LinkedIn Larpmaxxing
hereticpleb.vercel.app
hereticpleb.vercel.app
I have connections, and friends occasionally like a comment when I share something. I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform, even in the comments. That makes it really hard to share a good blog post.
Honestly, I get more engagement on Facebook. My mom and in-person friends find what I do slightly interesting, at least when the algorithm decides to show it. Same story there, though. Links to a blog get buried compared to native content.
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
It is, they’re darkpatternmaxxing.
There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..
The answer is not to sign up to X, but to learn to suppress your FOMO. Chances are it was drivel anyway. Especially true for LinkedIn.
Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.
But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.
Sometimes I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.
Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill. It've never actually gotten a job through linkedin though, but then again, all the jobs I've gotten after my first one has been through my real world network some of which have grown out of linkedin relationships.
I do wish the corporate larping platform our society has decided to use was decentralised though.
I guess a few posts a year are ok if they don't sound angry or delusional. But zero is really best.
Nobody would accuse me of performative normality
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-houle-a18809320/
Students at my Uni are still LIONs and will mostly accept my follow requests but other people in my town don't, I am gradually building up my network.
LinkedIn wants to reconnect me to my old friends in the knowledge graph industry but I could care less.
It's like I am a cast member at Disney and people already saw the movie.
I an connected to at least 10% of the students on campus so I know I get some visibility thanks to LinkedIn.
On a sunday.
I didn't go to the hospital.
I had a client, and a project.
Ready to go.
On a sunday.
You don't give up when life challenges you, you move faster.
Keep building [ROCKET EMOJI]
Interestingly, unlike instagram the LinkedIn business model has nothing to do with it. It’s built around b2b sales and professional recruitment.
The mighty second brain of course. https://youtu.be/6NukGtwJb7Y?si=yg09jegXRM4C-hFE
You can absolutely find non-performative posts on Instagram. There is value in a sincere post - ex. sharing pictures of your cat to your friends.
Whereas in LinkedIn no such value exists in my experience - I can't imagine myself posting there for any other reason than to be performative.
So in terms of % of posts being performative I don't think anything tops LinkedIn.
I absolutely abhor it the "newsfeed" because it's never once had anything interesting on it, and my inbox resembles what I've heard described from women about using dating apps in terms of how so many recruiters will spam boilerplate messages to anyone with the most tenuous connection to what they're recruiting for, making it a lot of effort to sift through to find anything of substance. I've gotten messages that literally just refer to me having a "background in IT" as evidence that I'd be a good fit for their positions, which is somewhere between "you know how to write code in some programming language" and "you've touched a computer before" in terms of relevancy (and that's not even getting into what I've also heard from women about how men will try to DM them on LinkedIn like it's a social networking app; I have to imagine the experience is even worse for them). It honestly feels like companies have just become overly reliant on it for recruiting nowadays, and it doesn't even end up even working well because too many places can't be bothered to even properly describe the jobs they're hiring for (e.g. tagging them as "fully remote" and then putting in the description that they require 3 days a week in the office), and at least half of the postings aren't even from the companies themselves that are hiring but just from generic recruiting firms that describe a position but don't specify the name of the company. If you can avoid making an account, it's definitely preferable not to, and I envy you, because I wish I had that luxury, but unfortunately I just didn't have any other good prospects for finding a job.
Then ChatGPT happened and dear lord did LinkedIn ever fall off a cliff. So, so many low-effort, zero-value updates. Far worse than any other social network I use.
A waste of time. Every. Single. Time.
It wasn’t quite as needlessly performative. But it’s never been good.
It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.
I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.
It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
Who’s the target audience for that?
It's pure Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[0] in action.
[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
They all post vids of their vibe-coded dashboards where agents are doing market research and executing trades, while they kick back as collect to profits.
I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.
After tech layoffs started, the get-rich-quick folks looked on what other fields pay well, and the decided that the absolutely most selective, the most credentialed and gatekept niche role in finance, that's the one to impersonate.
Just scrolled now and saw like 5
Something like: "I have been looking for a QA middle role with 2 years of experience for six months. Here is the stuff I won't be doing: relocating to a different city, commuting more than 30 minutes, ...". Most of the comments say, "Good luck. You will definitely find a job". Only a few mention that it's time to update your worldview.
Select your connections carefully.
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
OTOH I do see the performative posting "I bumped my pinky toe on the cupboard and here's what it taught me about leading teams" and I genuinely don't understand who they're writing for. Isn't it obviously bullshit for everyone? Who cares about that?
I actually see posts from maybe 5-10% of my connections on LI, one strike for being boring or bland or performative and they're out of my feed.
The entertaining part, for me, is seeing social media or sales people trying to get a job via LinkedIn. For IT, replies are normally: "I'll call you", tagging someone who is actively hiring or "Reach out to so-and-so at company X, tell them I said hi.". For people who should be experts in sales and social media the replys are "To bad we're not hiring right now", "Best of luck" or "Shared".
Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.
I immortalised the posts here:
It will be really fascinating to see what happens with the potential for LLM-generated output to become a dominant component of new training data.
I suspect any positive results here are due to training on the test set. (Their training data collection script uses their feed, which is then also used for the slop detector demo vid.)
Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
Also I'm constantly getting friend requests from randos all over the world. I thought you had to have some kind of 2nd or 3rd tier actual connection first?