I did away with another social media service. Buh bye LinkedIn. Why? In the what is becoming an old adage, if you aren’t paying for the product you are the product, I couldn’t figure out what LinkedIn was giving me. Two incidents relatively recently had me thinking just perhaps I needed to delete another social media platform. The first was I started seeing people want to “link” with me who had nothing to do with my area of expertise and appeared to be marketers. The second was, a mid level infosec researcher (and masters thesis adviser to one of my PhD students) when I attempted to link up with him explained that we had never exchanged emails so why in the world would he want to “link” up with me?
Oh, I don’t know but “no harm no foul” and is it really that level of cult of personality?
So, no more LinkedIn for me. If somebody wants to get hold of me there are many ways. So far I think I’ve shed all of the social media platforms. I’m looking hard at Twitter and thinking their rules are a wee bit exploitational. I’ve been trying to close out accounts where I’m on subject matter web forums too. My wife says I’m anti-social but I figure I’m really social. I just don’t like anybody. There is a lot to be said for being a curmudgeon. I’m not sure what exactly all these social relationship sites are about. I’ve been doing social media in various incarnations for nearly 30 years. At some point it transitioned from social to monetization and that’s where I fell off the wagon. I guess what I’m saying is when I socialize it involves friends, food, and adult beverages shared in camaraderie not vacuous empty contact templates on a web page nobody pays attention too.
Nothing wrong with dropping accounts at all. If I get the itch and opt to research someone, the more accounts they have out there, even unattended, the better.
I’m pretty much an open book as the blog here demonstrates. I just can’t figure out what these social media platforms mean to me. I have no problem with other people being used by them 🙂