Live data from Hacker News

Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

elliotcsmith.com

101–110 of 405 posts

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#101

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' > Doing work that matters might. This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. > Go for depth over…

[dead]

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#102
In a corporation-dominated economy, LinkedIn can't produce anything different... People are limited in what they can say. On LI, you are representing your employer to some extent. You can't just post all your juicy gossip or crazy takes.

At best, you can nerd-out in your subject area, but even that's limited as you risk being seen as either a show-off or you may make a mistake one day and be shuned for it. It's kind of high-stakes. It's like social networking but with your employer potentially scrutinizing your posts.

On LI, people are always one bad post away from losing their income. You're never going to get fully honest takes in such environment.

The only people who can share everything honestly on LI are people who are very predictable and basically don't have any opinion about anything... Not the most exciting kinds of people.

Though at least this self-censorship boringness ceiling does make it easier to get eyeballs for your content if you're willing to get risky. It's easier for content to stand out.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#105
post #52

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' > Doing work that matters might. This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. > Go for depth over…

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT

And written in a very specific way

Not like that. Like this.

The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.

And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.

It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.

And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.

I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn

But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.

That sounds like mediocrity to me.

In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#107

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' > Doing work that matters might. This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. > Go for depth over…

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO s…

If it leads to someone purchasing a solution that solves a need, how is that zero value?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#108
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO s…

This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?

They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.
Post reply on HN