Category: Social Media

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

Pass the puke bucket: Microsoft’s LinkedIn rolls along as a platform for charlatans.

[I posted the following to LinkedIn yesterday, March 3, 2025, and it was quickly shadow-banned by Microsoft.]

This morning Microsoft’s LinkedIn algorithm thought (although it can’t think) I would be interested in a post (an ad, actually) from a self-styled LinkedIn ghostwriter claiming to have clients paying him 1000s of dollars a month to “grow their LinkedIn accounts” (totally meaningless, of course), saying he got thousands of connections for himself using an AI ghostwriting tool he developed. He claims that not only does the AI tool write viral, engaging posts for you on LinkedIn, it also generates ideas about what to post based on your business. It sounds like it tells you what to write.

This type of tool is best used by people who have nothing say and don’t know how to say it. Professionals know what they need to say and can say it.

This nonsense demonstrates quite well what Microsoft’s LinkedIn platform has become, a tool for charlatans working the aisles of desperate people who believe that LinkedIn “success” will save them.

I’m not surprised that this ad got hundreds of comments requesting the AI tool freebie trial. The wretched masses are yearning to get connections. Go for it. 

In case people are wondering, the ghostwriter is young and has a profile that doesn’t indicate any qualifications or experience; no education shown and no experience in organizations other than the business he runs, and its website doesn’t have a physical address and doesn’t even name him. You need to be really dumb to not realize what that suggests.

Charlatans selling to the huddled masses yearning to have connections and have “LinkedIn success” have become the norm on Microsoft’s LinkedIn platform.

And I guess the blocking of this garbage from your LinkedIn feed is left up to the unfortunate recipients.

LinkedIn has become pretty much meaningless, unless you are working the aisles of desperate users or you can’t resist the opportunity to say that you are excited, thrilled, or honored to announce something.

For my part, I am annoyed to announce that Microsoft has effectively removed any value from its LinkedIn platform.

One algorithm leads to another.

[Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 16, 2025]

Disclaimer: I don’t have a LinkedIn account to find clients or look for a job, since my client demographic is essentially absent from LinkedIn, and I am not on LinkedIn looking for a job.

Now, with that out of the way:

The often-heard claim that LinkedIn is a business-related platform is delusional if we are talking about people seeking work.

There are people looking for employment on LinkedIn, but all that Microsoft’s LinkedIn is doing is using their algorithm to give users the opportunity to face yet other algorithms, operated by what they think are potential employers.

They will need first to game the Microsoft LinkedIn algorithm and then will further need to game a hiring algorithm to even get an interview, which apparently is a rare occurrence.

Those games are generally meaningless, and desperation and delusion are the only reasons many people hang onto LinkedIn, which is demonstrably just another social media platform, owned and run by Microsoft for much the same reasons Zuckerberg owns and runs Facebook and the reasons Musk owns and runs X. And we know those reasons, don’t we? Enough said.

Publishing of Intellectual Property without Permission: It’s unlawful in most places.

Publicly sharing a stolen image in a social media post that consists almost entirely of the stolen image is unlawful in most legal jurisdictions.

Adding credit to or citing the originator doesn’t make it lawful without first getting permission to publish, and many such “credits” just name (often by a meaningless pseudonym or platform name) the immediately previous thief who unlawfully published the image elsewhere.

All of this is a win for platform owners like Mark Zuckerberg and a loss for the universe of people still purporting to know right from wrong. Zuckerberg is guilty of countless violations of ethical common sense and doesn’t live in that universe. And his sucking up to and funding Mango Mussolini is another indication of a problem that needs fixing and is a reason I left his platform recently.