LinkedIn just baffles me lately, it really does.

It sent me this interesting notification that my post had been featured in a news story. So far, so good, love the exposure — but the title didn’t really seem to match up with my post?

Amazon Music leans into audiobooks

Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers in the UK, US and Canada can now listen to one free audiobook every month – part of a push to turn the platform into the “premier, No. 1 audio entertainment destination.” Customers won’t be able to keep the books, which they can if they subscribe to Amazon’s Audible service. But Amazon hopes the offering will help it compete with Spotify, which started giving its customers audiobook access last year. Amazon’s option will undercut Spotify’s in price, at £10.99 a month versus £11.99. In other Amazon news, the next version of the Alexa voice assistant is reportedly running into problems.

Huh?

Yeah, this has literally nothing to do with my post:

The latency issues that reportedly plague Alexa are just the latest reason to look beyond interactive chatbots when it comes to GenAI applications. A network of AI agents can work away behind the scenes without the pressure of having to return a result immediately, and provide their output once they have it ready to deliver.

This approach also allows for more checks and guardrails to be added to sanity-check the process, ensure compliance with legislation and regulation, and protect data, whether IP or PII.

This post in turn was a comment on a post by Jason Del Rey, linking to a piece of his in Fortune:

My latest exclusive for Fortune:

Internal Amazon documents show critical issues with the new AI version of Alexa that the company has been developing for more than a year.

Internal documents say that the biggest issue in testing is concerning “latency” or the time between a user question or command, and the assistant’s response.

The latency issue needs “significant improvements” before the company should announce the new version of Alexa, one document from early November says.

Customer satisfaction scores among testers is currently below the company’s target score of 5.5 out of 7, according to one memo.

The company is also planning targeted discount offers for current Alexa users who recycle their current Echo devices and upgrade to new ones since they won’t be compatible with the new Alexa. Such compatibility issues will impact nearly 4 million Alexa users, according to the documents.

This is a massive, complex project that Amazon and the Alexa team is attempting, but these documents, reported here for the first time, show there could still be a lot of work to be done.

Does Amazon have more time and can they still develop into a leader into the consumer gen AI space?

I hope you’ll take a read.

I heard you like Amazon

Basically the only common factor between my post and the ostensible topic of this LinkedIn “news story” is that both mention Amazon. The whole intro and all of the other comments that are included are talking about audiobooks, except for a tiny aside right at the end of the intro:

In other Amazon news, the next version of the Alexa voice assistant is reportedly running into problems.

Ironically, this is about as clever as Amazon’s own recommendation algorithm, which is even now wearing out its compute recommending ever weirder scissors to me, just because I recently bought some scissors, and therefore all I must want in the world is MOAR SCISSORS!!1!

A reader wanting to get different perspectives on the market for audiobooks, who came to the series of posts that LinkedIn has put together into a “news story” format, would be confused by the inclusion of my post. They might even assume that I had somehow gamed the algorithm to get myself some exposure.

On that note, it’s worth noting that, while the top few comments in the news story, having the significant benefit of actually being on-topic, have garnered 100+ reactions each and several comments at time of writing. Meanwhile my post has a whole five reactions, which honestly is fairly typical for a post of mine when I haven’t put effort into promoting it in any way. In other words, even if I were trying to game the system to get my posts to the top of people’s feeds, it wouldn’t be worth my while.

This sort of thing is why people like Bluesky and Mastodon: no algorithm messing with your feed, and incompetently to boot.

I used to say that LinkedIn was “for actually getting things done”, but between the rise of ridiculous struggle-porn posts from would-be influencers, and the platform’s own efforts to turn itself into a walled garden, that is less and less the case. Twitter’s experience, and to a less dramatic degree, Facebook’s, should tell LinkedIn management that you can only rely on being the only game in town until someone else shows up with a better game.