It’s odd to see how conspiracy fantasies, suspect sources, disinformation and deliberate emotionally provocative or even antagonistic wording are on the rise on my LinkedIn timeline.
I first encountered a QAnon account in a comments section last August, but that person was still many steps away in my network. Now I see things popping up from direct connections and their connections. I had assumed that LinkedIn being tied to your professional reputation would go a long way to prevent such things, but apparently not any longer. In some instances, it’s almost as if people don’t realise they’re doing it, a boiling-a-frog effect of sorts.
One person being called out for some under-informed reactionary content by pointing out that their employer has the capabilities and resources to prove them wrong even responded “leave my employer out of it”. That’s not really possible though, as your employer is in your by-line and accompanies your avatar with every post and comment you make. Seven months after first encountering something like that on my LinkedIn timeline it is now a daily part of my timeline, and all coming from my Dutch network and their connections.
LinkedIn is starting to feel as icky as Facebook did three years ago. Makes me wonder how long LinkedIn will remain a viable tool. I don’t think I will be spending much or any attention on my timeline moving forward, until the moment LinkedIn is as much a failed social platform as others and it’s time to let go of it completely. That doesn’t mean disengaging with the people in my network obviously, but it is not at all my responsibility to help LinkedIn reach a certain level of quality of discourse by trying to counteract the muck. I was an early user of LinkedIn (nr. 8730, look at the source of your profile page and search it for ‘member:’ to find your number) in the spring of 2003, I know there’s already a trickle of people leaving the platform, and I wonder when (not if) I’ll fully join them.
@ton Move to @flockingbird ?
A pretty regular week, a pretty unremarkable one. This week I
started using Obsidian’s dataview which allows building queries across my notes collection and show the results in notes themselves
discussed a potential new client engagement
had the weekly client meetings
worked on a narrative inquiry website
participated in the European ENDORSE conference, on reference data and semantics
discussed and detailed three internal projects for the coming 2-3 months, on building a training product, a company knowledge base, and on networking
had our monthly all hands meeting
adapted the definition of done of an ongoing project
described the intended results of a project on making intergovernmental audits more data savvy
saw the intergovernmental audit project accepted
did the YTD bookkeeping for the company
deep read a number of EU law proposals
booked a vacation home by the sea for a weekend away
re-evaluated my use of LinkedIn
@VictorVenema @flockingbird is dat dan al iets verder dan de ideefase?
@ton @VictorVenema We’re moving forward, but not enough to “move to flockingbird”, no. There’s working software, but far from alpha even. Let alone that it’s running somewhere in production.
@ton Reading your blogpost, I’m wondering if you are in need of a place where there’s a timeline and comments but without the “q-anon”. Or whether you are in need of a place that has no timeline and/or comments at all.
@flockingbird Good question, I don’t know the answer. The timeline at L is ineffective in the same way FB’s is: it does not show me what my contacts are posting, it’s algorithmically manipulating what I see. (evidenced by e.g. getting served week old posts as if new, and posting something to a network of several thousand people being ‘seen’ a few dozen times at most, whereas plenty content _not_ from my direct network is being shown.) Yet, I also see some use for the timeline, .. 1/2
Continuing on from my recent remarks about the deterioration of LinkedIn, and my earlier thoughts on personal CRM as a non-LinkedIn, I’ve requested a download of my LinkedIn data. I wanted to take a look at what is included in it.
As I remembered from an earlier download the provided contact list contains the name, current role and date of connecting, but no links to the corresponding profiles. That renders the list of names more or less useless, if you would actually want to take your data and move on. However, going to the overview of my network on the LinkedIn site I can get my entire network shown in a single list. This overview used to be paginated, but now the network page is an endless scroll. It takes a bit of scrolling to go to the bottom of the list of a few thousand connections but then I had all my connections shown on a single page. Having saved that html file I can now strip out the links to profiles and add them to the list of connections in the data download. How I can make all that downloaded material useful as input for a personal CRM system is still an open but interesting question.
Since a year or so the deterioration of the LinkedIn timeline has been very visible to me. Next to an increasing number of people sharing things as if LinkedIn is Facebook, the timeline is not under the control of the user, and presents algorithmically determined items. Sometimes that results in seeing things days or weeks after they were posted when I would have liked to see them the day they were posted, but instead got the rants of someone else. The only way one can shape the LinkedIn timeline is by removing people from it. So I did, and removed all people from it. I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have no LinkedIn timeline, and use it as it was in the past, as a digitised contact list. Of course that brings my LinkedIn experience back to the place where it was when Jyri Engestrom predicted its demise if it didn’t introduce an object of sociality in April 2005. I’ve been using LinkedIn since June 2003 (user nr. 8730), and the barebones ‘digital rolodex’ actually serves me well, to see the background of someone I meet, and to allow others to see the same about me. From now on I can skip the timeline that LinkedIn serves me as a default, and engage with people in my network, and the things they share on my own terms and initiative, seeking them out when I want. Next to keeping my own notes.
To get to an empty timeline I had to unfollow everyone I’m connected to. Which is not a simple thing to do, as LinkedIn provides no easy option to unfollow large amounts of people, and requires you to unfollow everyone one by one. Of course there are work arounds and that is what I used, with a snippet of code in my browser console.
LinkedIn can be nice and quiet, with everyone unfollowed