Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

Yes, and I assume my reply will also be broadcast to my network. Even folks that agree are likely to see this sort of calling out as petty.

I use LinkedIn as a professional identity placeholder and online resume for HR groups. I ignore pretty much all the posts because much of what I've sampled has been trash.

I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.

Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.

It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.

I’d love to see metrics on how many linkedin posts have unrealistic icebergs physics.

Almost every time I log in to check the same spam message someone is posting about success and illustrating it with an iceberg.

Tangentially related and fun: https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html

LinkedIn is a sewer where all the shit is sprinkled with insight hustle glitter.

The feeds are like one of those SEO robot sites instead of bullshitting search engines it's people hoping for some great career insight.

Oh no... I'm doing it right now.

Off the top of my head, it would have the tone of Facebook before they allowed public accounts outside of schools and right after they introduced news feed, it would be aggressively moderated, and it would cost enough money per month that people would think twice before engaging in a behavior that led to an account getting banned or using bots. There would be an initial setup fee of at least $100 along with a monthly subscription fee, and getting an account banned would result in a total loss of your payments and deletion of your profile.

* Users would explicitly agree that their profile posts are subject to moderation.

* Profiles would be private and users would be heavily discouraged from using a real name. Friending someone else would require an out of band secret key exchange. A new key would be required to add each person to a group and the entire group would be informed when a new user was added. The only people with real visibility would be the mods.

* There would be no advertising or tracking.

* The service would be located in a country that doesn't immediately bend over for Five Eyes, China, or Russia.

* There would be no org pages or corp accounts.

* Anyone holding public office, running for public office, or affiliated with a political campaign would be explicitly banned from using it at the EULA level. Group pages with more than X members would automatically be flagged for periodic review, and obvious attempts at political organizing for a campaign or movement such as BLM or the Proud Boys (chosen purely as examples of political movements) would result in a ban for all affiliated accounts.

* Egregious (as in obviously intentionally hostile rather than ignorant or inadvertent) racism, sexism, bigotry, etc would result in a ban.

* Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.

* Any attempt at bulk data collection would result in your account being suspended and flagged for review.

You get the idea. Social networks should be about sharing fun content with your real life social network. They should not be about self promotion, BS drama, politics, disinformation campaigns, advertising, influencing, branding, etc.