The decline and fall of LinkedIn

In the beginning...

Years ago,  I remember someone telling me about a great website where you could connect with people in business and build your network: it was called LinkedIn. I joined, and became an enthusiastic user, even paying for Premium for a long time. But over the last few years it's really gone downhill and I see no product innovation to bring it back. This blog post is about the decline of LinkedIn and what Microsoft could do to make it worthwhile again. 

(Gemini's view of the decline of LinkedIn.)

Gods with feet of clay

One of the first real signs of trouble I saw was the near-canonization of some business leaders. A CEO would post his views of the world that typically included some semi-insightful posts about valuing employees. Other LinkedIn users promoted these posts way beyond any rational assessment of their value and the CEO became something of a philosopher-king. 

Then the inevitable happened. The CEO was ousted for poor performance or even worse, ousted for sexual harassment. In one case, I saw a CEO go from being praised effusively one day to being condemned the next, by the same people.

Once you've seen this cycle happen a few times, it's hard to take it all seriously.

Junk videos

There are a ton of short videos on LinkedIn. There's an entire video genre of people in Asia doing ingenuous things with no safety precautions. Another video genre is machines doing cool stuff like cutting wood or pressing metal. Nice, but they dilute business content; if I want to see videos, I'll go to TikTok or YouTube. 

Junk political posts

A lot of social media is a cesspit of low-quality political posting. Sadly, LinkedIn has gone the same way. I see many people posting memes critical of whichever government/country/company has offended their snowflake beliefs. These memes are devoid of nuance, wit, or intelligence and often have a real nastiness to them. It seems like some people are angry all the time. It's exhausting and I don't want to see it in on a business site.

Sadly, it's not just memes. I've read a number of posts attacking climate science or vaccines or renewable energy. In a couple of cases, I've really dug in and looked at the arguments and data behind the claims. Spoiler alert: they never add up. In one case, the author was making a foolhardy claim about China's adoption of renewable energy. Even their cherry-picked data didn't stand up to scrutiny and they were taken apart in the comments. Their response? They said it was their opponents' duty to provide data! I'm all for people posting content that challenges the orthodoxy, but it has to be good quality;  Retraction Watch are doing it right, LinkedIn posters are mostly doing it wrong.

Junk political posts are like stones in a shoe. You can tolerate it for a while, but there comes a time when you need to shake it out. 

Fakes and fraud

Over the last few years, I've started to get odd connection requests. The requestors' LinkedIn profiles looked really strange and their photos looked too perfect. It turned out, I wasn't alone. The site was inundated with fake profiles, many of which were used for attempted fraud.

LinkedIn did try and crack down, but they were very late doing anything at all, and even now, I'm still getting what I think are fake connection requests. 

The fakery is nudging me to only connect with people I've met in person, but this means I bump into another shortcoming: the lack of innovation.

Lack of innovation

Amazingly, there's no way to add an annotation to a contact. Let's say you and and I meet at an event and we connect on LinkedIn.  Quite reasonably, we want to make a note about where we met and we'd liked to do it on LinkedIn because that's where our connection's profile is. We can't do it because there's no such feature.

Of course, there's also the issue of how we connect in the first place. We both have our phones. You'd think there would be a simple way of making a connection, but no. One of us has to find our QR code (not easy), while the other scans. The scanning person has to find the connection link on the person's profile which is sometimes easily accessible but sometimes it's buried away. This leads to some farcical screen pecking. It's astounding they haven't made it easier.

LinkedIn Learning

Oh wow. So much low-quality content. 

No competition

Of course, one of the causes of these problems is the lack of competition. Switching isn't easy; it's hard to build a network and there are huge sunk costs for everyone on LinkedIn. But this situation is unlikely to persist forever. 

How can they turn this around?

They really do need to innovate. Not small incremental changes or nonsense changes like re-arranging where functionality sits, but real changes that make a difference to users. 

How about starting with making the in-person connection process easier? That's got to be low-hanging fruit. Annotations would be another welcome feature.

Next up, improve the quality of posts. They could start with removing the outright political junk (that means junk from all political stances), especially political memes. 

After that, reduce the number of videos and make them business focused.

Meetup.com and related sites do a mostly good job for events. If LinkedIn were to move into this space, they could link people in person and virtually. Similarly, LinkedIn could move into the virtual event space. Instead of signing up with your email address, you'd sign up with your LinkedIn profile.

