If you're in the northern hemisphere, please remember to get your sunlight or turn on your SAD lamp. Get hygge when you can. The days are shortening, the air is bitterly cold, and grumpiness abounds.

I was quoted in this Press Gazette story about Google's Site Reputation Abuse policy, which... if you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I have very strong feelings about.

How to train an algorithm: Why and how I manage LinkedIn

Twenty-five years into my internet life, I'm rather resentful of having to "train" my algorithms. I have been here long enough, and most social networks have gobs of my behavioral data; can't they figure out what I like already? Why does Meta seem to start from scratch every time it introduces a new algorithmic feature?

Particularly in vertical video, which all the networks keep pushing at me, I find the most popular content to be literally juvenile and in many cases, downright horrifying. When I watch vertical video, I turn into a square. Why do social network serve me the dumbest content imaginable with themes like "Millennial women do everything wrong," "literally everyone we know has ADHD," "I have opinions on cups," or the classic "no one knows how to hold a camera." I'd prefer the stylized idiocy of Jackass: The Movie (2002, now streaming on the Criterion Channel) to whatever dopey lo-fi pranks make gen Z frat boys chuckle. 

The new options for text-based social networks don't interest me much either. I never cared much for Twitter at any point in its history. Threads is phenomenal for lurking on weirdos, but because of a history of sudden, sweeping algorithm changes, I have no desire to build an audience on any Meta platform. The big selling point of BlueSky seems to be "you can block anyone you want," which runs contrary to my personal take on social media: for a network to be truly conversational, one has to tolerate all parts of the conversation, just like in real life. Heavy-handed blocking means you're eliminating dissent instead of acknowledging that we all have the right to be dumdum trolls every now and again. As the Algonquin club taught us, you're not a good conversationalist if you can't handle talking some shit.

We must remember: the internet is optimized to make us angry. All these years in, the recommender systems are still not that great at parsing sentiment analysis and context, and machine learning meaningfully interpreting taste and aesthetics remains out of the question. The complexities of mass algorithms read more often as reduced to the lowest common denominator. Big tech has abandoned Choose-Your-Own-Adventure into force-feeding audiences whatever their own personal Fox News looks like. It feels like 1999, when — despite the excellent music released that year — the next song on the radio was either Limp Bizkit or Kid Rock.

I am a snob, and also, I like work

But the good stuff is out there, and the cultural snobs will always have to dig to find it. And while I personally don't have the patience to sift through the vertical video feeds designed for teens with unlimited free time, I do, remarkably, tolerate the cringe grown-up's social network: LinkedIn.

Last year I was in a bit of a slump, client-wise (we all were), so I started posting on LinkedIn frequently. Now, although I'm rather pleased with my business, I'm still there.

Maybe it's because I spent the early 2010s workplaces that encouraged collaboration among coworkers, and I enjoyed those discussions. Or maybe it's because I think the generic corporate American mindset doesn't offer many meaningful opportunities to challenge the prevailing points of view. Maybe I remember sitting silently in corporate conferences where "thought leaders" spouted off ridiculously inaccurate interpretations of trending data with absolutely zero oversight or critical thinking. 

Also, I am lucky enough to enjoy my work, and I've developed informed opinions and experience-based approaches in my career. I've always liked my colleagues, and I find that across industries, people have some pretty smart things to say.

LinkedIn is colloquial peer review. It's a place to respond to ideas, good and bad, about doing the work. When I joined, 20 years ago (yikes), it was a resume service. Now it's a decent place to talk about building and making and tweaking and I am so very thankful that politics remain out of it because that's everywhere else.

The working woman's guide to LinkedIn: 18 ways to improve your professional social experience

How do I stay on LinkedIn and not want to tear my hair out? Let me count the ways in my personal optimization system.

