Thanks for the response. I fully get why you're doing it and appreciate the options to turn them off. With that said, it's really just a band-aid to appease the vocal opponents.
My mental model of sharing (and I'd bet it's shared by many others as well) is that there needs to be an explicit "sharing action" taken. I should know exactly what happens when I do something - I don't on your site. As a result, I never get to the "aha" moment because I'm afraid to click on anything.
You are definitely right and we'll be continually looking at better ways to integrate seamless sharing into the app.
Seamless sharing is also a "band-aid." It gets users sharing your app at the beginning but there's definitely some users who are turned off by it.
So although this is where a lot of our referral traffic comes from at the moment there are undoubtedly better ways to do this and we're working on it. These are early iterations on the product and we'll be circling back very soon.
My mental model of sharing (and I'd bet it's shared by many others as well) is that there needs to be an explicit "sharing action" taken. I should know exactly what happens when I do something - I don't on your site. As a result, I never get to the "aha" moment because I'm afraid to click on anything.