LinkedIn should punish the “comment X to get access” bait spam

I liked social media. I love learning and showing people how things are done there. I’m a LinkedIn and Skillshare trainer and wrote a few books. I also published tons of information on various social media channels.

I also like that creators get benefits from publishing information. A social media platform should reward great contributions and they did that in the past.

From views to interaction bait

The problem began when lots of views weren’t enough. Either because it was too easy to automate them with bots or because the real worth of a social platform started to get measured in “time in app” rather than “quality of information”. Advertisers reward those that make people the most addicted and lock them in. And the platforms themselves started measuring quality of contribution as causing as much conversation and interaction with other users as possible. Which is a race to the bottom in terms of quality as the most engaged pieces of content are not those that educate or delight, but those that cause controversy and rage. Some platforms excel at that. Others do encourage their contributors to play the system by forcing interaction, no matter how inane.

The “comment to get access” bait

Lately I’ve seen a pattern emerge across social media by growth hackers, tech influencers and other chancers that annoys the hell out of me because of its utter uselessness. The “Comment to get access” bait.

• Someone posts and impressive thing as a screencast
• They don’t provide a link to the resource (or sign-up)
• Instead, they ask people to comment with a certain word to get access via direct messages

Behold it in all its glory :

Now, my question is who benefits from that?

• Not the people commenting “banana” as they sound like idiotic minions
• Not the original poster, as they still need to follow all posts and then send direct messages
• Not the platform, as hundreds of posts stating “banana” are not content to mine and re-use, but just noise
• Not other readers, as finding interesting comments in this noise is a drag

All in all, this feels seedy, unprofessional and superfluous. If LinkedIn wants to be an educational, professional platform, it probably should punish rather than promote posts like these.