I often wonder if LI is trying to do too many things at once. At this point it hard not to come to the conclusion that it promotes certain types of behaviors. The problem is that if left laissez-faire, the feed will not attract folks who abhor work influencers. So, perhaps they need to ask who they are really targeting?
For generic work-banter, an app like Blind seems to cut it better. Given the anonymity, it is able to (anecdotally) elicit truer depictions of one's workplace, and this helps folks get real value through what are in essence (unaggregated) reviews of companies and job roles.
By using real profiles and establishing a set up of "professionalism", LI absolutely cuts/reduces the possibility of deriving real value for the layman (read non work influencer and non CXO). Apart from connecting with old colleagues and looking for a new job, why should the layman even bother logging into the platform on a fairly regular basis?
Having said that, LI is great for some things even for the layman. It has been great for looking for new jobs as the article states. But it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it needs to figure out their core audience or differentiate product offerings before it deteriorates into a job board for the laymen like me, in which case it will be possible for a new and trendy job board to come along and replace it.
Blind would be great if it didn't attract and retain the most toxic and reactive folks (in my brief experience). That attribute makes it an undesirable place to be for someone who's well adjusted at their job, which I would say undercuts your assertion that it provides a more accurate view of the workplace. A counterbalance to the polished view you'd get through LinkedIn? Sure. But it's where people go to talk shit.
I'm not a UI/UX guy, but the presentation in the book was so good, I decided to read it all in one sitting! As a user, I have faced the problems you describe in pages 38 and 57, websites should always try and make it clear where there are more options/content that may be hidden due to lack of screen real estate.
A thing I've noticed, and I could be wrong about this, is that social networks have not done much to increase avenues for interaction between 2nd degree connections of two people (say a and b) without needing the active participation of the a and b themselves.
For instance, if we have the following undirected connections: {(a,b), (b,c), (a,d)}. There could be a mechanism to make the graph more dense by the way of increasing interactions between (c,d) without needing, for example, a to like c's content for it to then appear on d's feed. Done naively, this could result in a lot of unwanted content on someone's feed, but I wonder if there are ways around it.
> I think YouTube is at its heart fundamentally incompatible with providing only high quality enriching content.
I think this is in some ways similar to reddit. While there are some great threads from time-to-time, it is a way for people to quickly vent/amuse themselves.
Once I un-subscribed from all the defaults and main stream subs, content got wildly better for me. I still appreciate being able to pick what subreddits I see, instead of a big prediction engine pulling from different subs I may like.
Huge ones like /r/askreddit are like tabloids. Same with any big /r/*advice. Niche subreddits are so good though.
That's a great point, and is in fact something I wanted to touch upon in my previous comment. Being able to choose great subreddits is a big plus, and to be fair there are great YT creators who create great niche content. But a common theme has been that they usually start small in size (hence niche) but the moment they grow big, they start to "look" similar to the large channels/subreddits: for YT, they start getting bombarded with clickbait titles, sponsored videos (not just an ad/video). For reddit, "funny"/"flaming" comments hijack every discussion.
I'm not too sure about that, without competitors perhaps yes, but otherwise they can still excel as a "gateway" to investment that many millennials like me seek in this app economy.
So the menus rotate about once per month for most restaurants. And all of a sudden diners have to scroll through a ton of menus to find something they want. We can't use item-to-item collaborative filter because we always have a sparse data problem on the new menus.
So instead we are trying to create NLP embeddings on the menus and then ranking new menus based on similarity to old menus the diner liked.
For generic work-banter, an app like Blind seems to cut it better. Given the anonymity, it is able to (anecdotally) elicit truer depictions of one's workplace, and this helps folks get real value through what are in essence (unaggregated) reviews of companies and job roles.
By using real profiles and establishing a set up of "professionalism", LI absolutely cuts/reduces the possibility of deriving real value for the layman (read non work influencer and non CXO). Apart from connecting with old colleagues and looking for a new job, why should the layman even bother logging into the platform on a fairly regular basis?
Having said that, LI is great for some things even for the layman. It has been great for looking for new jobs as the article states. But it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it needs to figure out their core audience or differentiate product offerings before it deteriorates into a job board for the laymen like me, in which case it will be possible for a new and trendy job board to come along and replace it.