138 - Top Voice Red Teaming

For fun and sanity sake, I enjoy putting things to the test, and seeing how absurd they really are under the hood. One of the things I tested was LinkedIn's "Top (X) Voice" system, where an algorithm tosses you into a category based on heuristic associations of the wording in your posts, and then pesters you to comment on topics and specific questions. The algorithm tossed me into "Risk Management" and "Research Skills" after I consistently declined to comment on questions related to building trivial narrow AI systems.

To put this system to the test, I decided to add precisely one comment to each of 3 topics within each category to start out. Being myself, I maxed out the character limit every time, and I did emphasize the same quality that I invest in all of my writing. The result proved thoroughly amusing.

One comment, on each of 3 topics within a category, immediately placed me within "the top 4%" for top voices, in both cases. Remember, that is the bare minimum effort, and the percentile accounts for reactions from people, which depends on the number of followers a person has. At the present count, I have just under 2,000, while many of my connections have 5,000 to 15,000. It really shouldn't be that easy to hit the top 4% under those conditions.

So, what does the top voice system mean? Not much. Just like all of the "Certifications" that mean less than nothing in practice, except occasionally to the companies who issued them. In years past, I once collected over 50 certifications from a wide range of companies within a 6-month period to put that to the test and even the certifications from Microsoft were worthless in the eyes of Microsoft.

If you see me comment on any of those "collaborative articles" that LinkedIn's Microsoft overlords feed into the next-token-predicting blender, know that I'm just testing if another trivial investment of effort can make the leap from "top 4%" to "top 1%".

Remember to be skeptical when people are promoted as experts by automated systems, corporate sponsorships, or lobbyists. I'll toy with these systems to mock their creators, but many game them to sell snake oil. Critical thinking may be out of fashion right now, but it beats drinking the Kool-Aid.