Category: Social Media

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

Expanded Thoughts on My “LinkedIn Experience”

Executive Summary:  For any freelancer (and not limited to translators) not totally locked into sitting in front of their computer and hoping work arrives, LinkedIn is as useless as tits on a bull. In fact, even (and perhaps particularly) if you are locked into that strategy, LinkedIn is pretty much useless.

Some uselessness of LinkedIn not directly attributable to Microsoft:

  • Usage of LinkedIn by Japanese individuals and entities is tiny compared to the anglophone world, hence the small number of JA-EN translators I encountered there. One of the reasons I rejoined LinkedIn was because of the lack of online venues with active interaction between Japanese/English translators. LinkedIn did not fill that need.
  • Almost all of the hundreds of connection requests I received (and almost universally ignored) were from people in the Global South, some of them involved in activities not easily discernible from their profiles, but many being translators. Surely, they saw my profile and company name and erroneously thought I had translation work to give them; I do not.

Uselessness of LinkedIn directly attributable to Microsoft and its business model:

  • Countless ads for AI systems.
  • Countless ads for jobs training AI systems by annotating data.
  • Many ads for training you to achieve “AI success” by learning how to prompt AI.
  • Incessant promotion by Microsoft itself of AI and AI promoters.
  • Phoniness and bluster are everywhere and rewarded by Microsoft with reach that leads to engagement. These are characteristically from people claiming to be the best things since sliced bread and also fighting against tremendous odds and never losing. I feel some of these people have serious self-confidence problems, but I digress.
  • AI-generated posts clearly uploaded to farm engagement and often about topics totally unrelated to anything the poster’s profile might indicate that they do when they are not posting AI slop.

Uselessness of LinkedIn attributable to general users:

  • A large portion of users present themselves as consultants, coaches, and trainers.
  • Countless formulaic posts, many starting with the overworked expression of thrill, excitement, or honor about just about anything and everything. They often end with silliness such as “Hi, I’m Danny Deluder, and if you need…”
  • An increasing number of posts that include images stolen and unlawfully republished, probably by people who will conveniently tell you that the image was on the Internet, so it was “public domain.” These people should be beaten about the head and shoulders with a heavy shovel, but I digress.
  • Account owners who reply to every comment to a post they make using AI, easily discoverable from not only the vapid text, but also the lengths of the responses, the dispersion of which often no more than one or two words. It’s as if they told an AI to reply in N words.
  • Incessant posts from “LinkedIn coaches,” purporting to coach you in achieving “LinkedIn success.”
  • Countless posts by people self-identifying as

Uselessness and annoyance of LinkedIn attributable to translator users:

  • Many desperate and delusional translators chanting the “culture mantra,” which claims that, because translation requires an understanding of cultural nuances, humans will not be replaced by AI. These people apparently don’t know or want to know that most translation that is purchased is not affected by culture. Bless their hearts, but I have given up on trying to educate these people.
  • Ads by translators working the aisles of desperate translators and looking to take money from them for coaching.

Annoyance of a specific group related to business in Japan:

  • There is a Japan business group that has a few members who know about Japan and make sensible comments based on the real world, but almost all of the many thousands of members (over 15,000 if I remember correctly) are silent, and the group appears to be generally populated by non-Japanese looking to do business in Japan or, in many cases, just get a cover story to be able to come and live in Japan.
  • Because of the above demographic, there are Japanese members of the group selling services to foreigners trying to acquire visas or residence status in Japan.
  • Again, because of the above demographic, there are complaints that Japan is not fair to foreigners, including some comments about the unfairness of requiring proficiency in Japanese to gain employment. I will write about that particular silly entitlement at another time.

For translators specifically, I can say that, with translation quickly winding down as a realistic activity for most freelancers, the type of clients the few survivable translators will need to acquire are not going to be acquired by having a LinkedIn account or posting there. Many more—and much different—things are going to be required.

What has cyberspace turned into?

On “normal” social media platforms:

