I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post half baked nonsense all for the sake of building a personal brand that nobody really cares about.

I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity. A seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing.

(I considered posting a screenshot here but will save the folks in my 'network' from potential doxxing. The LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit has no shortage of curated examples.)

I like writing on the internet, probably more than most. That doesn’t mean that I think its useful to post vapid nonsense on a regular schedule just for the sake of posting.

You’ve probably seen the posts, both the reality and the memes. Generic advice disguised as a story. What my divorce taught me about B2B sales kind of stuff. It seems to be encouraged in much the same way that SEO content is encouraged. Yeah, it probably increases some metric around views or whatever but honestly, what for?

The vast majority of it falls into Toxic Mediocrity. It’s soft, warm and hard to publicly call out but if you’re not deep in the bubble it reads like nonsense. Unlike it’s cousins ‘Toxic Positivity’ and ‘Toxic Masculinity’ it isn’t as immediately obvious. It’s content that spins itself as meaningful and insightful while providing very little of either. Underneath the one hundred and fifty words is, well, nothing. It’s a post that lets you know that sunny days are warm or its better not to be a total psychopath. What is anyone supposed to learn from that.

What frustrates me the most about it is that the underlying premise of LinkedIn is still good. There’s some decent stuff on there in amongst all the noise. But, for whatever reason, that good stuff gets lost amongst a million posts of washed out nonsense.

Worse still is that those same lessons about ‘how to grow on LinkedIn’ encourage users to engage with this kind of content. Leave a pointless congratulatory comment and both you an the author will earn more professional network points.

As a result, the mysterious algorithm sees that same content as content that boosts time on site and the cycle continues. LinkedIn wants you on LinkedIn. Comments, likes and other engagement is a sign that you’re still online. It likely correlated well with clicks on ads and conversion to premium.

It annoys me in particular because I think people post this kind of stuff from a genuine place. They care about their careers and want to do better. I don’t want to shut that down. What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor.

So what should someone do? Honestly, the best approach is to remember that LinkedIn is a website owned by Microsoft, trying to make money for Microsoft, based on time spent on the site. Nothing you post there is going to change your career. Doing work that matters might. Drawing attention to that might. Go for depth over frequency.

If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. You’ll get less views and less engagement but there’s less temptation to post nonsense just for likes. You’re going to have a harder time getting people to stick around and read what you’re writing but that additional pressure raises the bar. Yeah, there are plenty of blogs that mostly go unread but even knowing that people will click away when they get bored should help distill your posts into content that matters.

Lots of people who write good content don’t live on LinkedIn, they might repurpose things for the platform but they exist elsewhere. If you’re more of a consumer than a producer and you want to help make things better the best thing you can do is reward the real stuff. Find those people who aren’t playing the game and promote that instead.

Or, failing all that, as with most nonsense on the internet, you can always close your laptop for the day and go outside.

Background: School-based online surveillance of students has been widely adopted by middle and high school administrators over the past decade. Little is known about the technology companies that provide these services or the benefits and harms of the technology for students. Understanding what information online surveillance companies monitor and collect about students, how they do it, and if and how they facilitate appropriate intervention fills a crucial gap for parents, youth, researchers, and policy makers.

Objective: The two goals of this study were to (1) comprehensively identify school-based online surveillance companies currently in operation, and (2) collate and analyze company-described surveillance services, monitoring processes, and features provided.

Methods: We systematically searched GovSpend and EdSurge’s Education Technology (EdTech) Index to identify school-based online surveillance companies offering social media monitoring, student communications monitoring, or online monitoring. We extracted publicly available information from company websites and conducted a systematic content analysis of the websites identified. Two coders independently evaluated all company websites and discussed the findings to reach 100% consensus regarding website data labeling.

Results: Our systematic search identified 14 school-based online surveillance companies. Content analysis revealed that most of these companies facilitate school administrators’ access to students’ digital behavior, well beyond monitoring during school hours and on school-provided devices. Specifically, almost all companies reported conducting monitoring of students at school, but 86% (12/14) of companies reported also conducting monitoring 24/7 outside of school and 7% (1/14) reported conducting monitoring outside of school at school administrator-specified locations. Most online surveillance companies reported using artificial intelligence to conduct automated flagging of student activity (10/14, 71%), and less than half of the companies (6/14, 43%) reported having a secondary human review team. Further, 14% (2/14) of companies reported providing crisis responses via company staff, including contacting law enforcement at their discretion.

Conclusions: This study is the first detailed assessment of the school-based online surveillance industry and reveals that student monitoring technology can be characterized as heavy-handed. Findings suggest that students who only have school-provided devices are more heavily surveilled and that historically marginalized students may be at a higher risk of being flagged due to algorithmic bias. The dearth of research on efficacy and the notable lack of transparency about how surveillance services work indicate that increased oversight by policy makers of this industry may be warranted. Dissemination of our findings can improve parent, educator, student, and researcher awareness of school-based online monitoring services.

Promoting a simple unbloated web!

Nowadays, hardware resources of our personal devices are essentially oversized to manage bloated websites. If we incite web designers to return to a lighter web, small devices such as old PC, old smartphones, retro-machines and small boards could be usable.

This is the goal of the smolweb concept.

But what is a bloated website? Two aspects are critical: the size of the code and linked resources downloaded by the browser, and the computing effort to do the layouting by transforming it into absolutely positioned boxes with text and images. Reducing both can make a website “smol”

This site attempts to define what a smolweb is and to give some guidelines for use. It is certainly not the only solution to get unbloated websites, but it will help authors, designers and webmasters who want to build “smolwebsites”. Do not read these recommendations as a bible, this is only what I think to be a good way to build respectful websites for authors, readers, internet bandwidth and hardware.

Scammers have been spotted abusing AI site builder Lovable to mimic trusted brands, steal credentials, drain crypto wallets, and spread malware.

Hackers Hijacked Google’s Gemini AI With a Poisoned Calendar Invite to Take Over a Smart Home. For likely the first time ever, security researchers have shown how AI can be hacked to create real-world havoc, allowing them to turn off lights, open smart shutters, and more.