Engagement Farming
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the following masterpiece posted on (where else) LinkedIn1:
I would usually call it “a Bullshit Bingo Winner” but fortunately Tom Hollingsworth expanded my vocabulary with “argument farming” or in this case attention/engagement farming. I can see no other reason why someone would post something so meaningless and full of buzzwords.
Fortunately all is not lost. It’s still possible to find an occasional interesting tidbit on LinkedIn like this discussion of sources of network complexity – not that I would fully agree with the author or comments/counterarguments, but they had something to say, and there was some obvious mental effort going into it.
-
There’s a reason behind posting it as an image and omitting the author’s name. ↩︎
Excellent term, my friend! My original take was about people specifically trying to be contrarian but I love how you expanded the idea to include people trying to create engagement with poor posts or unclear ideas.
You really shouldn't include in this discussion people trying to create engagement. That could be your worst mistake. You should think about you career.
And you should not bait nerds like me into this kind of logic honeypots... I just cannot resist.
Self-referential joking aside, thanks for exposing this behaviour pattern, it was not obvious to me.