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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

#191

Post by wohoef »

Aurornis wrote: post #181
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…

In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#192

Post by simianwords »

alansammarone wrote: post #177
simianwords wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like saying your product is good unless it is bad and there are other alternatives

What? Your project might be good or bad, if it's bad/low quality/low effort and you take sales away from a better option by abusing human biases (such as recency bias), then you're destroying (potential, not actual) value.

What if your product is good and you want people to purchase it?

Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#193

Post by appease7727 »

etra0 wrote: 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.

LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.

The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.

Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#194

Post by cootsnuck »

oytis wrote: post #125
notahacker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area. Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain…

Now here's the question then...do you wish those outstandingly good engineers (who do seem to want to share their thoughts hence the blogs and conferences) were sharing some of their good thoughts on LinkedIn?

Do we wish more worthwhile people were posting on LinkedIn? Or do we think that posting on LI is incompatible with sharing worthwhile thoughts?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#195

Post by simianwords »

alansammarone wrote: post #180
simianwords wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean. You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. It’s not always like that and you are removing agency from the person purchasing the product.

No so much "stupid", just full of biases and somewhat lazy. This is a well-researched and documented fact. Knowingly abusing these biases to get them to buy or use something that they either don't need - or, worse, buying a low quality/low effort product when better alternatives exist - that's extremely detrimental. That's how we end up with the enshittification of everything.

Yes there are biases sometimes and it can get exploited and this is an exception that proves the rule. But the rule is that people know what they want to buy and know what they are getting into. You are trying to get in between by suggesting you know more than the buyer and seller.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#196

Post by goodpoint »

ndriscoll wrote: post #95
simianwords wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.

The whole point of advertising is making the "free market agents" less rational. The most popular product is rarely the best.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#197

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ndriscoll wrote: post #156
hliyan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that even reviews from verified purchasers get gamed in the real world, and aggregated reviews can only cover simple information because people don't have the expertise for a proper review (e.g. try to find basic information like idle power consumption for computers. Or whether some part has working or broken pcie power management). So the problem is that you need morally unassailable competent reviewe…

My wife used Angie's List to find some really good, honest contractors.

Many years ago, when it was still fairly new.

I'd never recommend Angie's List, these days, though. It's pure garbage.

She also used to rely on Amazon reviews.

Again, it's a dumpster fire, these days. Absolutely worthless.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#198

Post by boccko »

simianwords wrote: post #176
ohdeargodno wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation! Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation! Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation! Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_

Not sure what you mean. You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. It’s not always like that and you are removing agency from the person purchasing the product.

'You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.'

No. _history has unequivocally proven_ that people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. Or at least they should, if they were aware of the full extent of damage typical products cause.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#199

Post by LeftHandPath »

etra0 wrote: 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.

The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.

Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.

Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#200

Post by toolslive »

What bothers me most is how "fake" it all is. I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices. Companies with fake job posts that keep on getting recycled (clicking "report this job" does not help at all) aso aso. It's sort of a parallel universe where everything is nice and dandy... sort of a Barbie universe.
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