Category: Social Media

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

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.

What is it with the Microsoft thugs that own and run LinkedIn?

I trashed my account of about five years standing in October and LinkedIn sent me a “we’re sorry to see you go” email. Fine. I don’t need any emails from them, so I trashed the email alias on my company server that I had used as a contact address for that LinkedIn account.

Just today, probably seeing that email to the above-noted address is bouncing, these cyberlouts sent me a “You’re on a roll on LinkedIn” (subject line) email at a gmail address (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea big fucking culpa) I had once used as an address for LinkedIn things with an account I haven’t had for ten years, with a notification bell and number-of-notifications count, trying to get me to sign in (and revive?) the account.

If you click on it, a page pops us trying to get me to sign into that long-gone LinkedIn account.

To add insult to injury, the email telling me that I’m “on a roll” itself has two introductions to a cumstain trying to sell akiya, of all things, to unsuspecting foreigners, intended targets surely including, but not limited to, self-proclaimed digital nomad hipsters who look forward to interacting with their peers, not realizing that it will be very difficult to find peers in Hachinohe or some other venue that has these lovely properties. Let the nomad beware. But I digress.

I am not thrilled, not excited, and not honored to get this shit sent to me, to borrow the phony formulaic openers self-proclaimed “founders” on LinkedIn often open with.

They have an Unsubscribe link to click on, but I suspect that clicking on it would just notify LinkedIn that there’s “somebody home.” I’ll let this sit for a while. The annoying thing is that this is not an alias address that can be conveniently trashed, but any email from them can be automatically trashed, and I will think of other ways they should be rewarded.

It’s good that the distance of cyberspace provides the Microsoft people avoidance of accountability and protection from people who would do them physical harm.

Have not much to say? Create content instead.

Not so many years ago, before problems were reinvented as issues, services as solutions, and jobs as roles, people who had something to say would sometimes write those things.

These days, people increasingly identify as “content creators,” but some of this trendy content creation strikes me as aiming to obviate the need to have something to say. Just create “content” instead; it’ll make you “stand out.” And some of the people identifying as content creators don’t seem to have much to say, or to write, or to “create.”

The American Translators Association a short while ago promoted a webinar aimed at helping translators write translation content. Well, at least their choice of the verb write is refreshing. For members, it was just USD 45 for the hour-long webinar.

The webinar was billed as helping translators find what topics to write about. Don’t they know? Is that really necessary? We are often told to write about what we know. Does that mean…?

Perhaps it is aimed at translators who have so much to say they cannot decide what to write about, or perhaps it’s for those who have nothing to say. I’ll let you guess which.

This “translation content” is described as giving you visibility and as being good for marketing. Perhaps, but it sounds like participants are going to be told things they should have been able to figure out on their own. Perhaps more importantly, just who is the “translation content” intended for?

It was only USD 45 for the hour-long webinar, but with no indicated limit on the number of participants, if you get my drift. Perhaps ATA should run a webinar for USD 45 to teach participants how to run webinars for USD 45. That might be a better strategy than creating…uh, writing content.