Comment by dofm
8 days ago
And things have changed.
People don't answer cold calls! They increasingly don't read emails. There are no classified ads worth a damn. They work from home! They ask AI more than they google.
The remaining stuff is on Facebook.
It is pointless arguing people shouldn't look to Facebook to find these kinds of jobs and get those recommendations, and preaching the morality of independence to, say, a gel nail technician who makes all her money from friends recommending her and social media photos of her work, is nonsense.
I hope you're not the guy who tell people who are on the breadline that Facebook is bad and they should use classified ads. Because that guy sounds old and out of touch.
It doesn't matter what we think of Facebook (and instagram, and to a smaller extent other social media); it is crucial to networking.
I did all those jobs when Facebook usage was at its peak. It is not crucial to networking, and engagement is plummeting in these walled gardens as content is mostly ragebait, spam, and scams now.
I know the breadline well. Worked my way up from living in my car and eating out of trash cans. I do not personally know anyone who has come up from a lower place than me, and my advice remains constant because people are still the same even as technology evolves.
You can network at meetups, giving talks, trade shows, workshops, classes. Nothing converts higher than meeting people in person. That was true 20 years ago and may be even more true 20 years from now as human generated content on the internet drops to near zero.
Never build a business on hoping an algorithm someone else controls is nice to you.