I Don't Share Well With Others

One of the thing that's baffled me over the years is this urge people have to put one-click-share buttons on their web content. The idea being that this content you've just discovered has transformed your life so much that it must immediately be disseminated to your followers such that they can bask in a similar enlightenment.

This was annoying when it was just "Digg!" "Slashdot!" "Blog This!" and one or two others. But one weblog I read through RSS takes the cake so far:



By my count that's 18 ways to share this content through the social media clouds. And it is worse through RSS, since each one of those icons is translated into a list of text links for the RSS feed. Sometimes the list of potential ways to share the post exceeds the content of the post its self!



The whole thing smacks slightly of excessive ego to me -- that your content is so important that it should be as easy as possible to spread the word. More than a bit ridiculous.

Personally if I find something that I want to share, I'll deal with the distribution of the goodness.

Similarly, if someone finds my words worth sharing, I place the burden of sharing on them, since they are the ones who want to do it.

(Oh, and in the unlikely event said blogger finds his way here -- I'm not picking on you, you were just the most handy example. You are in my RSS reader, which means I do read you, and that counts for something.)