AI Winters

I've been doing some reading about the history of AI and I found out some things that were new to me. There's a consistent pattern of over-promising, under-delivering, and ludicrous press hype, all with disastrous consequences. There have been at least two dramatic falls in funding over the last decades, called AI winters.

(Gemini's view of an AI winter)

First AI Winter (1974-1980)

The concept of AI has been around for a while, but the first real demonstrations came with the perceptron experiments in the 1950s. The press ran with wild with speculation and massively over-hyped the technology, famously, the New York Times forecast that conscious, self-replicating robots were just around the corner. The perceptron was a great start, but the technology didn't progress very far or very quickly. Of course, it couldn't live up to the hype.

In the early 1960s, researchers spent a great deal of time and money on machine translation, most notably from Russian into English, with the Cold War obviously providing the money and the motivation. Unfortunately, the methods and the computing power just weren't there and the results were very disappointing, certainly nowhere near the level needed to be useful and nowhere near the level needed for funding to continue.

Despite these setbacks, money still flowed into AI research. Eventually, governments started to take an interest in whether their money was producing results, which, frankly, it wasn't. In 1973, the British Government published the Lighthill report which was a devastating assessment of the whole field, and as a result, the UK Government withdrew almost all funding. In the US, government agencies produced similar analysis with similar effects.

Over the next few years, no breakthroughs came, which seemed to justify official skepticism. Despite the lack of breakthroughs, AI research continued, with membership of AI research organizations increasing.

Second AI Winter (1987-2000)

By the early 1980s, things had changed. Japan had risen as an industrial power and it's powerful industry ministry, MITI, had made waves in the west. When MITI decided to fund "Fifth Generation Computer Systems" that were supposed to deliver AI, western governments got a dose of FOMO. At the same time, LISP was having its moment in the sun, driven by early successes in expert systems. Government funding came back and entrepreneurs founded companies to exploit the new technology. Notably, there were a number of companies producing LISP-specific hardware.

Once again, it was a false dawn. By the late 1980s, general-purpose cheaper and capable workstations had arrived, and LISP was ported to these machines. In turn, this led to the collapse of the LISP-specific machine market and to the collapse of the companies making these machines. Investors took note.

Expert systems generally ran into trouble. Outside a few domains, they weren't that successful and there were no breakthroughs. The idea limped on with a few variants, but only had minor successes.

The mighty MITI suffered a setback when progress on Fifth Generation systems was a lot slower than it had expected or wanted. In 1992, it quietly closed the project.

By the early 1990s, AI had a bad reputation again. It had suffered two hype-driven booms and had failed to deliver twice. Investors were skittish, so investment dried up. Governments spent their research money elsewhere and universities focused on other areas. But there were people still working in the area and working on new ideas. Later on, those ideas would bear fruit spectacularly.

What does this mean?

It's a cliche to say "this time, it's different", but so far it is. Yes, the technology is hyped, but the business benefits are obvious, the skeptical voices are louder, and the hype isn't as foolish as it was before. Comparing the press coverage from the late 1950s to now, you see hype, but it's more grounded in reality and there are fewer flights of fancy (no talk of self-replicating robots).

Gartner have a nice model of adoption called the hype cycle. Here's a typical chart used to explain it, taken from Wikipedia. The chart's pretty self-evident, so I won't explain it.

(Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

AI's path is more complex than the simple hype cycle, but you can see the same general pattern. We're in high growth now, so it's likely we're in the "Slope of Enlightenment". Are things likely to slow down as we reach the "Plateau of Productivity"? Not any time soon.

Are we likely to see another AI Winter? Probably not, but if it does happen, my guess is it will be a combination of data center constraints plus government action plus human revolt.

Ways of getting to space

How can you get to space and orbit the earth cheaply? Today, it costs $1,500-$3,000 to get 1 kg into low earth orbit (LEO), and more to go further. Is it possible to bring these prices down? The answer is, maybe. Let's have a look at some of the possible technologies and what they might cost; but first, let's talk about where space begins.

Space and Altitudes

There's no clear boundary between earth and space; the atmosphere and gravity don't just end suddenly. The space starting point is usually taken as the so-called Kármán line at 100 km above the earth's surface. Low earth orbit goes from 160 km to about 2,000 km, with the ISS orbiting in the range 400–430 km. For comparison, the distance between London and Paris is 454 km.

