<story><title>All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go</title><url>https://www.thebaffler.com/past/all_linkedin_with_nowhere_to_go</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shubb</author><text>Linkedin, to me, is the most honest social network.&lt;p&gt;Social networks, Facebook or Google Plus, exist to create a base of knowledge about people, and then sell use of it, usually to advertisers.&lt;p&gt;Users don&amp;#x27;t use Facebook in order to be advertised to. They use it to talk to friends, store photos, or possibly to create a low effort website for a business. Yet their value to Facebook is as a target for advertising, and maybe one day their information will be used to provide metrics for insurers and employers.&lt;p&gt;The highest cost keywords on Google are for payday loans and insurance. In both cases, the money in the industry is in making users buy a product that costs more than it should - if you make money selling payday loans, you are making users with a lower risk profile than the interest reflects buy your loans, rather than go to the bank.&lt;p&gt;Linkedin users know they are creating a public face that employers, employees, and business partners can use to evaluate them. Linkedin sells access to this data, for the purpose that the users put it up there.&lt;p&gt;No one posts drunk photos on Linkedin, and if they are complaining about &amp;#x27;spam&amp;#x27; from recruiters, they are clearly not looking for a job at the moment (which is what linkedin is for).&lt;p&gt;Google and Facebook are private surveillance systems that bribe users using unrelated functionality, to document themselves for purposes that are against their interests (making them buy things they otherwise wouldn&amp;#x27;t, etc). Linkedin provides a publishing platform for users to document themselves and broadcast that documentation. Which one is less evil?</text></comment>
<story><title>All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go</title><url>https://www.thebaffler.com/past/all_linkedin_with_nowhere_to_go</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>praptak</author><text>To me LinkedIn is useful as a self-updating list of contacts. I actually got a job this way: spotted a decent low-buzzword job ad, banged the company name into LI, a friend popped up who I didn&amp;#x27;t know worked there.&lt;p&gt;I got the job, he got the referral bonus. Double win. Maybe we&amp;#x27;d still get it without LinkedIn but one sure thing is that LI made it very fast and convenient.</text></comment>