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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free so I'm mostly feeling positive about it, but I agree that like any social network it has downsides and can lead to psychological stress.

Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as I find this to be the primary mechanism by which these platforms try to suck people into their content machine (there are other mechanisms like notification spam). Most of these systems seem to target dopamine-releasing pleasure mechanisms in the brain, but some are built around darker psychosocial patterns (e.g. success relative to others, the feeling of adequacy and social confirmation).

HN is like a diet to my brain in comparison as it just presents a single page of news without inciting me to scroll to the next page and doesn't show any notifications to me either. Please keep it that way!

View on HN

Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed". Its full of mostly useless content by wannabe thought leaders drowning out a few posts which may have been insightful/relevant. Job search and add/message connections are the only features I have found useful.

It's easy enough to block the feed in your browser. I've done exactly that with Facebook. I haven't deleted my FB account as I still get some random messages from old acquaintances that don't have my phone number, but I removed the feed with uBlock to make sure I'm not exposed to that.

I did that manually on Facebook exactly four years ago. Unfollowed everyone one by one so I have no feed. Now I rarely log in to FB at all and have forgotten about so many people I had no business remembering but only did because of the Facebook news feed.

Before I deleted my profile, I fixed my feed by unfollowing all pages and all news. I unfriended people who were not true friends.

My feed went back to being social rather than emotional manipulation or clickbait news. It was amazing.

Eventually the site lost its value for me because 75% of my real friends deleted their profiles, so it was an awkward/depressing ghosttown. I eventually deleted mine because of ethical qualms.

During the 2016 election cycle I started unfollowing everyone who posted political stuff unless it was someone I was actually close with (immediate family and a handful of close friends) or I thought their posts were actually interesting or insightful. My Facebook has been much nicer since. I still have a feed but it's people I care about and people who post actually interesting stuff.

I did something similar lately. But it's hard to keep up with local news, now. I couldn't find a news aggregator for my country/province. Maybe, I need to build that myself.

I recently started reinvesting in RSS via reader that I can sync, and was pleased to remember that my local paper (a Gannett paper, which matters since they use the same engine on all their properties) supports several RSS feeds, from a site-wide news feed to counties or topics. It's been good enough for me to not push further, but I imagine my local TV news sites have similar feeds. This should scale up from county to city and state, I'd think.

I went through an "unfollowed" everyone in my feed except very close family and friends, the local farmers market, and my local newspaper. Facebook is actually useful now.

Some people don't believe it when I say this, but when I unfollowed lots of people, after some time Facebook just automatically re-follows a few.

It has happened multiple times. I explicitly unfollow someone, never interact with them in any way, and then they again pop up in my feed after two weeks. Somehow if you follow too few people, Facebook just picks some more people for you to follow without ever asking you or telling you.

What country would that be?

FYI your Facebook profile and Messenger account seem to be decoupled now. I deleted my profile but still have a Messenger identity that people can message.

Are you sure you deleted it ?

The behavior you are describing reminds me of the behavior that happens after deactivating your account, not deleting it.

I deleted my facebook last year so maybe things have changed.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I deleted it. You may be right.

My main goal was to harm Facebook's ad business, so I still accomplished that. As far as privacy, I've mostly given up on escaping from Facebook's databases.

First thing I did was block the usual mega influencers and it got super quiet.. Not to mention any names but you know who I'm talking about.

>>Not to mention any names but you know who I'm talking about.

Not trolling but I'm willing to bet that the majority here in HN, including me, do not know who you are talking about.

Agreed. I checked my LinkedIn newsfeed and while there's a lot of noise, I don't see any single source for it. It's actually worse, because the spam is now distributed instead of originating from a single bad actor.

It seems like I would have to unfollow everyone, which is not a big deal for me (I don't look at the newsfeed to begin with) but could be problematic if you find some content useful.

To me it seems like (in no particular order): Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Richard Branson, Guy Kawasaki.

The "verified" badge on there is a good heuristic for who not to follow (if not outright block them) because those are not people anymore, but marketing/PR operations.

LinkedIn desperately tries to get me to “follow” the people you mentioned which I always ignore however not following them still doesn’t isolate you from the noise.

It seems like everyone on LinkedIn is trying to be an “influencer” or wannabe thought leader posting bullshit motivational content or presenting obvious facts as something groundbreaking.

To name a few but you're missing the top dogs the ones who can't even squeeze any more connections and give advice on how to gain more connections.

Did you choose to follow those people at some point? I get regular "recommendations" on who to follow on LinkedIn, including Gates, Nadella, and Branson, but I never take them. And I don't have any content in my feed from any of those folks.

All the content in my feed is from my connections or interactions by my connections. Of course there is plenty of vapid "thought-leader" content from them too.

Actually I've gotten some amusement from watching a few former colleagues overtly try the "LinkedIn thought leader" thing. Kind of funny to observe the (sometimes very large) gap between what they post and what I know they used to do in their day jobs.

