Relative size comparison of social media platforms (December 2023)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
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Hell, why do this many people use LinkedIn? The whole platform was built off of scraping Windows user's address books without permission, sending unsolicited emails to all of those contacts using the name of that user, and pretending like they were such a great platform that of course your friends are inviting you to also join. And I'm pretty sure they still use this practice today because I continue to get emails from people who have no idea why their name is being attached to the spam I receive.
LinkedIn is a “need” for the ones wanting a job and trying to tell their new job /company is the best. Once these needs are satisfied they forget about it and only come back when the need arises again.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don't post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I'm not aware of any other professional social networks.
I guess it just annoys me that they built a product on incredibly shady practices and have somehow managed to wedge themselves in to the business world under the guise of being "legitimate". Trusting anything on their site, to me, feels as risky as trusting anything you see on Yelp -- sure a real person might have posted the review, or maybe the business paid their blackmail tax to not get de-listed, but how many better opportunities are not being shown because the company deleted all their positive reviews?
I mean, sure, it's not good if they did sketchy stuff to bootstrap their network. I hadn't heard there before but I wouldn't be surprised.
But I don't think it's really the same as Yelp. Or at least not how I use it. Trust isn't really a factor. I don't use LinkedIn to review a company. I don't look at their soulless posts about how great their team is. I use it to see "do I know anyone who works at this place that has an opening I want?" Then when I see my old friend is a manager there, I shoot him a message (possibly not even via LinkedIn if it's someone I know well) and ask if it's someplace I would want to work at. There's not really a lot of room for fake in that process.
Also sometimes recruiters just message me. Some of them suck but that's not really particular to LinkedIn.
You're not thinking of Glassdoor, are you? Because that's more like yelp and I don't especially trust the positive reviews on there.
I don't really want to go to bat for Microsoft though. I'd be happier if there was a better professional network out there. But, you know, capitalist hellscape.
I’m in IT management at my company, the general management and HR folks basically require anyone in a leadership position to have a filled out LinkedIn profile with it linked to your Office account so it shows up in your outlook card and linked in your signature. So we look “professional and tech-driven” since all social media is lumped in with the tech industry for some reason