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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

elliotcsmith.com

111–120 of 405 posts

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#111

LinkedIn is a vanity fair, and I'm not sure why it even matters in 2025 — it's just a job board when you need it.

How else are you going to liquidity-stalk that company you left with some options or even shares?

I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#112

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…

Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#113
post #22

> 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. The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product. It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depr…

If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#114
post #92

LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol). I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird. What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn. Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.

I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.

The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.

I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#115

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…

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#116
post #32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boomers have retired.

Gen X usually gets lumped in with boomers because they’re basically invisible. But Gen X DGAF either way.

Boomer is now used to refer to a mindset and not just a generation.

Gen X very much became the boomers they hated. Half of the millennials I've known for years have become identical to the boomers they complained about 10 years ago. The millennials I know complain about zoomers being lazy and not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and using strange lingo and being addicted to things their generation wouldn't have tolerated. And they things they like suck but the thing millennials liked were "good".

Basically, boomer is anyone older than you and acts like a grumpy or entitled old person. Zoomer is anyone younger than you who makes you uncomfortable with your age.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#118
post #94
post #22

> 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. The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product. It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depr…

I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more…

The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.

If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.

There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#119

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…

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

As a counter example to the logic, not saying linkedin is this, smashing up someone's stuff could also make them need to buy new stuff to solve a need but wouldn't in any way provide value.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#120

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…

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

If someone has a legitimate need, they will look for a solution in appropriate locations (directories, search, magazines, what have you) and do not need someone to scream their marketing blurbs into the void in hopes of being noticed.
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