Who we choose to add to our network on LinkedIn, who we choose to follow on Twitter, and similarly on other social networks, has a disproportionate impact on our subsequent experience of the service. I have zero experience on Facebook, but I am certain this is true of it too.
This may seem obvious – and it is – but I think it is worth mentioning because of how sensitive your experience is to your network.
Social networking platforms optimise aggressively for engagement. Their algorithms are optimised to get you to add ever more people to your network (or in case of Twitter, follow more people) and to optimise your home ‘feed’ for maximal engagement (and therefore maximal opportunity to consume advertising). This means the people that LinkedIn suggests to you are directly tied to the people whose invitations you accept. Ditto for the posts you see on the main feed.
In other words, your decision to accept/reject an invitation on say LinkedIn has magnified consequences to your subsequent experience. This builds on itself quickly. Your acceptance of sub-optimal contacts means you are now on the networks of people who are irrelevant to you. Your profile gets recommended to people who are less and less irrelevant to you. And therefore your invitations queue is filled with low-quality profiles. This situation can get pretty bad pretty quickly.
The same thing happens on Twitter when you follow people not necessarily relevant to your interests (whether professional or not). It determines which accounts’ ‘who to follow’ you show up on, and that determines the quality and makeup of your followers. That determines the engagement you see on Twitters in terms of conversations you have.
Algorithms also seem to be weighted in favour of recency, so even if you’ve been careful in the past, slipping up now could undo much of the quality you’e built up.
It’s much harder to correct this than it is to prevent it in the first place. Tools to control your experience, such as block, mute and report, address the symptom not the problem. Social networks are almost exclusively optimised for growth, to reduce friction in adding to your network, not managing it. Bulk edit capabilities are few. It’s also hard to gauge at a glance which accounts to weed out, because you see limited information against individual profiles in any ‘Edit your network’ view.
I’m not sure if there’s a way around this other than just being deliberate. I’ve found that on Twitter, simply adding people to (private) lists of interests that I create has an effect on my topics and people suggestions pretty rapidly. LinkedIn doesn’t even have a lists equivalent. You could create multiple accounts – on Reddit, Twitter and other such networks but they are cumbersome to manage. Creating multiple accounts is even harder on networks that insist on verifying real-world identity.