Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

Except LinkedIn shares anything that people interact with. It’s almost impossible to avoid the cruft imo

The post is absolutely correct, but this is one of those "let 'em whirl" things for me (inside joke -it just means that if it's none of my business, I am under no obligation to make it my business).

I have a LinkedIn profile. It's minimally active. I post links to some of my GitHub repos, and dust off the mantlepiece, every now and then. I make sure it's up to date and accurate.

I can't even imagine using it like Facebook. The main reason I keep it, is so that I can direct people to a fairly bland place to find out about me, professionally. I'm not really looking for work, but it helps people to take me seriously.

If I want them to find out more about me personally, I'll give 'em my phone number, and we'll do lunch.

I seem to be in the minority, there. I have seen honest-to-God disinformation and rancor trolls on LinkedIn; just like on Facebook and Twitter. They are quite transparent, but they also generate thousands of "likes," and comments.

Um...no thanks. I don't think I want to go on record liking something like that.

The rather disturbing things, are people sharing about personal emotional traumas, and 12-step recovery anniversaries. Unless they work in the therapeutic/rehabilitation field, that's irrelevant (and probably quite harmful -not everyone is forgiving or understanding).

Those stories can be deeply motivating and helpful, but not on LinkedIn.

The past year has been interesting. The way we interact with each other IRL seems to have been affected.

I've noticed a huge uptick in people minding other peoples' business. Things like chiming into overheard conversations between strangers, offering advice or criticism; despite never being asked for it, etc.

This has always been an issue, but it has become exponentially worse, over this last year. I'm really noticing it, recently, with people emerging from their caves, like the final scene of Surrogates.

I suspect that one reason might be that the principal medium for personal interaction for many of us has been online communities, this last year, and the rules are quite different online, than IRL.

For example, I would not say what I am writing right now, in most IRL interactions.

I think we may have some adjusting to do over the next few months.

The problem with this is well-stated in Brandolini's Law [0]: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

So, effectively, this means that given equivalent amounts of effort, you've got 10 people producing bullshit for every 1 refuting it effectively. Thus the bullshit continues to spread.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

I removed all recruiters and similar, leaving only people I know and (mostly) other engineers... And even then I basically only check the notifications anyhow.

So I consider myself fortunate; by not taking LinkedIn that seriously, I've avoided a lot of... awkwardness, to put it nicely.

> www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed

This filter is absolutely perfect! I NEED LinkedIn as I actually get job offers via it, but all the other crap on there can go to hell.