What I wonder is, from a libel perspective, is putting an up-front disclaimer that your association of a person with information is done without even rudimentary validation that is true information about the person it is associated with a defense against libel, or just an admission of one of the key elements of the tort?
I'd be interested to see this litigated; I'm hoping the latter, because otherwise I expect the rate of algorithmic defamation to increase to rather intolerable levels in the not-to-distant future.
From my newspaper days, no amount of disclaiming will get round the fact that they put a picture of the guy next to the article. The test in the UK is if whatever you publish will make a reasonable person think worse of an individual and there are only a handful of very specific defences available, the best of which is that whatever you say is true.
> The nature of profit is that you take more than you give, so it’s not surprising that these billion-dollar behemoths that call themselves startups take far more from us than we get in return.
This is an excellent argument for prohibiting the existence of companies, or any commercial transactions at all.
The nature of profit is that you make more than you spend.
But that does not mean you take more than you give - value is also created in the exchange (or at least it should be).
(Maybe that is what you're pointing out, reductio ad absurdum? I'm not sure.)
Yes, that was my point. The nature of profit does mean that you receive more from your customer than you give back to them. Gains from trade mean that your customer also receives more from you than they give to you.
I was going to provide that as further text to my original comment, but thought it would be more effective to let the quote speak for itself.
In fact, for for the normal case of uncoerced transactions, it's safe to assume that both parties are getting more than they give, in ways that provide the greatest utility to themselves.
This (excluding errors of judgment on the part of one of the parties).
One party values money (or data, etc) more than the time/materials/end products and the other party values those end products more than the cash (or privacy, etc): the trade happens. Both parties are ahead of where they started.
This doesn't mean you're always happy with the terms, but it does mean that you're coming out ahead on the deal. If you are willing to do a deal where you know you the other party is coming out ahead and you're not: you're just an idiot.
Well he called himself a socialist, so he might be totally down with that. No private exchange of labor or capital allowed in the communist utopia, only free association. Because y'know, if people were unshackled from the burden of capitalism, they'd be beating down your door to mow your lawn, fix your car, etc. for no compensation whatsoever.
Not really. The nature of trade is that people only interact with these startups if they value the good or service greater than they value their cash, privacy, or whatever. Maybe the users are ill-informed, but that's the expectation.
>Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’ last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It took place in a house then being sold for $125 million.
Kind of ironic, in an article about accidental identification.
Using another source of algorithmicly generated content to produce its own content? If it was, then I'd love to see linked in do a news post with this as the news item, which could then force Slate to do a story update.
It would have been even better if Slate had issued a correction explaining that the William Johnson responsible for the play Blue Balls debuting at the Labute New Theater (see author bio at the bottom) was in fact yet another William Johnson
Not this serious, but when I updated my position from entry level at Microsoft to CTO of a startup, LinkedIn notified all of my connections that I was now CTO of MICROSOFT.
Customer service said it was a "known issue". My friends thought it was funny, but I'm stia little annoyed because it made me look sloppy.
My favourite endorsement on LinkedIn - and one of the few ones that are actually genuinely deserved - is an ex-colleague of mine that has a bunch of endorsements for "general awesomeness".
If you add "general awesomeness" as a skill on LinkedIn then by that very act you don't really need anyone to endorse your general awesomeness because you just are. Any endorsement is jumping on the bandwagon and superfluous at this point.
Well, that's what I thought too, but enough people liked it and commented on it that I was getting notifications for days. (I'm assuming they show it to more people when it gets reactions, which I agree, is almost never)
3 months or so. If the job has a trial period I definitely don't want to add all my colleagues before the trial period is over. I also don't like adding people who start at my company until I know that they're good at their jobs.
I get connect requests from women who are the manager of Ford Motor Company in Nigeria, or the Vice President of some bank in London, or other ludicrous and unlikely occupations. Always women. Every other day or so.
A few weeks ago LinkedIn posted a 4 year work anniversary for a colleague of mine who passed away 3 years ago. I complained on Twitter. They responded immediately and a few hours later they said they were taking his profile offline.
I'm not saying I have the solution to this particular problem, but it's still kind of jarring to see these kinds of updates.
As soon as they got back to me, I sent them a link to the obituary and since this conversation was on Twitter, I also had to verify who _I_ was. My assumption was that they were going to ask for it anyway, so I just got them the info as soon as the conversation got started, but no, they hadn't asked for it at that point.
An obituary is a news article that reports the recent death of a person.
