

LinkedIn and Censorship in China - tomkwok
https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2015/jul/linkedin-technological-and-financial-giants-morally-pygmies

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kylnew
I deleted my LinkedIn account months ago and it has had no negative impact
whatsoever.

Just less emails telling me my mom has endorsed me for Javascript.

~~~
Balgair
I mean really, what do they do for me exactly? I have never heard of a friend
that got a job through them or found any real value. Besides having a digital
rolodex function, one that my email client does anyway, how do they help me?
It just seems like a liability, one more thing that can mess up in my life or
that I can inadvertently mess up.

~~~
Nelkins
Counter anecdote: I got my current job through LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out
the first time, and I said I wasn't interested. A few weeks later I decided to
test the waters and I put my resume on Dice.com. The same recruiter reached
out on LinkedIn a few hours later, saying he saw my resume on Dice and asked
if anything had changed. It had, I interviewed, and I've been working here for
a little over a year and a half.

For me it's a convenient way of having recruiters reach out without having my
normal inbox completely spammed.

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phowat
Everyone hates LinkedIn, yet most people keep using it (myself included).
Where's the kickass LinkedIn competitor so we can all move on to ?

~~~
mhidalgo
Just curious what are the things you hate about linkedin specifically.

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joosters
The completely pointless 'skills' sections, where anyone can add whatever
skills they like to their profile. Oh, you're skilled in 'Data Center'? How
utterly meaningless.

~~~
vidarh
I know someone with multiple endorsements for "General Awesomeness". To be
fair, he actually deserves those. But yes, not exactly a "skill".

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discardorama
Two wrongs don't make a right, but since the author is in the US, I'd like to
ask him: do you know why it took Al Jazeera so long to get into the US? Do you
know what Al Jazeera had to create a separate entity, "Al Jazeera America" ?

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dasil003
Not that I don't think the Chinese government does evil things, and not that I
think LinkedIn has any moral high ground on anything whatsoever, but is it an
American company's job to solve Chinese political oppression?

I'm more concerned about the NSA and whatever shenanigans American
corporations are capitulating to back home. That is something where I have the
context, cultural awareness, and moral duty to try to effect change. But when
it comes to the Chinese government, I don't see how western individuals or
companies have any capacity to impose their moral compass. If you don't comply
with local laws then you don't operate in that country. China will simply
build their own LinkedIn and the world will be less connected. I don't see how
that adds a modicum of pressure for the Chinese government to reform, change
has to be demanded from within China.

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FilterSweep
Interesting opinion, but The stipulations to becoming an entity in China are
not much different than in the U.S. and other countries. Replace their
government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become
clearer. I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more
accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt as the game is zero-sum.

~~~
toyg
_> Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the
parallels become clearer_

They are not even remotely the same thing. You can choose to ignore "social
media outrage" and stay out of jail; try ignoring government demands in China
and see how it works out.

Cultural pressure to conform may be strong, but as long as it's informal, it's
relatively easy to survive. When it becomes formal, you have to deal with a
lot of people legally allowed to physically hurt you.

There _is_ censorship in the West (especially in the UK, where the police
started jailing Twitter trolls and Facebook bullies, as well as censoring DNS
calls), but it's nowhere near the scale of what you see in China... yet.

 _> I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately,
the whole industry is morally bankrupt _

Maybe LI is a bit morally-bankrupt _er_ than the average?

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joosters
_" In its heyday, Weibo employed 4000 censors in house"_

I thought Weibo was still big in China, yet this implies that the service is
on the wane?

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prewett
I think WeChat started being more popular a year or two ago, due to less
censorship (at the time). However, this is all based on vague impressions from
reading sinocism.com and not by any hard data whatsoever.

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wyclif
"Technological and financial giants, but moral pygmies" (as HN edited the
title) is better than the original which has an error. Heads up.

EDIT: Now HN has edited the title again to something completely unlike the
original title.

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crudbug
Technology recycle - Slow Death !

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honest_joe
Seriously China is a fucked up country when it comes to software,services and
IT.

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VeejayRampay
Your handle shows promises of honesty, but where is it when you end up
bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-
encompassing banner of an pejorative qualifier such as "fucked up"? Come on.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a
> half people under the all-encompassing banner

Yeah, well, the "country" has an all-encompassing government, which is pretty
consistent in applying a uniform set of policies (at least when the policies
benefit the government, anyway). In the context of an article about censorship
and cooperating with authoritarian governments, it makes perfect sense.

~~~
VeejayRampay
Fair enough, I would tend to agree.

Just wanted to point out that many Chinese citizens are victims of the system
you're describing and it would be unfair to them to use too broad a stroke
when talking about a "country" (as opposed to "The Chinese government" or even
"some factions of the Chinese government").

~~~
honest_joe
Which is obvious ? Do not paint them as victims because not all of them are.

They have the money to buy iPhones but not your average 0.99$ app ?

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dang
This is a substantive post, but the title is too baity for HN, so we've
changed it to something neutral. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests a
better one.

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vaginaman23
It's funny how quickly anti-China comments in this thread are being downvoted.
Hey underpaid China censors+bots, are you there?

~~~
gjm11
Right now, the only one I see that's been visibly downvoted is yours right
here. Which I am about to downvote myself, because I have a general policy of
downvoting complaints about downvoting (because they are boring) unless
there's something more to them than "waaaaah, I'm (or my
political/religious/social allies are) being downvoted and I don't like it".

