The only thing bothering me on LinkedIn are the recruiters and that got much better in the last years.
Most of the time I use it to stay in touch with old co-workers and to syndicate my articles, which sometimes (2-5 times a year) leads to new clients.
That’s “what it should look like”. To get there, I expect it’s “establish the right norms from the start and incentivize the right content and behaviors along the way”. To monetize, I don’t know and I don’t especially care.
* Users would explicitly agree that their profile posts are subject to moderation.
* Profiles would be private and users would be heavily discouraged from using a real name. Friending someone else would require an out of band secret key exchange. A new key would be required to add each person to a group and the entire group would be informed when a new user was added. The only people with real visibility would be the mods.
* There would be no advertising or tracking.
* The service would be located in a country that doesn't immediately bend over for Five Eyes, China, or Russia.
* There would be no org pages or corp accounts.
* Anyone holding public office, running for public office, or affiliated with a political campaign would be explicitly banned from using it at the EULA level. Group pages with more than X members would automatically be flagged for periodic review, and obvious attempts at political organizing for a campaign or movement such as BLM or the Proud Boys (chosen purely as examples of political movements) would result in a ban for all affiliated accounts.
* Egregious (as in obviously intentionally hostile rather than ignorant or inadvertent) racism, sexism, bigotry, etc would result in a ban.
* Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
* Any attempt at bulk data collection would result in your account being suspended and flagged for review.
You get the idea. Social networks should be about sharing fun content with your real life social network. They should not be about self promotion, BS drama, politics, disinformation campaigns, advertising, influencing, branding, etc.
> Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
Alas, that turns accusations of bullying into pretty effective bullying.
But for simplicity, moderation and downvote buttons would do a world of good.
I attribute lack of evident destructive mobbing on hn to adequate moderation workforce.
Oh, the power of small inconveniences.
BYW, how much do I get for posting this valuable wisdom?
That's the bane of social media platforms where engagement is low (Twitter suffers from this too). There are very few content creators, and especial on a professional network, there isn't enough content generated to share daily, so to generate content, the platform needs to dig deeper into the bottom of the barrel and show you second-level engagement (ie friend of yours commented or liked some rando's content).
I never got a job through it though, real life networking and personal connections generally yield higher salary opportunities than recruiter-sourced ones (if you're planning to stay outside of FAANG)
I get a fair number of interview requests through it though so it would have some value as a recruiting tool. Let's face it, CVs are a badly structured way of listing and distributing your employment history...
I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.
I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.
Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.
It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.
I'll never forget when many years ago my boss, by that time a CEO of some major publicly traded companies, called me to his office and kindly asked I moderate my Usenet activity on some niche group. It turned out he was a lurker there and foresaw certain things I said might cause problems - it turned out he was right. And that was a long time before the Twitter era.
A friend from a previous job now leads a project for company X. Someone else switched their tech stack to Y. Another person migrates from cloud back to on-prem.
It might have to do with my policy of not adding random people as connections.
But you are wading through a swamp to find those gold nuggets.
I eventually cleared my profile (along with my other social accounts). I'll delete it outright once I'm confident my abandoned nym can't be repurposed into a sockpuppet.
It makes a ton of sense if you think about it, the people you want to connect with professionaly are people in the same workfield and their bosses. These people have A) far more intresting tidbits to share then recruitment and HR folk, and B) getting a job at their company is far easier if you they have some kind of clue of what you actually do during your previous job on a very fundemental level.
Which mostly underscores your point.
It is also toxic as hell.
But I know people who got employment offers from LinkedIn. So it adds value in that sense.
I just mute and block those influencers. And check LinkedIn maybe twice a week.
One of the things I cannot find any excuse for is how fake people are. They are behaving in a fake manner even when they don't have to.
Like, someone makes an IoT project (usually copied from GitHub), and markets it like this- "I was having X problem. I though why not solve it with modern technology? So I made this innovative blah blah copy of something".
Yuck. So cringy!