Does an obituary qualify as authentication that a person has died? I would have expected them to require a death certificate from the relevant government department. In Australia these are handled by state level, eg.[1]
Are you asking whether there's a social-engineering attack vector here? Probably, but this sort of change is reversible (assuming your infrastructure is even slightly reasonable). If someone wanted to report me as dead, and went to the lengths of fabricating an obituary about me, I wouldn't be upset at LinkedIn for disabling my profile, provided there was an easy-ish way for me to convince them that reports of my death had been greatly exaggerated.
As security policies go, a setup that with a small chance of temporarily marking someone as dead when they're not seems better than one with no chance of marking someone as dead when they are.
As in many, many similar cases, Twitter should charge companies (Linkedin, numerious telco etc) a fee for providing a forum to conduct customer service.
Incredible that they would ship something so potentially damaging when they openly acknowledge that it's unreliable. It would be trivial to include an emailed request for confirmation to the subject before spamming her/his contacts. Move fast and break people's reputations!
1. Establish a news website.
2. Spend a few years so people respect your site as legitimate.
3. One day, issue headline "LinkedIn executives X, Y, Z, etc. arrested in pedophile ring investigation". Or some other heinous crime.
4. "Enjoy your update emails, you fuckers."
I'm lucky in that I'm pretty sure my combination of first and last name is a first in history, but I feel for the "William Johnson"s of the world. He is lucky for having there been a notification about this. He could just have easily been passed over for job offers or more after a quick search and no correspondence, just a "we're not interested."
Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...
> Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...
All the more dangerous if you can't find out someone is a white supremacist because they've politely asked to have the internet scrubbed all the terrible things they've done.
That's not true at all. If you had those opinions and wanted to keep them to yourself, how could that possibly be a bad thing? Shutting up about biases and intolerance is a fine way to allow clearer thoughts to be heard.
To play devil's advocate, discovering a prospective nanny is a proponent of killing children that look like yours is much better than finding out after you've hired her.
There is a public interest test that could be applied (and is, albeit imperfectly, with the "right to be forgotten").
If said nanny said something 20 years ago and has since changed her views completely it is not really relevant - people's opinions change. If she has actually killed children is very very relevant.
I'm not searching for a job right now, but I've decided that the next time I do, my resume will also contain a "This is me" that says what is me on HN, reddit, github, etc., and a disclaimer that anything else with that name isn't necessarily me. There are at least two other programmers that share my name, one of which even has vaguely similar programming language skills, to say nothing of all the other hits it gets. And my handle "jerf" is merely rare, not unique, and not everything that comes up under that is stuff I'm associated with either.
I'm the only living person with my name, and websites still confuse me with other people. Not only deceased people, but there's also a couple of clueless middle-aged people I've never heard of that used my gmail address to sign up for various websites - my gmail is first initial + last name, and that is not only clearly not unique but also confusing to some older people.
+1. I'm talking to you Sharon! I'm tired of getting your loan application details and RNC propaganda delivered to my inbox.
I'm just as annoyed at companies that don't bother with any kind of email confirmation click-through before sharing personal information though. I even frequently get one-click links to edit people's profiles with all their personal details.
If it includes a phone number I send them a polite text and ask them to be more careful when typing in their email address. I figure a little stranger danger fear might help motivate them to stop signing me up to be spammed.
OTOH I'm seriously considering leaving behind my many years old GMail at this point. I really only use it as an identity service for other site's logins 99% of the time. I just don't know what the options are and I don't feel like signing up for something that might not be around next year.
I have an ultra-common first and last name combination, and I've never had a problem in the job market. I don't think that it works the way you think it works.
I had an acquaintance named Mike Smith, he was black. Black men get pulled over a lot. When your name is Mike Smith every stop is a felony stop. When he married he appended his wife's last name to his own.
William Johnson is probably actually pretty safe. It's the people with names just unusual enough that no one has met more than one who have to worry.
For instance, a friend of mine has a somewhat uncommon name. Unfortunately, there's another guy (I think there's only one) on Facebook with the same name who has a borderline racist cartoon as his profile picture. Guess which one comes up first when you search on my friend's name.
A libel case resulting from a situation like this could be important in setting precedent for how responsible companies need to be with (for?) their AI.
Simple: penalize the lack of oversight unless it can be proven that an AI/algorithm is significantly superior at performing a task than a human. So if a human trucker is asleep at the wheel while the AI drives and the truck crashes, fault the driver (and possibly company if policy) for negligence. If the driver is awake and the AI glitches out and the driver does the best they can to rectify the situation but still results in a crash, then it it was it is: a mistake.
