Linked in, not linked out

March 16, 2023

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 …)