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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

elliotcsmith.com

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Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#181

Post by Aurornis »

Shacklz wrote: 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…

> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.

Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.

But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#182

Post by Avicebron »

This post made me open linkedin..

The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager"..

They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror, pulls a strip down and sticks her phone back to the tape.

Seems like she's a bad manager. Obviously tape doesn't go over the mirror, well she's leveled up her skills in the next few seconds. She installs the brilliantly designed mirror-mount-phone-holder-multi-axis.png (TM).

No she's a good manager, she's meeting her employees in the middle, both passenger and driver can pull the phone right next to their face in case they need to see the map. Good managing! Fractional leadership!

I do wonder when the next car digs itself into a ditch, whether putting the phone in front of the drivers face was ideal. But hey, I'm just a lay-engineer struggling to form a sentence with an aw shucks look, far from the hallowed halls of what an MBA or fractional CTO could know.

This seems emblematic of something...

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#183

Post by torginus »

notahacker wrote: post #105
oytis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My impression was all 'content' that does well on LinkedIn (including the stuff I like), is because people want to engage with the creator in hopes they get in their good graces which will somehow help them land a job, or they're in a pact with others and like each others' content.

Recommending others and getting recommended by folks whose word means something might be meaningful, but that's about it.

Regular (and often painfully below average) rubes with a dozen self-appointed titles (SaaS platform evnagelist, Innovator, Tinkerer, Father), who post articles like 'Here's what murdering a homeless man taught me about b2b sales' are the definition of cringe.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#184

Post by motorest »

fhd2 wrote: post #94
Shacklz wrote: 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…

> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.

This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.

I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#185

Post by raghava »

Disaster stemming from the deadly combo of Dunning Kruger effect + network effect + recommendation algorithms floating similar BS up top.

Most who post absolute BS on such "professional" forums as a way to gain a larger "network" easily attract similar ones with relatable mediocrity index. The network effect kicks in and mediocrity gets amplified.

Everyone thus gets forced to either to act insanely ridiculous or just GTFO to retain whatever little sanity they have left in them.

Most corporate jobs are just mediocrity-maxxing absolutely BS jobs. It is only natural that the most popular corporate SM amplifies and promotes BS and mediocrity at scale.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#186

Post by sssilver »

Semi-related — why don’t we create a service in which people make employment “claims” and other people (their managers/customers) sign these claims with their own keys, so these claims can be cryptographically verified by a third party in a distributed fashion?

This way, Linkedins basic premise of being a centralized “CV as a service” would become obsolete, leaving just the social network, which I personally would gladly abandon.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#187

Post by cootsnuck »

Henchman21 wrote: post #128
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting. Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers. But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sal…

Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.

So what are the people with worthwhile products and services supposed to do then? Just not engage in marketing? Sincere question.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#188

Post by Aurornis »

Avicebron wrote: post #182

This post made me open linkedin.. The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager".. They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror,…

> This post made me open linkedin..

> The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know

The two common failure points for developers using social media are getting triggered at the first instance of content they dislike in the feed and not following sources of content they want to read.

Nobody should feel compelled to use any social media if they don’t want or have to. If you actually want to understand what other people see in the platform, though, you have to understand how they use it.

Any social media with a feed requires an ability to skim and filter. If you stop and read the obviously low quality content to either hate-read or to get triggered then you won’t make it far on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Hacker News comments.

Second, you have to curate your sources. If you strongly dislike a post then use mechanisms to see less of it. If you want to see more of something then like it. Follow people who produce good content. Once you’ve given the algorithms some signal the content improves to your liking, even though it’s not perfect.

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