The question is whether you are rating superiority on the overall set of classifications, or the smaller set of problems. I suspect it's a much easier task to make an AI that's better at reducing accidents than the general public, than it is to do that and also be better given a specific set of error conditions, such as "in a direction with a glare, and with roadwork and changed road conditions, correctly notice that the dog running ahead off to the side with people chasing it might be a situation that could spill into the road..."
In this case though, I imagine they allocated far more resources towards positive correlations than exclusions, since they just want a way to get their name in front of you.
> I don’t expect much from companies like LinkedIn, but when their incompetence makes our lives more difficult, they could at least pretend to care a little more.
This had the potential to do a lot more harm than just making his life "more difficult".
I dunno, I made a joke about "White People" years ago on Twitter (something like "White People won't dance") and then Klout figured I was an expert on "White People" and sent me a free subscription to the Red Bulletin.
Whilst abhorrent, it's easy to see how this happened. No matter how much you train a machine it will make mistakes in this kind of classification when natural language is involved. Identifying that an article is about something or someone is a very very hard problem.
True, but they could set the threshold higher. Like for instance have it match for both name, last name, and company. There is a tradeoff between accuracy and relevance and that can be tweaked.
I agree. I feel this points towards the limits of linguistic-based technology. Relying just on text strings to find correlations/matches is not enough. What I wonder is: why don't recommendation engines go beyond and try to cluster entities by more sophisticated means? It must be possible to determine that, in this case, the person involved was not clustered -not 'close enough'- to the universe of entities related to white supremacists. Relying just on words/names will lead to this kinds of results, specially where ambiguity is involved (the person's name is unfortunately very common).
There are no lawsuits in your country? Im sure even though you are not an American you can appreciate his need to setup a defense immediately when it concerns his livelihood? People are fired and ostracized for much less in this country, especially when it comes to social media outrage.
If an organization circulated emails to all your professional contacts which stated that you were a "white nationalist", would you sit back and rely on their good intentions to resolve things?
Especially if your professional contacts weren't people that worked in tech that could spot a shitty algorithm from a mile off
Well, because (but for the arguable effect of the disclaimer about the algorithm) its clearly libelous, and lots of corporations are very loathe to respond to non-paying user, but more prone to respond if there is a possibility of legal action and associated negative publicity.
I have a moderately common name, shared by several people with more impressive public accomplishments than I have. I always laugh about people Googling someone's name to research them, because that'd be completely impossible for me without adding a few search terms.
But you don't even need that. If you've ever searched Facebook for a name, surely you know that most names are not unique identifiers.
How did this "Connections in the news" feature use a person's name and surname to uniquely identify them? This is appallingly asinine, as this example indicates. My name is as generic as they come, and so this is a risk for me. I wonder if LinkedIn were to group its members by name and count them, how many people (excluding those not on LinkedIn) would actually be uniquely determined by a name/surname combo? A quick search for "William Johnson" yields 7,476 results. Why didn't LinkedIn even ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed that William Johnson in the news? What an absolute fuck-up.
> ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed that William Johnson
I think they now ask recipients of new endorsements to confirm before they're posted. So asking for a confirmation on something as potentially damaging as a news link should be the least they do here -- and the work would be trivial (in the mathematical sense).
Did all 7486 William Johnsons on LinkedIn have that sent out to their contacts?
The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the mail. In some ways that would be even worse.
I don't remember: they don't ask your race on LI, do they? And let's hope, hope hope that they aren't doing facial analysis of photos for something that is absolutely irrelevant.
I'm very glad about less freedom of speech here in germany. It surely has it's downsides (mostly because it's a slippery slope). Here you would win big in court (several hundred euros, you're rich afterwards), but also you'd win the right to publish a correction on the same place and the same prominence as the original article.
This is a good opportunity for everyone to disable this feature before LinkedIn sends any news articles to your contacts about you.
Go here (https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy) and turn off the setting labeled "Notifying connections when you're in the news". It's the last item in the first section. While you're still on that page, scroll to the bottom and enable two factor auth too.
This is also a good opportunity to close your LinkedIn account and never look back. Between the password thefts and algorithmically-generated libel, I have no idea why people continue to trust LinkedIn with their data and likeness.
