Why I am finished with LinkedIn
I have actually gone nowhere and can be reached by a method noted in:
Some reasons are related to the behavior and business model of the platform's owner, Microsoft, while others are more focused on the situation faced by (and mindset of) many translator users of the platform.
I will not trash my LinkedIn account yet, because it facilitates checking the digital footprint of people I encounter and want to check.
That said, I am finished with writing posts and any other activity on Microsoft's social media platform LinkedIn, for some common-sense reasons.
Microsoft-related Reasons for My LinkedIn Silence
The enshittification of LinkedIn makes it highly annoying. This is encouraged by Microsoft's business model, which has placed the platform in use to support AI and support AI supporters, while punishing those who don't have AI proliferation as a goal
The specific annoyances are numerous and diverse.
A constant stream of AL slop posts from Global South accounts.
I understand why people in the Global South see LinkedIn as a window to the world most of them will never be able to travel to, and perhaps many don't realize that posting slop (or probably even non-sloppy things) on LinkedIn is not going to be a path out of their circumstances.
That said, there is so much slop that simply blocking individual global south users is futile in stopping the flow of this aspirational slop.
Microsoft's AI promotion
The owner of LinkedIn is hell bent on promoting AI and promoting AI promoters. The slop feed I see is filled with such garbage, including large numbers of self-styled AI coaches.
Constant unwanted notifications of meaningless jobs
I am not looking for work of any type on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn apparently doesn't believe that, and kindly sends me notices of jobs that are almost exclusively either training AI or fixing AI output.
I suspect that much of this work is going to Global South people, who are more likely to accept the extremely low rates paid, but it will probably seem better than monitoring social media posts for videos of rapes, murders, and the like, an task that has in recent years been largely foisted off onto less-fortunate members of the labor pool.
Targeting with toxic ads
- Bot-placed ads for Crypto
- Jobs for "Indians only." I recently received nine of these AI-generated and probably bot-posted ads in a single day. They were all basically the same lovely AI graphics (but with a few variations), but all ostensibly came from different users in India. I strongly suspect that those accounts were fake.
- Plantation investment scams
- Promotion of ads on LinkedIn itself
- Ads for coaching
Punishment of "non-aligned" posts by shadow-banning
Posts that are in any way negative of AI or of the way the platform operated are almost certainly to be shadow-banned. The result is that even people you are connected with or otherwise follow you will not see your posts. This is not conducive to discussion between colleagues, but that never seems to have been a goal of the platform, at least after the acquisition by Microsoft.
Unexplained prohibition of posting
This probably happens as the next stage after shadow-banning. In my case, it has extended to prohibiting me from replying to someone with whom I was having a polite exchange, after they made a comment on a comment I made on the post of yet another visitor. This behavior of Microsoft would alone have been sufficient for me to leave.
The proliferation of hyper-curated persona
Phony appears to be a given among many LinkedIn accounts.
The proliferation of self-styled coaches, many purporting to coach "LinkedIn success"
Translation/Translator-related Reasons for My LinkedIn Silence
Despite the undeniable bleak outlook faced by most freelance translators, countless freelance translators clinging to the delusion that AI will not replace them or (just as silly) that they can survive if they use AI themselves
Use of AI might help, but freelancers are losing their agency clients, so they still have to find non-users of AI as new clients. Almost no freelancers can do that, but almost no freelance translators on LinkedIn address that issue.
What we hear is constant talk about "adapting" (doing dirt-cheap post-editing appears to be what that is) or adopting AI for your translation workflow. I understand the pain of considering the truth of what has happened, but I will no longer attempt to educate the uneducable. I'm done with that fruitless enterprise.
Translators who engage in a coaching business, taking money from fellow translators for advice
I find this abhorrent, especially when I see that mostly what they are selling is a stream of feel-good platitudes that encourage their colleague/clients to look away from the real world out there.
Lack of both colleagues and potential clients for JA-EN translation
LinkedIn is virtually unused by clients in Japan and, probably because they realize that, colleagues that I interact with (some face-to-face) are virtually absent on LinkedIn, at least in terms of posting and discussions. LinkedIn is essentially non-existent in the world of JA-EN translation in Japan.