When I share a link on Facebook, I’m sharing a part of myself.
That sounds disgusting, I realize. But the idea is that I don’t just vomit out content on social media. I carefully curate what, when and how I share media. I take pride in it.
It’s a “My name is Joshua Errett and I approve this content”-type thing.
Frictionless sharing is the opposite. It takes the heavy lifting – if you can call it that – out of sharing. There are no links to cut-and-paste, no Like buttons to click. You shared the article without sharing the article.
News organizations like the Huffington Post created these apps, called “social readers.” Read one of their articles via Facebook and that article gets posted to your wall automatically.
Somehow, these readers were a hit.
But in mid-April, the use of frictionless sharing plummeted. On April 11, the Guardian, Washington Post, Yahoo, Mashable and most other news websites with auto-sharing apps on Facebook took a nosedive – some losing almost 50 per cent of traffic from social readers. The decline continues.
Spectacular. Good news all around. Finally. It took almost a year – frictionless sharing was introduced in 2011 at Facebook’s F8 conference – but it seemed that this bit of social media engineering was finally getting the reaction it deserved.
Alas, a mass revolt it was not. Turned out Facebook had made changes to its news feed that affected the numbers significantly, dropping daily usage of some readers by hundreds of thousands of clicks. (A reminder that Facebook is very much in control of sharing.)
Though a majority of readers agree with me – only 28 per cent of HuffPo readers have accepted the conditions of its app – frictionless sharing lives on.
So if you hate this sort of intrusive broadcasting of your reading habits simply because you clicked on a story but still need to read it, take one of the following actions:
Deny it. When the app asks for permission, click Cancel. It may let you proceed to the story. If not, accept, read your precious story, then go to Account Settings > Apps and delete the social reader app immediately.
Browse around it. Firefox and Chrome both have browser add-ons that magically go around the Facebook apps, so you don’t agree to autosharing but you can still read the articles.
Share with yourself. Change the privacy settings of the app. Instead of sharing each and every article you read with your friends, change the privacy to “Only Me.”
Google it. Take the headline of the story and throw it into Google.
Clicking on a Like or Recommend button had never truly been a source of “friction,” so there’s really no need for frictionless sharing.
Removing the active, creative parts from the sharing process is a bald corporate marketing ploy. It takes the fun out of sharing and, by extension, out of Facebook.
joshuae@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/joshuaerrett
