I just feel like there should be somewhat of a boundary between personal and professional life. There are things I would say to my friends that I wouldn't tell anyone in charge of giving me money, at least not directly, and I feel like LinkedIn (purposefully or otherwise) is actively trying to erode that boundary. It's horrible.
But, yeah, I keep my LinkedIn--to the degree I use it at all--very anodyne except to the degree you have relatively extreme opinions on specific tech topics.
My political opinions are pretty normal (basically typical American lefty), and if my employer were to find a blog post I wrote about universal healthcare or something it's doubtful that they'd fire me. That's a little different than me plastering "BIDEN 2024!!!" all over my resume, and that's why I utterly hate LinkedIn.
But fine.
> Then there was the vaccine effectiveness, which was claimed as 100% but actually was well below that. Same for their preventing transmission, which was nonsensical.
I think there's literally no one that claimed the vaccine was 100% effective; certainly no one with any kind of medical credential. I don't think there's ever been any vaccine in history that's been 100% effective, the numbers I heard when I got my vaccine was between 80-90% effective, and due to Bayes theorem hijinks that means the actual likelihood of being immune is well below that. This was never a cover-up, the scientists were pretty up-front about this.
> Let's start with Wuhan being a likely origin point. This one gets bonus points, because it wasn't just a "conspiracy theory" but also "racist". All based on a Lancet paper that any smart reader could tell was bunk, and which turned out to be totally soaked with conflicts of interest.
I don't recall anyone saying it was racist for saying Wuhan was an origin point. What people called problematic was people trying to label it as "kung flu" or "Wuhan Flu".
> Then there was the "conspiracy theory" that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity; again, turned out to be true.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I don't think this was ever disputed. "Natural" immunity may indeed give you stronger immunity to COVID, but it has one major disadvantage: you have to catch COVID to get it, which is potentially lethal, and even if it wasn't "lethal", can have long-term side effects that we're still unsure about, not to mention that while you have COVID you're substantially more infectious than when you're not. Any reduction on infectiousness is a potential win.
> literally no one that claimed the vaccine was 100% effective
Well, apart from the President of the US [0], and Pfizer themselves [1], and many others.
> I don't recall anyone saying it was racist for saying Wuhan was an origin point
Many, many people claimed this; including a NYT reporter [2] and WaPo [3].
> I cannot speak for anyone else, but I don't think this was ever disputed.
Yes, this was heavily, heavily disputed. Even Nature claimed mRNA was superior [4].
I hope you reflect on the fact that it took me only about 5 minutes to dig up these links, and that what you called a "nosedive" can now be seen as an educational experience.
[0] - https://news.yahoo.com/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-01184362...
[1] - https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
[2] - https://www.thewrap.com/new-york-times-covid-lab-leak-apoorv...
[3] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...
That said, I'll give a look to your links, though I seriously suspect that they don't validate everything you're saying.
I haven't talked about Covid here for a long, long time.
I responded to your claim with a long list of easily verifiable instances of "conspiracy theories" being proven correct - which was then immediately flagged despite containing no misinformation, rudeness, etc. The irony is lost on people, apparently.
I'm sure you can find something wrong with all those links, if you try real hard - but if you put as much effort into verifying them I bet you'll learn a lot more.
I've never encountered this, but if I did, I'd be pretty thankful for the advance warning that I would not likely enjoy working there.
Now, I have no idea how much parsing they actually did; you might have been able to put "asdf" to make it validate.
www.linkedin.com##:matches-path(feed).scaffold-layout__main
www.linkedin.com##.global-nav__primary-link.global-nav__primary-link--active.app-aware-link
For years LinkedIn languished as the site everyone was on, but nobody actually used for anything. But I have actually gotten a couple of leads from it now.
The feed is trash though, for sure. And you have to laugh at the endless parade of bimbo pictures attached to accounts that are supposedly "recruiters." Unprofessional and insulting.
I had an experience where one of them reached out to me about a job over the phone. She had a hot-sounding voice and the job seemed intriguing, so I figured I would give it a shot. Her LinkedIn photo was stunning. Yes, I sheepishly admit that I was taken in by her and this influenced my decision to even consider a random job from a recruiter.
She was friendly but kinda ditzy, seemed to barely know what she was talking about, and once the easy stuff was over, I was abruptly handed over to some dude. It's like... I thought you were my recruiter, so who's this other guy? He pretty much handled my recruitment process from that point on, but she was allowed to be the first one to talk to me on each call and get the credit for "recruiting" me, although she turned out to be more like live-bait than anything else.
IMO, the tactic of many of these recruitment firms is to hire attractive women to fool male programmers into considering otherwise unappealing jobs and direct most of the profit to the male recruiters.
Part of me is glad the industry is in such a state that no recruiters are contacting me anymore. 99% of third party recruiters are blood sucking parasites.
It’s a similar complaint to how your Facebook and Instagram feeds barely contain the people you follow anymore, which encourages regular people to post less and attention seekers to post more.
The business model of ad-supported social media apparently doesn’t work under the paradigm of checking in on your friends for a reasonable amount of time (like 5 minutes a day) and calling it a day. Instead, it’s just optimized to be as much of an addiction as possible, and there’s no way your real respected work colleagues can provide that amount of content.
The site will be done for once they start putting trending topics in the jobs page.
But there’s a right way to use LinkedIn.
Keep in mind that the majority of people only want to network when they need something. You can use LinkedIn to do the opposite and create meaningful connections.
1. Judgment-free support. That lady you barely remember from your previous job is starting a business. Encourage her. Some person is starting yet another podcast? Ask a couple of kind questions.
2. A low effort contact list. Next time you go out to an event and meet with new people ask to connect on LinkedIn. You have a better chance of maintaining that connection with LinkedIn reminders than if you exchange phone number or email.
Why do this? Life is short.
Putting this out there so people don't think they need to join some absolutely shit random corporate social networks to get a job.
Though honestly the worst part is the "inspiration porn" that people post on there all the time, nearly all of which reduce to "the job market is tough, but don't give up because it gets easy!!!". When you point out that it, in fact, does not ever get "easy" to wake up to 30 rejection emails every morning, they either try and sell you on some meditation routine, tell you that you have a bad attitude, or just block you.
Honestly, it really is the absolute worst platform that I am stuck using. There are worse websites, obviously, but no one is forcing me to go to 4chan or The Daily Stormer every day.