Brutally honest feedback: if everyone has a brand, then it's not special anymore. What's the next move after that?
I'm not trying to help everyone become a LI influencer, I'm solving for devs (like me) who know sharing work and ideas helps careers, but hate the performative "content creation" game.
The check-ins aren't about building a "brand" in the influencer sense. It's more like "I solved X today", or "I used Y library". Meaning quick note -> formatted as a post as if you want to share.
Does that change your take, or is the whole premise flawed?
What makes progress reports useful and career-helping are valuable notes, not game-like achievements. Those are hard to craft, and often not digestable to a larger audience.
I'll think the next steps for you. If things continue the way they are, it's likely someone will try to skip the influencer stuff and create automated systems that evaluate whether someone is really making progress on something novel or not. That sort of thing could change the way we look at developer presence.
In that world, you want to cultivate a smaller audience that can understand your notes, build upon them, and resonate value within that smaller audience. I'm saying a smaller audience because the larger it is, the higher the chances of it derailing.
You're right that optimizing for reach creates influencer theater. What if the product optimized for credibility within a smaller, technical audience instead?
Instead of "broadcast to everyone," what if it was: - Daily check-ins capture real work - Weekly digest shared to niche communities (Dev.to, HN, technical Slack/Discord) - Audience: 100 devs who understand your domain > 10,000 LinkedIn randos
Re: automated evaluation of real progress—that's fascinating. How would you validate "novel work" vs "performance theater"? Is it context (where shared), substance (depth of notes), or something else?
Your smaller-audience point resonates. Would you use a tool that helped you share technical progress with ONLY people who'd understand it, while filtering out the influencer noise?
I don't know. That's future shit, no one invented this yet. But I think someone will. Otherwise, hiring will become very difficult. As code becomes more and more commoditized, it should become easier to see.
> Would you use a tool that helped you share technical progress with ONLY people who'd understand it, while filtering out the influencer noise?
I wouldn't trust it today.
How about having some guardrails, like requiring code snippets, and "lessons learned" before even seeing proposed AI-enhanced content?
Obviously, people are people, and every tool can be abused (in a good and a bad way).