Do we like the share buttons? Do people use them?

Question

I'm not a facebook or twitter user, and this question might be a reflection of that, but I wonder if people like the little share links near every question.

I guess this question will have several parts

1. Design: do we need to have these ugly (IMHO) icons blatantly located near the "action" (the voting and favorite buttons)?
2. Do people use these links or are we polluting our retinas for nothing?
3. How did twitter and facebook get selected? I mean there must be tens, if not hundreds of these things now...why choose two? why these two?
4. Perhaps a different design? how about a "share" link that opens (upon hover or click) to show a grid of possible social networking sites?

Answer 1

They are there to help to promote the site. Granted, not every user will use them. We chose Facebook and Twitter because they're the two most popular ones. I frequently search Twitter on mentions of the Stackexchange sites. People do use them.

I don't think these two icons are obtrusive. However, I'm open to change the styling of them.

It's hard to imagine that the same audience will appreciate a question like "Does TikZ use the same internal mechanism as PSTricks to produce vector based pdf outputs?", and be able to elaborate on the fine points of, say, dvips and pdflatex differences. It's just not the right kind of media for the stuff we're dealing here, and definitely not the right audience.

I respectfully disagree. When it comes to Twitter, most follow the circle of people who are in the same interest group. Imagine if @textip tweeted a TeX.se question, it'd be beneficial to his 1100+ followers. Also the TeX.se will gain some potentional users too. There are many people on twitter who tweet TeX related things.

Full disclosure: I'm an avid Twitter user. However, it took me a long time to "get" Twitter. All social media sites are what you make of them. When it comes to Twitter, if you find the right people to follow, it's very very beneficial. It may take some follow/unfollow to get to a comfortable point though.

Answer 2

I hadn't noticed them until now. Personally, I don't like them and wouldn't use them.

Answer 3

1. Putting these buttons —often called social bookmarking tags, but let's call them syndication bullshit— on everything is current SEO best practice: gathering "organic" links is crucial to any web-centric business, and Twitter and Facebook are two of the most important sites for this.

   They're not very obtrusive. Be thankful that there are no Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Blink List, Stumble Upon, &c., buttons. Stack Exchange is VC funded, and I wonder if there might be more pressure in the future to crank up this aspect. I note that SO doesn't have the buttons.

2. Good question. I guess some people must do.

3. The other sites are not as big. Not even close.

4. That's common. It gives a more complex UI, which the Stack Exchange team don't like.

Answer 4

Facebook and Twitter are fairly good when you need to share the latest funny picture of your cat, have found an ostensibly hilarious video that you absolutely need to show to everybody, or post an update what you had for breakfast.

It's hard to imagine that the same audience will appreciate a question like "Does TikZ use the same internal mechanism as PSTricks to produce vector based pdf outputs?", and be able to elaborate on the fine points of, say, dvips and pdflatex differences. It's just not the right kind of media for the stuff we're dealing here, and definitely not the right audience. Those might work for other SE sites (can't imagine which, though), but not for us. So, as Will says -- ignore.

For those of LinkedIn persuasion (or other professional networks, local interest groups etc.), question sharing could be beneficial, but SE doesn't support anything like that currently.

Full disclosure: I use both Facebook and Twitter occasionally.