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For me the experience is bad not because I don't understand how the platform works but because it represents some of the soullessness of modern culture and online media. Most of the content that it posted there, even by real people doing real things, often sounds like self-parody or a TEDx talk. The platform itself warps the way people relate to the world. The point you raised about reputation is a good one: it's not just reputation in itself but also a certain culture and way of thinking that is unofficially enforced.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the usefulness of it but I can feel something dying inside of me each time I use it as well. I cannot for the life of me relate to someone who enjoys LinkedIn for its own sake.

This exactly.

Instagram has people posting “accidental” selfies that took 3 hours of make up, 156 tries under a full lighting rig and then an hour of post processing.

LinkedIn is full of that same brand of fake, just applied to work. Acting like some boring-ass conference was awesome, pretending that celebrating some minor work achievement with cake was the ultimate team building exercise etc.

You know, I've long struggled to articulate what it is about LinkedIn that I find so grating, and you just nailed it perfectly, thanks.

A significant percentage of my LinkedIn contacts are friends, ex-classmates, social acquaintances, other people who aren't in my "professional network" but I accepted their connection request because meh, why not? The fakeness is particularly obvious when reading their posts. I'm like "C'mon Dave, I know you don't really give a shit about car insurance, it's just a job. Do you talk this with your colleagues?"

I keep LinkedIn around because it's helped me find jobs in the past, but my experience on the site improved dramatically when I set up a custom uBlock Origin filter to hide the homepage news feed. I've never seen anything on there that remotely felt worth reading, and my most common reaction to other people's LinkedIn posts is to cringe.

That sounds like academic twitter to me as well (I never used Twitter for anything else, so I can't say if it is just the platform in general).

Are there any Twitter subcultures that aren't cesspools?

What I meant by "understand how online networking works" is not that you - or anyone else - has struggled to grasp which button to click to connect with someone. Hundreds of millions of people use LinkedIn, and yet that's not quite the use case I'm talking about, so let me be clearer:

Most of the value lies in the messaging. You connect with someone. You read their stuff, or they read yours. You strike a conversation. You continue that conversation here and there. You hop on a call to get to know each other a little more. You continue chatting here and there. It could be a week, it could be two months, but do you see how easily now you're not "a vendor" or "a jobseeker", but, YOU?

So your CV doesn't need to compete with a gazillion other CVs, before people start asking you if this opportunity is of interest. And clients come to you because they trust you. That's the kind of networking I'm talking about.

Yeah, I like it. It gets me business. I get to engage with really nice people in my industry, who self-select because they find the stuff I write interesting. It's not dependent on my physical location or whether I got entry into some event.

To clarify, I was indeed talking about understanding the culture, and it is the culture itself that invokes a reaction of nausea. Engagement metrics, Medium-style "lessons learned" posts, growth hacking, hustle porn, the word "influencer" taken at face value, "storytelling", hashtag optimization, "adding value" etc. I live in the real world and I accept and understand that this stuff makes money and that it's not gonna change any time soon but the economic reality of it does not lessen the feeling of postmodern horror. I know there are plenty of genuine conversations about real, non-marketing projects interspersed around this but the general culture is disturbing on a profound level.

Totally agree.

Personally, I don't even mind shameless self promotion. Got a new cool job? Good for you. Are you giving talks at conferences? Amazing. You raised money, you screenshot positive reviews of your app, you post your open source package or article, that's all great, I might even share it or like it if I know you and want you to reach a part of my audience.

What I can't stand is the "growth hacking". Claiming quotes as your own to look wise and insightful. Badly describing a step in Elon's career to sound like someone who never gives up. Bad Work memes by people who can't meme! "software devs vs designer" or "how DHL, UPS, Amazon delivers packages" tiktoks. Obviously dysfunctional bogus prototype from "now this" from the nineties disguised as something novel. Talking about how working for $tech company is special / not special at all. Posing in suit at home describing how difficult it is to work from home... For some reason, these posts annoy me, especially if they are obviously a copy of a post that went viral last week

Just writing this list made me frustrated.

What bothers me more is the absurd amount of noise in those posts. A "software devs vs designer" bad meme can get 200 absolutely inane comments from people who just want the poster to notice them at all costs. It's only comparable to Youtube.

Facebook engagement feeds on outrage, but LinkedIn feeds on people wanting to make "connections" at all costs.

This captures my sense of the linkedin "culture" pretty much perfectly...I have an account mostly as a rolodex of former coworkers and business contacts, but I simply cannot stand the things people post and the way they interact with each other. Even just the tone and writing style is off putting. It's actually kind of wild how quickly I want to gag if I bother to scroll through the feed.

This is so on point you should write a whole goddamn article and publish it

This is pretty much my experience with linked, to the extent that I use it at least.

