Rich-Get-Richer Effect in LinkedIn
https://hbr.org/2016/05/the-more-people-we-connect-with-on-linkedin-the-less-valuable-it-becomes
This article criticizes the current norm of LinkedIn, which is the more connections a person has the better he/she appears. As the article points out, LinkedIn used to hold a “smaller is better” strategy. It suggests people to carefully select who they connect to and only connect with who they know and trust. However, the interface of LinkedIn contradicts with such a philosophy and emphasizes the number of connections a user has. The site has a whole page of suggested connections to encourage users to connect as many people as possible. But if people make a lot of connections they don’t know well, their network on LinkedIn doesn’t really provide the values they were expecting. People make connections on LinkedIn because they hope to discover new work opportunities through second-degree connections. When people make third-degree connections or even fourth-degree connections, they don’t know the connections well enough to ask for a favor, which loses the whole purpose of connecting to people.
The analysis of LinkedIn connections suggests that the rich-get-richer effect in social media networks is two-fold. For LinkedIn, the more connections users make the better because that brings more people into using this product, which makes this product more valuable. When LinkedIn enjoys the benefits brought by rich-get-richer effect, users don’t necessarily get to enjoy because now a lot of their connections are actually meaningless. This conflict can be solved by, according to the article, adding tags to connections and allowing users to categorize connections. This way users are able to differentiate their meaningful connections from connections they don’t know well, which aligns with the company’s business goal and improves the quality of users’ networks.