Getting to these heights is relatively easy; staying there is much harder. To stay in orbit you need a substantial orbital velocity; for example, at 200 km above the earth, you need to reach 7.7 km/s to stay in orbit. Because of the high cost of entering orbit, the earliest space launches were suborbital, the first being a V-2 on 20 June 1944, which reached 176 km. Achieving orbit takes more fuel, meaning a bigger rocket, so it took longer; the first orbital flight was Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, with an orbit of 223–950 km.

Rockets

Although rocketry is proven technology, it has its limitations. Because a rocket has to carry its own fuel, it burns fuel to carry fuel; during the Apollo 11 mission, the Saturn V rocket was 85% fuel by weight.

The fuel fraction needed to get to orbit is expressed by the rocket equation:

$$\Delta v = v_e \ln \frac{m_0}{m_f} = I_{sp}\, g_0 \ln \frac{m_0}{m_f}$$

Where:

• \(\Delta v\) is the change in velocity
• \(v_e\) is the exhaust velocity, given by:
  • \(I_{sp}\) — the specific impulse
  • \(g_0\) — gravitational acceleration
• \(m_0\) is the mass of the entire rocket, including propellant
• \(m_f\) is the mass of the rocket without propellant

This equation is a simplification that applies in this form to single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rockets, but it's enough to show the problem. Wikipedia's example calculation shows that an SSTO rocket must be 88.8% fuel. This percentage drops for a two-stage rocket, but the cost is added complexity.

The rocket equation tells you how much fuel you need to carry a payload to orbit. The bigger the mass, the more fuel, and hence the bigger the engineering challenge which is the so-called tyranny of the rocket equation.

(Copilot's retro rocket.)

To put rocket costs into perspective, let's look at something simple. A cup of coffee weighs about 240 g, or 82 g just for the coffee. The cost to orbit for this mass is $360–$720 for the cup, or $123–$246 for the coffee itself. These costs are coming down, but they're still high enough that rocket space travel is restricted to governments and billionaires.

Fuel costs aren't the only costs. There's obviously R&D which is extremely high. By using mass-production techniques and riding the experience curve, we can cut costs to orbit, but the rocket equation puts a floor on costs; rockets are always going to be expensive.

Planes

Normal jet engines require oxygen to burn fuel and sufficient atmosphere for their wings to provide lift. Both fall off with altitude, preventing jets from reaching space. However, a high-flying jet can reach the Kármán line by carrying momentum built up from acceleration at lower altitudes.

In the 1960s, the US X-15 experimental plane was flown above the Kármán line twice, and in 2004 SpaceShipOne did it three times. These are suborbital flights; the craft only briefly touched the highest altitudes. Reaching orbit by plane would require a rocket at some point, and might require three types of propulsion: a jet, a scramjet, and a rocket.

Commercial planes typically fly at about 9–12 km; much, much lower than the Kármán line.

Guns

The idea is simple: build a large gun and fire a payload into space. It's an old concept, famously appearing in Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon. In practice, it's much harder than it seems.

The acceleration in a space gun is enormous, over 1,000 g, which would kill a person almost instantly. This limits space guns to launching satellites, though a cheap satellite launch is still hugely valuable.

The most notable real-world space gun attempt was the HARP project in the 1960s, which managed to send a projectile to 179 km, comfortably above the Kármán line, at a cost of only $300–$500 a firing. The project ended in 1967, apparently from funding pressure and politics.

Chemical space guns run into pressure problems that limit acceleration and the height the projectile can reach, so electromagnetic rail guns have been suggested as alternatives. The StarTram concept uses this idea with some additional twists, but remains only theoretical.

The HARP project was the high-water mark of the space gun approach. Its architect, Dr. Gerard Bull, subsequently tried to get more space guns built but struggled for funding. Eventually he persuaded Saddam Hussein to fund "Project Babylon," a supergun capable of firing projectiles 750 km. The project ended when Bull was assassinated, most likely by Mossad,  in a Brussels hotel in 1990. No one has seriously attempted a space gun since.