Because the impact these issues have on most people is very small and LinkedIn is a useful tool for managing a professional network -- one that can make a real difference in finding a new job. To most people, such a tool is not worth giving up merely on principle. I am bothered by LinkedIn's track record, but still find it worthwhile to stick around.
The person in the article didn't post that they were a white supremacist, but somehow LinkedIn communicated that to the world. The issue isn't that they're making information you added public, it's that they're making up information about you.
Linked in got me my current job via a recruiter blind emailing me with a job spec. My entire job hunting process was "connect with a bunch of people, upload my CV to be autoformatted, add a cool picture". From then on I added any recruiter who spoke to me, and got ~1 job spec a week.
I'm a lazy man and linkedin provided me a service.
PS. They've emailed me to say they'd reset my password, but aren't forcing me to do it as my cookie login or whatever still seems to be valid. "Heh".
"Choose if we can show your profile information on your employer's pages" shows "Yes" but the text below "Hide my picture and profile information from showing up in this section of a job detail page?" says "Yes". So is it showing or hiding that?
I also got tripped up by that. I eventually decided to go with "yes" to mean "don't show my info". It would be interesting if someone with a smaller employer could test, though.
Grown men kicking children off of a soccer field, whether they "reserved" it or not, is the most pathetic, lame thing I've heard of in a long time, and they should all be ashamed of themselves. What a bunch of losers.
Ok now... It's not like a bunch of adults went to take over a park just so they could kick the kids off it and sit around and drink beer or something. They went to PLAY SOCCER after going online and seeing they could rent it from the city. How were they supposed to know any different. Also the city didn't rent it out 24/7 they rented out 2 slots on Tuesday/Thursday from what I read. Tradition and culture don't get to trump reality just because. This is the cities fault no the employees who legally rented the space and expected to be able to use it...
It's rather odd that their news algorithm exists in the first place.
I use LinkedIn for one reason and one reason only: to maximize my career options, both in scope and magnitude of opportunities. While I'm happily employed, I learned long ago that if you're not spending a few hours a month thinking about other career opportunities, you're hurting yourself in the long run. LinkedIn is a great platform to stay on top of that several-hours-per-month workflow.
For example, you see that an acquaintance has changed jobs....you send them a text...you grab coffee and talk about their career change....you gather the data point and keep your network primed. LinkedIn has made this process way easier to initiate than it used to be -- for me, at least.
So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members. If I find myself in the news, and I think it's a cool story that makes me look good to potential employers, I can share it to my LinkedIn network. Hell, if I really like the article, I can embed it permanently on my profile.
Thank God I have a relatively rare first-last name combo that makes it very unlikely that something like what happened to Will Johnson could happen to me. That's straight-up nightmare material.
It's pretty boggling that LinkedIn would implement a feature that not only doesn't create value for its users, but actively poses a risk to their ongoing career development. The whole point of the site is essentially to serve as a cloud-mounted, data-rich business card. Why jeopardize that platform with crappy AI that spreads harmful falsehoods about members?
> "So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members."
Because pushing any kind of information at users is considered "engagement", which is a term that has been so thoroughly abused that it no longer holds any substantive meaning.
Yeah. The more I mull it over in my head the more I think that it was probably something that seemed like an interesting engineering challenge but was never properly examined as a business decision.
I think it's so that people can congratulate you first. Think of it as the "local boy makes good" storyline. I've done that a few times when I meant to email someone, got distracted, and was reminded when their name popped up on TwitbookIn or whatever the site is now.
And you're right, "Leroy Masochist" is a rare name combo.. ;)
That's a good point, but isn't the distribution of "local boy makes good" stories a bit of an edge case? I mean do we really need AI to do that for us at the risk of something bad happening?
I'm not trying to imply that you personally agree with LinkedIn's decision, by the way; just trying to get my head around why they think it makes sense.
I think they see it as an issue where most of the time it's "close enough" that if it's wrong it'll just be wrong in a way that people will laugh off and that will still generate engagement.
As long as the cases where it goes wrong enough to be offensive and hurtful are rare enough, there's very little downside to them.
That makes sense as the closest answer (but still guessing).
They could further limit it by location/region or companies mentioned to improve the quality but that may be overkill and reduce the number of notifications too much for their tastes.
Yikes. I recall a few years ago having to email a bunch of news outlets to ask they reword some headlines. It seemed some sports player with the position of Wide Receiver and the surname Boyce had been misbehaving himself.
I can only imagine the explaining I would have to do if "WR Boyce indicted for child abuse" turned up on my LinkedIn feed.
