For me, broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, fb like, etc) brings back little in return. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for reputation purposes but it does not make me feel gratified.<p>Now consider HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable. Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked" (exception being, you threaten their reputation). And i'll always leave a comment here versus on the creators website (as i hate comments coming up in google searches for my name). In the end, HN completely alters how i interact with content.<p>HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but that comes at a cost. Some content creators may not even wish for stories to be here and get sucked into this bubble. For content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet.<p>What i wonder is: Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally? Should this change the social media strategy of content originators?<p>{sidenote: Dick Costello should bring down voting and up voting to tweets}