I see my friends from my old job posting about wind turbine projects using our software. See my last big project get released into the wild. Give them a thumbs up; keep in touch, keeps doors open. Find new doors. Not a time sink, more high quality data than googling jobs. Seems mostly helpful. I get spammed invites from many kids coming into industry/almost graduating, but I mostly like it - if they seem honest I accept and get to watch them take their first steps in the job world too. I’ve had seniors asking for advice on how to break into computational mechanics and try to help with project advice / sending resumes along. ...Make friends and influence folk. Not bad.

Thanks for this. I always had the impression that it was just for recruiting and transactional networking. I'm gonna give it a try.

> If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.

Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? LinkedIn largely markets itself as an employee <-> recruiter <-> employer connection platform, and almost all of the posts I see reflect that. Let's say I mute the posts advertising job openings or blatantly pushing company PR. Most of what's remaining is just buzzword regurgitation by self-proclaimed "thought leaders" trying to make a name for themselves before they jump ship for a better title. There's a reason we don't see many LinkedIn links getting to the front page of HN - there's very little good original content there.

If I want to get an honest opinion from professionals in my community, I'll follow them on twitter, read their blogs on their own platforms (or the likes of substack), or even reach out directly. Everything posted on LinkedIn is implicitly poisoned by the filter of "This post exists mostly to make me look good to future employers/employees", which rarely makes for good content.

> Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this?

Definitely not. No one I know uses LinkedIn except when they are looking for a new job.

The ones I've found who are using it a lot are either: paid to, or desperate for work and try to fluff up and BS their way into a job.

While I largely agree, the direct messaging function is also very useful - sometimes I can't find the email/number for the person I want to speak to because they've moved on since I last had their details and for whatever reason I didn't get the new details - in that case LinkedIn messaging is often a good backup and often a fair bit quicker than asking a series of mutual acquaintances for details.

> Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own reputation.

I've seen so much blatant bigotry and thinly veiled sexism on LinkedIn that I'm having a lot of trouble relating to this one.

> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others.

Same here, I've seen plenty of shitty self-serving or downright condescending comments get rewarded with "claps" or whatever emoji they use on there.

Unfortunately it's slowly turning into another Facebook content-wise.

That and the Business Insider links. Does everyone else pay for a subscription or something?

Bigotry and Sexism aren't reputation-threatening for large swaths of the business world.

If true, kind of supports my point that "LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism" isn't very accurate.

I rejoined LinkedIn a while back after quitting years ago. I've since had numerous connection requests from people I didn't know who didn't even reply to a short, friendly message back. I joined some popular groups related to my professional interests, and their content turned out to be close to 100% bad-subreddit-quality self-promotion. The valuable connections I do have on LinkedIn invariably originated with some encounter elsewhere and then one of us looking the other up, not through LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn has produced, to my knowledge, 0 useful opportunities either for me or for someone in my network through me. Not a single one, ever.

Meanwhile, I've been an active participant in many other online forums for decades, from old-school Usenet to HN. The opposite of everything I wrote above about LinkedIn applies with many of these other forums: I have enjoyed countless worthwhile discussions with interesting and/or professionally relevant people, replies or private messages I've received have been genuine and relevant, from time to time useful opportunities have been found for me or someone I was talking to, I've often found external material via those forums that was interesting or informative, etc.

So am I bad at online networking, or is LinkedIn just a bad forum for useful online networking? IME, it's very obviously the latter, and that doesn't appear to have changed much during the extended period when I wasn't using it. The more I write here, the more I think it's time I got around to deleting that account (again).

This 100%. Don't waste time on linkedin. Online networking? Sounds like BS, sounds like another self help book, or some dumb TedX talk that says you aren't successful because you cross your legs when you sit. It's all nonsense and BS.

There's a sector of society that is conned into believing the white collar koolaid and LinkedIn is the social network for that. Anyone who's really doing anything doesn't spend time there, ime.

> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking.

No, it's largely about me, as a reasonably tech-literate person, understanding abusive design and dishonest behavior.

> You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points.

They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or posted memes about work ethic. Knowing what your client's PR line is can be useful, but there's a world of difference between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing actual pain points.

Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met, forums which seem designed to not result in interesting conversation.

> They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content.

They really do. Mind, not ALL of them.

If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS.

I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results.

https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-...

> dark patterns everywhere.

Not disputing that, unfortunately.

> Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!)

The people who hate linkedin with a burning passion (or at least see it as a bizarre, soulless hellscape of inauthenticity) are people who see sentences like this and think "the horror, the horror".

Maybe you really do "live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing" but to me that just sounds like bullshit.

Exactly what I felt after reading that. What does the intersection between NLP and financial marketing mean? I'm genuinely curious - hopefully the parent commenter will provide a link to the service/product.

I mean how would you want them to phrase it?

"I use NLP to solve problems in/for financial marketing(ers)" is all they said.

I'm fascinated how simple uses of language like this are such a turn off for so many people but correlate pretty highly to more pay. You say bullshit, I say knows how to present themselves, a little flourish generally goes a long way.

If the argument is generally people who use flowery language don't have the skills to back it up then I have experienced that before certainly, but then I offer you that if it works for people who don't have the skills then imagine how useful it must be for someone who does.