>>Kind of funny to observe the (sometimes very large) gap between what they post and what I know they used to do in their day jobs

And hence the saying "Nobody is a prophet in their own land".

>Did you choose to follow those people at some point?

Maybe one or two of them. But I don't even know who Guy Kawasaki is.

Oh c'mon you know the top influencers on the leaderboards.. The guy with the clever cranium, the lady with all the stories about people she didn't fire who turned out to be awesome. Don't make me spell it out. You know what to do with your idols.

Of late (this year) in my experience the job section is mostly reposts of other jobs or positions already filled or fake roles.

Any post by a company with no logo is virtually guaranteed to be spam. I'm seeing them side-by-side with the real post. It's highly polluted by these bad actors.

LinkedIn has their own job platform with the “Easy apply” feature, but also seems to scrape job ads from a lot of third-party sites.

The scraped ones are the bad ones. Bad formatting and categorisation, not kept up to date (the job might be expired on the original site but still displayed on LinkedIn) and you have to register and apply on an external site.

It’s quite ironic that LinkedIn is so against scraping despite doing it themselves.

I'm not sure what you're seeing is scraping. There are various services where companies can upload a job posting once and it's automatically posted across multiple job platforms, with LinkedIn being one of them. Formatting often gets lost on the way.

All scraper job sites have low quality inventory eg indeed.

Last time I was looking I used those sites to fil the quota for job applications per day that receiving JSA (social security) requires in the UK - whilst putting the real effort in to the 2-3 decent possibilities a week I found.

No company wants automation played against them, they want automation put to use by them, to benefit them. Hypocrite paradox. It wouldn't be the first one.

My experience last year was the opposite- I used Linkedin, as well as my university board and competitors, but LinkedIn landed me 3/4 offers

I agree, it's not uncommon to see pages of the same listing by a dozen different recruiting companie, many with no logo.

The worst part though, to me, is that it seems too often to completely ignore my search terms in favor of showing me "sponsored" or jobs that match my profile, even if they completely lack anything from my search.

It's a shame, because it has a few features I really like that I dont see in other job boards. The ability to filter by both the company industry and the job function is pretty nice.

I noticed that too when I was looking for a job. I've learned to tell which is a real company and which is a scammy recruiter.

Also, I can't stand the interface for looking for a job. I really wish it had a "Jobs since you last looked", because otherwise I just kept seeing the same jobs I wasn't interested in.

> Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed".

I am always wondering who reads that? It turns out that a lot of people do read (or at least see) the feed.

I don't read it any more :) I used to go through the feed in search of quality content. Tried configuring it, but the signal to noise ratio is too low.

Some companies require engagement with social media as a requirement for advancement. So you are not wrong about the wannabe thought leaders. This is where they go. Nobody will make negative comments on these posts- it's like making a negative comment about your boss in public.

> ...it's like making a negative comment about your boss in public.

That brings up another issue, that employment background checks are increasingly checking social media posts for "questionable" activity. It's already daunting enough to see that I can't express my true self on places like FB for various reasons but now it's a factor when I'm applying for work?

I think if it was voluntary, and for like a PR position or other very public-facing, it would be different but when I found out this was going on I was relieved that I basically checked out of social media long ago voluntarily where I was already very guarded about how I expressed myself.

Isn't this illegal in EU?

But you are right, seeing witch hunts on social media makes me think you shouldn't use them. I don't express a lot of my political opinions online anymore for this reason alone and am cutting on how much personal information I give up.

According to this site[1], the GDPR would likely delegitimize most of the social media checks. "The GDPR also requires that employers only view social media profiles when the information is relevant to the position being applied for.

The advice also warns that, “The employer should – prior to the inspection of a social media profile – take into account whether the social media profile of the applicant is related to business or private purposes, as this can be an important indication for the legal admissibility of the data inspection.”

This means that while business networking sites such as LinkedIn may be considered fair game, platforms used for more personal purposes, such as Facebook and Instagram, are possibly not relevant."

I don't live in the EU, though, so I'm oblivious of the details.

1: https://checkpoint.cvcheck.com/the-gdpr-and-its-effect-on-so...

>That brings up another issue, that employment background checks are increasingly checking social media posts for "questionable" activity.

Honestly, can you blame them in the current climate? If they can find something that is seriously questionable (I leave the definition of that to the reader), anyone else can too. And no company wants either internal dissent or an external PR hit because someone they hired ranted online about something that's outside the scope of "civilized" discourse as determined by the standards of the arbiters of appropriate public discussion.

You're exactly right... In fact there is a girl on Twitter with a very large following (>800k) who spends all her time hunting down people on social media who have ever in their lives said anything that could be construed as "seriously questionable" (whose definition changes according to the times).

