Here is what I would guess LinkedIn must have been thinking: Nearly everybody boasts about their achievements in their profiles and CVs, making it hard for rea

Here is what I would guess LinkedIn must have been thinking: Nearly everybody boasts about their achievements in their profiles and CVs, making it hard for readers to tell high performers apart from low performers. So what could be a better way than to have others vouch for people </ironical>? This is very similar to older days of websites trying to enhance their rankings by hook or crook, and Google measuring a website's relevance by how many other websites link to it (ultimately leading to the PageRank algorithm). Unfortunately, this has not worked the way they may have intended. Any widespread data-oriented company has to work hard to keep noise at low levels. A means probably intended to reduce the noise in this case has become a source of noise rather.