that is basically evil, as every social media platform started with VC money in the 2010s is, and one of the incredibly smart (evil) features that preys on academic insecurity/vanity is that it will tell you every time someone finds your profile through a search engine but won't tell you anything about the searcher (known if they also have an account on the site) unless you pay for a premium plan, and of course i am never going to do that but i love moments like this when i get a notification like "yoooo a gray smudge from Australia really wanted to know your deal last night"
i forgot the funniest side effect of this system, which is that there is an infamous troll in English literary studies, a guy who has developed his own elaborate theory of how the Earl of Oxford was secretly writing Shakespeare's plays. his MO is a cold-email (or a tweet you or whatever) and be like "hey check out my cool theory" and then no matter if you respond to him or not he will follow up and get increasingly hostile, veering very rapidly into personal insults and threats, and he will also do this to anyone he sees talking about him or to anyone talking about him (i have had conversations about him with non-academic friends on twitter and he's used these to then email/harass those people).
anyway he once used academia edu to look me up before emailing me so i actually literally know where he lives now (knowledge held in reserve for the unlikely event he does something serious)
