Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn
index.medium.com
index.medium.com
And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and landed my dream job. You can too".
I think the reason is alluded to in the article: it's not polite to call out BS, and if you do the work involved is OOM larger than creating it.
https://twitter.com/BestofLinkedin/status/139178233788132966...
And this:
https://twitter.com/BestofLinkedin/status/138491328852230963...
It feels like this field is ripe for trolling - people making fake accounts and making similar inspirational posts that are a bit too outlandish but could almost be real.
Or maybe these troll accounts exist, but the posts are indistinguishable from the real thing...
But it's perfectly fine to spew BS if you do it politely. The "politeness" weapon has been used on me many times
So, effectively, this means that given equivalent amounts of effort, you've got 10 people producing bullshit for every 1 refuting it effectively. Thus the bullshit continues to spread.
Instead of being pressured into saying yes, you quickly think about the information and ask a general question like, "well that might be possible, I'm personally not sure how, perhaps you had some ideas on how we can accomplish that in the proposed timeline?" and so forth.
If someone is marketing you a BS solution, you can usually dip down to a kernel of truth and quickly form a well crafted open ended question to ask how they address some problem their solution clearly couldn't. "With our application, you can easily interface with any platform" -- "that's awesome, how much effort is typically required to do that? Do you have example cases?" And so on.
You could also use an even more general/vague question similar to the one you just posed: asking someone to elaborate on something that's clearly BS usually catches them off guard if they were just making up nonsense and had no thought behind their statement. If they had some thought, it's going to be pretty clear. All that's needed is to pepper on some politeness to make it: "that sounds intriguing and thought provoking, could you elaborate on that idea more?"
These are benign on the surface but can be used offensively and without any clarity of the genuine intent to pass the BS baton around.
Best not to poke the bear.
* "Assuming" because you won't risk it, not because it couldn't happen
It's sad because I did find some quality talent from LinkedIn during my recruitment drives for previous startup couple of years back, Also since someone looking for a job is de-facto expected to have a LinkedIn profile helped that.
But now when I recently logged in, I saw something akin to sharing video status like in other social-media chat apps and my profile page is asking me to upload a '30 second video intro'; I feel this is going increase inequality as someone who was able to project their qualifications and experience first without distractions is now made to compete with someone who's good with TikToking.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/tech/linkedin-china-microsoft...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ohtis_is-your-linkedin-feed-f...
When they say "I really care about all the employees, here I am giving the janitor a $500 giftcard" I hear " I feel bad about letting several employees think they were getting big bonuses, so here I am looking for feedback on how great of a person I am"
Not like Out of Memory, like in a Linux process.
www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.feed-shared-navigation-module.overflow-hidden.Elevation-2dp.left-rail-container
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.pv3.feed-shared-news-module
www.linkedin.com###launchpad-wormhole
www.linkedin.com##.right-rail
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper
www.linkedin.com##div[class^="feed-shared-update"]
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.community-panel.mb2.artdeco-card
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.mn-abi-form
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.app-aware-link.text-align-left.link-without-hover-state.t-bold.t-black.t-12.feed-identity-module__anchored-widget--premium-upsell.feed-identity-module__anchored-widget.link-without-visited-state
www.linkedin.com##.Elevation-2dp.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.artdeco-dropdown--justification-right.artdeco-dropdown--placement-bottom.artdeco-dropdown.mb2
www.linkedin.com##.scaffold-layout__aside
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.feed-usher-header
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__closed-share-box
All this leaves out is the leftmost side (where your number of connections are seen), and the top blue row. The feed is entirely gone. You can still read and message people, see your connections, etc. But no more viewing the feed. It's made my linkedin visits so much easier to bear.
Edit:
Some HN searching shows a single filter which blocks out most of the home page, and is probably cleaner:
www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
Sources:
It simply hides the feed. Then I could apply for jobs/network in peace.
It worked so well that I did the same with Facebook and Twitter. I don't even like those websites. Visiting them is more like a reflex.
Drop this one. Breaks linkedin for me
Parent mentionned:
> All this leaves out is the leftmost side (where your number of connections are seen), and the top blue row. The feed is entirely gone.
Not sure why anyone would even access linkedin at all then? Connections count is essentially meaningless
This filter is absolutely perfect! I NEED LinkedIn as I actually get job offers via it, but all the other crap on there can go to hell.
The worst thing is that these kinds of posts have a really negative effect on many people around them. So I think it's ultimately self-defeating for LinkedIn in the long run to foster this kind of environment. For me they just instigate a gag reflex, but for others it can just make them feel low and awful. And so they leave the site.