She's gotten incoming freshman kicked out of the colleges they were accepted to. Fired from their jobs. Businesses closed. Dozens and possibly hundreds of them. She's literally dedicated herself to destroying lives.

This is precisely why that although the 1st Amendment only specifically mentions government limits on laws regarding free speech, that free speech MUST ALSO be a cultural value that is protected and defended FIRST and the content of the speech judged SECOND.

People love to say "you are free to speak but we never said there's no consequences!!" as though that's some sort of ace in the hole. Well, sorry folks, but it isn't free speech if you are able to ensure I can never make a living for the rest of my life. The law generously limits what is illegal speech, and certain kinds of hate speech are included.

"I may disagree with every word you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" MUST be a social value for "free speech" and especially the 1st Amendment to have any meaning at all.

In general, I'm very happy that I couldn't publish to the Internet unfiltered until long after I internalized "Never say or write anything in public that you wouldn't want to appear on the front page of the newspaper." I pretty much stay away from politics online, especially on anything like twitter that is public--especially any opinions that are nuanced and easily misconstrued.

I do have good professional reasons to be on twitter and I honestly don't have much inclination to have political arguments there. If I did, I'd probably get another pseudonymous handle but even that carries some risk that it could be connected to you in some way.

You make excellent points. I do not envy hiring managers, that's for sure. How to combine respect for privacy and freedom of expression with protecting a company from undeserved harm? Maybe this the problem LinkedIn was trying to solve until it became a giant spam ground for annoying recruiters and influencer wannabes.

So who is this horrible girl on Twitter who’s destroying lives? Surely naming names in this case would be justified.

More than likely doxxing is against the rules here but her first name is Skai and shares a last name with a famous singer. Not hard to find.

And this is my axe to grind - that these people exist and just one misconstrued, out-of-context quote and boom, career is over.

And the degree to which this social-media-background-check crap goes - just see a recent entry from jwz's blog about this[1]. I had little idea things had gone that far already.

Sure, play stupid games/get stupid prizes but we are all human and go through phases of self-discovery. Turning social media into a saccharine, superficial cat pics trading ground where everyone is fearful of losing friendships over, say, well-intentioned analysis and opinions seems like a pathetic outcome for humanity overall. Not to mention how easy it is to miss sarcasm or other thought subtleties that can't be easily conveyed on international multimedia social networks.

I agree with others who say HN is a refreshing exception to the toxic mess that is social media, though.

1:https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/02/enjoy-your-dystopia/

Yeah, that’s why I basically use it as an online CV host and little else. I din’t think I’ve ever read a post that was shared on linkedin, and rarely ever bothered reading any of the news/notifications/updates.

> wannabe thought leaders

A high percentage of which seem to be recruiters cutting and pasting words of wisdom, inspirational quotes that dozens of people "Like."

I don't know how people can take this stuff seriously.

I don't get any of these. Can you unfollow these people or are they some kind of sponsored/injected content?

The only wannabe thought leaders I see are all people I actually know who are taking other people's thoughts and passing them off as their own. Thankfully, I rarely scroll the feed -- I only use linkedin to receive unsolicited messages from people who just want to be my friend so they can sell me their services. I should really delete my linkedin profile.

You can unfollow them if they are a connection by clicking the three dots on the top right of a post. You remain connected but you no longer see their updates in your feed.

Or people pasting gotcha dumb math “problems” where hundreds of people reply the answer. I could never understand that.

People like being told that they are smart, indirectly. If someone posts a "hard" math "problem" and the viewer can solve it... that indirectly means that the viewer is smarter than the poster. Which viewers love.

Did you read the comments from the guy that left facebook? It was like reading YouTube comments. People were flaming him from their professional accounts.

"83% of people won't be able to solve this" (some basic puzzle follows).

83%‽ That's almost half!

It's like the reverse of the /g/ or /sci/ meme with a picture of Makise Kurisu saying "You should be able to solve this" accompanied by a laughably difficult problem.

What really grinds my gears is CEOs and the likes fishing for validation with dumb, usually copy pasted "anecdotes" that seem to glorify employee-exploitation practices.

Before lockdowns, I kept seeing this post, that boiled down to "employee asked for WFH, due to personal life issues. Now they are even more dedicated and can spend the time freed up working 8-6 instead, and we both win! Thoughts?"

Yeah that's up there with the "unlimited" vacation scam.

On a slight tangent, seeing all the companies come out of the woodwork to praise WFH policies during COVID was truly astounding. I suspected 100% of these companies would go right back to working in an office as soon as COVID left the news. And that seems to be playing out right now. I've been working remote for many years now, so I know these people are totally full of shit. It's the worst sort of virtue signaling and pandering imaginable. Then they all switched to Black Lives Matter. These people sold their soul to the devil.

