LinkedIn Groups: Low-quality discussions by jgn on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 in Technology and Annoyance
So I get an e-mail summary of the discussions on my LinkedIn Groups, and man, are they weak. It seems to be the worst for medium- or high-volume groups. Below is an example.
First off, the "Most Active Discussions" come first. Doesn't LinkedIn know that after 20 or so contributions, the value of each additional post dwindles to nil? Need I mention Godwin's Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law)?
Second, there's no human editor. Come on, does any real Rubyist really care very much about which IDE is best?
Then we have the spam / contact harvesting problem. E.g., the question about how many years of experience constitutes a "mid-level" Ruby on Rails developer? Would it surprise you to know that the original poster, Katie Gufstafson, is a recruiter? This is an obvious ploy to harvest people for placement. It's spam.
After that, we get the new discussions. Essentially these are announcements about jobs, and there is little discussion with each one. There are also a few lame technical questions that in this context simply reveal the poster as inept.
So I guess I'll be turning off the e-mailing of discussions from just about all of my LinkedIn Groups. It's too bad -- the promise of something more high quality was appealing.
Meanwhile, I've been getting way too many unsolicited contact invites from recruiters. I'm afraid that the value of LinkedIn is trending towards zero.
