Paul's Internet Landfill/ 2024/ Stripmining Social Connections

Stripmining Social Connections

Here is a monetization scheme that is incredibly harmful: get users on your platform, and then pay them money to sell to their social connections. We see this pattern with Avon ladies and Tupperware parties and pretty much every multi-level marketing scheme.

The reason that this is incredibly harmful because one's social network is based on trust. Exploiting that social network for monetization is a great way to destroy that trust. If you know that Aunt Debra will be contacting you every two weeks to sell you Tupperware, then you likely won't want to be in contact with Aunt Debra any more. This monetization scheme takes authentic relationships and converts them to transactions.

All social media influencers suffer from this, I think, but in many cases social media influencers depend on parasocial relationships developed in-network, not authentic out-of-band relationships.

I am not certain that LinkedIn follows this archetype, but I feel it probably does. I feel much the same way about other business networking. Being uncomfortable with this is probably my deficiency, but so be it.