[he11ow]

I used to be a big fan of LinkedIn. I've posted, here and elsewhere, expressing these views. But some of the value LinkedIn used to offer is definitely eroding.

The feeds have become really terrible. This wasn't always the case. Before, a lot more weight was given to posts from people you were connected to, vs. the weight given to their overall engagement. This offered two kinds of value: One, you were more likely to keep updated on what's happening within a professional niche (assuming lots of your connections were in that niche too.) Two, your own writing would be shown mostly to people in your business niche, which helped foster trust.

I've formed a lot of useful connections this way. A lot of client relationships, past and present, started out this way. A bunch of people helped me in a bunch of ways (intros, advice) because they felt I was a real person, not a rando profile image.

That's mostly gone now. A useful post is now so rare, and the rest is "engagement" fodder. Eventually, I turned off the feed, and that's how it stays most of the time. (I installed an extension someone once posted about here.)

The chat feature, which was always really powerful, is still there. But it used to be that the flow was written insights -> chat -> in person/Zoom. Without that slower process of getting acquainted, the connecting itself has less potential to become really useful.

[CRConrad]

> The feeds have become really terrible. This wasn't always the case. Before, a lot more weight was given to posts from people you were connected to, vs. the weight given to their overall engagement.

Isn't that just, like, the (apparently inevitable) enshittification of all social media?

And since in each case it's governed by the platform's algorithm, and algorithms don't write or approve themselves, seems it's invariably intentional.