My wife has been out of the job market for 10 years (had kids, mother got sick and passed away, we moved for my job, she went back to school, but used to be successful in design/marketing @ a FAANG, studying now for UX research.) Anyways, very tough to get back into the job market. And now she goes on linkedin to try to connect with old job aquaintances and look at jobs and the like and it's all these people puffing themselves up like peacocks and it's just confidence destroying. Amps up the inner critic and self-judging in many people, comparing yourself to these people, and for what? Half of what is posted isn't even fully... real?
Work is work. It's great some people really love their jobs. But what I see on linkedin these days doesn't reflect a normal person's career focus.
Seems like it could be a constructive exchange: newbies get useful basic content; posters get likes and followers. But, only if the content is actually good.
A sample of interactions I had recently:
Discussing cost/benefit of going for hybrid/private cloud deployments while discussing this article with another company's VP Eng: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
Reminiscing over (paper) mechanical drawings from university days and reconnecting with a few colleagues I've lost touch with in the intervening 20 years.
Interior designs of some of the newer office spaces in the city that are aimed at tech startups.
Comparing notes on the "Messy Middle" of startups with another founder.
You could technically dig a trench with a spoon, but why would you?
But yeah. Even without the videos, the LinkedIn timeline is a pretty soulless place.
Makes for a nicer feed, but maybe that means I’m missing out on some recruiting opportunities? I thought recruiters could reach out to folks on LinkedIn without establishing a connection first.
I’ve never taken much interest in the ‘feed’ part, and view the site mostly as a tool for finding work, though I’ve not had to look for the last few years due to non-LinkedIn networking...
I have a LinkedIn profile. It's minimally active. I post links to some of my GitHub repos, and dust off the mantlepiece, every now and then. I make sure it's up to date and accurate.
I can't even imagine using it like Facebook. The main reason I keep it, is so that I can direct people to a fairly bland place to find out about me, professionally. I'm not really looking for work, but it helps people to take me seriously.
If I want them to find out more about me personally, I'll give 'em my phone number, and we'll do lunch.
I seem to be in the minority, there. I have seen honest-to-God disinformation and rancor trolls on LinkedIn; just like on Facebook and Twitter. They are quite transparent, but they also generate thousands of "likes," and comments.
Um...no thanks. I don't think I want to go on record liking something like that.
The rather disturbing things, are people sharing about personal emotional traumas, and 12-step recovery anniversaries. Unless they work in the therapeutic/rehabilitation field, that's irrelevant (and probably quite harmful -not everyone is forgiving or understanding).
Those stories can be deeply motivating and helpful, but not on LinkedIn.
The past year has been interesting. The way we interact with each other IRL seems to have been affected.
I've noticed a huge uptick in people minding other peoples' business. Things like chiming into overheard conversations between strangers, offering advice or criticism; despite never being asked for it, etc.
This has always been an issue, but it has become exponentially worse, over this last year. I'm really noticing it, recently, with people emerging from their caves, like the final scene of Surrogates.
I suspect that one reason might be that the principal medium for personal interaction for many of us has been online communities, this last year, and the rules are quite different online, than IRL.
For example, I would not say what I am writing right now, in most IRL interactions.
I think we may have some adjusting to do over the next few months.
This is not a term I'm familiar with.
2016 saw plenty of them, and they were effective.
These days, they don't really need to do anything. We got this.
So they turn into sharks fighting over scraps.
A bunch of recruiters posted like this- "generic name was a recent college grad he/she was really talented. they asked for X amount of money. But I gave them Y (Y quite > X). This is the time for human solidarity and being honest and rewarding people for their talent, blah blah blah."
In some screenshots, the name, tech stack, and amount of money were all same.
How low can these people stoop?
For 15 minutes of fame and potential fortune? Planck Length.
There's plenty going for LinkedIn here, given how unhip it is. Including some reasonably popular threads.
> The Medium is the message, and the message is "it's time we make this official".
I’m not sure I understand. To me medium is just an easy way to get a blog started. Nothing more to it. People often complain about their business model, but then people here always complain about any business model, or lack of a business model.
I decided to game the system and shot up to the top of the rankings by simply posting actual useful stuff (pretty much the same commentary I would post on my personal link blog, but with some bearing on work topics).
I quit doing it after a while because I thought I had made my point, but not before I had reached the top three in our cohort.
