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Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

elliotcsmith.com

231–240 of 405 posts

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#231
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its about product discovery. It is in fact essential to a rational market. Imagine you create a really good product. You actually believe in it and you think people would want to buy it. Please tell me how you will practically get it noticed? I would like actual practical advice.

In the exact same way as if you had a godawful product and you want to sell it. Promote it, talk about it on social media, possibly contract some marketing services, find out who is more prone to purchasing it and focus on that group, etc etc.

I think you are agreeing with me. This process is valuable - it brings your product to people who benefit from it. It does not diminish just for the reason that there might be godawful products some times.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#232
One of the most obnoxious things about LinkedIn are the games that people play. Fake engagement over a series of my posts only to drop their pitch in my messages.

That, and it's so rare to find real content on the site that isn't just some mimetic rehash of the same thing other people are saying.

Frankly, it's a very ominous network to interact with—it's very unsettling to see how quickly and deeply people have adopted a performative mask that's uniquely a "LinkedIn character."

Endless droves of "think pieces" from people you can tell have never really been challenged in their field, have limited experience, and insist that they are the expert missing from your sheathe.

The saddest part is that the mediocrity will only ever increase, not decrease, in a world that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same reply as I wrote above: No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with t…

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Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They mostly don't know what they are getting into though. You can't trust advertising, obviously. You can't trust reviews. You have no way to tell if there is actually a better product than the one you are seeing the ad for. You better hope there is a good return policy.

You can't trust advertising completely nor can you trust reviews completely but they are signals. Treating things as binary will not get you anywhere. Signals exist and are useful if not 100% accurate.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point of marketing is to remove and subvert that agency, disconnect buying decisions from real value, and to limit the consequences of flaws and underperformance.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency. They can't. Your shit blogspam is all over the internet. You've been using LLMs to advertise it everywhere. You've been using bots to post fake reviews online. You've been selling them on platforms that don't give a shit about customers and will never take returns. Either by being first or having more money, or time to blow into it, you can ea…

You are completely exaggerating and pointing out edge cases. Sure sometimes advertising can be harmful and there are laws against false advertising. But in general it is helpful and provides value. For instance I personally like it when I 'm shown a relevant advertisement which actually convinces me to purchase it. Just recently I saw some advertisement on Instagram related to some concert near where I live. It was actually relevant and I considered purchasing a ticket.

You can always exaggerate and cherry pick bad instances from anything. What you are doing is similar to this. There were a few Samsung phones that blew up and caused injury. You now characterise all phones as being harmful and dangerous to society.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#239
If you find reading posts on LinkedIn as annoying as I do, there’s actually a nice solution that will literally wipe your feed blank:

1) Change your preferred feed view to “Most Recent Posts” : https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/preferred-...

2) Unfollow all of your connections. You’ll stay connected but won’t see their annoying posts anymore.

…and there you have it! Focused peace and zen on an otherwise excruciating website.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#240

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.

It can be this, but there are a lot of things that people actually do need, and they have choices in what to buy. Good marketing will catch their interest and convert it to sales.
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