Centrifugal Launches

Taking inspiration from a bolas, what if you accelerate an object in a circle and, once it reaches a high enough velocity, release it? If you accelerated a payload in a vacuum, you could hit 10,000 g and reach a tremendous exit velocity, enough to fling your payload high into the atmosphere. Even if you couldn't reach orbit, by sending a rocket far into the upper atmosphere, you would dramatically reduce its fuel needs (and hence cost). Of course, a person would be squished by this acceleration, but once again, a satellite or cargo launch would be good enough.

A company called SpinLaunch built a prototype in New Mexico to investigate the idea. Unfortunately the engineering challenges proved too much and they've since pivoted to more traditional rockets.

The Space Elevator

Space elevators are beloved by science fiction authors. The idea was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Fountains of Paradise and it's appeared in several other novels since.

Here's the concept: move an asteroid into geostationary orbit as a counterweight, deploy a cable down to earth, anchor it to the ground, and ride an elevator up the cable into space. Simple in principle, but the forces on the cable would be extraordinary, requiring entirely new super-strong materials. Clarke suggested threads of buckyball-type nanoparticles, which didn't exist when he wrote the book.

(Gemini's view of a space elevator.)

The engineering challenges are immense: capturing an asteroid, developing the cable material, surviving lightning strikes and weather, and so on  It's not likely to happen any time soon.

A baby step towards a space elevator was attempted in 1996 ,when the space shuttle crew tried to deploy a satellite on a 20 km tether; unfortunately it snapped before being fully deployed, illustrating the difficulties.

Skyhooks

Imagine a satellite with two huge rotating arms long enough to reach into the upper atmosphere. As the satellite rotates, one arm dips into the atmosphere. A plane flies up, the arm catches it and flings the plane into orbit. Conversely, you could de-orbit spacecraft without dangerous re-entry.

(Claude's view of the skyhook)

To use this system, a plane only needs to reach Mach 10+ at high altitude, far cheaper than reaching orbit unaided. Although it sounds outlandish, it appears more feasible than the space elevator. Still, it's likely decades away from development.

Space Fountain

Imagine a water fountain pushing a ball aloft, now scale that up to lifting a platform to space. Instead of water, a space fountain would use a stream of metal pellets fired electromagnetically upwards to lift a platform high into space. Like the space elevator, the platform transports people and cargo into space and back again.

The key idea is that the pellets never physically contact the platform. Instead, a magnetic deflector captures each pellet and an electromagnetic accelerator fires it back down; the ground station catches and re-fires them upward. The pellets are continuously recycled.

(Perplexity's view of a space fountain. It looks a lot like a rocket to me, but then, there's never been a real space fountain...)

It's an elegant concept, but the engineering challenges are immense, and the electricity bill to run the electromagnets would be enormous.

Balloons and Rockets (Rockoons)

A balloon can carry a rocket high into the atmosphere, the combination is called a rockoon. One of the early pioneers was James A. Van Allen, whose rockoon experiments provided the first evidence of the radiation belts now named after him.

The idea is cheap and effective for experiments, but suffers from a fundamental problem: balloons are nearly impossible to steer. Payload capacity is also limited by the balloon's lifting power. Rockoons may work for small scientific payloads, but won't get large amounts of material into orbit.

There have been a lot of pictures in the press showing the curvature of the earth taken from balloons, giving the impression a balloon can get you to space, but that's not so. Balloons typically reach about 30 km where 99% of the atmosphere is below them and the sky above is dark black. It looks like space, but it isn't. The highest a balloon has ever reached is 53.7 km.

Atomic Bombs

There's an urban myth that the first object into space was a manhole cover launched by the first atomic bomb test. In reality, it was during the 1957 Plumbob test, not the original Trinity test; and it was a steel bore cap, not a manhole cover. In any case, the "manhole cover" was almost certainly vaporized in the explosion and never made it to space.

In the 1950s–60s, Project Orion envisaged using miniature nuclear bombs to push a vehicle into orbit, requiring around 800 detonations per launch for a crewed mission. Thankfully, the project never progressed beyond simple chemical explosive tests.

Nazi Super-Science

While researching this post I came across a demented conspiracy theory claiming the Nazis developed an anti-gravity device called Die Glocke (the Bell), supposedly capable of time travel, anti-gravity, and spatial distortion. It's plainly nonsense, but it does have believers.

So It's Rockets for the Foreseeable Future?

Unless there's some extraordinary breakthrough, it really is just rockets for now. 

AI statement

This is all my own writing. I used AI  to generate images and to help with some research, but not for any piece of the writing itself.