RSS
Stop that! Web trends that need to go
Every now and then I come across a new web trend that I find preemptively vestigial.
Today’s trend is the ever-irritating urge for news and blog sites to include feeds displaying the re-tweets of a particular article or post.
Example:
Witness a TIME news feed article about the Glee season finale. That’s all well and good (aside from, perhaps, the use of the word “addicting”). But look at what you get when you scroll to the bottom of the page:
From the perspective of a site manager or editor, this sort of re-tweet tracking tool may be quite helpful. It allows for great statistical analysis and popularity tracking (it’s also underhandedly beneficial for SEO.)
It has, however, no place whatsoever on the front end of the site.
As the above graphic illustrates, this scroll-bar-generating list of people re-tweeting the article is irrelevant to me as a reader. This is largely because the feed reads less like an evolving conversation… and more like a particularly dull game of “telephone”.
Aside from occasional brief accompanying statements, none of these Twitter users are contributing anything to the content of the article. They’re not really meant to, after all; a re-tweet is about sharing content, not constructing new ideas.
So: if you want to track your re-tweets that’s all well and good, but please resist the urge to show them to me. Instead, keep that real estate focused on materials that really add something to my experience as a reader. Make me want to engage, or point me to other materials on your site that naturally relate to what I’m reading.
If you do, I’ll be more inclined to stick around.
Categories Digital Media
Twitter
LinkedIn
Nice spot and love the way you have called them out on it.
I have always wondered what value showing RT’s offers and was rather irked by it too. At least turn the practice into something useful
Some things are best left in history, much like the need for developers to show site visitors how long it took to generate a page!!!
I’m with you on this. Although perhaps sites that do this are trying to encourage readers to retweet by showing them that “other people are RTing it, too.” I don’t know.
I’m curious to know what other trends you’d like to see vanquished. One that I’m realizing I need to stop myself is the need to “spice up” my blog posts with numerous links. Trying to find the balance between giving credit where it’s due vs. enticing readers to get distracted and not finish the blog. Your thoughts?
I think links are best used for direct references to external content (e.g. I was reading this (link)TIME article(/link) the other day…) or providing readers with information on something that isn’t considered general knowledge.
For example, if I’m writing a post on the battle of Gettysburg, it may make sense to litter the post with links to reference pages about specifically mentioned individuals (like linking to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s wiki page, etc).
At the same time, I try to put myself in the position of a reader. I’m here to read this article. Am I really going to want to click a link that takes me away from this article as I’m reading it? Not likely. I’ll probably wait until I’ve finished reading the whole piece, then click the link. The issue here is that if there are too many links, the queue becomes overwhelming.
So as you say, it’s a balancing act. Perhaps finding test readers to ask or attempting to extract yourself from the position of author and into the position of reader is a good method for success.
In total agreement with the redundancy of displaying RTs – I think the RT button with a count is enough to show social proof (although why so many of us will only RT what others think is cool is beyond me).
As far as links go, I like to see links within the post if it helps me to understand the people/place/events referenced. Not every reader will know what you’re referring to, so an external link helps with that. And of course, linking to your own relevant content can help keep people interested.
Thanks!
[...] Companies have banned Twitter at work, citing claims of reduced productivity. There are even apps whose sole reason for being is filtering Twitter’s noise. As Twitter’s become more popular, sites have started to pull tweets onto their pages, often to the claim — sometimes rightfully — that they’re too redundant. [...]