  1. Follow people from many different fields. Seek out people younger and older than you. My feed represents a healthy mix of UX professionals, SEO nerds, content marketers, a few editors, some media sales folks, and, my personal favorite, ontologists and knowledge graph experts. Too much of any one field breeds resentment toward the field, and you don't want that. The ideal is a feed that looks like an actual workplace, with people from different fields doing their thing.
  2. LinkedIn isn't a job interview. It's a ginormous meeting. People in the meeting will occasionally say inane shit, and it can get contentious. At the end of the day, most of the contributions are fine and we're all working toward some sort of consensus. But don't say anything you wouldn't say to someone's face in a meeting.
  3. Like meetings, the good conversation needs to happen out in the open. DMs can be fun, but the work needs to be done out in the open.
  4. Ask hard questions like an executive or client. Interpret challenging questions as practice. If you've never been asked a hard question in a meeting, you're a lucky duck, but it happens to many of us all the time.
  5. Represent your honest work self, and leave the "imposter syndrome" at the door. You're fine. Everyone thinks you're fine and smart and worth listening to. If they get angry or defensive because you're not a first-degree connection, they're a stick in the mud, and that's on them. But they're not going to start a subreddit about how much they hate you.
  6. If someone says something smart, follow them or connect, generously. Comment even when you're not connected. Don't get precious about your connections, and don't sweat the difference between connections and follows. If someone says something smart, follow them or connect.
  7. If someone says something you vehemently disagree with, let them know. Once. If they keep posting dopey takes or you're just seeing too much of one person in your feed, unfollow them (but remain connected because they are probably a nice person who you'd like in real life). 
  8. The LinkedIn recommender system annoyingly thinks that if you engage with a person once, you want to see all of their posts, likes, and comments. If you want to remain connected with someone but want to see less of them, just don't engage with their posts, even if you kinda like each one.
  9. Each post is its own entity. Don't create a series. It's highly likely someone will see the last post in your series before the first because the system tends to wait a week to surface certain posts and I don't know why. Don't expect anyone to have seen or read or liked anything you've posted before, ever.
  10. Don't spend too much time thinking about anything you post or comment. A post should take 30 minutes, tops, and a comment that can't be dashed off on mobile isn't worth thinking about. No one cares if you make a typo. If it's not the smartest thing you've ever written, that's the beauty of a social network: it starts over again tomorrow.
  11. Don't talk about LinkedIn — or any social channel — in real life. What happens on social stays on social.
  12. It's gauche to tag people into your posts as a way to attract impressions or to ask people to like your posts via DM. Call me old-school, but I hate that popularity contest "algorithm hack" garbage, and I will comply exactly once per person.
  13. Most people posting good content don't have a lot of followers. Most people with a lot of followers don't post the best content. C'est la toile.
  14. Don't take it personally. What people think about your work is not what they think of you as a person. I know plenty of perfectly fine people in real life who likely think I'm annoying on social media. My friends mostly don't use LinkedIn, and I want to keep it that way.
  15. We're all stuck in the same fresh hell, and no one's denying the frustration of it all. But adding more sourness into the mix doesn't really move the conversation forward. You get out of it what you put into it.
  16. It's completely fine to accuse bros of being bros, especially if they never acknowledge women's contributions and act like they are their own self-created genius. 
  17. You can ignore whomever you want. They are used to it, and their automated asks will end.
  18. And for god's sake, log off on weekends (I try really hard to follow this one but often fail).

So yeah, if haven't already, follow me on LinkedIn. I'll try not to hate myself for typing that.

Content tech links of the week

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

Manage your subscription

Affiliate referrals: Ghost publishing system | Bonsai contract/invoicing | The Sample newsletter exchange referral | Writer AI Writing Assistant

Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI

Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.

John Steinbeck's East of Eden was my favorite book I've read in a long while, and one of its secondary themes was how people with lots of ideas are not good at capitalism.

The 1955 Elia Kazan film (famously starring James Dean in his breakout role) was not that satisfying... but the Florence Pugh is starring in a new miniseries adaptation. I love that Ms. Pugh seems committed to portraying difficult women, and I am stoked to see what she'll bring to the complicated character of Cathy Trask.