Category: Social Media

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

Enshittification of LinkedIn on the March

I have watched for some time the LinkedIn coaches selling coaching to desperate LinkedIn users who want to get jobs or achieve “LinkedIn success,” whatever that might mean (probably very little).

I now find from my LinkedIn slop feed that there are coaches on LinkedIn selling coaching to help people get work on, of all places, the click-work platform Upwork.

I am not surprised to see that numerous posts on LinkedIn to sell Upwork coaching are from people in places like Nigeria, Ghana, and Pakistan, which are probably home to many power users of click-work platforms like Upwork.

The proliferation of these Upwork coaching ads on LinkedIn says speaks about not only the people who use Upwork, but also the progressive enshittification of the platform LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn was never a good place for freelancers to find meaningful work, and now it is acting to promote coaching for users of an even less meaningful platform.

The end is near. No, wait, the end is not near. I think we might be seeing the end already, but these platforms are supported by countless desperate users trying to survive.

Sucking on your addictive LinkedIn security blanket?

For too many people in certain domains—translation is one of them—LinkedIn is an addictive security blanket, wrapped in and protected by a delusion that is promoted by a company that knows that selling addictive delusions. particularly to a population of people who are confused and uneasy about the future, is highly profitable.

Religions have worked that game for as long as they have existed. In a sense, because LinkedIn users, similar to people claiming to have a faith, apparently don’t require evidence to believe in something, belief in the platform could be treated as a religion, without the tax exemption, of course

Microsoft fed me a post recently from a freelance translator that evoked over a hundred comments. The post and the comments were discussing how to “succeed” and attain “reach” by posting on LinkedIn.

What in the world are these people talking about? Does harvesting a large number of impressions and comments (by colleagues, not clients) on LinkedIn mean success? Does it gain translators clients that pay them money? The evidence of that is extremely slim, and nobody seems to even bring that aspect of the platform up. It’s the irrelevant elephant in the living room where people are talking about LinkedIn “success” and “reach” as if these meant something on a social media platform that purports to be a business networking platform but is actually nothing of the kind for translators.

I’ve heard a number of translator colleagues say they made a LinkedIn account but got nothing from it, and they far outnumber that ones who say that they have acquired clients because of their LinkedIn presence. Although I wonder about what kind of clients and the veracity of such claims—LinkedIn has an established reputation as a bullshitting platform—such cases might exist, but with AI-using agencies far along in their move away from professional translators, the constellation of conditions, circumstances, and skills required for freelancers to acquire the direct clients they need to *perhaps* survive means that the value of interacting on LinkedIn approaches zero.

The freelance translators most likely to survive will be those who realize the value of real-world networking with potential clients. LinkedIn is not the real world they need to be active in. Translators who don’t understand what that means and don’t try to find out will not survive, and it is safe to say that most won’t.

There will be a small number of exceptional survivors, of course, but the drastically changed reality will preclude most freelance translators from surviving.

Nothing to See but a Performance

It’s rather comical on both sides of the recent kerfuffle about Australia’s performative banning of under 16-year-olds from having social media accounts.

There are a number of things that just don’t make sense.

(1) There is apparently no punishment for having an account if you’re under 16.

(2) The social media platform companies are ostensibly risking multimillion dollar fines for not complying with this law. It is pretty obvious that what will happen is that people like Zuckerberg will be called to testify somewhere and they’ll say “We spent all this money, trying to comply, so we’re doing our best.” Does anybody believe that there is actually a desire to lose all those customers, which means to lose all that behavioral information?

(3) As I input this note, there are countless young people making new anonymous social media accounts—backed up by new anonymous email accounts—in which they say they are 16 or older or somehow fake being 16 or older. There are reports of that already happening. There is a will to do that and they will find a way to do that.

There will also be a market for social media accounts that can be repurposed to get around this performative restriction.

(4) The vast majority of social media accounts are essentially anonymous to start with. I’ve never made a social media account where I had to prove my identity.

The platform owners don’t care. All they care about is your behavioral information, which they vacuum up and used to sell advertising, meaning they have no incentive to actually kill accounts or prevent accounts from being made by people under 16.

(5) Social media companies already use countless people in the third world to monitor for murderers, rapes, and other atrocities in posts on their platforms. Are those people going to be diverted to the task of verifying that account owners are 16 years or older?

Even if social media wanted to comply (they don’t) I can’t believe that people in developed economies are going to enlisted at reasonable salaries to do all this monitoring, which is a level of diligence on the part of tech bro billionaires that they have never shown in trying to figure out even who it is that has hold of currently active accounts, let alone their ages. It is a lawless land and that’s just fine with them because it’s a very profitable land.

(6) The banning of children under 16 from social media is purely performative and might actually serve as a diversion from concerns about what social media is doing to people 16 and older. In that sense, it could actually be welcomed by social media owners. They will fail at doing what would actually be necessary—because it’s inevitable that they fail—and then they’ll look like they’ve done their part, and the remaining social media users are still targets for all the evil things that go on in social media, including, but not unlimited to, behavior manipulation by the platform owners, deep fakes, and much worse.