From LinkedIn to Medium?
My First Post on Medium
Hello everybody. I am a consultant in the fields of computer science and information technology. For nearly two years I have been active on LinkedIn where I found some audience especially among Czech people. It’s been a nice experiment and it’s probably not yet all over but it was never meant to be the main platform for my content.
Why not LinkedIn
LinkedIn is fun and I found there a lot of people to talk to. It was a huge leap out of my comfort zone and I’m pretty sure this experience pays back. I found business and valuable contacts there. Although my experience was invaluable, it still feels like a recruters’ nest rather than a diverse community.
Culture and Accessibility
The prevalence of recruitment topics and discussions is not the only disadvantage of LinkedIn. Whenever I use LinkedIn I can’t beat the feeling that the whole and only point of the platform is to grab people and sell them and their connections.
I found a way to make my articles and posts public on LinkedIn so that I can share them with other people but the list of them and the search feature are reserved to LinkedIn members. I would like to target audience that includes people that don’t want to become members of a SPAM platform.
LinkedIn actively promotes and rewards violation of its own rules. Members are still asked to only add people they know but violators are clearly preferred by the algorithms. I am not sure if the platform actively promotes fake personalities and influencers and their completely made up stories or if it’s just a side effect of user behavior.
Technical Issues and Limitations
LinkedIn misbehaves every now and then. Comments are often hidden for no reason. Different content reaches my phone and my browser logged in to the same account. Order of comments is distorted all the time or comments get doubled.
People you want to mention in a reaction are often not found. Important features are missing either in the mobile app or in the browser version. Features are inconsistent and often hard to find. History of edited comments is not accessible. Blocked people’s comments are still visible under the content of an unsuspecting user.
Unfortunately, many of the bugs are not just technical issues. A disappeared critical comment makes an impression of author’s censorship. Hidden blocked content invite for cyber-bullying people right under their content without being noticed. Last but not least, the people search flaws, especially when mentioning someone, are indistinguishable from potential censorship by LinkedIn staff.
So What?
Given the low technical quality of the LinkedIn platform and the closed and overly commercial nature of the service, there is no other reason to use that platform for non-recruiters than the people that you can reach there. That is the network effect that keeps their business running.
Maybe it is true what some people say and LinkedIn used to be a platform connecting professionals but when I started using LinkedIn, it was already spoiled. Note that I didn’t mention the acquisition by Microsoft. It is one of the smaller issues in my opinion.
Why Medium
That is a good question. I didn’t choose it myself. It is the choice of a community I’m working with to deliver some content. Going to the details is not the purpose of the article. In reality, I just wanted to try it out and this article is the way to do it.
Expectations
I don’t have any. I have just tried the writing UX and it seems to work for the basic stuff. Ten years ago I would laugh if you told me that I will use a mainstream content publishing service run by a corporation. We expected to have everything either self-hosted or community-hosted and then use some sort of aggregators to connect the communities. This sadly didn’t reach the main stream and we now live in a corporate centric world.
First Impression
According to Wikipedia this site was started in 2012 and therefore it should be a mature service. I haven’t used much of it and doesn’t feel bad at the beginning. However, I have already found a UX fail when scheduling this article. The user is expected to write down a date in some awkward and illogical format (neither day-month-year nor year-month-day) instead of simply choosing from a calendar. Moreover, the article didn’t even get published on the chosen date and time which was Dec 31 12:00. I’m not sure where the problem was.
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
I’m living up to this motto and I love the Monty Python song which pretty much describes how optimism works. Welcome at my new channel and I wish you a happy new year 2019. Let’s see what happens!
P. S. I would be happy if I had someone to proof read my articles, make notes and discuss the details with me. I have just lost my private English teacher/consultant probably because I was too stubborn and discussed all style nuances in too much detail.
