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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn are the kings of this sort of misleading information. I find it quite annoying but I suspect it is probably effective for them.

See also: the way they play with the "how many people have clicked on your profile in that last XYZ days" to always make it seem like you've got a lot of people clicking.

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It is not misleading information, it is brilliant marketing. Gotta give them that.

The fact that it is effective marketing doesn't nullify the fact that it is misleading. In fact, those two properties go hand-in-hand most of the time (though not always).

How is it misleading? Saying that someone is in the "Top 5%" most viewed profiles is pretty straightforward. Just because there are a lot of people in the top 5% doesn't make it "misleading".

It is misleading because it is clearly playing off the fact that most people won't do the math and will think 5% puts them in an elite group.

Misleading doesn't necessarily mean lying.

That's silly. "Doing the math" doesn't change how "elite" your status is, because "elite" is relative to the size of the total group being considered, just like percentages are. If you're in the top 3 of your high school graduating class that only had 3 people in it, does that make you part of an elite group? I think not.

Those people still were viewed more than 95% of all the rest, it doesn't matter if it's a group of 100, 1,000 or 1 million people - still pretty impressive.

Now I'm wondering what I need to do to market myself there...

Consider how many LinkedIn users are active. Probably fewer than 25%. I'm guessing the top 10% are the people who use LinkedIn a few times per month (like I do).

People who use LinkedIn actively will get way more views since they will be adding connections and viewing other people's pages more (LinkedIn emails people your contact info if you view their page).

At first, being top 5% made me feel popular. But considering the pool includes users who created an account 3 years ago and haven't touched it since, I'm not so sure.

Not disimilar to somebody informing me the other day that I'm in the top 2% of HN users by karma. Objectively pointless, and subjectively relies on ignoring the thousands of old or throwaway accounts to boost my ego (which is already healthy enough).

What is misleading about the number of people who have viewed your profile information?

One game they play is with the interval measured. "X people in the last 5 days," then next session, "Y people in the last 7 days," or "Z people in the last 10 days." They're putting gamification where it's not needed, seemingly just to say they're doing it.

And then charging you to see who those people are.

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