There’s a terrible plague happening on the Web today. Social media buttons are blaring from almost every site imaginable. Each time you load a page, there they are again! They entreat you to ???like this??? or ???tweet that??? or ???+1??? whatever. It’s gotten almost unbearable over the last couple of years.
The sad and pathetic thing is that social media buttons may be very much a one-way street for a lot of sites. They take from a site but they may not give back much or anything in return for the space they occupy on pages. Publishers glom these stupid buttons all over their pages, expecting vast amounts of traffic in return. But who really wins? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the publishers a lot of the time.