Tag: LinkedIn

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.

LinkedIn is becoming just another social media cesspool.

In just a week or so, I have seen a rapid and disturbing increase in the number of posts thrown at me by Microsoft’s LinkedIn that are clearly Facebook-like engagement-harvesting slop.

A typical post describes at length some historical or current event that might have happened or a person, although some are clearly total fabrications. Sources are not cited, because there are none to cite.

Most of these posts are lengthy (as if someone told ChatGPT to write N hundred words about XYZ), and much of the writing has the undeniably cadence and style of AI.

Many of these posts are from non-anglophone places. Many of them are accompanied by AI-generated images, and sometimes by photographs that the poster is highly unlikely to have obtained permission to use. This turns a post that is merely annoying drivel into an unlawful act that is annoying drivel.

In any event, while Microsoft seems skilled at detecting when posts are in any way negative, particularly with regarding its platform or AI, and effectively shadow-bans such posts (as it did to this blog post today when it was uploaded to LinkedIn), it actively promotes the above-noted garbage, which is nothing more than AI-slop aimed at harvesting engagement for someone or something with nothing to say or offer.

This garbage needs to be kept on Facebook or other social media platforms, although an argument can be made that the social media platform called LinkedIn is rapidly coming to resemble the Facebook cesspool, and I’m making that argument.

Write if you get real.

It just struck me that I have been passing up a great opportunity to promote my business.

I need to trash my tiny company and start up a new tiny company. Then I can call the business a startup, and if I present myself as a founder and an entrepreneur, I can solidify my position on the spectrum, the buzzword salad (BS) spectrum that is.

I can then take my newly fashioned persona to LinkedIn and be excited, thrilled, and honored about anything and everything that happens.

That will secure my position on a path…uh, sorry, journey…to LinkedIn success, and we know how meaningful that is.

Seriously, folks, when I hear people mixing up a salad of buzzwords like journey, startup, founder, entrepreneur, elevating, scalable, and many more empty attempts at relevance, it reminds me that 受注してなんぼ, if you’ll excuse the Kansai version of the Bob and Ray “Write if you get work” sign-off.

Perhaps an even better version would be write if you get real.