'N habits of people with emotional intelligence' sorts of posts are very common in what i see, and so formulaic

I use uBlock Origin to completely block out the news feed and messaging, and it makes my LinkedIn experience orders of magnitude better. When I visit linkedin.com, now, I'm greeted with a navigation header bar and a blank page where the news feed used to be. It's perfect.

I personally found messaging to not be very useful or relevant, and I just couldn't keep up with the backlog of messages. If they really want to contact me, they can just email me.

Here are the UBO rules:

  www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
  www.linkedin.com###messaging
  www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header
  www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content
  www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay
  www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item

Reading the comments here. I find it scary that people are willing to deal with broken "tools" to such an extent and manipulate their own behavior to fit profit-seeking companies. I can see why we will be stuck with the same few social media and recruiting platforms because people are not willing to change but they are willing to put in the effort.

All the recruiters are on LinkedIn and pretty much use it exclusively.

There’s a similar network effect problem with Facebook, but it’s a lot easier to leave Facebook because you presumably can still message your real life friends in other ways.

With LinkedIn you can’t leave without also seriously hurting your ability to get in touch with recruiters.

That said, you basically don’t have to spend any time on it after you set it up. Maybe update once a year? So doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

Fwiw, I still get recruiter emails now and then years after having shut off my LinkedIn account. If they mention how they found me, it's usually through GitHub.

...not that I've ever had anything useful come from talking to a recruiter. The useful bits have always come through my existing personal network more directly, or through meatspace networking. I shut down my LinkedIn because I basically started to view recruiter emails as spam.

Perhaps you are a dev, then GitHub/Lab is a good place to search for something specific, if your recruiter knows what the they exactly seek. In my line of work (audit/sec/GRC) most of my contracts start as "6 months of THIS" and they end 2-3 years later after I have worked on their operational model, on the manner their control framework is defined and executed, their deliveries to their external auditor are defined and scripted, and some more process-control-audit related parts are etched in stone (oh and some SOX 404 just because I was in the neighborhood)..

So in my world, having a CV with the necessary keywords (SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, COBIT, NIST SP 800/XX/yy/zz, NIST CSF, etc.) is a life saver because I always have headhunters calling me. I don't see them as spam. I just tell them to ring me 30 days before my contract/extension ends, and they gladly do so, and I stay working like this.

I don't spend more than 10minutes per month, and only to accept/ignore/reply to messages. I use it. I don't let it use me (apart from the fact that they sell my data to anyone who is willing to pay them).

Even as a dev I think the person you're replying to is wrong.

Sure - if you know people that work at the specific company you're interested in then you can just get a referral through them, but if you don't then having a history of email contact with recruiters at interesting companies via linked in is quite valuable and makes it easy to jump to the interview process.

The job market is strong so we (devs) get a lot of email from recruiters trying to hire, and the recruiter quality can vary (generally employees of the specific company are better than hired firms), but in general I think this is a good problem to have.

I don't categorize the person you're replying to this way, but I've definitely seen devs go on a bit of an ego trip because of the recruiter emails they get and then treat them dismissively. A career is long, there's no reason to be nasty to them or cut them off - at some point you might need their help.

Are you are involved with recruiting in any way? Then be the change you want to see in the world. Does the company you work for use LinkedIn or use recruiters that send messages of LinkedIn? Make an effort to stop hiring them, and use neutral tools like email.

I dislike LinkedIn, but have seen very few people walk the walk professionally when it comes to influencing their own workplace to stop using it in some way. I have advised every company I have worked at against using external recruiters, and rarely has it been accepted (even though we always got a lot of candidates from the external recruiters who weren't a good fit with regards to either skills or eagerness).

Props to the article author for actually doing so, and I hope they will remember this and not use LinkedIn when the company they are cofounding has to recruit their N > 20th employee.

> use neutral tools like email

Email might be a neutral tool, but not using a tool like LinkedIn is worse because you're restricting your hiring pool to immediate connections. For all its warts, LinkedIn allows job seekers to connect with a wider range of jobs and job posters to connect to a wider range of potential candidates.

The answer isn't to double down on a "it's not what you know but who you know" world.

Most outside recruiters are terrible, we can agree on that. It's a two-fold problem, they give you poor candidates and harm the reputation of your firm by leaving a poor impression of you to them. I'm looking for work right now and had first hand experience of this recently; I don't know if I should feel sad that I didn't get a job that sounded perfect or happy that I dodged a bullet because if the candidate experience was so bad, what would working there be like?

> www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed

That's the one that I used, thanks! I find messaging valuable :)

I use UBO a bunch but I've not considered to focus on linkedin. This is excellent. Thanks so much!

I've been using it more to read Dalio's articles. Which makes me curious why he is using linked in and not just hire someone to set up a personal blog for him ( ? )

LinkedIn has a news feed, and you actually look at it? There’s your problem. I’ve set up an OnMyCommand macro so that when I select some text and right-click, it will search for the selected name:

open "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=__OBJ_...

