LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking.<p>- If you see it as a place to mostly transact with recruiters, Yes, your feed is absolutely going to be crap. If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.<p>- If you see online networking as shouting-from-rooftops self promotion, of course you'll notice the worst of the worst shouters. If you realize anyone you'll ever need to engage with professionally is basically a click away, you start looking at what on these people's mind. You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points.<p>- "Performing professionalism" is the best. Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own reputation. Being an ass might end up costing real dollars, so maybe best avoided, the logic goes. You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that.<p>Plus, LinkedIn is nerdy. Text posts actually perform better than links. Attention is fairly aligned with follower count. (I've collected data for a year, and some pretty clear trends emerge)<p>So yeah, it's good that we have this variant of a social network, if anything I wish there were more like it.