Is LinkedIn headed for an Enron style fiasco?

I know, it’s an outrageous question, however, if you keep your ear to the ground as I do, you may find yourself voicing similar concerns. But first off, this being my third post deconstructing our gracious hosts (#1 and #2) I feel I ought to briefly explain what the heck am I about.

Well, it’s my nature. This issue allows me to practice two things I really enjoy, figuring out complex online mysteries or challenges and writing, especially when relating to issues with significant impact on society or profoundly intrigue me.

Personally I am relatively satisfied with the value LinkedIn (“LI”) provided me so far, including the modest-size but terrific quality audience I get for my posts here, so you can tag me as a happy (and paying) customer. I believe that in writing this post I am doing LinkedIn a huge favor, as everything is still reversible it’s better addressing my queries today, instead of facing official inquiries tomorrow. So I apologize in advance if some in LI would take offence by this, I guess that’s why it’s called tough love.

Order in the house:

In post #1 I identified bizarre, unexplainable and biased phenomena in LI’s posts distribution system.

In Post #2 I presented a theory which accommodates all the whimsically-strange data in Post #1 suggesting an extensive and arbitrary manual work done daily by LI’s editorial staff.

In Post #3 (you are reading now) I aim to provide additional input as well as to skim some possible implications of all of this.

LinkedIn appears to be making outright false and misleading statements

If you have ever written a post on LinkedIn you would remember this cheerful message appearing when you click the “publish” button:

The above screen grab (not mine) is presented by LI to its content contributing members 150,000 times a week (that’s the number of weekly posts we generate) and leads us to assume that LI has just notified all our immediate connections/followers of our new post, through the “Bell” or “Flag” icons (respectively on desktop and mobile).

Most of us don’t venture there but LI also mentions this in its Help Center:

“LinkedIn notifies you via a notification on the top right when a 1st-degree connection has published a long-form post”

Alas, it seems this is a false statement. We know this because:

1. Any one of us can easily locate multiple posts by his 1st-degree connections he didn’t get any notifications for.
2. The data I gathered in Post #1 make it statistically improbable that all our followers get notifications.
3. Weirdly enough LI itself admits so in its Engineering blog:

“...only connections whom we deem are strong connections will receive these notifications”

One cannot overestimate the serious implications of this obvious discrepancy between statements made by LI to its members and reality. Only after publishing Post #1 was I made aware of the extreme level of betrayal and mistrust many active members here feel towards LI, due to what they claim is a bad faith plan to limit the distribution of their posts.

Many others claim they were successful bloggers who were personally invited by LI to publish here and today see their “views” shrink to null. For lack of any official response from LI to this issue many resort to conspiracy theories. 

This untreated and open (legal) wound is a mystery wrapped in a riddle stamped with a bad omen.

LinkedIn is opaque about issues that matter most to its business

One of LI’s strategy pillars is:

“Become the Definitive Professional Publishing Platform. We strive to make members more productive and successful by creating the web’s definitive professional publishing platform, which enables members to publish, discover and consume relevant professional content at global scale”

Most LI members have no interest or desire to post articles of their own and there is little LI can do about it. Many of them however are active on LI by reading and responding to articles written by other members.

Obviously, the real “engine” of LI’s growth are the free “contractors” it depends on to fulfil its stated strategy. This small group, probably consisting around 1 million members (out of 400 million registered members), are regularly or occasionally producing professional content that is read and engaged by others. They are the ones who produce those 150,000 articles each and every week.

These content producers holding the sign “will work for views” are LI’s only viable catalyst to grow its publishing business as well as transform other members into becoming more active. If not for them, LI would be a large and static database of CVs with members and employers communicating only when the need arises, in an email-style correspondence - a guaranteed disaster for some of LI’s revenue streams and future aspirations.

LinkedIn’s management should realize that it needs to provide full transparency with respect to its posts distribution system as well as equal and fair opportunity for those working bees to actually be read by others. But LinkedIn only talks the talk, while making all the errors that would eventually discourage us from investing time and resources in writing valuable and interesting content.

The statistics gathered in post #1 make it clear that the system is arbitrary and biased against us, in a way that even for the most talented of us it is useless to write anything on LI falsely believing high quality professional content is bound to be picked up for mass distribution.

Contrary to the real world (aka anywhere else), in LinkedIn “content is not the king”, at least not professional members content.

No, our content here is more akin to a porter carrying readers to other content LI specifically wishes to promote and so gets the lion’s share of available “views”. Once mission accomplished our ill nurtured content is disposed of and gets no more views, completely irrespective of the specific quality of our content. After all there are 149,999 starving porters behind waiting their turn to carry readers to the obese-stricken chosen ones. This cycle is merely an artificial life support extending a make-believe fairy tale about a serious professional publishing platform called LinkedIn.   

Someone within LI should have already noticed this by now. Yet another ominous tell.

What in God’s name are editors doing in a social network (outside N. Korea)?

Aren’t you curious about that? Or have you accepted their presence here as a fundamental fact of life? Have you noticed any editors writing posts of their choosing on your Facebook timeline? Or deciding that certain public posts of Facebook members get a distribution boost?  Or providing you daily with great and authoritative advice on how and what to Tweet on Twitter?

I’m curious by nature and wanted to find out if there is any validation out there for my theory in post #2 claiming that editors are actually the ones responsible for the selective and biased distribution of our posts. I believe my theory is correct as no algorithm, no matter how flawed, could have produced such weird results, except one which uses a random function as a built in concept.  Funny enough I haven’t found any official mission statement for editors on LI.

So the next best thing I came up with are summaries in profiles of actual LI editors (there are hundreds of them). Here is a short wrap up:

One editor states she helps:

“professionals around the world get the news and insights they need and be known for what they know”.

Another states he helps:

“oversee the original and third-party news you see on LinkedIn. That means managing our homepage and mobile news app, LinkedIn Pulse, and making lots of quick editorial decisions.”

Yet another states she is:

“Curating news, views and posts for the more than 30 million members in India. Discovering great writers...”

Come again? Let’s observe this closely.

Journalists, managing teams of (other) journalists in all continents and numerous countries have a very demanding 2 part job description. They help each one of us professionals get the news and insights we really need according to their best judgment (I assume).

Whether you happen to be a medical doctor, a Java expert, an IT manager, a patent lawyer, a biology professor, a tax lawyer, a veterinarian, a graphic designer, a dog walker, a politician, a chemist or any of the thousands other professions and sub professions out there, LinkedIn’s journalists know best what news and insights you need to know concerning your profession.

But also some good news for a change, If you happen to write posts on LI, don’t worry, these teams of journalists got you covered as they are responsible to let all of us professionals “be known for what we know”. It’s amazing they get any sleep or find the time to write the long articles they post here, just divide 150,000 weekly posts by 300 editors, that’s about 500 posts a day. Who can blame them for needing to make “lots of quick editorial decisions” and we should probably thanks them for “discovering” about 54 “great writers” out of the total 30,000,000 Indian members.

This explains why they sent all of us different professionals the same “How Being Busy Makes You Unproductive” article by Dr. Travis Bradberry. It’s either an excuse of sorts or a cry for help.

I’m still working on deciphering the hidden meaning behind all the rest of Dr. Travis articles, each one tailored specifically for ALL OF US as professional “news and insights” we all need to know.

Will keep you updated.

Disclaimer from the lawyer within - this represents my private views only and in no way can be regarded as an advice for anything. Mind you I’m a newbie here so there are probably good explanations for everything I have yet to encounter, please wait for a response from LinkedIn.