Does anyone else feel like LinkedIn....

[Lilliea]

feels like a bunch of people using ChatGPT to talk to each other? It's becoming really, really weird. Part of my role is networking so I post once or twice a week about latest developments in the industry, then engage in the comments. The responses are hilarious. Just classic AI talk. Not all, but a lot. Does anyone else fing it hard to engage when you know people are using a computer to respond?

I didn’t have to be on it for years although had a basic profile and have never posted, recently changed careers so been looking professional contacts etc up… was totally shocked to see all my lovely friends who now mostly WhatsApp rather than social media it up, are all on there posting buckets about their professional life but it’s all complete bollocks!

Eg, go for a drink, ‘how’s work, old friend Liz?’

‘Fucking HATE it, they’re all tears, trying to figure out if i have enough savings to just walk out’.

Pop on linked in next day, there is Liz: ‘ENCHANTED to have spent such a THRILLING evening with my BELOVED, ESTEEMED colleagues and peers at the Complete Bollox Awards event… what a MEANINGFUL engagement, I just LOVE that this is what I GET TO DO EVERY. DAY.’

Er, what? Surely all this cognitive dissonance is bad for us?

I gave up on LinkedIn when they suddenly started asking me to go through the online ID verificiation via some third party. Maybe I am a bit odd but it felt intrusive.

I must say I'd never spent that much time on LinkedIn prior to that anyway as it often felt to me as though it was a professional equivalent of Facebook. I had a lot of so called "connections" starting from stakeholders at work, suppliers, former colleagues, classmates from school and uni etc all of which were posting things that most of the time I found neither interesting on a personal level, nor useful for work or other purposes. Now that I don't go on LinkedIn for anything, I wouldn't say I feel like I am missing out.

I took against LinkedIn from the start because they were the world's worst spammers. There was a time when I used to open my inbox each morning and there would be ten or more mails from LinkedIn claiming that people I'd never heard of wanted to connect with me. I'm convinced that they were paying Google to bypass spam filters, because this continued even after I set up explicit rules that any mail containing the word LinkedIn should be considered spam.

Thankfully that doesn't seem to happen any more, but the appeal of it still eludes me. For some reason my boss is obsessed with it and keeps trying to get me to create a profile. Which seems even more odd because the only reason I can think of for doing that would be if I wanted to get a different job!

The most annoying thing is that you can't even call out the totally made-up inspirational stories etc because you use the site wearing your "work hat"!

When I was doing strategy research, back in the noughties, I set up a fake LinkedIn profile to evaluate it as a "thing" in IT.

That fake profile still exists and gets connection requests to this day. In a way it's had a better career than me.

(I also set up a fake Twitter account that is still active. Just in case anyone was under any illusions it's only real people there now).

In my field, you have to be on there or miss out. I’ve found jobs through it and made some good connections.

You have to wade through a lot of shite to get to some interesting content. It’s definitely changed for the worse in the past few years.

Thank you!

And another thing ... somehow the algorithm has changed lately, so instead of seeing posts from the people I follow and am connected with, I see "recommended for you" (ie someone I've never heard of) or posts my connections have liked, which are obviously interesting to them for some reason, but mostly not in the slightest to me. And I see the posts from my own connections two weeks later. So the content stream is now basically useless in real time.
The job ads and DMs are the only reason to go there

It’s the pits.
I and other colleagues received a barrage of abusive and xenophobic messages from a customer who located us through LinkedIn - legal dept. had to get involved.

That will be the "AI" that is everywhere these days. Everywhere in a way dog shot is everywhere.

Everyone is "thrilled!"