LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. They also include a great list of courses available that I recommend for continuing your development as a professional. Also, LinkedIn groups could be a great source of information where professionals can network, share ideas, and have a discussion about new tech or topics. However, this professional social network has become Twitter lately and it is hard to stay informed with relevant posts within the app.
Today, I would like to cover the thousands and thousands of useless polls posted in niche groups. For example, if you are in a SQL and Data Analysis group, you can find a poll like this:
The other day, I encountered a JavaScript poll within a JavaScript/Frontend group asking how to declare a variable. Don’t you think that if a person is in the group, such basic knowledge should be already known?! Why not create polls that invite discussion and reflection instead? I am not calling myself a genius and that everybody should know everything. But, I think that dumb polls like this just pollute the system because real and well-crafted polls may be buried in the timeline, notifications in our phones disturbing our tranquil day just for irrelevant posts and polls in those groups.
LinkedIn needs to do something about it because this “feature” is more damaging than helpful. No way a person should be making a poll on how you declare a variable in JavaScript within a JavaScript Group. Maybe moderators or LinkedIn itself remove this feature or limit the number of polls per group or person. This need of making content to become popular (Influencer) on LinkedIn made me disable all the notifications from this app.
If you don’t have anything to ask, don’t ask it. If you don’t have anything to post, don’t post it. It is so simple in this era where there is so much information available that we miss the relevant one because of the pollution with useless data and posts in a social network that is supposed to be for learning and sharing resources.
Another problem with the polls is that a lot of people are using them to promote services. Those posts are not even relevant to the group but they are posted without a moderator deleting them. For instance, the following post was made in a JavaScript group:
There is another in a business analyst professionals’ group with the following irrelevant content:
Now, I mentioned Twitter at the beginning because there is another topic that I would like to cover: The “funny” memes and posts on a professional platform. We need to have fun in what we do. We should enjoy coding, designing, and other things that are part of our job. However, there are posts that should not be in a professional setting and can be left out for sites like Twitter, Facebook, the Fail Blog, or 9gag but not for LinkedIn.
The primary goal of these professional groups is to share knowledge and connect. There is nothing funny and relevant to JavaScript in the next image.
I don’t find this image funny and I don’t think mixing a kid with alcohol will ever be. Another issue is that it shows in my feed as soon as I visit the site or open the app like this kind of content is relevant to me. In some instances, I get a useless notification about a similar post in my feed that is not even one of my connections. Thus, for this reason, I am sorry LinkedIn notifications and groups. But I am out.
