I consider LinkedIn to be a great case study in the value and perils of social networking. On one hand, maintaining a list of all the people I've worked with a

I consider LinkedIn to be a great case study in the value and perils of social networking. On one hand, maintaining a list of all the people I've worked with and their up-to-date CVs is incredibly valuable, and LinkedIn has enough network effects to make it irreplaceable. On the other hand, despite the fact that Microsoft makes plenty of money from other business, and LinkedIn all of the above value would be effectively free to maintain and generate an immeasurable sum of relevance and good will, somehow it's still subject to the same Capitalist-American-tech cultural incentives to engage in a short-sighted McNamara fallacy to drive engagement. This means that the feed in LinkedIn is every bit as bad as any other social network as folks jockey for visibility and influence, but with the added wrinkle that peoples careers depend on this, and it's well understood in the corporate world that negativity is counter-productive to large group efforts, thus leading to an extremely saccharine and "toxic positivity" vibe that can come off extremely dystopic to independent thinkers.