Conversations and Control

The Internet, modern mobile devices, and social networks have changed the way that we communicate with one another. These technologies allow us to stay in touch with people we care about no matter where they are. They let us quickly and cheaply connect and do business with one another. They provide a platform that allows all of us to broadcast our thoughts and to share content with arbitrarily large audiences spread across the world. And they have transformed audiences from passive consumers of what is being broadcast, to active participants in the conversations about what we are consuming.

It took thousands of years from the invention of writing until we built technology that allowed the written word to be replicated and distributed at scale. Even after the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, books were still relatively expensive, and education was still relatively rare. Consequently, less than 20% of the world's population was literate until the invention of offset printing and a series of social and technological changes that came at the tail of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Cheap books, modern newspapers, and mandatory education for children in industrial countries helped stimulate an acceleration of literacy that has continued through today, resulting in an ~85% literate population according to OECD and UNESCO data.

The journey from papyrus to a mostly literate population awash in written word took 4000 years. That gave us plenty of time as a population to adapt to the innumerable social changes that this technology brought with it. By contrast, it's only taken us 40 years to go from 300 baud modems and communities of computer enthusiasts networking and sharing with each other, to 2017, where a significant chunk of the population of the world carries an extremely powerful computer in their pocket with a fast connection to the Internet and several large social networking platforms that give us quick access to our friends and colleagues, and in many cases a broader global audience, with whom we can share anything and everything that occurs to us. Because of these technologies, we experience the world and each other in very different ways than we did just a few short decades ago.

As impatient as I am, I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that these changes over the past 40 years are mind-boggling in breadth and magnitude of impact, and that perhaps, we've not perfectly adapted ourselves as individuals and societies to the capabilities that our new technology has given us. On balance, I believe that these technologies are fantastically good, and the benefits that they bring to all of us are enormous. From the perspective of our children they will be as natural and essential as the printed word has been to the many generations that preceded them. But there are some cracks in the edifice. We (everyone, not just us engineers) are going to have to focus some real time and energy over the next several years repairing these cracks so that our children and generations beyond will have a solid foundation to build upon.

One small change that will hopefully help to address one small crack is the ability for authors of articles like this one to choose whether or not they would like a comment stream attached directly to their work. Sometimes the purpose of authorship is to provoke a conversation, and the best place to have that conversation, sometimes, is in direct proximity with your work. However, there are occasions where you have something to say, and you'd just like to say it without hosting a referendum or writer's workshop at the end of your article.

Over the last year, more and more content publishers have begun to debate the value that comments and conversations contribute to their sites. Some publishers have decided to completely remove comments, citing a decline in civility, a monopolization of conversations by a vocal minority of commenters, and overall diminishing value in allowing readers to comment on their sites. We believe that the preponderance of conversations on LinkedIn are valuable, and are a big part of connecting with other professionals to stay up-to-date and well informed. That said, we think that authors should be able to choose whether or not they want a comment section at the end of their articles.

Starting today, authors of articles on LinkedIn will have that control. Folks will still be able to share and link to articles from their LinkedIn feed and from other social networks, and folks will still be able to discuss articles in those contexts. But, authors get to choose for themselves whether they want comments directly attached to their work created on LinkedIn, like this article, in the future.

This is the first in a series of changes that we're making at LinkedIn to give content creators more control over what they're sharing, and over the course of this year, to help everyone have higher quality professional conversations. As someone who really enjoys writing and the conversations that ensue from sharing what I've written, I'm really looking forward to what the Content and Feed teams are planning to deliver to our members this year.