Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

elliotcsmith.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 405 posts

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#281

Post by darepublic »

lisbbb wrote: post #254
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem of evil. The grifters and thieves always show up, late but inevitably, to the party. The game needs a patch to potentially fix though it's unclear what that patch would be and what could be it's unintended side effects

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#282

Post by Exoristos »

alansammarone wrote: post #175
terminalshort wrote: post #113

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…

There's an assumption in here that Google works like a proper search engine anymore. Otherwise, you're right on.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#283

Post by alansammarone »

simianwords wrote: post #251
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.

Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.

I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#284

Post by calmbonsai »

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…

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.

> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.

> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...

I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.

Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#285

Post by bryanrasmussen »

toxic mediocrity is clever, on the other not sure if it is clever enough that he has to describe coming up with the phrase twice.

>I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity

four paragraphs later

>The vast majority of it falls into a category I would describe as Toxic Mediocrity.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#286

Post by lo_zamoyski »

bluedino wrote: post #262

LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for. Things I don't find it useful for: Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me t…

> Typical motivational/marketing stuff

Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#287

Post by godot »

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…

I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.

For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.

And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#288

Post by HPMOR »

glitchcrab wrote: post #266
bluedino wrote: post #262

LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for. Things I don't find it useful for: Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me t…

A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.

LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#289

Post by alansammarone »

samiv wrote: post #269
ohdeargodno wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

"When an incompetent developer stumbles onto a successful idea an infinity of shit is created." I agree with you. Sometimes simply being the first mover businesses/solutions/software get name recognition and an unfair(?) advantage that greatly diminishes overall value by blocking better products from emerging. To put if fairly, some things are so bad it'd be an improvement NOT to have them, so someone else could do a…

You don't need to drag Python into this now :P

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#290

Post by brcmthrowaway »

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…

I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post
Post reply on HN