The Real Judge of Your Posts Is a Stranger, Months From Now

We are not the judge of our own work, and neither are you, entirely. The honest verdict on a post arrives late and from strangers, because it is the right readers, over months, who decide whether to keep reading you, whether to respond, and whether to eventually reach out, and everything short of that is a proxy for the verdict. The only question is which proxy you trust.

Most content services trust themselves: the writer decides the post is good and sends it. We think the writer is the least objective person in the room whether the writer is a human or a machine, so every delivery we send asks you for a grade instead, one to five, about four seconds of your time. A five teaches the system what to repeat, and a two lands in the next batch as a correction rather than in a filing cabinet as feedback, which is the entire difference between a rating system and a suggestion box.

We built it this way because we assume we are wrong somewhere every single week, and a pipeline that believes its own output can only repeat itself with growing confidence, which is a fair description of most of what is wrong with LinkedIn.

There is an uncomfortable version of this you can run on yourself: reread your last ten posts the way a stranger would, cold, owing you nothing, and notice that the post you loved writing and the post that landed are usually not the same post. Your affection for a draft is data about you rather than data about the reader.

We would rather be graded than believed.