up, almost without fail, quarter over quarter for 12 years.
I think to label YT, TikTok etc as pure consumption is not accurate entirely. I get your point, but on the ways they specifically differ from television is the ability to make reaction/response or whatever else videos. So for some at least it’s not pure consumption (even though it is for many users)
I do remember YT video responses did exist, but I haven't seen any in a long time. Google found this [0] 15 years old video explaining how to do it. According to the comment section it is historical. Video replies no longer exist.
The social media landscape vastly differs from country to country. WhatsApp is basically not a thing in the US outside of immigrant/expat circles.
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).
Compared to the other examples, it's rarely used. For instance, Messenger has 3B MAU whereas Signal has 40M, which is just a bit over 1% of Messenger's user base, yet Messenger wasn't mentioned in OP among others which is my point.
Seems like you're splitting hairs. His point was that some of these services popular with the HN crowd aren't as popular elsewhere. And Signal has historically had a reputation of being used primarily by techies, not the general masses (even if the current numbers indicate that's shifted).
Second this Jitsi is unknown to me. Bluesky I only heard about because they did marketing push with limited spots to drive demand and it got good press coverage being an investment/board seat of Jack
I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed.
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 a very similar experience when changing my email address. I went through my password manager to update my accounts and ended up liberally deleting all the accounts I don't use regularly. I honestly found it to be very 'freeing' and therapeutic.
I like this, and I think there’s a third axis if we want to include many-to-many moving towards the one-to-many of prior electric media. Something something broadcast AM radio, something something HAM radio…
Funny that you separate slack and Teams in my head they kinda sit close. I worked inside different teams & companies that used in different ways for some with the spaces it was more like a wiki in other places exclusively something like zoom, in my current team it's slack+zoom but to communicate with the non-engineering people of the company.
I have a similar mental model, but Teams the way we use it is more of a replacement of Slack than Zoom. It's a huge app in terms of features, and it covers both segments, so it's not really a clean divide there.
It's also a very powerful "office OS" type of platform. Nobody else comes near in that dimension AFAIK. Agreed that it's not a designer's wet dream, but it does the job, albeit in a clunky way.
Last month, I had ~100 daily views. This month (rolling), I've had 23k a day. In the past week, I've had 700k views. What caused this? Social media did... Specifically, Mastodon.
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.
Of course not. Social media is shouting at the void at best, but usual self-contained rage bait. People open Twitter/Mastodon to doomscroll and post their thoughts, and could not care less about linked content. I have seen the same exact pattern with trying to mention my latest blog posts on Mastodon or other social media: no one cares.
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.
> When social media came online in the 00s it was just a way to keep track of your friends. That's it. You made friends, you added them to your network.
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.
Facebook keeps adding crap to WhatsApp, and my friend group keeps ignoring it. Direct and group messages. That’s all. Nobody even uses the status feature they added a long time ago. There are four main-menu icons on the bottom, not counting “settings”, and we don’t use three of them.
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.
Currently there is nothing close to what myspace and facebook were like pre-2010. Telegram and WhatsApp are ways to chat to people, not see what they have been doing, or indeed what you have been doing yourself.
That's what a social network was supposed to be. We changed the name because it's not that anymore. It's people you never knew and never will producing content in exchange for advertisement.
For a very loose definition of keep in touch with.
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.
Heck, I'd be happy if it were my uncles in my feed. It's not, it's random strangers LARPing at what's obviously a very contrived lifestyle. "Hey look at me in my camper van - this is awesome - oh and I'm wearing a thong just in case the content isn't interesting enough" LOLWUT, I don't need that in my life. I only keep a FB/Insta account to stop somebody else squatting/stealing my name.
Here something funny about X/Twitter, if you dare post a link in your main tweet, this will significantly decrease the reach of this one. (you have to post it in the comments)
Because X/Twitter want people to stay in their platform, link outside X isn't great for them.
This is one of those post-acquisition changes that made Twitter a lot less useful. I don't really get the logic, Twitter is optimized for a certain kind of content - short text - and anything longer needs to go on another platform. Instead of embracing that the current ownership wants to compete with TikTok and Youtube and Instagram and substack at the same time.
OP here. I dropped an X/Twittter account in the end of 2022 with ~17k followers and… really, nothing changed. Since then, it’s safe to assume that things worsened there and everywhere.
I think things like this also depend on the site itself. A personal blog might fare different from a commercial website. I follow a few (niche) companies on Twitter who post new parts/products sometimes. I often click through to the link to see it. It is highly unlikely for me to visit their website out of the blue.
Pre and post Elon is a big difference for Twitter. Before I would post a tweet with links to my blog and would see an increase in both metrics and responses to it. Post Elon I don't think anyone even sees the tweet as I am not a paying twitter subscriber, and most people that would respond etc have left. And about 2 people see my Mastadon post.
I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that pretty much any semi-major company had a support presence on Twitter. Often just tweeting anything with the name of the company in it would get you a response from a support rep in a few minutes. It was one of the best ways to get in direct contact with support for many companies. The API limitations probably severely hampered this avenue of support for most companies, I imagine.
If you have 17k followers how many actual eyeballs see your posts? I guess it largely depends on how "stale" the account followers are (= how many are still active), but I have to guess it's below 1k? Maybe even below 100?
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?
LinkedIn still matters quite a bit for commercial/professional stuff.
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 don't know. Hence my qualification. I suspect the political angle of Twitter/X could be as active as ever. But there's been a huge dropoff in use across tech as far as I can see.
I don't know if views are a good measure of anything anymore.
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.
> [...] 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 [...]
It's curious that making a social network harder to access can (apparently) boost the quality of its posts.
