51–60 of 128 posts
In an attention economy the thing that pays is capturing attention - a terrifyingly finite thing that determines our lived experiences. Rewarding people who are good that this is a compounding mistake.
I genuinely think the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al could look very much like just bot farms generating bullshit at scale for other bots to consume and inflate the metrics on while everyone actually interested in... anything really, sails off to greener pastures that have revenue streams that don't require this.
To be clear, my ideal future would not be this, if for no other reason than the catastrophic electrical and bandwidth being wasted to pretend anyone on LinkedIn's best ranking posts understands a single thing under the sun, but I consider this a solid #2 option.
It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media.
But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the LinkedIn lunatics they see posting AI thought leader posts twice a day are completely average and everyone is like this, except them of course.
Very few people post to the LinkedIn feed. Those who do are usually playing a game of some sort. If you go to the LinkedIn feed and draw conclusions, know that you're drawing conclusions about a vocal minority of wannabe business influencers. These people exist, but LinkedIn is a circus sideshow to the world of business. Not the main attraction.
Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
Because I live in the UK, I’m often told this narrative of social decay, about how everything is getting worse and no one cares about doing anything properly. I disagree; I think it’s always been like this, and our feeling of disappointment persists because our expectation of improvement grows faster than actual improvement. LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate fo…
Haven't thoroughly read this article but these passages from C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) immediately come to mind: Once upon a time academic reputations were generally ex- pected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, mono- graphs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic col- leagues and intelligent laymen. One rea…
This formatting is intolerable on mobile.
Yeah, people really need to stop prefixing lines with 4 spaces when quoting something on HN. It needlessly forces a fixed width font with fixed width columns.
Just prepend a > to show you're quoting something. There's already precedent for it from e-mail and newsgroups, and most forums already use it for quoting. Make it italics if you want it to stand out a bit more.
Haven't thoroughly read this article but these passages from C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) immediately come to mind: Once upon a time academic reputations were generally ex- pected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, mono- graphs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic col- leagues and intelligent laymen. One rea…
“Once upon a time academic reputations were generally expected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, monographs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic colleagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older academic world did not contain privileged positions of competence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged competence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his ownpersonal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have worked, as craftsmen.
“However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means of competence which must be distinguished from his personal competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished. A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library, an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and of career—which secure clique membership makes much more likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn increases the chance to produce a reputation.”
Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
Been noticing this new phenotype of tech bro who writes with an air of superiority, subtly belittling all those beneath him. Also ardently believes in - bullshit jobs - enshittification - kubernetes being a psyop - tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since