Apologies to non-Mac users. OnMyCommand is at http://www.abracode.com/free/cmworkshop/on_my_command.html, though for beginners I will immodestly suggest my fork of the ReadMe: https://github.com/abra-code/OMC/pull/9/files

The news feed, like many of them, is worthless. I rarely scroll.

I'd really love to see others job updates there, or job openings. But mostly its just drivel.

My complaint is more like the ludicrously low quality user interface. Lots of inconsistencies, ridiculously persistent notifications on actions you just did, supplying a stream of suggestions to completely irrelevant job ads where one is claimed to fit well, user unfriendly search history, not to mention the hopelessly clueless user support unable to grasp what one is talking about and answering for never mentioned aspects after asking for already supplied details and explanations, like if they were in write only mode. Not so long ago all icons disappeared for weeks without any fix which I did not report to user support for the obvious reasons.

For a professional community it is hopelessly clumsy. Also overpriced.

Counter-example to the original author: I refused to have a LinkedIn account for the first 12 years of my career (LinkedIn launched the same year I started my career, I believe). But after I opened one, it really helped my career. I found my last two jobs through it. My timeline looks OK because I unfollow a lot of people. I've done the same with Facebook. I rarely come away from either site with my blood pressure any higher than it was going in.

> I unfollow a lot of people

This is the trick to turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate who you follow. Facebook in particular has many tools to do this, from preventing their content posting to your news feed to unfriending them altogether.

Too many people just follow everyone they know, then complain when they start seeing content that gives them negative outcomes.

There's also this weird social stigma where people think that if you unfollow them on a social website, you can't be friends in real life. That's not true either! They're just really bad at posting content I'm interested in viewing.

Exactly this. I learned this principle from a recent HN post:

The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.

You just need to curate your timeline. You have the tools. If you timeline looks bad, you probably haven't curated it properly. If it still looks bad after curation, then perhaps it's time to take a long hard look at your friends and acquaintances!

My problem with Facebook is they actively try to make your feed controversial. You can unfriend 95% of the haters and some how that remaining 5% will fill up 50% of your feed, and it's not because they are posting more frequently.

This is ultimately why I stopped using Facebook. One day, I sat down for two hours to systematically unfriend, unfollow, and click “I don’t want to see stuff like this” on all of the memes, politics, and other crap. I’d unfollow friends who exclusively shared this stuff, and tried to train the algorithm to avoid cat videos and memes.

Something amazing happened in the middle. I started seeing engagement photos and wedding announcements and baby shower invites, from the three months prior. All things that I would have loved to know about at the time, but that were systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”. For a brief moment I thought I had saved my Facebook.

But then, I refreshed my page and the tide of low quality humor, cat pictures, and political memes came back in. I remember I kept trying to tell Facebook not to show me anything from LadBible, but no matter how many times I clicked “never show me content from this page”, literally the same videos came back. A week later I came back, and the feed was again overgrown with the stuff, like poison ivy.

These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention and they cannot be redeemed. At least, I couldn’t redeem mine.

Very strange. Facebook seems to more or less honor my "never show stuff from this person/page again" clicks. Also, if you unfollow someone permanently (not for 30 days), I really doubt their posts will appear in your timeline again. Unless they arrive through pages or communities you're members of.

I agree, it seemed like a bug to me at the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's fixed now. To clarify, it wasn't the actual page's post that was appearing in my feed, but somebody sharing the post on that page. It's somebody who I want to follow, but I'm not interested in seeing half of the things they share. The permanent un-follow thing is legit, like you said.

Another thing I noticed was that basically the same video would be posted by a dozen (and growing) increasingly obscure pages, and my friends (and fb) would share from all the different pages indiscriminately.

If you block one obscure page, another one arrives to take its place within a few days. It almost feels engineered by design, to get around the "never show stuff from this person/page again" mechanism.

A former coworker mastered this by basically unfollowing everyone so they don't show up on her feed, then whitelisting specific things.

I couldn't be bothered... I shut it down.

I wish social networks would not automatically follow people when I connect with people.

> But after I opened one, it really helped my career. I found my last two jobs through it.

Selection bias. You may very well have found the same exact, or even better, jobs outside of LI.

Genuine question: how? For me, LinkedIn is the only platform where recruiter can discover my profile and contact me. I've got one job from it.

Other than that it only left me with jobsdb and jobsteet, both need for me to actively looking for a job.

May I ask how? You seem to know more about my particular circumstance better than I do...

LinkedIn has value as a rolodex and should've stopped at that. The social media features are, just like any mainstream social network, a cesspool.

If you want to use LinkedIn and keep your sanity, I suggest disabling all notifications except the email notifications for new messages and then don't log back in unless you get an e-mail and you need to respond to that person.