Because (a) it's a thing they can do easily, and (b) the response is usually neutral or positive. Plus, with the disclaimer it would be middling difficult to sue them.
Remember that the business model here is "do the 80% that's easy and let the punters sort the rest out."
Anyone familiar with their subscription numbers? I suspect almost all of their accounts are products, not customers .
From the article: "The nature of profit is that you take more than you give, so it’s not surprising that these billion-dollar behemoths that call themselves startups take far more from us than we get in return."
Other commenters have weighed in on this remark, which displays a shockingly childish view of economics. But if the author believes this, then his decision to use LinkedIn can not be rational, unless his goal is to lose.
I'm not on LinkedIn, but I get emails from them all the time. I assume it's just another cesspool and con job. This guy, at some point, decided to trust them with data about him. I'm finding it hard to feel very sympathetic.
You can fail to understand basic economics, and even make pretty dumb decisions, and still be pissed off if all your friends and colleagues get an email that says you're a racist.
The quote re: David Sacks is incorrect:
UPDATE: Sacks tweeted to correct our sources' recollection of the invitation they'd seen: "It's 'let him eat cake' not them. It's a birthday party. Get it?" We get it, David. Apologies for the error.
(http://www.businessinsider.com/yammer-david-sacks-party-let-...)
183 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIt's all fine until you accidentally Nazificate people...
It sounds like a database call somewhere has a cardinality bug, or that they search purely by name instead of some unique identifier.
I'd be interested to see this litigated; I'm hoping the latter, because otherwise I expect the rate of algorithmic defamation to increase to rather intolerable levels in the not-to-distant future.
Edit: Reading the entire article, it appears that is more or less what they said.
This is an excellent argument for prohibiting the existence of companies, or any commercial transactions at all.
The nature of profit is that you make more than you spend. But that does not mean you take more than you give - value is also created in the exchange (or at least it should be).
(Maybe that is what you're pointing out, reductio ad absurdum? I'm not sure.)
I was going to provide that as further text to my original comment, but thought it would be more effective to let the quote speak for itself.
Guess not. :/
Regardless, linkedin's customers are obviously not the majority of its users.
One party values money (or data, etc) more than the time/materials/end products and the other party values those end products more than the cash (or privacy, etc): the trade happens. Both parties are ahead of where they started.
This doesn't mean you're always happy with the terms, but it does mean that you're coming out ahead on the deal. If you are willing to do a deal where you know you the other party is coming out ahead and you're not: you're just an idiot.
Kind of ironic, in an article about accidental identification.
This guy would never not be in the news!
Yikes.
Customer service said it was a "known issue". My friends thought it was funny, but I'm stia little annoyed because it made me look sloppy.
Come on, LinkedIn, you have one job!
"Congrats on your new role !" - No, dude, I got the promotion a year ago, it's just that I am now looking to jump ship so I updated my Linkedin
I'm not saying I have the solution to this particular problem, but it's still kind of jarring to see these kinds of updates.
Does an obituary qualify as authentication that a person has died? I would have expected them to require a death certificate from the relevant government department. In Australia these are handled by state level, eg.[1]
1. http://www.justice.tas.gov.au/bdm/deaths/applyforcertificate
As security policies go, a setup that with a small chance of temporarily marking someone as dead when they're not seems better than one with no chance of marking someone as dead when they are.
Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...
All the more dangerous if you can't find out someone is a white supremacist because they've politely asked to have the internet scrubbed all the terrible things they've done.
If said nanny said something 20 years ago and has since changed her views completely it is not really relevant - people's opinions change. If she has actually killed children is very very relevant.
I recommend this to everybody.
I'm just as annoyed at companies that don't bother with any kind of email confirmation click-through before sharing personal information though. I even frequently get one-click links to edit people's profiles with all their personal details.
If it includes a phone number I send them a polite text and ask them to be more careful when typing in their email address. I figure a little stranger danger fear might help motivate them to stop signing me up to be spammed.
OTOH I'm seriously considering leaving behind my many years old GMail at this point. I really only use it as an identity service for other site's logins 99% of the time. I just don't know what the options are and I don't feel like signing up for something that might not be around next year.
For instance, a friend of mine has a somewhat uncommon name. Unfortunately, there's another guy (I think there's only one) on Facebook with the same name who has a borderline racist cartoon as his profile picture. Guess which one comes up first when you search on my friend's name.
In this case though, I imagine they allocated far more resources towards positive correlations than exclusions, since they just want a way to get their name in front of you.
