You sign up for a networking platform expecting genuine conversation and information exchange — then find it's mostly used for business outreach and sales. You don't get the value you hoped for; instead, unpleasant experiences pile up.
As a concrete example: someone registers purely because they want to hear from people outside their usual community.
- Right after signing up, a DM arrives: want to chat? Let's set up a meeting.
- In the meeting, the other side suddenly starts: "Let me introduce our company's service."
- You leave the call with an indescribable feeling.
- You're thinking "weird person," then a few days later someone else messages you.
- "Sorry for the sudden message. Our company provides XX service." "If you're open to it, how about an information exchange?" — with a service URL attached.
- It's annoying, so you ignore it.
- A few days later: "Just following up on my earlier message — even a quick information exchange?"
- You block them.
This keeps happening. You stop engaging with anything but clearly legitimate messages, and trust in the platform tanks.
This isn't only my story — plenty of people on various platforms live it. For the record, the above is something I actually experienced on a certain platform.
Whether to encourage that experience depends on the platform's mission.
If the goal is "remove the burden from sales reps," then fine — no problem at all.
But if you brand a mission about encouraging connection (ex: "deepen bonds between people"), then I think this is a huge, fatal opportunity loss.
Platforms have many sides of meaning, and of course priorities exist — but it gets so bad you wonder whether priorities are ranked at all.
The experience above looks like "experience-value damage that should be fixed if you claim a connection-first mission" — or am I wrong?
If you won't fix it, at least change how you pitch the product and the concept.
While what you say and what you do diverge, you scale the business — does that count as contributing social value?
At least, even if you then say "our platform is used by XX people and maximizes connection value — we're number one in the world!," if the lived experience is different, something still feels off.
Of course nothing is perfectly clean, and I get that negative cases will occur probabilistically.
Put extremely: "Well, lots of people, so on networking platforms that kind of thing happens by probability — can't help it. Depending how you use it, it can work, so hang in there!" — is that the line?
Incidentally, if a platform lead ever said it that honestly, I'd praise them — not sarcastically — for not hiding behind self-protective wording and not lying.
In the end, factors like "high name recognition, popularity, good looks" seem to keep rising to the top of platform rankings.
There's an argument that those things guarantee credibility on the publisher side.
But that isn't the essence either.
Another small example: platforms that "if you link out to another platform, an algorithm kicks in so the post doesn't spread, to keep people on-site" — I understand the business logic, but hasn't that drifted from the platform's point?
Experiences like these stack up — isn't that how platforms decay?
All the talk about mission / vision / values boils down to this. If this issue is raised in real internal meetings as something that should be fixed on the platform, and yet it has the highest priority and no improvement plan, something is clearly wrong.
Looking away from that while forcing a facade concept to chase rapid enterprise-value growth and profit maximization — dumping life-hours into gathering users — I feel no respect for that at all.
As one positive example I'll mention something I thought was excellent.
(It isn't a web platform and isn't a service pitched as networking, so the example may be odd.)
"Old Rookie Sauna" has an operation where if someone is talking in the sauna and a report comes in, staff warn them in real time.
Even if their enterprise value and profit are lower than a global web platform, I deeply respect that posture toward solving the problem.
Personally, I want a world where "if a platform truly understands what users want long-term and answers it, it can keep trust and keep growing."
There will be voices saying: "Then you build that platform! Doing it for real is hard!"
Fair enough.
Commentary like this has no value.
No room to argue back.
That's all.
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