Easy in Russia because LinkedIn website and apps are blocked and enabling VPN just to scroll the feed is not worth it

Maybe ban it in hosts and unban when needed?

I don't think Putin's censorship is the solution. After all you have skillsnet.ru

Something you got to give to LinkedIn is at least that this is the default behavior (as far as I know, I haven't changed any notification setting since I got it) It's great for someone that just want to have a "easy CV" so that recruiters at least know where/what you've worked with without back&forth mailing.

Recently I tried to get Twitter for the first time and my gosh what a mess that platform is. I only wanted it to follow some researcher to get up-to-date research topic but the damn app just have to fill the feed with "retweet" and other tweet I didn't even ask for (and I can't turn this off!)

This has not been my experience. Any recruiter I talk to asks for a CV. If I tell them my linked in is up to date they just ask me to convert it into a CV

I had the exact opposite experience lately. Recuiters find me and want Linkedin. The companies want a piece of paper.

The recruiter asks for a CV so they can redact any identifying details from it. They don't want to send your LinkedIn profile directly to the client to prevent them from talking to you directly.

The recruiter asks for your cv as a way to get paid.

If you submit a resume to a recruiter they can submit on your behalf to a company. If you submit to many in the same firm some will use the date received in order to assign any money earned.

Without this rule you would have people sending in resumes without the person's knowledge.

If its a decent Job you do need a CV (ideally tailored to the job) and a Targeted cover letter.

Hmm, I took some time a couple of years ago to follow the right people on twitter and now I use it all the time (I don't post tweets). Delete the app and just use the browser. It's really all about who you follow. I find it's the most "authentic" and also the funniest social media platform right now.

Instead of following them, add them to a list. This way, you only get their tweets without any retweets or likes. Personally I find the retweets and likes helpful as it expands my network to follow people that the people I follow also follow.

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't deleted the app yet so I might look in to what a "list" is. But yes "some" people only retweet relevant stuff, but most people (even researchers) are multidimensional, so they usually retweet on events. So unless there's some ongoing conference and such, the noise to useful information ratio is too great.

Other companies tried the more or less just a Rolodex thing. The thing is that they still had the same incentives to try to expand your network.

But LinkedIn is basically fine as a way of keeping track of people and potentially contacting those you're not directly connected to elsewhere. I go through my connect requests once a month or so and ignore about half of them. I ignore any messages trying to sell me something or recruiters that are pitching something that's not remotely my thing. (In all fairness, my profile isn't really filled out so it would be hard to know what I actually do or have done.)

I do similarly with respect to notifications which is a good rule of thumb in general.

LinkedIn is the only social media that has had a positive impact on my career. I’m being followed by possibly future employers, networking with peers and talking about shared issues, planning working lunches at conventions and getting job offers.

I never scroll through the news feed.

> LinkedIn is the only social media that has had a positive impact on my career.

It looks as if the site is beneficial when used strictly for professional contact(s), it's working as expected most of the time. The marketing side, which is part of its business model, is annoying. Groups used to provide valuable and interesting information in some professional fields. Now, not so much. When everyone tries to push their agenda all of the time, it is just noise. Despite this, some people are still surprisingly listening and engaging, so it still works from a marketing standpoint.

> I never scroll through the news feed.

That's the way to use it.

I dislike the news feed but have gotten four of my last six jobs from being discovered on LinkedIn. I’d love to close my LinkedIn but I never know when I’ll be job searching again.

I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume.

Have you seen https://standardresume.co? You can import your LinkedIn profile, choose a template and publish it as a web resume in minutes.

> From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free

i'm curious what others see as value from the platform.

in my narrow view:

- i have a list of connections id most likely be able to contact off platform

- a feed full of virtue signaling and mostly useless content

- messages from random recruiters. usually the full extent of the interaction is: phonecall, redo resume and send over, ghost (40+ interactions like this last year with 2 interviews resulting)

i spoke with someone in career services and their #1 suggestion was to start messaging people i don't know on linkedin looking for "connections" to expand my network.

perhaps i don't get "it" but it seems like for some its incredibly valuable and for the rest its actually a net negative all things considered.

I think people's job patterns varying is part of it. For me, I've mostly stayed at my relatively few jobs for a long time (10 years or more) and every job after the one immediately after grad school have been through people I knew. Others are hopping around a lot more and are more often through recruiters looking for some particular keyword skill.

LinkedIn is pretty useless for the former--except as a Rolodex--but anecdotally can be very useful for the latter.

I also tend to stay a lot at a given job (e.g. slightly more than 10y at the last one) but still found the current job through LinkedIn. I do 2 things:

1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested

2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with "that's all fine and well, but I make <absurdly_high_total_comp> now; do you want to continue the discussion?". (note: I'm not lying).

I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today's junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?

Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said "yes" at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).