  • AI-generated videos of UK royalty dancing with their royal children.
  • Crotch shots of AI-generated female athletes with definition in the crotch area that would get them disqualified from whatever AI-generated event they were going to compete in.
  • AI-generated dogs saving the lives of AI-generated babies.
  • AI-generated aircraft crashing onto the decks of AI-generated aircraft carriers.
  • AI-generated cars crashing into AI-generated trailer trucks.
  • AI-generated animals having AI-generated foreign objects removed from their skin by AI-generated veterinarians, this becoming common recently, along with many more, even more-revolting fake videos involving animals.
  • A constant stream of AI text slop from places like India, Macedonia, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Vietnam, often accompanied by unlawfully published photos, the poster neither giving credit for the images nor citing sources, and the slopper certainly not having permission to use the images.
  • A constant stream of ads—mostly confirmable as coming from Vietnam—for WiFi connection equipment and services in Japan, clearly aimed at Asian laborers who have been brokered into Japan to work.
  • Loan-shark ads aimed at foreign laborers working in Japan.
  • AI-generated voices of well-known people on a video of two seconds of the person to establish “authenticity” and continuing for several minutes with the faked voice but without any image, because the lip movement would give it away instantly. There are countless fake Neil deGrasse Tyson videos like this. The voice is very close, but the cadence of the fake narration clearly is not his. He has recently called this out in a video of his own, pointing out the damage this does to trust. This theft of images and spoofing of voices is criminal, but will go unpunished, thanks to the guaranteed anonymity of social media and apathy of users, many of whom have been numbed to this behavior by a torrent of unlawful posts.
  • Inspirational stories that never happened, mostly from places like Macedonia.
  • Ads claiming to sell you the method of getting rich quickly using ChatGPT. One recent testimonial boasts of being able to buy a luxury car and a home after just two months of stock market investment using ChatGPT.
  • Ads for underground banks aimed at Asian laborers in Japan who want to repatriate money they earn in Japan.

On some platforms, video slop you didn’t ask for and don’t need will autoplay after you watch something that you have actually elected to watch, requiring you to escape to avoid seeing it.

From the LinkedIn social media platform in particular—and it is as social media platform:

  • Vapid AI slop posts with both text and graphics generated AI, the subject matter of which most often being totally unrelated to what the poster purports to do when they are not generating AI slop.
  • AI-smelling text posts that evoke many comments, with each comment being replied to by AI, the replies being within a word or two of each other in length.
  • Microsoft-suggested posts promoting AI or promoting AI promoters.
  • Ads promoting AI.
  • Posts from soon-to-be-out-of-work translators claiming that AI will not replace human translators because AI doesn’t understand culture.
  • Unwanted irrelevant connection requests, mostly from the Global South (although I have fixed that problem).
  • Ads for paid webinars run or promoted by translation organizations to teach translators how to succeed and be better at jobs, although those jobs are quickly disappearing.
  • Translators’ organizations announcing activities of little or no relevance to translators working in the high-demand mainstream domains that are rapidly shrinking because of AI-using agencies.
  • Constant non-productive and futile complaints from freelance translators about this or that agency, this preaching to the choir constituting a waste of attention and time that could be better spent thinking about what to do next (hint: for most, it’s not freelance translation or probably translation at all).
  • Investment scam ads (including investment in mango plantations).
  • Ads for homes in Dubai for USD 1 million.

There you have it. Who could ask for anything more? More importantly, who asked for any of this?

Coming to terms with the true nature of Microsoft’s LinkedIn business model

[Update: I trashed by LinkedIn account on October 28, 2025, after the post was uploaded]

Although I am still posting on LinkedIn, it is clear that the platform is not very useful, particularly because of Microsoft’s recent shadow-banning of posts that are not aligned with its business model of promoting AI, rewarding cheerleaders, and punishing people who have the temerity to be brutally honest.

I have recently deleted 130-plus recent pending connection requests. These were mostly from people I don’t know and don’t want to or need to know. Many are in the Global South, and probably a good number of these people mistakenly think that I outsource translation work to freelancers. I do not.

Anyway, here are just a few of the salient and mostly annoying characteristics of Microsoft’s LinkedIn that I have observed:

  • LinkedIn promotes AI and promoters of AI.
  • LinkedIn has lately been flooded with slop posts written by AI.
  • The Microsoft LinkedIn algorithm does not work in the interest of its users, but rather (of course, and understandably) to maximize engagement, which turns into income for Microsoft.
  • LinkedIn fills my feed with many posts from people with no noticeable substance, and who breathtaking overestimate the credulity of people who might see their posts.
  • LinkedIn fills my feed with posts about Japan from people who seem to know nothing about Japan, many of these people being in places and in situations from which they will never be able to come to Japan.
  • LinkedIn has many accounts of translators who are in serious denial and delusion, thinking that they won’t be replaced by AI. They are wrong and cannot be reasoned with, this being the reason for my deleting large amounts of writings for translators, as noted elsewhere.
  • LinkedIn throws much more annoying things at me, including ads and suggested posts from LinkedIn coaches working the aisles of desperate LinkedIn users struggling to survive and, even more abhorrently, posts from translators engaged in the business of selling coaching to other translators, thereby furthering the misconception that freelance translation is going to survive. It’s not.
  • LinkedIn rewards phony narcissistic fluff with visibility, but punishes straight-talk posts by shadow-banning them.

There you have it. It is not a pretty picture, and it shows that, on LinkedIn, there’s much less than meets the eye.