The Problem with Linked In
This morning I received this ripe comment from a smart new follower on Medium in response to an earlier article about this increasingly invasive, annoying, and sewage-filled social medium:
I’ve been getting so many connection requests with the message along the lines of, “I looked over your profile and can help you do (insert one of many digital marketing related business things)”. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not even accepting these people as connections because they don’t offer me anything except a hard sell. And, I’m not looking for that. I’m starting to think LinkedIn is useless.
So just for the fun of it I Googled a few bits and pieces about LI, and found this, which made me fall out of my chair:
LinkedIn is that kind of place — “a wasteland of endless management consultants congratulating each other”, to quote one correspondent.- https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jun/09/linkedin-is-the-worst-of-social-media-should-i-delete-my-account
I love it when someone just nails it. This NAILED it.
Between the piles of dog poop that so-called social media consultants send me whilst claiming they reviewed my profile (how about I give you a quick quiz on that profile, Skeezix?) or scam bots that are claiming to find me ever so attractive and I sure hope this isn’t rude and boy I sure realize that Linked In is business (how about you shove it in your Mumbai pie hole you moron), Linked In has become, like Facebook, a major annoyance.
Another Medium member sent this to a story I wrote about a Linked In so called consultant:
Some time before the Indian- and many other- scammers began using Linked In as a way to entice people into a fake dating relationship I got plenty of come-ons from people who possessed no scruples, and not even a modicum of common sense. The format was business only. Men were constantly asking for dates as though that was acceptable. Not then, not now.
Linked In was at one point the place to have a resume, look for a job, seek out professional connections. To a degree it still is. But let me give you an analogy from my travels:
Tanzania is a gorgeous place, and the further you get out into the wilds, the more lovely. In some ways. Water can be scarce. The Masai, who are measured in wealth by their animals, herd great masses of goats, sheep and cattle. So on a seven-day camel trip in February of 2015, I got to see what happens to the water. The six of us (myself and five Masai men) had stopped our three camels at the side of a large pond to rest in the shade. As we ate our snacks, a young boy herded his cattle, sheep and goats in to drink. The animals waded into the water and shat and pissed into the spreading waves. The young boy leaned over to drink from it as well as cow dung danced delicately inches from his dark, handsome face. You get my drift.
You keep pouring shit into a nice pool of water (which is what we’ve done with our oceans, just saying) and you will end up with one big pool of crap.
Linked In began as a pristine pool for business people. Good intentions, poor management. After a while too many people, including scammers and abusers, shat and pissed into it. Now if we want to drink from it, we get sewage. There’s still water, but you have to use a damned good filter.
For travel, I use the Steripen. Works like a charm. Won’t clear it up but it does take care of the bacteria. Still tastes like shit but you won’t die.
For social media, I use simple common sense, and a very large bullshit filter. Works like a charm. Won’t clear it up, but it takes care of the bacteria. Still sounds like shit but you don’t have to partake of it.
From all the false humility, the implicit demand to congratulate people on birthdays and work anniversaries (I DON’T GIVE A FLYING SH*T), the sickening bragging, the fake emails, the scammers, Linked In is as full of poop as that African pond. I am constantly bumping up against turds.
Now granted. I drank some pristine water this past year when I rewrote my profile and promptly got work. That’s what I mean when I say if you use a damned good filter, there’s still good water there.
Each and every medium that begins with fine intentions is going to draw lowlifes and spammers and scammers and bots. It’s the nature of the world today. On Medium, I’ve had a few, but they are vastly outnumbered by excellent people who work hard to hold up the standards. It’s up to us to determine what we’re willing to tolerate, as well as what we absolutely refuse to spend emotional time on. I dumped Facebook last week. In three magical, perfect, gorgeous days I will be off there FOREVER. I feel ever so much lighter, better, less burdened. My sense of humor is lighter, better, less burdened. Unencumbered by videos and photos of animal torture porn that was supposed to get me to donate funds but instead sickened me to my soul and caused me unending distress (and since I can’t “un-see” this shit, it still does), I can begin to heal myself of that ugliness.
Linked In is headed the same way. I began to back off when after writing some 500 (unpaid of course) articles, some political dickheads started to troll me. When I wrote a heartfelt goodbye to long time NPR host Robert Seigel the year of his retirement, I got blasted by a bunch of vicious conservative assholes. It’s been downhill ever since, an increasingly swift slide into the sewage of professional jerks and angry commenters. Just like Facebook.
That was just the beginning. Then over the last several years, the scammers have proliferated, as have these social media consultants, which are no more than vultures pouncing on the unsuspecting and woefully ignorant.
For my money, my time and my mental health, I limit my time on any social media platform to just what I came there for. It usually doesn’t take long at all. Every time I show up I feel exposed to the bone, with people scanning every aspect of my online person for a crack they can invade and MONETIZE.
As with our intimate selves, and our food, we have to become connoisseurs of what we choose to do with our life and our time. We give the worst of the worst permission to invade our sacred space when we hang out online, from the corporate slime to the bottom dwellers who live on stale donuts and rat poison on their basement floors.
For me, that means more time offline, not responding to Linked In invitations, and setting up every kind of barrier to the increasingly obscene invasion of the self that we have allowed to permeate our society. I’m going outside to run, play, ride horses, talk with friends and be in the sunshine.
In other words, be happy.
