Smell Your Destiny was a 1995 web project that parodied our culture’s relentless quest for success. Created by Sonya Rapoport, the project revolved around using fish gills and chemicals to help develop desirable traits in humans that translate to success, as determined by Rapoport, including competitiveness, toughness, and gregariousness. (No, this is not scientifically feasible.)

Smell Your Destiny is unabashedly web 1.0. The graphics, the bizarre URL, the navigation, all proudly proclaim the 90s web. Also interesting is that there is nothing telling you to share or tweet this, no pressure to join a weekly newsletter, and certainly no hyper-relevant ads touting size 10.5 sneakers or disposable razors. It’s all just weird pictures of fish paired with zany writing.

When I finished exploring the site I tweeted about it. I wanted to share this fun window to yesteryear–I needed no prompting.

This is something that I, as a marketer, often forget–that if something is fun or valuable people will probably tell their friends, even if a giant Share button isn’t nearby.

Try and envision a website as an art gallery. The gallery does not have large signs telling you where to look and walk, and it doesn’t tell you to tell all your friends about this piece of art. Instead, the gallery suggests user paths via organization of pieces, and lighting and architecture. It understands that if you have a good enough time you’ll probably tell Susanne and the girls.

Content creators crudely advise sharing in the hopes it’ll create more attention–a strategy which has been advocated by popular social sources including Mashable and Hubspot. Both claim, and back up with statistics, that explicitly telling users to take specific actions results in higher user engagement rates. I trust both sources’ statistics, but am skeptical of the long-term worth of such brash strategies.

The writers and thinkers who have digitally earned my respect also respect my attention. They don’t force me to take actions, aren’t sensational, and don’t use many exclamation points–and if any of these do happen I simply stop following them on Twitter.

I’ll close with a humorous bit from the Oatmeal.

Reed Immer is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Response