Aaron Swartz, speaking via video conference to a room full of people at a technology conference in India:
In addition, online news sites started noticing that Reddit could send them vast amounts of traffic. They somehow thought they could encourage this by adding “reddit this” links to all of their articles. As far as I know, adding such links doesn’t actually improve your chances of being popular on Reddit (although it does make your site look more ugly), but it did give us lots of free advertising.
You’ve all seen them, right? The useless buttons to pimp your article on the link-pimping network of your choice. It’s been bullshit all along, and here is also former Reddit developer Aaron telling you it doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? It’s simple.
People pimp the links they like. People don’t pimp the links that are convenient to pimp. Some people might, and some sites might also consist entirely of contributors who do, but you’re likely to leave that site soon since you don’t want to read stuff that’s easy to link to, just stuff that’s good.
So remove the fucking buttons. It’s line noise. It also sends a very specific message:
“I want people to pimp my articles more badly than I want you to have an enjoyable experience reading them. In fact, the reason the button is even there is because I’m so confident my writing’s crappy, I think no one would pimp my article if I didn’t provide it. Wait, I wasn’t supposed to own up to that. What I really mean is that I’m a total ass and, convinced that I am that everyone is going to pimp my article regardless, I might as well assume that my readers’ pimpmobile bookmarklets are temporarily incapacitated and take pleasure in being able to provide a convenient service to those readers at the expense of wasted bandwidth, attention and valuable time of the rest of my readers.”
Or, shorter:
“I am a jerk.”