Category: Social Media

Thoughts on socia media, which has addicted many and alienated others.

Please, Microsoft!

Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.

With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.

The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.

There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.

Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.

The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.

The Church of LinkedIn

I am exceedingly tired of LinkedIn.

It is awash with phoniness, including that of coaches preying on desperate LinkedIn users searching for “LinkedIn” success.

And I’m tired of the delusions that in general proliferate on LinkedIn.

I am tired of people who are addicted to LinkedIn and are believers in the myth that posting on LinkedIn will somehow bring them something good. Only their own efforts will bring them good, and they need to make those efforts in places other than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn itself is a delusion, and the disturbing reality is that the delusion called LinkedIn has been bought into by a frightening number of people.

I guess people want to “believe” in something. LinkedIn is sort of a religion that gives them something to believe in without having to ask for evidence. If you need that, go for it. I prefer the evidence-based real world beyond my computer screen.

The Demise of Authenticity

Is authenticity no longer a “thing?”

I encountered a conversation on LinkedIn yesterday where the original post was clearly written in ChatGPTese or a dialect thereof, and every single comment was responded to in the same ChatGPTese. 

When I questioned whether the original post and the responses to numerous apparently human-created comments were being written by a carbon-based entity or something else, I received a quick response, also in ChatGPTese. It didn’t at all read like there was a human behind it.

Authenticity is becoming rare, both on LinkedIn and on other social media platforms. The only input needed from a carbon-based participant is a prompt to a silicon-based assistant, then you just post the result.

Who could tell the difference? Well, just about anyone more intelligent than a starfish and who has not been blinded by the AI hype.

And now, a moment of silence in memory of our dear departed friend, Authenticity.

Carcinogen Ads Promoted by Microsoft’s LinkedIn

[This was posted originally on LinkedIn on March 21, 2025, but I have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Microsoft’s LinkedIn sends me ads for Japan Tobacco. I am attempting to stop them, but don’t know if it will work. Japan Tobacco sells carcinogens.

While Meta is totally criminal and partners with criminals on its several platforms, I never got a Japan Tobacco ad on Facebook when I was a user of that criminal platform.

Partnering with JT is simply sleazy and doesn’t reflect well on Microsoft.

JT cannot advertise on broadcast media, and I suppose it is using what it can get, which is a complicit company like Microsoft.

Seeing this kind of literally toxic garbage thrown at me gives me new encouragement to post just anything I want to LinkedIn. Screw Microsoft’s cover story of LinkedIn being a business networking platform. It’s nothing of the sort.

I’ll need to see if telling Microsoft that the JT ads are “annoying or not interesting” works. If not, something else might be in the works from here in Curmudgeonville.

受注してなんぼ

I am excited and thrilled to announce that I’m neither excited nor thrilled to see Microsoft go the way of all social media cesspools, every day approaching closer and closer to Zuckerberg’s platforms.

TikTok-like videos, plantation investment scams, and more.

And, of course, there are the LinkedIn coaches who will teach you how to achieve “success on LinkedIn”. WTF does that mean? Nothing, actually, but the engagement-harvesting addicted LinkedIn believers who try to game the algorithm to get more impressions, followers, and connections apparently haven’t figured that out.

It’s meaningless, folks. In fact, never was more than an illusion of relevance.

As someone in Osaka might put it, 受注してなんぼ.