Is LinkedIn The New Twitter?

I've been really struggling with the "new LinkedIn." There are huge numbers of things I don't like, but I'm struggling through. I have noticed some interesting things both LinkedIn is doing and new behaviors the new interfaces seem to be provoking.

It has to do with these LinkedIn Publishing articles and the new LinkedIn home page. Mike Kunkle actually has an interesting discussion going on this, you should review that stream.

Mike poses an interesting question. It seems LinkedIn's algorithms are biased toward shares and updates, rather than to, what are usually more substantive, LinkedIn Publisher posts. Many of the participants in Mike's discussion stream agree.

In reflecting, my home page stream is beginning to look a lot like my twitter stream---which isn't a positive comment.

My twitter message stream has become increasingly trashy as people abuse twitter leveraging it as a broadcast mechanism. Though I mute some of the biggest offenders, too often, my twitter feed is filled with people autotweeting the same content. For example, within minutes of my publishing a blog post at my site, it's picked up by any number of people who want to broadcast my content. They don't read it, it could be absolute garbage, but rather than carefully curating content, the tendency is ramping up the volume of broadcasts.

As a result, my twitter stream is clogged with tweets about the same topic. It also gets clogged with paid advertisements and other meaningless tweets. Where twitter used to be a place where I thought I could share great content and find great content. Through the volume and trash, it's becoming and increasingly poor channel for both.

LinkedIn Publisher has usually been a great site for putting some of my content, as well as finding thoughtful perspectives and content from others. Before the new LinkedIn, my news stream seemed to pop those articles to the forefront.

But the newsstream on my LinkedIn feed has changed profoundly. It's dominated by shares, likes, status updates, and paid ads. I see the same update over and over again, day after day, as people like or share it with their networks. I'm finding it taking more time and having to scroll through my feed much deeper to find the equivalent content that I used to find. Instead, I'm finding real estate ads disguised as updates, math games, family pictures, paid ads and more dominating my news stream.

The same problems I'm having with Twitter, I'm having with LinkedIn's new feed---except at least in Twitter, each entry is kept to 140 characters.

As a result, LinkedIn's value as a learning tool, as a means to find rich/thoughtful content in Publisher, is rapidly diminishing. Sure I can find it, it's still there, but I have to scroll through lots of crap to get there.

Publisher used to be a valuable tool for me to share what I hope is valuable content. But now LinkedIn's algorithms seemed biased against it's own channel. The volume of people reading content here on Publisher has plummeted. Not just with mine, but with many others who were getting thousands of views on their content. At least in my blog site, there are things I can do to optimize SEO, but in Publisher, I'm victim to LinkedIn's algorithms.

Even writing this, I'm thinking, what's the use. Where a couple of months ago, a post like this would have had thousands of readers, I'll be luck, now, if I break a hundred.

People are figuring it out all these changes. They are changing their behaviors to optimize volume, just like they do in Twitter. They are sharing everything they used to use Twitter for sharing on LinkedIn. (Shamefully, I admit, I'm succumbing to that behavior myself--though I'm stopping). Like Twitter where volume seems to trump quality, I'm seeing the same thing with LinkedIn.

Yes there is a lot of content, yes a lot of it is good, but I'm drowning in volumes of repetitive information and having to spend more and more time filtering through the noise to find what's interesting.

Yes, I know I can mute some of the streams, but it pops up in a different format later, so I've stopped doing that.

I'm now wondering, perhaps since LinkedIn's home newsfeed is rapidly diminishing in value to me, perhaps I need to be hanging out somewhere else.

What are you seeing?