Tag: Microsoft

Microsoft’s LinkedIn Reaches Deep Enshittification

After devoting sufficient time to verifying whether my problems with Microsoft’s LinkedIn are simply misunderstandings on my part, it has become clear that the image that Microsoft projects for its LinkedIn platform is a far cry from what is actually going on behind the curtain. That, combined with the ever-increasing phoniness, fakery, and desperation of people whose posts are puked at me by Microsoft’s algorithm makes a change of approach an urgent imperative.

The Microsoft agenda is demonstrated by shadow-banning of posts.

Microsoft regularly shadow-bans posts that go counter to its business model and its agenda of promoting AI and rewarding people who promote AI. A post calling this technology out or even gently criticizing AI or its proponents will get very little reach. In fact, just about any negative post on other topics as well will receive the same reception. Cheerleading posts that are mindlessly positive are rewarded. People who want to game the algorithm to get reach are welcomed to do so. I have neither the time nor the inclination to be so inauthentic.

Phony is the new real: Faking it ’til you make it has been extended to faking it even after you make it or fail to make it.

While a large portion of LinkedIn posts have long been characterized by self-congratulatory fluff, including people proclaiming their excitement or honor about things neither worthy of excitement nor capable of bestowing honor, additionally annoying elements have been recently added to the fluffosphere on LinkedIn. One is the proliferation of charlatan coaches. Originally, these coaches were mostly claiming to teach people how to “stand out” (an overworked expression we need to retire) by creating a killer profile or posting things that attracted work.

The coaching business has now been adopted by AI prompt engineering coaches who claim you can “succeed at AI” (whatever that might mean) by learning how to give AI the proper prompts. They’ll teach you. Just sign up.

Sadly, the LinkedIn coaching business is now being engaged in by some translators looking to make money from their colleagues. They claim to teach translators how to succeed in an AI-transformed business environment. Just attend one of their paid webinars or contact them for a consultation. I have seen no evidence that these translation coaches have any intention of telling their willing victims that, having adopted AI, they will still need to acquire non-AI using clients, something which is not possible for more than a tiny portion of freelancers.

This same type of disingenuous behavior is also engaged in by translators’ organizations, some of which promote paid seminars about how to adapt to or adopt AI, aimed at freelancers for whom all the adapting and adopting in the world will not save from falling into the low-paid post-editing swamp that awaits freelancers. Without clients, AI means nothing, but translators are not told that part of the story. This is shameful behavior on the part of both individual coaches and translators’ organizations.

Posts promoting AI are so numerous that banning user accounts is meaningless.

Every day I receive countless LinkedIn posts that are suggested to me by Microsoft’s algorithm and that promote AI as the greatest thing since sliced bread; AI is the final solution to all our problems, and all you need to do is learn how to give AI the correct prompts. I had started banning accounts that made these posts, but it is clear that the account-banning approach is futile. Ban ten accounts today, and Microsoft will just come up with ten (or twenty) more tomorrow that promote AI. As Microsoft pushes forward with its agenda and business model, it becomes obvious that I should pull back from LinkedIn.

Desperation and Delusions

My feed on LinkedIn is also graced by countless posts from colleague translators delusionally denying that they can be replaced by AI, when in fact AI is already replacing large numbers of freelancers for the translation process. They also claim—correctly, of course—that AI cannot beat a good human translator, but are apparently oblivious to or unwilling to accept the reality that it doesn’t matter. There is a huge demand for translation that is good enough if cheap enough, and that demand only grows as the price drops and speed increases. No amount of complaining by freelancers is going to stop AI-using agencies they have depended on from accessing that market to eliminate the need to pay professional translators. who are left with only extremely low-paid post-editing.

All of this silliness and annoying AI promotion has brought me to the decision to post nothing more on my page on LinkedIn beyond links to content in venues I control. I might make an occasional comment on the pages of other translators or in a group, but I’m not going to donate to Microsoft any content on my LinkedIn page, which does not promote any business activity for me.

This decision is the natural result of Microsoft’s push to make AI the only topic and the only bandwagon people are urged to jump on. I am not going to jump.

Please, Microsoft!

Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.

With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.

The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.

There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.

Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.

The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.

Carcinogen Ads Promoted by Microsoft’s LinkedIn

[This was posted originally on LinkedIn on March 21, 2025, but I have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Microsoft’s LinkedIn sends me ads for Japan Tobacco. I am attempting to stop them, but don’t know if it will work. Japan Tobacco sells carcinogens.

While Meta is totally criminal and partners with criminals on its several platforms, I never got a Japan Tobacco ad on Facebook when I was a user of that criminal platform.

Partnering with JT is simply sleazy and doesn’t reflect well on Microsoft.

JT cannot advertise on broadcast media, and I suppose it is using what it can get, which is a complicit company like Microsoft.

Seeing this kind of literally toxic garbage thrown at me gives me new encouragement to post just anything I want to LinkedIn. Screw Microsoft’s cover story of LinkedIn being a business networking platform. It’s nothing of the sort.

I’ll need to see if telling Microsoft that the JT ads are “annoying or not interesting” works. If not, something else might be in the works from here in Curmudgeonville.

Sluggish Microsoft AI?

It took Microsoft almost 30 minutes recently to start shadow-banning a post I made on its LinkedIn platform, reporting what is happening in the war in Europe, coupled with a common-sense suggestion of what needs to be done (essential, to achieve a solution to the Russian problem, in form of a decisive defeat of Russia and removal of their ability to continue their aggression).

I suppose the shadow-banning is understandable, since Microsoft continues to promote the fantasy that its LinkedIn platform is a useful business platform, rather than what it actually is, just another social media platform, created and operated for the same purpose as other social media platforms.

A company of the stature of Microsoft, however, should speed up its AI-driven shadow-banning so as to more effectively prevent this kind of unpleasant content about the real world from reaching its founder and creator users, who might not be excited, thrilled, or honored to see such stuff.

They might be more interested in turning the page to embark on a new chapter, continuing to elevate their journey and, on the way, opening doors that lead to exciting places in the LinkedIn Phony Kingdom.

I wonder if Microsoft’s AI would have been able to figure out the sarcasm in the above paragraph. Perhaps, but it is irrelevant; Microsoft is basically the same as operators of other social media platforms.