While this is a good suggestion, shouldn't this have its own thread? This is "Show HN" - a chance to startup owners to shine. Such a post steals their momentum...
Sure, just talking overall. I see this trend starting on HN recently. I have seen few times when cool projects got hijacked even by owners of different, similar startups. Thus the comment. Good job btw.
In my opinion it depends. Here we are talking about really the same idea, and shariff is something I already used. It also is a few steps further, it has a backend to get vote counters and plugins for several frameworks, like Serendipity, Drupal and Wordpress (now, that is something which might have stolen the spotlight, and I opted to not mention that here).
But no, to your question, I don't think it is a new phenomenon or unwanted to mention related projects in comments. That's why I did not even consider that it might hurt op, thanks for chiming in. But yes, shariff should probably have its own thread, the ones I found are old and did get no attention. I'll re-submit it.
Privacy Badger [0] does this, among other things. I use it in combination with uBlock [1] and Decentraleyes [2], which replaces many CDN-hosted resources (eg. Google Fonts) with locally cached copies.
It's nice, but people love to see the number of current likes.
For one of my customers, I created a Facebook like area [0](visible on the bottom of the site) that shows the amount of likes. All required data is retrieved server-side and cached; to not expose end-users to Facebook tracking while still providing images and like count.
Out of curiosity, how do you do the caching? How long is the cache valid for? Is it only triggered by a user request, or is it updated by a cron job or similar?
Website was written in C# (ASP.NET MVC); the data is cached in-memory on the webserver.
I have caching limit (Like Count = 3 minutes, Page info (name, images, etc.) = 1 hour).
Every time one of the resources is requested from the webserver; it's served from memory (initial retrieval on site start); and on access, it's checked how old the data is. If the data's older than the threshold, it's refreshed async and displayed on the next request.
I always copy/paste the URL when I want to share a website. That's what the URL is meant for. Heck, it's easier to copy the URL (using the keyboard) than it is to use the mouse to click on some button.
Sharing buttons are a nuisance more than anything. at best, I'd say they're a tool to enable spying on users and should be categorically blocked (as standard uBlock₀ filter rules let you do with a single click).
> Sharing buttons are a nuisance more than anything.
They're actually most often used as a quick way for people to support a site. I've seen it at every company I've worked for - they're easily the most common way that our site is distributed socially.
It's easier to copy the URL, but it's still faster to share by clicking than it is to do by copying the URL, navigating to the site you want to share to, pasting in the URL, adding some descriptive text, and clicking the share button.
Besides, sharing buttons which are just links (as in this post) don't aren't really that intrusive.
I can't believe Amazon doesn't have a "copy link" button. I guess they don't want too many "amzn.to" links floating around, but I hate to need to use bitly or an extension just to get the compressed link.
Why do you still need shortened links? For text messages, aesthetics, or ease of analog communication? Twitter, previously the main use case, no longer counts link length in tweets.
While I don't think the URL shortening matters too much, there's still another important attribute of using these shortlinks that manifests itself on youtube: They also omit irrelevant metadata like URL parameters that were specific to your session or the way you arrived at the site.
For example, youtube will often include extra garbage parameters for stuff like playlists - which the youtu.be shorturls omit, making them perfect for sharing videos.
These parameters are not apparent to those with whom you share the shortlink, but I'd wager that the site stores a mapping from the shortlink to the session in which it was generated. Which may be OK for you; I don't know.
Is the identifier unique? Does it have to be? Without switching to a different browser on a different IP addr and finding the same video again through a different search, would you even know?
Yes, the format is youtu.be/<video id> where <video id> matches the one in the long URL (youtube.com/watch?v=<video id>&extra patameters...) and is unique to the video.
This feature already exists and you don't need a button for it. It's part of HTML metadata, specifically the <link rel="shortlink"> tag.
You could either provide some sort of button to your browser to place this into the clipboard, or use an extension like pentadactyl to add a keyboard shortcut for it. (It's simply “y” by default - so copying URLs works like yanking in vim)
As mentioned, they do have a shortened link option. Also, where do you need shortened links, now that Twitter has excluded them from character counts (and used their own link shortener before then)? Facebook truncates URLs, etc.
