Hm. You brag on your own LinkedIn profile about several interesting things: "Increased the number of invites generated from "people you may know" recommendations by 50%", "Intelligent blending of ads into the feed - able to increase sponsored content revenue by 50% without harming engagement".
So okay, you're already very familiar with LinkedIn's misleading dark patterns. You are, for instance, making ads look like real content in order to get people to mistakenly trust them more.
This makes your claim that you're hard at work "trying to improve the clarity of our products" mean something different than I had expected.
Hi angelbob, the specific work you referenced was algorithmic in nature. Simply put, users that are less likely to interact with ads will see fewer on their feeds. I hope you will agree with me that it is a better experience.
Good. I hope that's all "intelligent blending" means. Too often, that's a euphemism for "making ads look like more non-ads" to fool the user, with "progress" measured in metrics like how often they get clicked on -- which is, by any reasonable measure, a dark pattern.
And LinkedIn certainly does that kind of thing (example: sponsored posts on the front page inserted between posts from people I know, formatted identically, differentiated only by a medium-gray-over-white "Sponsored.")
But glad to hear that in this case you just mean showing fewer ads to those who don't click on them.
So okay, you're already very familiar with LinkedIn's misleading dark patterns. You are, for instance, making ads look like real content in order to get people to mistakenly trust them more.
This makes your claim that you're hard at work "trying to improve the clarity of our products" mean something different than I had expected.