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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I find that a lot of serendipitous connections are made on LinkedIn. People will see my profile and strike up a conversation. Seems to work OK for what it is.

What it isn't great for is content. There's never anything remotely useful there, the whole feed is a weird corporate version of the self help section in a bookshop. A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention.

But I also don't see the tradeoff in as poor a light as say FB. What's so personal about where you work? If people can see what I've done they can offer relevant services, mainly they can try to recruit me.

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^This. I've said it for years, but LinkedIn is my favorite social network right now. It gives me the dream of keeping up with all the people I've known (X moved to Y, started a new job, etc) but don't care to actually speak to, but doesn't force me to care about their politics or opinions about game of thrones. On top of that, the "office culture" feel keeps things a little more professional and/or shallow-- if you wouldn't say something at work, you probably wouldn't say it on LinkedIn, which gives just a bit of a sterile feel (vs Twitter or Facebook, which are everyone's soapboxes).

>A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention.

Doesn't this apply to any social network feed? Most of the time people (or companies) just want your attention and LinkedIn is still a social network, therefore it makes total sense.

Well, I would say HN seems interesting in most cases, not only some attention grabbing platform. Don't you agree?

I get what you mean but I didn't say that attention-grabbing platforms are incompatible with (at least some) interesting content.

Also, HN doesn't have many dark patterns (or any?) and I'd not consider it a typical social network like FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc but more like a forum. But even if we consider this place a social network, comparing it to any of the typical social networks is futile IMHO.

The difference between HN and any other social platform can be summarized in one word - dang.

The fact that it even supports all that content is kind of silly. I don't think it was ever reasonable to expect it to actually be useful.

I would guess the reason it exists at all is that someone at LinkedIn figured out that, by its very nature, their site does not generate regular or frequent user engagement. What need is there to visit the site except to update your information occasionally or at select times when you want to make a change to your job situation?

But if you're LinkedIn, you don't want to run a site that people visit every now and then. You want users coming back all the time. More 30-day active users is better, right? So you try to create an artificial reason for them to do that. And it must be job-related, because that's what your site is about. So random user-generated job tips it is.

Aggressively unfollowing people that amplify meaningless posts is the key, just like with any other social network. You can block power users so no comments or likes of their posts from your network will show up in your feed. Unfortunately you cannot block companies, so any like or comment on a fake-company-posting-memes's post will result in unfollowing the person responsible directly, unless you know them personally and give them a free pass by just hiding the post this time.

> Aggressively unfollowing people that amplify meaningless posts is the key,

Until you realize "wait, I don't actually use linkedin for much of anything. Maybe I get a recruiter that has an interesting offer (rare)"

In my experience, most people use linkedin at one time: when they are looking for a job, either to update or create their profile. Beyond that, the only people I see with any activity there are desperate recruiters, and "CEO of my own BS company" inspirational garbage content posters.

I found that seeps through largely via HR people in the contacts. Dropping them reduces the feed to the usual corporate announcement buzz.

YMMV.

"never anything remotely useful" is... quite a blanket statement.

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