Going past #10 took some doing, though. By that time I had a JavaScript scraper and a Jupyter notebook to predict the best hashtags, and if the LinkedIn API was actually usable I’d probably have fully automated the whole thing.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/hbr-ideacast/id1520221...
Well, that has the ring of truth, when applied to the newsfeed. And the final conclusion that you should just get on linkedin when job searching and then get off again is fine. I find it incredibly useful for job searching, to the point that I don't even bother with other sites.
However, the job search experience is badly spoiled by secondary recruitment postings. These are especially annoying when the posting is cut off so that you have to follow an external link to get the full info. And having to apply from external sites is also a pain. Linkedin seems big enough to be able to enforce some rules on those sorts of things.
I think the newsfeed stuff that this article focusses on really only affects people who buy into it. Personally, after reading a few posts of the type '5 reasons your boss should stop doing that thing you hate', I stopped paying attention to the newsfeed unless there was a robot video from boston dynamics at the top. And the secondary features don't really seem like they have enough meat to stick.
What do you think the ideal social media feed would look like?
It's amazing how free sharing works when it's not constantly fiddled with by algorithms. There is user voting of course but I read the 'new' page a lot too.
For Facebook that means e.g using the events functionality. For LinkedIn that’s private messages and network graphs (“do I know someone at X company”).
The “feeds” that are front and center on both sites is the worst feature and in no way necessary for using the service. It’s their easiest method of ad delivery though, which is why they want you to view it.
For Facebook the newsfeed is full of viral crap, ads, and if you are unlucky, toxicity. On LinkedIn it’s recruiters and workfluencers pushing posts that seem like parody but isn’t.
LinkedIn is the same as any social media. It can be gamed and if that's to the advantage of certain people then they will game it.
The problem starts when people are trying to game each other. This is bad, because it turns what should be a PvE game into a PvP one. With the shitty cards nature/evolution gave us, we have plenty of external challenges left to overcome; it's really sad to see and deal with people who instead want to abuse others to get ahead.
I say this as someone who had accidental success, and ran that successful business for over a decade, completely aware that luck and timing played a far larger part than quality.
For generic work-banter, an app like Blind seems to cut it better. Given the anonymity, it is able to (anecdotally) elicit truer depictions of one's workplace, and this helps folks get real value through what are in essence (unaggregated) reviews of companies and job roles.
By using real profiles and establishing a set up of "professionalism", LI absolutely cuts/reduces the possibility of deriving real value for the layman (read non work influencer and non CXO). Apart from connecting with old colleagues and looking for a new job, why should the layman even bother logging into the platform on a fairly regular basis?
Having said that, LI is great for some things even for the layman. It has been great for looking for new jobs as the article states. But it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it needs to figure out their core audience or differentiate product offerings before it deteriorates into a job board for the laymen like me, in which case it will be possible for a new and trendy job board to come along and replace it.
What is the price?
Of course the people who are actually good at their jobs are never seen there. They don't need to profile themselves because they're well-known to be good. And they don't have thousands of contacts because they only accept requests from people they actually work with. It's almost like an inverse proof of capability.
The only reason I'm still on there is because it's handy when you need another job. The social part is a complete failure IMO.
So you end up with a combination of sappy "look at this insightful business anecdote I have!" combined with then lots of over-congratulatory posts because nobody wants to offend a potential job contact. Never have so many words been said that say so little.
Still, I feel that for its core purpose, connecting with known business contacts and job hunting, LinkedIn does a fine job. They just have to layer on all this other useless functionality to give legions of product people, designers and engineers something to do.
There are of course meaningful people on social media who do have useful things to say. Some brilliant people in the tech world I know will post on their blogs every few weeks or post a few tweets each week. But they're spending the majority of their time actually creating things, not crafting tweets optimized to feed an algorithm.
YouTube is an interesting one, since it's an immersive medium. Some of the people with the best tech tutorials or "content" there will rarely or never show their faces. I think this is probably a consequence of not wanting to waste time editing, since again, they have real things to do outside social media. If a tech person is just talking to the camera for 10 minutes, I can do without it, and, again, usually they're trying to sell something (often of dubious value).
Shameless Medium loginwalling is the Bane of Hacker News.
Today I use my RSS feed to find interesting, novel content.
The ideal LinkedIn would have some kind of metamoderated, highly curated (and filtered!) "most interesting professional content for you" and the weight of "a friend of a friend shared this really popular thing" would be super small because that's a crappy signal.
My feed would much better could I tell LinkedIn to only show my post made directly by people in my network, and not shared posts.