I have no idea if talking like that "correlates pretty highly to more pay". Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I think people should speak and write clearly for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

The thing is "writes clearly" is completely subjective what they wrote was perfectly clear to me for instance.

The problem is that these titles/descriptions are very vague when it comes to explaining exactly what a person does, and people often view these types of vagueness to be confusing and sometimes unreliable. Other examples: Chief Heart Officer, Cloud Architect, etc.

Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points and relating it to your solution. I don't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for that (including some of the content put out by companies I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting.

But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!

> That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting.

I am going to put a question mark next to this dichotomy, and here's why.

This idea that you have "authenticity" vs. "corporate PR" is no longer true. For sure, there's still what we think of as "corporate PR" (Look at our employees volunteering! Look at the award we won!). But fundamentally, this idea that there are "corporates" and there are "workers" is fast becoming dated. You don't have to be a freelancer or an indie hacker with a SaaS side project to be a company of 1. You, and everyone else in the knowledge-work economy is a company of 1.

The lines between who's "in" (an employee) and who's "out" (unemployed) are really blurred - and will only become more so. Contractors; freelancers; side-projects; these are all manifestations of the same thing. So when I say "my content" and you say "it's your corporate PR" I think is the wrong way to look at it: Trust IS personal. Views ARE personal. Heck, employment IS personal.

> Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points.

No, it really isn't. Anyone who builds stuff, side-projects or otherwise, knows you CAN build all sorts of stuff, but the question is whether you SHOULD. To understand what's worth building, I was - and still am - having a lot of conversations with clients. LinkedIn made it a whole lot easier, of course. the pain points are not "potential", they're real. And because the building is done is tandem with the market, it's hardly a wonder I position the services as a solution to those pain points.

Maybe I got it all wrong but it seems to me this is what Steve Blank was talking about in the "The 4 steps to the epiphany."

I think you have a poor understanding of why the average LinkedIn user cares about their job. Most people would quit immediately if money wasn’t a concern, so the idea of spending time posting about their career for fun comes off as extremely fake and inauthentic. Your motivation is different from normal which is why you don’t get it. Are you self employed?

I thought that was a pretty interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks!

Personally I would rather build things of value in my spare time. Personally LinkedIn world reminds me too much of a big corporate HR department. If you work in HR fine, but for the rest of us?

Guess if your ambition is to climb the corporate ladder contributing a lot to open source and building a GitHub resume would more likely attract the companies you might want to work for in real life.

I totally agree with your take.

I didn't like LinkedIn for a long time (I much preferred Twitter) but since becoming a business owner I've appreciated having a place where I can go and "talk shop" and connect with other business owners going through the same things I am.

Maybe it's just that I've cultivated the right community, but at least 90% of the content I see on LinkedIn is interesting, personal, and thoughtful. I much prefer it to every other social network I use.

“If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.”

No. LinkedIn is where your feed will be full of people trying to sound like super productive “thought leaders” to people who think the phrase “thought leader” means something. Then again, if someone is the kind of person that thinks TedX talks have great content, or a sketchy business seminar in the local Hilton ballroom has great content, then I guess it’s fine.

I think the obvious objection is that LinkedIn sees itself in the way you say reflects not "getting" it.

Personally speaking, my experience has not been this. Perhaps it is the circles I run in, but the content that is posted tends to be sparse and of low quality.

To me LI is much less as described. My feed tends to be more BestOfLinkedIn than anything your descriptions: https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin

> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others.

Pick any of the news stories in the sidebar which are related to social issues, and expand the comments.

> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that.

yes you see a lot of positivist comments... But I believe they are just mostly noise, in a way it reminds me of the crowds we can see in official videos of dictatorial countries, all trying to weep or more than their neighbor when their great leader dies or cheer more when they do another military advance... For me the timeline of Linkedin is just that, lots of noise, really little practical information.

I agree with you however, the networking potential outside of the circles of a real-life network is tremendous, and I've used that quite a few times. Reminds me a bit of IRC friends and channels where you can quickly reach people with the right expertise without being a big figure of the topic...

Sounds like Pascal's Wager for social networks. "It's rational to believe it's good, because the act of believing will improve your experience.

Also a bit like the emperor's clothes. "If you don't like, it you just don't truly get it like I do."

> its users' fear for their own reputation

Lol, the OP article inspired me to go see whats on my Linkedin feed. In the top few items there was someone I dont know posting what I will generously call 'politically charged content'. Same shit different platform.

“The best content” is performative crap

> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking.

It also helps to have some empathy for people on the network. I get a lot of LinkedIn connection requests from people who want to sell me something. They add a message to the connection request--explaining what they are offering. I usually ignore them but don't get emotional about it. For the most part these are people trying to make a living like the rest of us. You can't blame them for trying. I wish them success.

What you've said doesn't reflect how I feel about LinkedIn, but it does reflect how I want to feel about it

Or maybe the burden on appealing to customers* is on the business providing the service.

* Or product, depending on point of view.