Spoiler Alert: I don't have one and I don't want one
Over the past few years, I have been slowly building my professional data brand. I was intrigued by LinkedIn's Top ___ Voice badges. Always down for an experiment, I decided to try and "earn" a badge with the ultimate goal of being successful to share my process and what I learned.
But 4 months later I am unsuccessful. #NormalizeFailure
And I'm giving up.
Which is unlike me. It takes a lot for me to give up. In this case, it's less giving up and more understanding the system better to realize it isn't aligned well enough with my values and goals to be worth my energy.
I peaked and plateaued in the top 15% of ~qUalItY cOntRIbuToRS to DatA ScIEnCe~ and here are my takeaways from the experiment.
Can I add value?
I focused on the articles with fewer responses and article sections without responses as a way to guarantee I was adding value. Overall, this skewed more towards data soft skills as those are the least popular articles. My hot take is that those topics are less popular because they are harder to BS with AI and require real lived work experience to meaningfully contribute to. But I was happy to illuminate these often overlooked skills.
Does the badge help or hurt one's professional brand?
The badge can hurt your professional brand. If I see you have the badge, I expect a certain level of experience and caliber of contribution. Not meeting my expectations negatively impacts my perception of you as a professional, especially if I see you got a badge by churning out a ton of low-value content. The majority of my favorite data follows on LinkedIn do NOT have a top voice badge; they don't need it because they have nothing to prove.
Does anyone even read the articles?
Never once did I come across a collaborative article on a topic that was relevant and helpful to my career. If you're seeking technical help or mentorship in data science, those articles are not the place to turn. You can report contributions for reasons that violate LinkedIn policies, like harassment or hate speech, but there is no way to report content that is wrong, redundant, confusing, stolen/plagiarized, or low-value or repeat offenders.
Who gets a badge?
By tracking my top % fluctuating through time, it's clear the focus is on quantity over quality. Boooooo! Most data science articles have hundreds of responses all saying the same thing, written by AI, or giving bad or confusing technical advice. The focus is unbalanced towards ADDING to articles, not reading, reacting, commenting, and curating responses that are already there. You do get a boost if enough people "like" one of your responses, but the boost I experienced from that was negligible compared to the boost I got from volume. Yes, there are (allegedly) other factors that go towards a badge. I think the rest of my profile is pretty solid... maybe even a bit above average... and imagine my data experience, data skills, occasional posts, connections, and data branding would help me more than hurt me.
What's in it for me?
I'm willing to provide a reasonable volume of free labor, knowledge, and content for a reward, but the sheer volume of work just to get to the top 15% and maintain my plateau there was unreasonable. Whenever I had a free 5 minutes to burn, I would go on LinkedIn, see if there were any new articles, and contribute to those where I felt I had something new to add. This averaged out to around 1-3 contributions per day for 2-3 days per week. For a while, I thought that sustained contributions over a long time were the ticket, but I received no meaningful progress when I hit the 1, 2, and 3 month marks. Few people likely have the stamina to keep at it enough to earn a badge.
Overall, I am over it. O V E R I T.
Anecdotally, I've also noticed more creators speaking up and sharing my frustrations and concerns over the program.
This post had me cackling at my desk. It's humor, but there's something important there. Bottom Voices are the people who're new, learning, and growing... people who are unafraid to say something, be right or be wrong, and own that... have a controversial take and hash it out with others... are willing to admit what they don't know and ask advice... aware that they're at the bottom and only have upwards to go... All things I'm interested in hearing more of on LinkedIn!
If you want to try for a Top Voice badge, I will always support you in going for it - please share your experience - but advise you to temper your expectations. The biggest benefits I experienced were brushing up on dusty technical concepts when prompted by an article's question, questions that caused me to reflect on my career as a whole, and a handful of interesting connections to follow. The biggest drawbacks for me were wasted time, concern about low-value responses being used by an unsuspecting learner, and frustrations with the algorithm's method of assigning value.
Instead of a badge, here's what I propose:
👑 Established experts who don't need to prove themselves
🔍 Newcomers eager to learn and grow
📣 Those interested in respectful debates 👓 Not an expert, just a nerd about a topic 💭 Dreamers thinking up big new ideas
What else would you add?
I am joking but not with the above emoji system. I believe a whimsical system that demonstrates how everyone's voice matters and adds value, without trying to fit your voice into a set reward algorithm, would be a nice upgrade!
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