Nowadays though it’s a complete parody of itself and spammed to death. I closed my account with 40k followers as it had become a complete waste of time over the years.
> getting hired via LinkedIn has, inevitably, become more about getting attention than being qualified for a given job.
Does anyone actually get hired via LinkedIn?
I have always assumed that the majority, and most extreme, of the performative LinkedIn “actors” are really simply wasting their time.
I find LinkedIn really useful for two things: looking someone up before meeting with them to see why we have in commmon, and using it as a candidate’s resume). I only really see the “feed” when some friend posts something and those tend to be things they have posted elsewhere.
Now my gf used to work there and she is an enormous fan yet…despite that she doesn’t post in the feed either.
So the rest of the piece is great, but is there actually hiring going on as a result of the feed?
If you're trying to get hired in marketing or communications, then the performance probably matters, but recruiters will reach out without your having to loudly pat yourself on the back in a thousand strangers' feeds.
Twitter: "So and so is so awful, gnash, boycott shame! Have you read my blog?"
LinkedIn: "That sooo resonates with me! You're such a insightful thought leader, have you read my blog?"
Yeah, I've always wondered the same. Maybe recruiters?
I do about 10 a day.
I've muted a ton of people I don't know at all because their rabid self-promotion or clickbait would keep showing up in my feed. But it is usually the same list of friends liking or sharing that content.
If anything, when on the recruiting side as I review applications I use engagement with that pabulum as an indicator that this person is a BS-artist and probably wouldn’t be a good culture fit for my team. These really attention-seeking personality types tend to stir up a lot of inter-team drama in my experience. Maybe bigger companies have enough slack in the system and outlets for people to blow off steam to absorb it, but in small teams they can wreak havoc with morale.
They achieve this by wearing avacado costumes https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/nneex4/fl...
Sure that post was trying to farm interaction but I can’t imagine associating your racism with your professional persona...
Could you create a social media platform that takes the positive aspects of LinkedIn (large network of users that are, at least ostensibly, targeting ambition, hard work, and self-improvement) but that leaves behind the accompanying parade of inauthenticity, brand names, buzzwords, tropes, and recycled posts?
I wonder what this would look like? Would it be possible?
One idea… a social media platform where people promote, share, and encourage meaningful projects :)
Thoughts?
I wonder what people consider to be good quality content?
It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.
The majority of random sites I visit have no need for cookies ultimately..
That's fairly easy to accomplish. I keep my ~/.mozilla in git and essentially git reset it on startup. Everything I didn't explicitly commit into it - gone!
I never felt to be engaged that far on LinkedIn, I used it to find job, and that's it.
Many employees have their speech chilled because commenting would not necessarily “align with their employers values”, so they dont
So you get some really odd takes from all founders and entreprenuers instead. Its more useful to network with those kind of people anyway.
Almost every time I log in to check the same spam message someone is posting about success and illustrating it with an iceberg.
Tangentially related and fun: https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html
I hate the social media aspect of LinkedIn so much. I don't want to validate you , I don't think physical appearance was any role in the hiring process, but LinkedIn keeps telling me to upload a picture.
It's still the best way to find a job, but I try to avoid the social aspects.
Why would you do that? I've posted my resume there, LinkedIn tricked me ("do you know these peoples") into "connecting" with former colleagues and recruiters can find me. That works well; the rest is rubbish and I don't know why they bother.
So I consider myself fortunate; by not taking LinkedIn that seriously, I've avoided a lot of... awkwardness, to put it nicely.
If you feel something's horrible there it's likely by design and within that context.
(edit: you're to you are)
Isn't this true for all major social media platforms?
Your communication metadata, your choices, you age, gender, location, and many other things are indeed products of companies like Facebook. But in a way, you are, too. Because the mere presence of yours draws some other people to that platform.
And celebrities who are famous outside of social media, are definitely more products themselves rather than the data associated with them.
On the other hand, on dating apps like Tinder, you yourself are the product in addition to any other information they might monetize in numerous ways.
I'm unsure how other platforms being identical in that regard moderates the statement. I still feel a reminder is helpful.
But I am saying that teaching people how to do something online is often much more lucrative than actually doing that thing yourself.
The feeds are like one of those SEO robot sites instead of bullshitting search engines it's people hoping for some great career insight.
Oh no... I'm doing it right now.
But at least due to companies wanting free exposure on Google, paywall bypass tools are now a thing.
It is also toxic as hell.
But I know people who got employment offers from LinkedIn. So it adds value in that sense.