Fair enough. If the position is actually relevant (i.e. not obviously scattershot spam--which I do generally just ignore), I'll at least politely decline. And I have had a couple followup phone calls but there wasn't really mutual interest for various reasons.

But, TBH, I'm far enough along in my career in this point and have a sufficiently specialized role (my current job had the description written for me after I started talking to the company) that random recruiting is unlikely to be a fit.

agree - and in the case of the latter it feels like its being permeated by influencer culture, by that i mean (im going to paint with a broad brush here) recruiters and the recruiting industry seems to have exploded and with seemingly non-technical agents. so they naturally gravitate towards shiny things - FAANG positions, hot tech (ex: React), well known schools. outside of power users, its becoming a requirement to play the game if you want to have any success. /oldmanyellsatcloud

Both my current job and my previous job were initiated by recruiters who contacted me on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has been extremely valuable to me. The recruiters who contact me are usually from professional executive search firms and highly relevant, though I only get a few a year.

I think the level of relevance depends on the industry though. I'm in finance/banking and fairly senior.

Curious... do you consider these instances of recruitment to be incidental to your use of LinkedIn? I.e. do you get value out of LinkedIn other than these offers?

Or is attracting these sorts of offers the only/main reason you're on LinkedIn?

I guess when I stop to think about it, I do get a lot of use out of it.

I use LinkedIn to contact professional colleagues when I don't have their email addresses. I've met 95%+ of the people on my contact list at some point in my career, and it's easy to send them a message to catch up. That's especially useful if they've switched jobs and they lose their work emails.

I also sometimes search people I meet at events or job applicants to find out a bit more about their backgrounds and see if we're connected with anyone.

Sometimes when I'm researching a company or hedge fund for work I'll search LinkedIn to get some information about the firm below the senior-most executives.

It also lets me know when some of my colleagues are mentioned in the media or have TV/print interviews. I like following up with people about those.

I never post or like anything. My employer actually forbids it due to securities regulations. I had to give our Compliance Department access to my account through a special program so they can monitor & log everything.

The value I see in LinkedIn:

1. My linkedin contact list is >300 people that I worked closely with over the years and all have seen me kick ass. I have actual email addresses for <10% of them.

2. I can browse my list and see where they are currently working. "oh gee, Mary works at coolCo, I should reach out to her because I' like to work for/with coolCo."

3. When I want to let them know that I started a new business venture, I can send them a message that is less obtrusive than an email.

4. If I give a prospective client my linkedin, they can see a) a brief summary of my resume, b) that I have a lot of contacts in x space, and c) that they may know some of the people I have worked with over the years. These all give me some measure of credibility.

I find this fascinating, as my experience is the opposite. I have hundreds of connections, mostly people I've met throughout my career. And yet, it has never actually delivered anything of value to me. A few potential freelancing gigs which didn't pan out. A lot of random encounters from people I would never want to work with.

By contrast, StackOverflow and Twitter have given me some really great work opportunities.

Is there a good way to search twitter for jobs?

I don't think it's so much "searching twitter for jobs" as having a good professional network that twitter can help maintain connections with (but not passively).

I always exit HN with a positive mental head space.

The discussion is generally informed, balanced and insightful . I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.

> I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.

It's very simple once you stop chasing growth and engagement metrics. The main reasons the other social media platforms are cesspools is because outrage generates engagement so the platform is designed to encourage it as well as encouraging users to join and stay regardless of the quality of their contributions, where as here the design itself acts as a small barrier to entry, in addition to a karma system and competent, human moderation that discourages (and eventually bans) bad behavior.

Strongly agreed. 95% of the web's problems can be blamed squarely on advertising-based business models. HN does not have ads, so the focus is not on getting more users and clicks (i.e. generating outrage), and the excellent moderators are quick to punish harmful users, because there is no motivation to keep them around.

HN is an ad. You are part of that ad model.

It doesn't show you ads because it is not trying to sell you anything. You could make a point that the hiring posts for ycombinator grads are ads.

I criticize HN all the time, but it has very strong points because it resembles the old Internet. No gifs, no pics, no videos, no graphical bullshit. Just text, this serves as a huge filter.

That's precisely what I hate about the LinkedIn feed. It's way too positive.

The fake kind of positive. I don't understand why people do that. They're trying to fool other human beings by pretending that everything is awesome, positive, etc.

Because if you let yourself believe it for a little while, you continue believing it for the rest of time.

The problem is that it -- at least my feed -- is not true positivity, it's fake positivity, which brings a strong negative reaction in me. Gurus talking entrepreneur-, startup- or hiring- bullshit, recruiters extolling the virtues of their profession, "if you're having a bad time with COVID19, here's something to stay positive" [bullshit follows].

LinkedIn is useful as an online resume. But the feed is mostly garbage. Fake positivity is the worst.

You should check out https://standardresume.co. It's a minimalist web resume builder that lets you start by importing your LinkedIn profile. No feed, no recruiter spam and we don't sell your personal data like LinkedIn does.

