I understand philosophers like Sarte and Kant would agree that the moral thing to do here is not use a plug-in that lets us nerds cheerily use links generated by an evil feature without harming ourselves (by auto-sharing what we read), but rather choose not to follow such links and to warn our often-unwitting friends that they are auto-sharing content merely by reading it.
Because the question is, what is the effect if others were to act like ourselves?
One action still rewards these evil social reader / frictionless sharing apps.
It actually has no effect on the market, it's the same as if I searched for the name of the article in Google. Companies can't tell that I'm using the link for the app or not. I do agree though on discouraging your friends to use these things and I think it's important to point out to people that they are autosharing without really understanding what they are doing.
If an article looks interesting, I usually comment saying, "Sounds interesting; I'm not going to use that social reader app, but I will look up the article later." That lets people know that if they really want their friends to read an article they'll get more bites if they post it as a link. Fewer people using the app does affect the market, and the plugin removes the main disincentive to using it, which is that your friends will ignore the links you post. It's better to raise awareness of that disincentive than to bypass it.
Pet peeve: conjecture stated with the adverb "actually."
It’s a guess, man. And I am not convinced. Consider that the traffic for that page is still higher now – a data point in favor of "frictionless sharing" if, say the company is testing randomly enabling it for certain articles. Separately, the fact is now you contributed a page view and perhaps a tiny bit of ad revenue in response to seeing an auto-shared article.
Comments
I understand philosophers like Sarte and Kant would agree that the moral thing to do here is not use a plug-in that lets us nerds cheerily use links generated by an evil feature without harming ourselves (by auto-sharing what we read), but rather choose not to follow such links and to warn our often-unwitting friends that they are auto-sharing content merely by reading it.
Because the question is, what is the effect if others were to act like ourselves?
One action still rewards these evil social reader / frictionless sharing apps.
The alternative helps impede them.
I know which world I want to help create.
It actually has no effect on the market, it's the same as if I searched for the name of the article in Google. Companies can't tell that I'm using the link for the app or not. I do agree though on discouraging your friends to use these things and I think it's important to point out to people that they are autosharing without really understanding what they are doing.
If an article looks interesting, I usually comment saying, "Sounds interesting; I'm not going to use that social reader app, but I will look up the article later." That lets people know that if they really want their friends to read an article they'll get more bites if they post it as a link. Fewer people using the app does affect the market, and the plugin removes the main disincentive to using it, which is that your friends will ignore the links you post. It's better to raise awareness of that disincentive than to bypass it.
Often I don’t even see an option to comment on these stories! — Especially when they appear as little lists of articles people have been reading.
All the plugin does is launch a Google search. It's the same manual bypass that I would have done anyway.
Pet peeve: conjecture stated with the adverb "actually."
It’s a guess, man. And I am not convinced. Consider that the traffic for that page is still higher now – a data point in favor of "frictionless sharing" if, say the company is testing randomly enabling it for certain articles. Separately, the fact is now you contributed a page view and perhaps a tiny bit of ad revenue in response to seeing an auto-shared article.
It probably does still matter.
I feel like the quality of the 'read' articles is even lower then of 'shared' ones.