Why I enjoy getting Hate on LinkedIn

I’m always a little happy about receiving hate comments on LinkedIn.

Wait, let me start from the beginning, maybe it’ll make more sense that way:

I don’t like how LLMs (“AI”) have replaced human emotion in communication.

ChatGPT defaults to the falsely cheerful tone of a middle-manager at a mid-sized company; the texts that come out of it are often not just emotionally dishonest, but utterly soulless. Texts of this kind don’t become any more honest just because the middle-manager at the mid-sized company actually typed them out by hand instead of automating that part away, too.

A large portion of LinkedIn’s databases are filled with absolutely meaningless fluff, written with the sole purpose of generating a bit of reach. That isn’t real, not in any way that matters at least, because there’s no real human emotion behind it.

Your pre-fabricated post about how proud you are that your department got to do a beginner’s yoga class during their lunch break for World Health Day? Complete with AI-generated pixel-garbage as the header image, scheduled for exactly 12:30, a few cheeky emojis sprinkled in? Maybe you even delegated it to the intern?

Yawn. That leaves me just as cold as it leaves you.

You let me know in the comments that you think I’m an idiot? Tapped out spontaneously on your phone somewhere between meetings, because you can’t just let a stupid post like that stand uncommented, and it simply came over you? Awesome. Now that’s raw honesty!

By this I don’t mean to imply that hate is something wonderful, and I’m certainly not calling for anyone to go write hateful messages. The world would definitely be a better place if we could all get along peacefully and harmoniously, always and forever. Still, sometimes it touches me in a not-unpleasant way when someone here throws their negative opinion of me or my posts in my face, unvarnished.

These comments are real, which is unfortunately becoming rarer and rarer on social media.

That’s why, sometimes, I’m even a little bit happy to get verbally attacked on LinkedIn. Truly, honestly, genuinely.

Can we somehow transport this human authenticity into the positive as well?