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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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).

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