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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

#321

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#322

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

anon7725 wrote: post #316
lisbbb wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, Facebook Marketplace is as or more useful than back-in-the-day Craigslist.

Most folks I know, use it, like they used to use CraigsList.

I don't use FB at all, so it doesn't matter to me.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#323

Post by ivape »

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…

The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.

Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.

Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#324

Post by seattle_spring »

seattle_spring wrote: post #131
Disposal8433 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0 indians for me. I only see French people because I'm French. And I also see only my friends because I'm not in a following frenzy.

> because I'm not in a following frenzy. I sure with that affected my feed. I'm only connected to people I've met in person, and have never followed anyone beyond that ever, yet my feed is chock full of "Top INfluencer voices"/"you might be interested in ..."

I sure wish*

Too late to edit. D'oh!

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#325

Post by chiefalchemist »

trinix912 wrote: post #295
chiefalchemist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The level of mediocrity and group-think on LI is freighting. It’s no wonder so many companies / brands struggle. Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.

It probably gets that way because nobody wants to be the one to argue back, as it puts them in a bad light. So what's left are cheap platitudes and confirmations.

I understand the unwillingness to argue. But we’re talking foundational flaws in the advice being offered. Even passive aggressive “Are you sure about… ?” Would be 10x better than shameless group-think.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#326

Post by makeitdouble »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #97
makeitdouble wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. That's spot on. And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it. I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic…

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…

> pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example

Pricing can definitely be marketing and is crucial to the company. The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.

Otherwise I agree bullshitting can be interesting and analytical, when looking at a full campaign promoting a life style or solely aimed at imprinting the brand, it's full on the fuzzy side but it is all extremely thought out, and grounded in relatively solid research when it comes to the bigger players.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#327

Post by alansammarone »

simianwords wrote: post #302
alansammarone wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ic…

The specs are not objective in the correct sense. They are just signals that you can later verify.. like all things. Everything has an accuracy number beside it - what makes you think the specs are to be believed?

True, agreed. But thats besides the point. For the purposes of this thread, if an ad contains text/information thats well defined enough to be verifiable/falsifiable in principle, thats better than 98% of the “ads” I see on Linkedin (or anywhere else for that matter). “We focus on building reliable, trustworthy AI” is not an example of that unless the CEO finds a way to, or makes an effort towards, providing a method for us to verify that.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#328

Post by alansammarone »

tayo42 wrote: post #305
alansammarone wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is... an understatement. I would agree advertising is a useful signal, but I would say that not only can you not trust advertising, you should put negative weight on advertising - i.e. whenever you see an ad, that means the company is putting some amount of money into trying to convince you by means other than an honest comparison/spec table, and therefore is likely to have an inferior product. So personally, I…

You have to advertise to some degree otherwise no one will even know what your product is

Id like to believe people have enough agency to do a google search to at least figure out their options, but granted, I might be wrong about that.

Edit: I do agree you should have a google-findable website which lists the objective characteristics of your product. If you call that advertising (I call it a "release", and I reserve the word "ad" for anything that has emotional appeal and caters to the indifferent/uninformed), then I agree.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#329

Post by monkeyelite »

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.

Is it bad to use automation?

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#330

Post by alansammarone »

simianwords wrote: post #238
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…

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 a…

Not an edge case at all - phones blowing up is not what we're talking about. The absence of "we spent less than 10% of our budget on cyber security (in fact, we proud ourselves in having less than 5 cyber security experts on the team, and our release cycle is very quick - we don't really listen to the nerds when they say they need more time!), so unless you'd rather avoid a 15 year old kid from Russia completely owning all of your personal data, our product is the most cost effective option! Also, we used existing circuit boards, so our phone's innovation is mostly on the cost side - we managed to make it dirty cheap for you. What are you waiting for?" is what we're talking about.
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