> I don’t expect much from companies like LinkedIn, but when their incompetence makes our lives more difficult, they could at least pretend to care a little more.
This had the potential to do a lot more harm than just making his life "more difficult".
I understand why this is offensive, but really?
Especially if your professional contacts weren't people that worked in tech that could spot a shitty algorithm from a mile off
actually it's linkedin, so I'd probably delete the email without reading it and maybe email them when someone asked me about it later.
Well, because (but for the arguable effect of the disclaimer about the algorithm) its clearly libelous, and lots of corporations are very loathe to respond to non-paying user, but more prone to respond if there is a possibility of legal action and associated negative publicity.
But you don't even need that. If you've ever searched Facebook for a name, surely you know that most names are not unique identifiers.
I think they now ask recipients of new endorsements to confirm before they're posted. So asking for a confirmation on something as potentially damaging as a news link should be the least they do here -- and the work would be trivial (in the mathematical sense).
The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the mail. In some ways that would be even worse.
Go here (https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy) and turn off the setting labeled "Notifying connections when you're in the news". It's the last item in the first section. While you're still on that page, scroll to the bottom and enable two factor auth too.
It's not like Facebook where people can get access to personal photos or intimate conversations.
I'm a lazy man and linkedin provided me a service.
PS. They've emailed me to say they'd reset my password, but aren't forcing me to do it as my cookie login or whatever still seems to be valid. "Heh".
http://imgur.com/8sBidJ7
"Choose if we can show your profile information on your employer's pages" shows "Yes" but the text below "Hide my picture and profile information from showing up in this section of a job detail page?" says "Yes". So is it showing or hiding that?
Seriously? People expecting to be able to use a field they reserved using the city's official reservation system is "arrogance"?
If anyone is at fault for that incident it's the city for not getting more input from community, or subsequently not communicating the changes.
But this article is a good reminder that there are folks who don't like property rights when the wrong people have them.
Making it available only to people who can afford to pay is very sad.
I use LinkedIn for one reason and one reason only: to maximize my career options, both in scope and magnitude of opportunities. While I'm happily employed, I learned long ago that if you're not spending a few hours a month thinking about other career opportunities, you're hurting yourself in the long run. LinkedIn is a great platform to stay on top of that several-hours-per-month workflow.
For example, you see that an acquaintance has changed jobs....you send them a text...you grab coffee and talk about their career change....you gather the data point and keep your network primed. LinkedIn has made this process way easier to initiate than it used to be -- for me, at least.
So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members. If I find myself in the news, and I think it's a cool story that makes me look good to potential employers, I can share it to my LinkedIn network. Hell, if I really like the article, I can embed it permanently on my profile.
Thank God I have a relatively rare first-last name combo that makes it very unlikely that something like what happened to Will Johnson could happen to me. That's straight-up nightmare material.
It's pretty boggling that LinkedIn would implement a feature that not only doesn't create value for its users, but actively poses a risk to their ongoing career development. The whole point of the site is essentially to serve as a cloud-mounted, data-rich business card. Why jeopardize that platform with crappy AI that spreads harmful falsehoods about members?
Because pushing any kind of information at users is considered "engagement", which is a term that has been so thoroughly abused that it no longer holds any substantive meaning.
And you're right, "Leroy Masochist" is a rare name combo.. ;)
I'm not trying to imply that you personally agree with LinkedIn's decision, by the way; just trying to get my head around why they think it makes sense.
As long as the cases where it goes wrong enough to be offensive and hurtful are rare enough, there's very little downside to them.
They could further limit it by location/region or companies mentioned to improve the quality but that may be overkill and reduce the number of notifications too much for their tastes.
I can only imagine the explaining I would have to do if "WR Boyce indicted for child abuse" turned up on my LinkedIn feed.
Remember that the business model here is "do the 80% that's easy and let the punters sort the rest out."
Anyone familiar with their subscription numbers? I suspect almost all of their accounts are products, not customers .
Other commenters have weighed in on this remark, which displays a shockingly childish view of economics. But if the author believes this, then his decision to use LinkedIn can not be rational, unless his goal is to lose.
I'm not on LinkedIn, but I get emails from them all the time. I assume it's just another cesspool and con job. This guy, at some point, decided to trust them with data about him. I'm finding it hard to feel very sympathetic.
Is sending out a incorrect and reputation-damaging statement better if done by an dumb algorithm or by a self-absorbed human?