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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

elliotcsmith.com

211–220 of 405 posts

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#211
post #198

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.

'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.

Its about the numbers. Sure sometimes they are stupid and make stupid decisions but the extent matters. Take your own example - if I ~reach~ read your purchase history can I characterise you as inherently stupid?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's my take. I'm of the opinion we should outlaw advertising. If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.

But then, I don't exist to do business. Acquiring profit isn't my goal. Acquiring status, rank, or advantage over my fellows isn't my goal. Its the goal of those we let run roughshod over the rest of us justified by phrases like "well its just human nature to be greedy; nothing to be done!" or "If I don't do it someone else will!"

This is how low we've sunk: lying is so normalized that we can't envison a world without it.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#213
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.

To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.

I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.

My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Classic zero accountability take. Why are you getting suckered into buying something you don't need because a commercials says so?

Because you are a generally honest and trusting person and so you believe them when they lie to you.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think if we strengthened fraud provision we eliminate many societal problems, including marketing. If marketers were required to be completely honest and transparent, a lot of this goes away.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#216

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 ?

Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)

So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.

The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.

LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#217
Totally agree that LinkedIn rewards toxic mediocrity, but do believe there are ways to avoid those parts of the platforms.

For example, stop following toxically mediocre connections.

LinkedIn will show you things based on what you follow/like/engage with. In my experience, there's troves of real operators posting genuine and helpful advice.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#218
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic zero accountability take. Why are you getting suckered into buying something you don't need because a commercials says so?

What? What does it mean for a comment on the internet to be non-zero accountability?

I took it to mean my take an implied lack of agency when evaluating advertisements in one's life and if one should act on it.

My take would be that one does indeed lack the agency to be able to evaluate ads that way. The environment itself makes it impossible. SNR is way too low to find valid signals to evaluate. The number being purely honest and informative with zero spin must be close to zero.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#219
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I'm a millennial and I think you summed it up pretty well.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#220

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 gl…

If it works you'll have a bunch of people faking it for each other, and if it doesn't then it's no different than anything else.

How would they fake it? Their own identity claims would need to be cryptographically signed.
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