Thursday, December 06, 2018

and then I remembered...

It occurred to me earlier this morning that, if I leave Gab as part of a larger effort to rid myself of social-media connections, I won't have quit all of the social media that I use. One medium will remain: LinkedIn.

I kind of like LinkedIn, though, and I'm not ready to abandon it. I rarely post there, but I like the fact that LinkedIn provides the user with a stripped-down, no-bullshit format that is almost purely about making connections—then doing nothing with those connections unless one suddenly wants to change jobs. Yes: LinkedIn calls one's online associates "connections," which is much more honest and businesslike than using the insincere term "friends," as on Facebook, or the vaguely humiliating term "followers" (as if the user were Jesus), as on Twitter. A person on Facebook with 35,000 friends doesn't actually have that many true friends. It's all bullshit. So fuck Facebook—right in the fucking face.

I'll drop LinkedIn if I ever hear that its security has been breached. LinkedIn, as a service, keeps a low, sleek profile that doesn't seem to interest hackers. It doesn't go out of its way to bother people, and I don't think I've ever heard any bad news about it online or elsewhere. I've certainly never received a sheepish email from LinkedIn, the way I just did from Quora, about a security breach that has compromised the personal info of millions of users.

So for the moment, I see little need to drop a service that seems safe, and which I only rarely use. LinkedIn, thou shalt remain!



5 comments:

John Mac said...

One thing I've done on Facebook is limit my "friends" to 500. So, now every time I do an add, someone gets deleted. It's kind of interesting to decide who stays and who goes. Of the 500 I'd say that maybe 50 are friends in the traditional sense.

Charles said...

I wish LinkedIn would not send automated requests from people who join up. I always used to think that everyone was trying to get me to join LinkedIn, and then one day somebody told me that the platform did that automatically, mining a new users contacts for potential recruits. I suppose that makes sense, but it seems a little... slimy.

Kevin Kim said...

Charles,

I get periodic connection requests, both from people I know and from people I don't know. They appear on my phone because I have the LinkedIn phone app, but I never get those requests on either my home laptop or my office desktop. While vaguely annoying, they're easily dismissed with a click on "ignore request."

I agree about the sliminess, but I find LinkedIn's style of sliminess easier to deal with, overall, than that of Facebook and Twitter.

Justin said...

Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin likes this post.

Kevin Kim said...

Thanks, Justin. I had to look up who he was, but I get your point. Maybe LinkedIn has to go, too. Sigh...