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Comment by thatoneuser | Hacker News Reader

Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used?

If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.

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I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about.

But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down.

Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?

For me the worst part about LinkedIn is the aggressive redirect to appstore on mobile when clicking on mail links. This is borderline malware behaviour.

For me this aggression is good, it makes me avoid that site, spending maybe a minute every 2 months on that wasteland of salarymen and networkers.

I never installed the app but as your parent comment said, it's so spammy, I had that fear since they do a lot of mail spam. If they made their mobile website usable, they would've had more than a minute of my engagement...

It definitely looks like the effects of Goodhart's law [0] operating internally, somewhere their KPIs are measuring just the clicks, views or e-mails sent instead of the spirit of those actions (engaging users, turning passive users into active ones, etc.).

LinkedIn turned into a place where I go to answer some messages that could be good opportunities in the future, and only when I don't feel overwhelmed by recruiters' contacts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Investors want to see engagement metric graphs go up. Execs tie compensation to getting that metric up. Product delivers by mandating more alerts. Payday.

When cheating is allowed to win, cheaters will win

And real people stop playing.

That is: LinkedIn users will stop being users.

In the short term. Long term probably not a great idea.

LinkedIn is just a list of my previous jobs that allows recruiters to spam me with job offers. Completely disabled the notifications and was considering deleting the whole thing

LinkedIn is completely awful in every possible way, but I'm a freelancer and a lot of clients seem to find me there, so it's vital for my work.

I don't use it for anything other than to have my CV there and messaging with recruiters, though.

Don't forget the constant shitposting by your friends and (ex)coworkers to make themselves appear very smart and hardworking. I've always felt LinkedIn is 300% the cancer that Facebook is because of all the virtue-signalling, pompous fakery and outright lying that occurs there.

It's the digital, more obnoxious version of a kid screaming ME ME ME at the sports team draft for adults. All those bullshitters with too much time on their hands (ironically at work) begging for the attention of recruiters and prospective employers to hire them.

I’m predisposed to expect shameless self promotion in so many business contexts that it seems “acceptable if annoying” to find on a business networking site. I’m not usually there to look at the “feed” anyway.

LinkedIn sends me notifications that say "you might have new notifications" and then when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose or just really bad qa.

> when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose ...

Read the first three words (my highlight) and there's the answer

Lol yeah, that's them not even bothering making up an excuse to pester you. They're literally just trying to snag a hook on you for nothing.

I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars through people I have met on LinkedIn, and I continue to make money through them. In business, networking is key. It’s not going to find you clients on its own, but it definitely aids in that process if you use it to network or prospect.

Personally it's never seemed like a valuable resource in that regard to me. How do you go about this and how much success do you see?

It’s mostly passive, to be honest. About 20-30 recruiters reach out daily, so I typically tell them that I’m only willing to work remote contracts (if I’m not looking for something full time) with a bill rate of $125 / hour or more. It only takes one out of a hundred to come back with an opportunity that brings in 20-25k per month for six plus months that I can do in addition to my day job to make the effort well worth it.

There’s so much work out there - let recruiters find it for you and be super selective if you already have income. After a while, repeat business will allow you to raise your bill rates. A motivated engineer willing to put in the work can pull in $300-$400k per year, even in middle America, without trying to source work for themselves.

out of curiosity, what work do you do remotely?

Nowadays, mostly Elixir, Ruby, and React development.

Thanks a lot for the tip. Guess I'll have to try it that way and see.

Once it text messaged and emailed every contact in my phone telling them to join. It was like 2 unintentional clicks from the home screen.

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