11–20 of 290 posts
I never understood why I always got so depressed reading LinkedIn, until I read The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao. And then I saw that LinkedIn consists almost entirely of clueless people talking to other clueless people, and exclusively in posturetalk (these are Rao’s terms - “clueless” means something specific). And if you haven’t read The Gervais Principle, I highly recommend it, although it may bum you out.
LinkedIn probably has a net benefit for your career by keeping up to date and checking the messages once a week, but I cannot get over the awkwardness of seeing total BS stories and thousands of replies saying "YES! AMEN!". "I was running late to an interview this morning but stopped to help a man who fell off of his bike and fixed it up for him. Afterwards I bought him a coffee and talked about life. He mentioned ho…
It serves an important function, and I have used it to find work and connect with former colleagues. But I think by ratcheting up the social media style attention algorithms, the company has been strip mining their credibility, and there is not much left
I would guess that way more people are on LinkedIn than Twitter. Most of the work-force is on the former, mostly only technologists, journalists, and artists on the latter. I have friends in the traditional London banking community who absolutely don't know how to engage genuinely with social media and probably aren't interested in learning, but they're there on LinkedIn, talking in the traditional corporate language…
Ah so that's why twitter is so insufferable
The thing that's been around the longest that always bugged me was: Getting endorsed for skills by people who have no ability to evaluate my competency at those skills. It's so shallow and badly designed at its job. But like every social network out there, it's buoyed by its inertia and network effects, and will last far longer than it should given its quality beyond the size of its network of users.
LinkedIn probably has a net benefit for your career by keeping up to date and checking the messages once a week, but I cannot get over the awkwardness of seeing total BS stories and thousands of replies saying "YES! AMEN!". "I was running late to an interview this morning but stopped to help a man who fell off of his bike and fixed it up for him. Afterwards I bought him a coffee and talked about life. He mentioned ho…
LinkedIn probably has a net benefit for your career by keeping up to date and checking the messages once a week, but I cannot get over the awkwardness of seeing total BS stories and thousands of replies saying "YES! AMEN!". "I was running late to an interview this morning but stopped to help a man who fell off of his bike and fixed it up for him. Afterwards I bought him a coffee and talked about life. He mentioned ho…
Every community slides into its own stereotype like becoming a caricature of itself, but it's not objectively a bad thing, just strange to outsiders while the regulars are just fine with HN as it is. Oops, I mean LinkedIn.
I never understood why I always got so depressed reading LinkedIn, until I read The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao. And then I saw that LinkedIn consists almost entirely of clueless people talking to other clueless people, and exclusively in posturetalk (these are Rao’s terms - “clueless” means something specific). And if you haven’t read The Gervais Principle, I highly recommend it, although it may bum you out.
This post, verbatim, would go viral on LinkedIn.
Everyone knows it's bullshit, but this kind of toxic/fake positivity is demanded, and weirdly, it works even though everyone knows it's fake.