Hacker News Reader

Comment by emayljames | Hacker News Reader

I'd deactivate for 5 bucks. I don't see or hold any value in it. I really don't care about an old school friends meal, who I would only have a fake "hi, how are you", then an awkward silence with if I met them anyway. Linkedin on the other hand has a foundation of worth, as does HN.

View on HN

Let's make this a thing. Please link me to your active profile. If you deactivate it and keep it deactivated for a year, I'll send you or your favourite charity $5.

I will be doing it for free, soon. Thanks very much for the offer though, and a fantastic trend too. If only it would catch on. (I need to use thier messenger for the next 2 weeks as I transition employment, no other reason to keep).

Please enlighten me on the worth of LinkedIn because I have yet to find it. It’s basically become Facebook For Old People where said old people gripe about Facebook and post absolutely stupid comments on Facebook-like videos.

If you keep your LI profile up to date and have in demand skills, people will be knocking down your door to give you money. I've found all my best jobs from LI contacts tbh.

It was a wasteland for a while but in my opinion has rebounded.

As an anecdote/data point: I largely forgot about LinkedIn, and never really heard much from them. One day I installed the app and decided to see what all my old contacts were up to, just browsing around. Immediately after, my page views went up and I was sent a few messages from recruiters. I'm wondering if they don't 'reward' more active users in recruitment searches...

I find it the same too. Professional and about new and fresh connections. Positive input.

When you have a meeting with someone you can see where they do/used to work and perhaps find people in common. It's also apparently a good way to find employees though I'm not sure how our recruiters manage to use it in that way.

Otherwise...I don't get linkedin either. My gf used to work there and raved about it a lot but I still couldn't figure it out.

Don't use it as a social network, only talk to recruiters.

You can use it to find people who work at a company you want to work for, and get a leg up in the hiring process on people who apply directly.

I'm approaching this from a monetary/value perspective. Linkedin has helped me professionally, to make fresh and professional connections, whereas FB has always been about stale/past connections. You may very well be right about the old foggies part, but professionally it is great.

LinkedIn is one of two main sources of job offers for me (the other one being my personal connections).

You can do things like that on LinkedIn? I've only ever gone to the page to see job listings and update my profile for potential recruiters.

Yeah, obviously people who don't care about their friends aren't interested in Facebook. You're no more the market than I am for a curling iron.

It has nothing to do with not caring about friends. It has everything to do with the company itself. Every news story that comes out just confirms my decision. Not one of them has made me think that I was being too hasty in my decision.

Before FB, it was possible to stay in contact with family, friends, etc. Was it as easy? Maybe. Email was perfectly fine. What FB (and everyone else in social too) was make so damn easy to post to the world "here's what I'm doing this exact second. please look at me!" The noise went sky high, and the signal went very faint. Then the algorithms kicked in, and the signal got even harder to find.

It's not that I don't care about friends, it is that FB has no greater value than just talking/texting to people. FB just tries to pretend they bring value to things we already had and still do, before it existed.

FB has negative value compared to talking to people face-to-face in real life… but even while it continues to destroy value by undermining our relationships, various communities have been captured there due to network effects, and then you have to use FB if you want to connect to that community.

True. I do wonder, though, if this community effect has increased polarisation of views.

This is a simple form you can reuse:

Does [increased polarisation of views] increase engagement? [Yes]

Therefore, we can conclude that Facebook does this.

FB is designed for maximum-engagement regardless of whether that is positive or negative for the useds (to use Richard Stallman's pun).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com