/reader

Here’s the idea:

• You have a bunch images
• Each image is a real-life og:image pulled from an online article
• You try to guess the title of the article based solely off the social share image

For example, can you guess the title of the article for this image?

Is it:

1. The ultimate guide to developer happiness
2. Florida woman wins $500,000 at Georgia/Alabama football game
3. A guide to sizing wedding rings
4. The key to building high-performing teams

Answer: it’s an article from slack.com and its real title is number 4 above.

Did you get it right?

Without question, we seem to have accepted (and stretch ourselves to support) this idea that every web page in the entire world should should be annotated with an image that encapsulates its contents into a single, visual expression.

This game is meant to illustrate the absurdity of this notion in both principle and real-world execution.

Why Make The Game?

I often vent about social share imagery to anyone who will listen — both in person and on my blog.

Sometimes a satirical game can convey the idea better than words.

What’s Wrong With Social Share Images?

Nothing inherently.

But because they’re possible, everyone feels like they’re leaving clicks and pageviews on the table if they don’t implement them.

“You’re not going to have an image for every post? Are you a crazy person?! People are 1,267% more likely to click through to your website if you have one!”

So everyone makes them, and as a result they end up stretching themselves — and the meaning between the image the content — to come up with these images.

That article has a picture of a clock? It could be about anything, such as:

• Time management & productivity
• History of clocks and time keeping
• Time dilation and physics
• Aging and mortality
• Technological advancements in timekeeping
• Time travel and fiction
• Biological clocks

It could also have nothing to do with clocks and just be an article for a technical blog where nobody could come up with a better idea of how to visually express “Latest news from our release of [insert codebase name here]”.

For anybody who has done it, the task of coming up with a good image for every article is a tough one. The web has turned everyone into a publisher, but not everyone is backed by a large media corporation that employs people to do this task as their full-time job. If you as an individual or a small group of people try to compete with the quality of social share imagery from media publications, it’ll never be as good. Full stop. In other words: you’ll never be as good at the game as the companies who do it for a living, so the only way to win is not to play the game.

Or, you can try to compete and then you reach for automation. As Nicholas Carr says, “The endless labor of self-expression cries out for the efficiency of automation.” But automated social share images have their downfalls:

• They’re bland and generic (e.g. stock photography or AI-generated imagery)
• They’re unrelated to the content (e.g. abstract computer-generated patterns and shapes)
• They’re duplicative (e.g. an image with text for the title and description of the article, which is already included in og:title and og:description and, on many social sites, displayed under the image itself)

So What Are They Good For?

Social share images are basically billboards on the information superhighway. Perhaps they were intended to convey additional context about the article, but in practice they’re really just screaming to catch your eye (and attention) and hopefully make you click.

Perhaps even better than a contextual image summarizing the content of the article, these images should just have some flamboyant visual with giant, bold type set in Impact that says, “BET YOU COULD NEVER GUESS WHAT IS HERE! CLICK TO FIND OUT!!!"

Look I get it. Social platforms are giving you the chance to have a free billboard, one that might grab the attention of all the people passing it by in their feeds. Why wouldn’t you leverage a free billboard?

I mean this game, which makes fun of social share images, even has one. So who the hell am I to say anything?

Nobody really, just another person on the internet.

Again, you can check out the game at: omgimg.jim-nielsen.com

Reply via: Email :: Mastodon :: Twitter