Why Social Media Promotes Outrage—and What It Reveals About Broken Job Boards
Markets Optimize What They Measure - Not What They Market
What Social Media Can Teach Us About Job Boards
Social media started out pretty innocently. You shared baby pictures. Posted about hobbies. Maybe connected with some old high school friends. But somewhere along the way, your feed turned into a war zone—outrage, polarization, and performative chaos.
What happened?
The platforms didn’t turn evil. They just followed the metrics.
While the platforms market connecting with others, they measures engagement like a hawk. Clicks, likes, follows and shares were the numbers to monetize. The quickest path to high engagement? Rage. Fear. Division. These aren’t bugs in the system. They are structural outcomes of optimizing for the interactions that the company prioritizes - engagement. It’s not connection between friends, its engagement with the platform itself. Semi-entertainment.
This isn’t all bad, funny cat videos CAN add value. But when it comes to creating harm between disparate groups of people, bullying, sexualizing or violence - yes of course it is.
And here’s the twist: the same thing is happening on job boards.
The Metric is the Mission
Most digital platforms do not reward outcomes. They reward proxies: activity, volume, clicks. In hiring systems, the metric is often application volume. How many people clicked. How many resumes were submitted. How much "engagement" the post got.
But what if no one got hired? What if every candidate left disillusioned and ghosted?
The system would still declare itself a success—because it measured clicks, not matches.
Just like social media prioritizes what goes viral over what’s true, most hiring platforms prioritize what’s measurable over what’s meaningful.
Job Boards Are Like Grocery Stores
Imagine a grocery store with a huge parking lot and endless foot traffic. But no one’s walking out with groceries.
Would you call that store successful?
That’s what many job boards are. Busy, noisy, optimized for presence—but offering no way out. They celebrate applications, not hires. They are basically holding untold numbers of empty boxes of food because the goal isn’t to provide a solution to job seekers it’s to provide the illusion of a solution so that they can profit form the engagement chaos (panicked/furious job seekers and employers) while not facing accountability.
There’s literally no harm and only profit to be made by creating millions of fake posts with AI.
It’s not that high traffic is bad. It’s that high traffic without resolution should raise concern.
Wait, Are You Saying I Should Use a Dead Job Board?
No.
This isn’t about choosing between chaos and crickets. It’s about choosing platforms that optimize for the right thing.
Some platforms are structured around user success. Others are structured around user activity.
You don’t need to avoid job boards. You need to use them with your eyes open.
Ask:
What are they measuring?
What do they report in their marketing materials?
Are they boasting about how many users they have?
Or about how many people got jobs?
What to Look For: Signs of a Platform You Can Trust
Platforms That Allow Real Feedback
The Job Applicant Perspective: lets job seekers publicly review the hiring process they went through.
Ghosted.com: gives candidates a way to document ghosting and push back on silence.
These platforms are designed with feedback at the center. They don’t just show volume—they show experience.
Platforms That Allow Informal Signal
Reddit job subs: People talk. You can see patterns, even if it's anecdotal.
Facebook job groups: The comment section becomes a review system of its own.
Glassdoor: It's employer-focused, but can offer glimpses into post-application experiences.
These platforms aren’t built to solve the job search, but they at least let users warn each other.
Why This Actually Matters
Most job boards profit from activity, not resolution. They make money when you keep applying, not when you succeed and leave.
When the profit is in the pain, the cure only happens if both sides have power.
If the job seeker has no voice, there’s no pressure to build systems that help them. If you can’t see what works, you’re stuck spinning the wheel.
What I’m Building — And Who Else is Trying to Help
That’s why I created The Job Applicant Perspective. It’s a feedback-enabled job board designed to help job seekers:
See which employers ghost
Track hiring timelines
Rate the overall experience
Platforms like Ghosted.com and ghostjobs.io are also working toward accountability, transparency, and user-centered trust.
These aren’t just products. They’re blueprints for a better hiring system.
Want the Full Theory?
This post draws on my larger body of work: The Theory of Online Market Gravity.
You can read the full set of working papers here (on SSRN):
Principle 1: Markets Optimize What They Measure
Principle 2: The Functional-Tension Axiom
Principle 3: Aurora’s Law
Principle 4: The Jevons Paradox of Hiring
Principle 5: The Conditional Belonging Principle
Algorithmic Hiring and the Efficiency Paradox: Systemic Failures of ATS in U.S. Labor Markets
Job Ads vs Job Posts: Unmasking the Market Inefficiency in Online Hiring
Reinventing the Digital Labor Market: How Job Boards Without Trust Mechanisms Fuel Inefficiency
If you're new here, check out previous posts:
Post: An Old Insight About Coal Explains Why You Can’t Find Work
Post: Job Ads Vs. Job Posts: How The Internet Broke Hiring (and How to Fix It)
Or visit The Job Applicant Perspective to see a platform built around the insights in this post.