I went ahead and posted a link to yesterday's text to Linkedin.
That was, of course, a bad idea.
Bad, but also interesting.
It was not bad because I got nasty comments or anything, but because it brought me right back into the worst kind of social media mindset; checking for reactions way too often, worrying at first that I would have missed (or written) something that I would later regret, and so on. A light shower of social media anxiety, the kind of which I feel none when just posting to my site or on Mastodon.
That in itself was also an interesting part: "Look, this is what being more active and opinionated on Linkedin could do to you. Only more so."
Oh, it also made me think even more of other GPT-related content which showed up in the flow. People who suggest other people let language models work on their contracts as if the result could be in any way trusted … are they deliberately misleading or completely ignorant? Urgh, see? Not good for my mood and blood pressure!
Another very interesting detail I found this morning was that virtually nobody clicked through and actually read the text. Checking the statistics for my website, the page did not even get 50% more hits than the second most visited page, a page which had got no "promotion" of any kind.
By linking my text rather than putting it in the post outright, I probably saved myself a lot of reactions. Clearly, nobody follows a link on Linkedin. Which is probably just the way Linkedin wants things to be - get people to post their content on the site, so that they stay engaged.
What I take away from this is that posting a link with a comment is pretty much the same as just posting a comment: nobody who gets randomly exposed to your content will follow the link, even if Linkedin's own preview helpfully provides a headline and reading time.
Another interesting question this brings up is whether there is any point at all in posting to Linkedin about new episodes of Kodsnack.
…
Or anything else, really? What is wrong with me, why am I spending energy thinking about all this? Is that not just another way of being influenced by the algorithm?
HEY PEOPLE, COME OUTSIDE, THERE IS A BETTER WORLD OUT HERE!
(Maybe I should not have coffee this morning. I seem to be worked up enough as is …)