Although I still posting on LinkedIn, it is clear that the platform is not very useful, particularly because of Microsoft’s 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 connection requests that were pending, these mostly being from people I don’t know and don’t want to or need to know. Many are from the Global South, and probably a good number of them are from people who 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, but 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.
- 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.