Tag: LinkedIn

Microsoft’s LinkedIn, where fake is rewarded and real is punished.

There are signs that intentionally abandoning your true persona in posts on LinkedIn in an effort to game the Microsoft algorithm, which shadow-bans posts it deems undesirable—one unforgivable sin is negativism about Microsoft or AI—can work to reduce the effect of shadow-banning. For me, however, that amounts to being someone else.

As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

And I will say “I’m going to be myself, because the personal cost of being someone else to game a mindless algorithm designed by tech broligarchs is much too high.”

Desperation drives a lot of LinkedIn posts from the global south.

My LinkedIn feed is inundated with posts from people with whom I share no business or language interests. They are mostly from the Global South and mostly AI-generated slop, and the low value of the posts is disturbing.

Why is it that the majority of LinkedIn post mentioning Japan that are fed to me by Microsoft are from accounts of people who are not in Japan, including many in the Global South, who are very unlikely to ever be able to come to Japan?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need to spend a bit of time thinking about LinkedIn and the demographics of desperate LinkedIn users.

Many LinkedIn users in the global south will never have the opportunity to visit locations such as Japan, but post in the hope that AI-generated or even human-generated Japan-related slop will attract engagement and perhaps income. That is highly unlikely, but such is the LinkedIn world of desperation.

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.