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Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

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Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#92

It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers. And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and lande…

LinkedIn = Instagram for business people.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#93
post #25

LinkedIn is missing a major feature, different classes of connections. Your network is meaningless when it’s full of recruiters as well as people you actually worked with.

linked in doesn’t solve the networking problem. maybe i’m different but i’ve never reached out to anyone over linked in to “network”. if i needed to do that i would call, text, email. linked ins real purpose is a search engine for recruiters to contact you. your whole contact list could be recruiters and no colleagues and it would be the same website

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#94

It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers. And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and lande…

> it's not polite to call out BS But it's perfectly fine to spew BS if you do it politely. The "politeness" weapon has been used on me many times

You can use the same sort of polite etiquette in well crafted form to undermine these polite attacks. It takes quick thinking and usually works best in the form of an open ended question that sets the BS in its place. No one says anything explicitly but everyone internally acknowledges it. It may be a bit passive aggressive but such is most modern business culture and meetings.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#95

It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers. And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and lande…

A friend and I have a mini-hobby of sharing these with each other under the title of “Today in Thanking Myself”. The highest level are the ones where people pimp out their own families for LinkedIn karma

That’s by far the worst. Something bad happens to their family and they make a post about it! I have seen examples too terrible to post as a comment (assume something very bad happened and the next day theres a post on jt)

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#96
Counterpoint: as it is with Facebook, the quality of your feed depends entirely on your connections and who among those connections you have chosen to mute/unfollow. I have over a 1000 connections and I've assiduously unfollowed/muted anyone in my network or adjacent to my network who posts anything that I feel is not substantial.

A sample of interactions I had recently:

Discussing cost/benefit of going for hybrid/private cloud deployments while discussing this article with another company's VP Eng: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...

Reminiscing over (paper) mechanical drawings from university days and reconnecting with a few colleagues I've lost touch with in the intervening 20 years.

Interior designs of some of the newer office spaces in the city that are aimed at tech startups.

Comparing notes on the "Messy Middle" of startups with another founder.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#97
I think the news feed on LinkedIn is an absolute cesspool, but it's not hard to see why. It has the same "look at me!" dynamics of any social network, and in addition it has the "any present or potential future employer, look at how great I am", too.

So you end up with a combination of sappy "look at this insightful business anecdote I have!" combined with then lots of over-congratulatory posts because nobody wants to offend a potential job contact. Never have so many words been said that say so little.

Still, I feel that for its core purpose, connecting with known business contacts and job hunting, LinkedIn does a fine job. They just have to layer on all this other useless functionality to give legions of product people, designers and engineers something to do.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#98
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many post on HN added value to my life, and it happens on a regular basis. As for posts shared on LI, I mainly feel awkward reading them. You know that when someone suddenly got active on LI they either got fired or are looking for prospects. It's just a kind of weird game, more so that people basically have to use their real names and reveal their employment history in order to benefit from the site, so they're part…

It’s amazing how antithetical this is to requiring real identity. Proponents say anonymity is the cause of spam and all sorts of unwanted content online. Yet using one’s real identity can end up just being terribly inauthentic.

I never say anything I really think or feel under my real name which isn't utterly benign and uncontroversial. There is a profound sense of unsafeness when you're in full public view like that. It seems almost unavoidable that the end result is almost entirely watered down blathering.

I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#100
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can indeed curate, but I definitely get the vibe that cringe is the default mode on LinkedIn (which is still strictly better than Twitter’s default mode, toxicity).

Maybe, social media curation is a skill that not many people posess.

Maybe curating LinkedIn is a skill that not many people desire to possess. I have an account because it's expected when you're looking for a job. I'm not interested in articles about business or whatever the good content on LinkedIn is supposed to be.
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