LinkedIn is a toxic mediocrity.
What a great way of placing it!
The post is short and there’s not much to quote. Yet I’ll keep some quotes in here anyway.
It’s soft, warm and hard to publicly call out but if you’re not deep in the bubble it reads like nonsense. Unlike it’s cousins ‘Toxic Positivity’ and ‘Toxic Masculinity’ it isn’t as immediately obvious. It’s content that spins itself as meaningful and insightful while providing very little of either. Underneath the one hundred and fifty words is, well, nothing. It’s a post that lets you know that sunny days are warm or its better not to be a total psychopath. What is anyone supposed to learn from that.
Speaking from myself, I despised LinkedIn from day one, when its design was mediocre enough to demonstrate lack of any talent of people who made it. Yet it’s so much praised, mostly by idiots or not very sincere people.
Yeah, I’m loving it (LinkedIn) too, wink wink! It’s a great place to … [what? No, really, what?]
And here goes another quote:
Nothing you post there is going to change your career. Doing work that matters might. Drawing attention to that might. Go for depth over frequency.
If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. You’ll get less views and less engagement but there’s less temptation to post nonsense just for likes.
With which I agree.
It’s followed by this piece of thought, with which I mostly agree:
You’re going to have a harder time getting people to stick around and read what you’re writing but that additional pressure raises the bar. Yeah, there are plenty of blogs that mostly go unread but even knowing that people will click away when they get bored should help distill your posts into content that matters.
As a semi-professional blogger (of almost two decades), I was good only because I have never been having a single fuck about that. For a while, I pretended that I care, but I didn’t really.
Now I’m old enough (haha, no, I’m still very young, by the way) to understand that I don’t care about people leaving my site, not reading my thoughts. I do that for myself, not anyone else. That keeps me going, and makes no difference whether I’m read by millions or nobody. Millions are stressful, of course, and I’m not up to the challenge of posting controversial thoughts to ignore a million fuck-yous from random strangers. Ignoring this is challenging, even if 100% of them are idiots.
I’m fine with people click away.
Hey, you! Yes, you! Get the fuck out of here! I count to five, you filthy animal!