I just mute and block those influencers. And check LinkedIn maybe twice a week.
One of the things I cannot find any excuse for is how fake people are. They are behaving in a fake manner even when they don't have to.
Like, someone makes an IoT project (usually copied from GitHub), and markets it like this- "I was having X problem. I though why not solve it with modern technology? So I made this innovative blah blah copy of something".
Yuck. So cringy!
The only thing bothering me on LinkedIn are the recruiters and that got much better in the last years.
Most of the time I use it to stay in touch with old co-workers and to syndicate my articles, which sometimes (2-5 times a year) leads to new clients.
That’s “what it should look like”. To get there, I expect it’s “establish the right norms from the start and incentivize the right content and behaviors along the way”. To monetize, I don’t know and I don’t especially care.
* Users would explicitly agree that their profile posts are subject to moderation.
* Profiles would be private and users would be heavily discouraged from using a real name. Friending someone else would require an out of band secret key exchange. A new key would be required to add each person to a group and the entire group would be informed when a new user was added. The only people with real visibility would be the mods.
* There would be no advertising or tracking.
* The service would be located in a country that doesn't immediately bend over for Five Eyes, China, or Russia.
* There would be no org pages or corp accounts.
* Anyone holding public office, running for public office, or affiliated with a political campaign would be explicitly banned from using it at the EULA level. Group pages with more than X members would automatically be flagged for periodic review, and obvious attempts at political organizing for a campaign or movement such as BLM or the Proud Boys (chosen purely as examples of political movements) would result in a ban for all affiliated accounts.
* Egregious (as in obviously intentionally hostile rather than ignorant or inadvertent) racism, sexism, bigotry, etc would result in a ban.
* Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
* Any attempt at bulk data collection would result in your account being suspended and flagged for review.
You get the idea. Social networks should be about sharing fun content with your real life social network. They should not be about self promotion, BS drama, politics, disinformation campaigns, advertising, influencing, branding, etc.
> Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
Alas, that turns accusations of bullying into pretty effective bullying.
But for simplicity, moderation and downvote buttons would do a world of good.
I attribute lack of evident destructive mobbing on hn to adequate moderation workforce.
Oh, the power of small inconveniences.
BYW, how much do I get for posting this valuable wisdom?
That's the bane of social media platforms where engagement is low (Twitter suffers from this too). There are very few content creators, and especial on a professional network, there isn't enough content generated to share daily, so to generate content, the platform needs to dig deeper into the bottom of the barrel and show you second-level engagement (ie friend of yours commented or liked some rando's content).
I never got a job through it though, real life networking and personal connections generally yield higher salary opportunities than recruiter-sourced ones (if you're planning to stay outside of FAANG)
I get a fair number of interview requests through it though so it would have some value as a recruiting tool. Let's face it, CVs are a badly structured way of listing and distributing your employment history...
I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.
I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.
Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.
It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.
I'll never forget when many years ago my boss, by that time a CEO of some major publicly traded companies, called me to his office and kindly asked I moderate my Usenet activity on some niche group. It turned out he was a lurker there and foresaw certain things I said might cause problems - it turned out he was right. And that was a long time before the Twitter era.
A friend from a previous job now leads a project for company X. Someone else switched their tech stack to Y. Another person migrates from cloud back to on-prem.
It might have to do with my policy of not adding random people as connections.
But you are wading through a swamp to find those gold nuggets.
I eventually cleared my profile (along with my other social accounts). I'll delete it outright once I'm confident my abandoned nym can't be repurposed into a sockpuppet.
It makes a ton of sense if you think about it, the people you want to connect with professionaly are people in the same workfield and their bosses. These people have A) far more intresting tidbits to share then recruitment and HR folk, and B) getting a job at their company is far easier if you they have some kind of clue of what you actually do during your previous job on a very fundemental level.
Which mostly underscores your point.
They did have their heads up their asses, they didn't do anything because the company never innovates on new ways to make money that are actually simple and achievable. It's more interesting to go for things like self-driving cars and then fail at them.
And now we are stuck with this awful awful platform that is LinkedIn.
The influencers make me want to gouge my eyes out. It's just plain nauseating to read this empty drivel, and you can't escape it.
The worst is the obvious performative social justice messaging. Seeing my former CEO, who makes 111 times what his average coder makes, prattling on about equity is just plain awful.
Ditto for the regurgitated dozens of times stories of inspiration that are almost certainly fabricated or exaggerated. You see the same story over and over but it mutates and changes over time with little pictures added here and there......