In my experience, it's less than 0.5% on average, and in some cases, far less. However, I've found you can get better than average share rates by bluntly asking users to do so - with a lightbox after they've scrolled to the bottom of the page (indicating they've actually read the entire article), for instance. You can do the same if a user watches a video to the end, etc. You're not allowed to directly incentivize Facebook sharing, however you're free to strongly encourage it.
As with many things in life, it turns out that you won't get what you want unless you ask for it.
This is cynical, and arguably (probably) a net negative, but in nearly all cases, intrusive stuff like lightboxes, modals, and exit intent stuff works. It increases time on site, conversions, whatever metric you want to measure.
My interpretation is that they increases time-on-site by pushing away people that aren't committed enough to wade through bloatware... and I don't understand how that works in the long-run.
Is it more profitable to push away customers so you get high-quality data on the core customers, and increasingly targeted advertising? How does that work out in the long-run when you need to replace lost customers?
More shares per view translate to more views, period. While sites certainly need to balance user experience with their need to grow, aggressively asking for shares works, and sites that do it will always do better traffic-wise than those that don't. I realize that ultra-white hat developers don't like this fact, and many would like to see it cause some sort of detrimental effect on the sites that do it. But unless the implementation is egregiously bad, most users simply don't care.
I've learned to intentionally stop all videos before they finish so that you don't get another unrelated video auto-started, you don't get some weird ad or other overlay that makes scrubbing back in the video impossible, and so you don't have to see a bunch of "subscribe to my other thing and here's a video preview of it that makes no sense without sound!"
I'd personally never use them since they only annoy me on other websites, but clients (or even designers sometimes… ugh) often want them because "We're Web 2.0". That's kinda why sharingbuttons.io exists!
I think about this often, and honestly, they don't seem to be worth it; I think if we got rid of all the share/like/tweet buttons the web would be pretty much the same (except with maybe less clutter).
I'm always afraid that the link will be borked somehow (for example: a link that opens the app or requests an app install -- it happens on the facebooks, man).
On another note, I'm a huge fan of small utilities like this. Sometimes cruising HN it's easy to get it in my head that a project isn't worth doing unless it's a scalable VC business ready to submit to YC, or a community-supported FOSS. It's nice to see a little web utility doing its thing online.
This is an amazing idea, and I will be implementing this today. Great job. I haven't seen any rendering problems across browsers either.
The only change I would make is to remove the "Share on Twitter" text that is included with each large button on the website example. It's pretty much implied for the end user once they see the colors of the buttons and the icons.
For example, I shortened "Share on Twitter" to just "Twitter".
Along this point, I feel the 'medium' preset's removal of the logos is odd as it's not typically done. I'd rather see the medium preset be '[logo] Twitter' instead.
This is perfect. I wish I had known about this last week. I was volunteering for an event that my work place sponsored -- It was a "girls who code" thing, and I was helping them with HTML and they wanted something like this. All the ones I found didn't work out of the box.
Totally agree, but it's the only datapoint I have, and the good thing is that they probably have a really wide demographic being the gov website and all. I will search for more.
Totally disagree, for the kind of content they are the best ones. They are even better than all blogs and tutorial about those topics that I found. Try to find the same info about ANY other country
I didn't know HN has a sharing link! Would you mind submitting an issue with the link and I'll see if I can get to it? (or you submit a PR?) https://github.com/mxstbr/sharing
Haha, I was actually under the impression that you made this in response to AddThis [1]. They basically do "sharing links as a service", plus analytics. It's not such a bad idea, since they were recently bought by Oracle for $175 million.
I think these ones will not be blocked, because they don't use any JS, and there's nothing to identify them as sharing buttons. Even the icons are embedded as raw SVG tags.
mailto links should be handled by your OS's default mail client. I just realized mine opens Chrome even though I clicked it from Firefox and Thunderbird should be my mail client anyway.
Nice work! Now if you can just convince the world to use it.
I forget what it was, but I had the same idea while reading something on HN about a month ago, however, since I don't have an account on any of those services, I didn't bother trying to implement it. I was also a little pessimistic that some services wouldn't even have simple links like that so they could protect their interest in tracking, but it looks like they all have something. The only downside I can think of is that the URLs might disappear and a site owner would need to update their site to get sharing working again (assuming a new link is available). But I can't imagine that happening too often and it's not like anyone ever died because share buttons didn't work for a minute.