Thanks! Will check it out.

I think it's the people and the nature of the "hacker" topics. You need a certain amount of attention span to read plain text comments, enjoy a front page with no images, you need patience to learn programming and tech stuff. You need some explicit thinking and less knee jerk reactions. There is some actual object level to discuss, some objective technical things, not only who stands for what and who likes who political games.

Of course this could be reproduced in other similar communities as well.

my bet is a combination of high barriers to entry and the disincentivisation of bad behavior.

on hackernews, the first one comes as a side effect of the general topic and the relatively high level of discussion and entries, and maybe also of the fact that it's text-only.

the second one comes via the threat of downvotes, or, more generally speaking, the possibility of negative feedback.

I never visit LinkedIn except to update my profile (rare), or following a link in my email from either a message I feel I should reply to, or a job alert that actually interests me.

I...guess I knew there was a newsfeed, I just didn't know anyone actually looked at it.

I am one of the first LinkedIn members. Closed my account this year.

It gave me nothing much.

Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.

On the hiring side, we tried using LinkedIn during a recent hiring round of about 5 highly skilled C developers. We flipped through hundreds of LinkedIn candidates and exactly zero made it past the resume filter. Completely useless. The only successful hiring method we found was actually the monthly Who's Hiring threads here on Hacker News.

Are you saying the filter was useless, or you couldn’t find a single candidate out of hundreds?

Sorry. What I meant by "resume filter" was us manually scanning through the candidates. We put some criteria for C programmers into LinkedIn and got a bunch of web and .NET devs who had also mentioned C someplace. Perhaps skilled C devs just aren't looking for jobs on LinkedIn (totally possible! I wouldn't if I were looking), but I was kind of surprised that we got literally zero viable candidates. I expected at least a couple to look interesting enough to contact.

I highly recommend more niche sources, like triplebyte, angel list/angel co, stack overflow, indeed, glassdoor, etc.

Many universities (at least in Europe) still teach some C in introductory level courses to build basic terminal apps with file I/O, string manipulation and pointers. One of my exams was to build a basic address book with fseek or draw a tic-tac-toe board form a struct.

When I see C on a resume with 0 industry experience I'm 99% sure it's that knowledge level of C which is nearly useless in real world.

That's really interesting. I'm a highly skilled C dev (not bragging, it's just genuine) on LinkedIn, yet I don't tend to get "found" much, except by recruiters.

One thing I found both awkward and fascinating was a job rejection from somewhere I never applied to or had any prior contact with! That was a strange feeling.

Someone internally recommended me for a robotics position. I didn't ask them to, but it was a glowing recommendation I was told. HR looked at my LinkedIn profile and concluded that since it mentions web (I do different things at different times), I received a surprise mail telling me I was unsuitable for the role and I should watch their company site in case webdev positions come up. But I'm not often a webdev, it's just up there for those times when I am!

From that strange incident as well as the types of approaches I get from recruiters (we think you are a perfect match for... our client asked me to write to you... oh, having now looked at your profile I see you are not... etc),

I'm inclined to think LinkedIn profiles for those with a variety of experience just confuse people looking to hire.

I haven't figured out a way to solve this dilemma and from talking with others at a conference, it's a common problem. The way it's done outside LinkedIn is tailored CVs, which focus on relevant items to each role and leave out the less relevant. But you can't do this on a big shared profile.

It's really interesting that HR person wasn't seemingly concerned about turning you off from ever applying there by writing you that and ... rejecting you before you'd even applied yourself..

I feel like some internal miscommunication had to have happened but maybe not.

All these mechanisms are not 100%. They are averaged around "an average" person as all these things are. I would argue that anybody that realizes the true intention poses enough intuition to stay away from it. Its a tool. Use parts of it you need and dont pay attention to the rest. Its not hard. If it is hard - be thankful it revealed something about you that you want to work on overcoming.

I completely agree.

Extract the utility (eg. Facebook’s events and groups) without getting sucked into the cycle of shallow dopamine hits that is the news feed.

> From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free

Could you please explain like what value you derive out of it. LinkedIn primary purpose is to build your professional network so that you can find your next job easily. It does not work out because programmers does not vouch for someone unless they have worked directly in my experience.

I know of at least half a dozen people who have found great jobs by HR reaching out to recruit them on LinkedIn.

> Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous"

I like that way of looking at it.

I have to agree. I no longer even load the FB timeline. I have to have an FB account in order to interact with the community for one of my open-source projects, but I check it maybe once a day.

I wonder if the value of linked-in depends on where you live. I live in Norway and when I had linked-in I kept getting contacted by recruiters for totally uninteresting jobs. Often in England or Ireland.

Ad-based media is not free. It changes you on a subconscious level and manufactures demand in your mind. And if you're using an ad blocker, you're stealing from them.

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