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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

#91
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed. >Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] 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. LinkedIn rewards m…

What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential. What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visibl…

A guy who has morals in this age? Sign me up,

I really want to incentivize such honesty and morals in general It seems that you have your company listed in the about page of hackernews so that is nice.

I wish your company all the best! Seriously!

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#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.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#93

> I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity. A seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing. It took me approximately 5 minutes to install uBlock Origin and create a filter that removes the feed. No more toxic mediocrity to see because there are no posts to see. It makes Linkedin a lot more bearable for me.

ah cool great idea, I've now done the same

www.linkedin.com##[aria-label="Main Feed"]

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#94
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…

I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.

It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#95
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…

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#97

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…

> 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 sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation in…

The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at . Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short. Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.

Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing.

The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.

Re: Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

#100
post #76
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even a good job board anymore because it's filled with junk and evergreen postings.

Can't agree. While there are some evergreen postings, LinkedIn job applications still landed me a couple of interviews (and much more compared to cold applying on the company website). And then there's recruiters reaching out which landed me even more interviews + my current - genuinely great - job.

The recruiters reaching out to me are all for terrible companies or for non-remote roles in other areas of the country. It seems Glassdoor and others have better job boards than LinkedIn.
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