> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space
As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.
Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.
Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.
Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.
LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.
As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.
Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.
Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.
Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.
LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.