Even the title of this chapter gave me a few shivers. As with Ch2, many of the ideas here are familiar, and yet, it’s an area I’ve pulled back on significantly in the past few years, while the authors are encouraging doubling down.
Hard to blame them, as Reid is the founder of LinkedIn, which sold to Microsoft in 2016 for $24billion. There has been money in social media for close to two decades now.
Is it ok to say that I’m proud of the fact that I saw many of the downsides to social media early, having been living a post-Meta/ X life for something close to a decade?
The one platform I continued to “invest” in, but in a modest way, was LinkedIn, but I was cautious and strategic in my engagement. IMHO, it has also become an epistemological bubble/ echo chamber where differences in opinion are amplified and only one side of any argument is represented, despite actively turning off all the “features” designed to make the content it presents “more relevant to me”.
In reality, it’s now a place primarily for salespeople to find leads, and I get five to ten calls each and every day from people who almost certainly found me on the platform, as I’m not visible anywhere else. Perhaps the Jobs component is slightly different, but there are many alternatives for career classifieds and another theme in this chapter is the power of a network of humans for finding new opportunities, not throwing your hat in a ring with two hundred other hopefuls and talking your way through recruiters with 5-10X less experience in the IT industry, unable to make connections and leaps of logic.
And so, this chapter was a challenge, and again, I only took a few notes from it.
Would building my network and potentially creating a following have some value? Probably, but it would almost certainly benefit the platforms I’m doing this on far more than it would benefit me, while exposing me to risks that would take significant time to mitigate, and requiring compromises I’m unwilling to take.
The thing I took away from this, is that instead of taking action on someone else's flawed platform, I should invest the time and money into building my own, one that serves me and my interests without compromises. I’m sure it will take a lot longer to see the benefits that Ried and Ben espouse, but it will almost certainly provide more value in both the short and long terms.
We will see, I guess!
And so, here we are on MV.com, and at this point, I'm the only one here, so not a lot of networking going on as yet. I do have at least some plans to rectify this in the future, once there is a little more content for members, but for now, I need to focus on writing and publishing, mainly for my own benefit.
