'LinkedIn Is Not a Dating Site' Should Users Be Trying to Find Love on LinkedIn?
dot.la
dot.la
Why does every public projection of an opinion need to be accompanied by some absolutist division of all of humanity into Team Right and Team Wrong.
Yeah women do this as well, leveraging their looks, and the HN commenters referring to incels and predators are missing this quote from the article:
'House says overtures on the app are often a two-way street. "I have a lot of female clients who reach out to men to date on LinkedIn," she added. "They think a guy is really hot and maybe they can get a job or maybe a date."'
They could use an approach similar to Facebook, wherein there is only a notification of there is mutual interest.
So when someone is hitting on someone using LinkedIn, that person is the societal equivalent of the jerk who hits on a waitress at her job. She has no choice but to be nice to you and tolerate your “smooth” lines because she’s a prisoner. She can’t leave easily and the jerk might be an important customer of the business. Even if the jerk is being coy about it (likely for the purposes of plausible deniability later), it’s incredibly awkward and disrespectful to the waitress.
This is no different than a female client flirting with a male financial advisor putting him in the awkward position as well.
Both are jerks. And while these are common stereotypical situations, there exist with the roles reversed too. Ask any male bartender. It’s awful and a real impediment to security in their relationship when every other night, some lady implies she’s available to him.
The second and bigger problem with LinkedIn are all the idiots who think it’s an extension of their social media. They pontificate on political events, give condescending lessons on life, share way too much about their personal life (nobody cares about your daily wins), and use #hashtags so #frequently that is #impossible to #read their #posts, not that they worth reading anyway.
It seems no matter what you do to purge yourself of these fools in your “professional network”, you’ve always got a few saps that end up liking their posts and so that Instagram-like garbage shows up anyway. You have to constantly tell LinkedIn you’re not interested, or just keep your network to a low high-quality number of people that are too busy working to play with their phones.
When I get a connection request, even if it looks like a promising industry connection, I check their activity history. If they’re on LinkedIn liking and posting things every week, then it’s a no go. You’d better be worth a cool $100 million for me to make an exception.
My feed is my feed. I follow companies to keep track of my industry. If you are cluttering that up with your sappy posts, even if I agree with you, you’re gone.
Unless you’re my boss, in which case, my hatred runs deep. I can’t even unfollow you because you are the kind of LinkedIn Loser who checks for mismatches on connections verses followers. So yes, much deep hatred.
But I feel most women automatically take any messages from men declaring their affection, be it genuine or not, in a pretty negative way by default.
I get it's a protective natural reaction, but it can be harmful. If you're a woman, and you take this too seriously and in a negative way, suddenly you start thinking all men are mindless jerks. I've seen it. It's all about the choice of words.
If I were a woman, and a stranger sent me an email out of the blue, but was educated and chose his words well, I wouldn't care at all. In fact I would seek him out so that we get to know each other better.
If not I would simply ignore it. Of course this can be hard if you get bombarded with hundreds of messages, and emails and stuff.
But I would try not to be dismissive and view it in a negative way by default. People live in a defensive state always, and that is really harmful.
I don't think it's about the choice of words, but the choice of context. This is a professional networking website, so focus on that.
People expose their LinkedIn profiles for a specific purpose, and that's networking. It's not an invitation for cold calls.
Hijacking a community like this poisons the well for everyone else. When it becomes prevalent enough, women put their guard up, or avoid that community altogether.
Secondly, as a LinkedIn user, there is a reasonable expectation that communication in the platform will be professional. The platform's value proposition is grounded in this expectation as a sort of social contract. Sometimes people are ok with others defying said social contract, but you should assume they won't be.
Explain that.
Long answer is for incels to explain their ideology
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...