Private trackers are a good examples of that. And Subreddits with karma rules. If your users have an attribute that is tied to credibility and status, and moderation can remove it, people will usually be civil.
Not to be a pedant but the relevant variable has not been manipulated here. We would need sites of (more or less) equal-in-expectation popularity to be assigned to use social media or not. The metrics the author provides are capturing effects of past social media distribution.
> This created tragicomic situations, such as people posting anonymous reports of toxic companies in the comments of the blog and one that threatened to sue me if I didn’t take down the spreadsheet.
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.
I flat reject any business (for personal business - landscaper, contractor, etc) who doesn't have a site that is NOT facebook. I'm just not dealing with that.
Yup, I don't touch any Meta properties, avoid them like the plague that they are. If your page is on FaceBook/Insta, or you require login to FB Messenger for your sales/customer service chat, I just NOPE right outta there...
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.
Social media activity seems to be really bad for certain kinds of content. On Twitter I frequently see art posts with thousands of likes and less than 10 comments. And inevitably a few of those replies will be pussy-in-bio spam bots. Even on Threads, accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers often end up getting between 10 and 20 comments as well.
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.
I also notice that some content like art and music only pull passive engagement. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have platforms like Twitch, where a creator's success is almost entirely dependent on their ability to build an actively engaged following. I think the key to it all is that the creator has to encourage and participate in interactions with their following.
SM platforms like Twitter and Facebook are Time Squares. People ignore most of the posts, stare at something for 2 seconds if it catches their attention in some way (bait usually), and point to what really interests them (retweet,…). And sometimes you stumble on an active discussion (in the analogy, it would be like pointing a camera to those involved and showing them on the big screen with speakers blaring)
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.
What can one really comment about art though?
"That is beautiful" or "That is shit".
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.
Getting a bit of encouragement and positive feedback can be very motivating. It doesn't cost the giver anything and it can really have a positive impact on the receiving party.
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.
I'm not surprised OP isn't getting many clicks on social. It's because people don't want to click on links inside automated posts, which is what he uses for Mastodon.
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.
I run the official WordPress ActivityPub plugin, so my blog is a “instance”. Since sometimes I post longform content and the plugin doesn't let me customize the template accordingly, I opted to post an excerpt plus link on fediverse. Not the ideal scheme, I know.
I feel that posting on Social Media is flexing with people you think are important.
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.
I think this goes against common sense. We often see articles shared on social media or on link aggregators like Hacker News. Sometimes we read them. Sharing links on the Internet is easy and works well. Surely that matters?
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.
Links on social media depend on heavily on the algorithm, same as what he said about google, the reach a fraction of googles so unless your post went viral and gets retweeted/reposted it will have the OPs observation. Or you have a lot of followers and they their primary way to know of new articles is from the X for ex. Daring fireball, I only click into the site if Gruber posts it. Ever since he stop posting, I’ve never went back to check.
I wouldn’t give up on it but I would try some minimum effort to build up an audience
I have the sense social media is really bad for written content in particular. It's likely the best broadcasting mechanism for YouTube channels, shops, some types of services.
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.
Nobody would care if you own just a personal site, but if you’re a company (and not well know ) I sometimes check to see if you’re on LinkedIn, or have posted recently on Twitter. Because if you haven’t, that might be a sign you might be going out of business
Maybe that’s unfair. But I would think twice before relying on your product for anything important
100%. I recently had to research scuba diving centers in a city I’ll visit soon, and part of my criteria was to check how recent their Google Maps comments were, and how active their Instagram was. Some diving centers are the center of a community of divers, who will follow and comment on their pictures… while other are more commercial endeavors for tourists that just post on a schedule and no one cares about it. Social media activity is also a good way to deduce if they’re active, positive and growing their business or if they’ve checked out and entered “maintenance mode”.
I'm going to bet that these social media sites are lying about their user stats because they are dependant on Ad dollars. I still find it crazy that there is no third party checking whether an Ad is getting real users or just bots. Only industry that sells a product based on stats that they also provide. Crazy!!
When I use social media apps, without ad blocking, links that expand into share cards look an awful lot like ads, which I never (intentionally) tap. I wonder if OP is seeing click-through rates similar to those seen by advertisers.
If you are too present on social media, there is no mystery left about you. You become too familiar to trigger the curiosity of a follower to click on another link you posted. The economy of attention doesn't lead far.
I'd disagree with that. Most people I know that use social media for marketing are just following the eyes, making as many people as possible aware that they exist and have done something. If you don't try to put your work out there nobody will know you've done it. If the economy of attention didn't lead far there would be no advertisements.
Marketing on Facebook or Twitter is a horizontal landscape. Those on the platform are your only traffic. Having a website outside of these types of platforms is a vertical market because one does not have become a platform tribal member to engage.
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.
Agree. Yet, I find myself checking social media to see if the company is still alive/active. When seeing a lot of activity on social media, I assume they do well or at least they are still in business.
Mastodon was the epicenter of the XZ discourse. The original discoverer uses it. Krebs uses it. I attribute my success to it. Maybe this was true a few months ago, but it's very quickly establishing itself for tech discussion
Your number one article is "4 maneiras de burlar paywalls de sites de jornais" which is "4 ways to bypass newspaper website paywalls". Seems like an easy way to bring users in from Google. There is nothing wrong with that, but that skews the results.
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.
Depends on your goals. People are beginning to shop primarily on TikTok and Instagram. Social media seems to be enshittify-evolving to be the new e-commerce.
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
I have no basis to agree or disagree, but the social engines involved are incentivized to do so: they can cash out the data they are constantly farming.
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?
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?