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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

#251

Post by simianwords »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #236
simianwords wrote: post #192

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.

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.

The point of marketing is to provide the signal - you can use your agency and decide whether that signal is valuable or not.

If I'm shown an advertisement for a watch from a well known company with some detailed specs I'm inclined to believe it based on the brand reputation. This signal (the specifications) is valuable to me but not necessarily completely accurate. I'm better off with the signal than without. The reason being there are more instances of truth than lies across all advertisements.. otherwise they wouldn't work.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#252

Post by daxfohl »

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.

Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.

The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#253

Post by simianwords »

Levitz wrote: post #223
simianwords wrote: post #192

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.

Then they wouldn't need convincing?

Its bringing the signals closer to me than I would have otherwise had. The agency part is for me buying it but not necessarily for me to do the research so in that case you are right.

But in practice it is beneficial (for both parties) to sometimes bring the signal closer. If you truly believe in agency then you must trust that the person who buys it after being shown the advertisement was better off being shown the advertisement.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#254

Post by lisbbb »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #197
ndriscoll wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole Internet is like this now--it's a victim of its own success. "Dead Internet Theory" is correct, I believe. There must be some kind of sociological term for what happens with popular websites that become victims of their own success, like Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, all of them follow the same predictable pattern. When they are small and unknown, they are useless. Then they hit some critical mass and a wave of new adopters show up and it's amazing--for awhile--then as the inevitable grifters and thieves arrive, the whole thing becomes a turd of astronomical proportions. Then the good people disappear, leaving only the trash behind.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#255

Post by cpursley »

olex wrote: post #120
cpursley wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only a certain percentage of potential buyers activity look for a solution. Even Apple advertises.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#256

Post by _swfb »

To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.

LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.

I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.

And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#257

Post by lisbbb »

terminalshort wrote: post #113
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…

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

I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#258

Post by motorest »

oytis wrote: post #52
nickfromseattle wrote: post #5

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…

> 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

> 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

I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.

I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#259

Post by simianwords »

jayd16 wrote: post #249
simianwords wrote: post #203

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.

This is actually a pretty solid example of a flaw in free market economics. Marketing can increase and decrease knowledge and there's not a strong market force pushing things the right direction.

I thought about what you said and I think you are correct. But since we don't live in an ideal rational world do you agree that without advertisements the market can fail? How would new products even enter the limelight?
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