Baby pics, life lessons, and obits: What happened to LinkedIn? | Hacker News Reader

Baby pics, life lessons, and obits: What happened to LinkedIn?

thewalrus.ca

67 pointspseudolus48 comments

I find LinkedIN influencers funny for a long time, so I decided to become one. In a sort of ironic way, I sometimes do posts on LinkedIN where I just fluff a dumb story / idea and go with it because I love all the reactions from people that probably don't read it because it's obvious how dumb it is.

Last one was about moving all my company's servers to a renewable-using co-located server facility that prides itself in their personal connection to the underlying hardware and how their approach is similar to how Belgian monks brew beer. Which of course is true because I deployed something on my friend's NAS and he loves brewing beer and taking care of his server. The move has been commented as "Inspiring" by some HR.

Oh I also helped a friend deploy a super simple site on Vercel NextJS so of course it had 99 Google Page Speed Rating so I wrote this big ass post on how my company prides itself in delivering high quality results to our customers. I posted graphs of our almost 0 visitors, the google Page Speed and link to the super shitty website. Almost no one clicked it though a lot of people 'clapped'.

I honestly can't wait to go to an interview where someone asks me about my posts.

I have heard good things about this LinkedIn competitor:

https://www.shlinkedin.com

LinkedIn is a global lying competition, with positively Shakespearean levels of bullshit and insincere toadying, and none of the irony. Close up, I’ve watched the most toxic developers pen lengthy passive aggressive blog posts to attack people without naming names, seen people post the most ridiculously positive comments about others only ten minutes after I’ve heard them mouth the exact opposite. Like Facebook, it’s an awful amplication of the most hideous parts of humanity. People will literally say anything to get attention and further their careers. Awful.

You just described social media on the internet as a whole - not just linkedIn.

...and in that context I agree with you. The social side of the internet has vecome a giant, unchecked complaint and comisseration engine to be avoided at all costs (he says as he posts this comment on HN - so meta my brain is melting as my fingers move. Time to cancel all of my accounts... again).

It's like an episode of Rick & Morty

I only post work-related stuff on LinkedIn, and usually find similar content in my feed. Having said that, I mute or unfollow creators of the kind highlighted in the post. In some cases, I remove the connection with whoever liked that content, and do it without regrets. High quality contacts in my network almost never shitpost.

Clay Shirky once casually said in a class, "Can criminals use your app? How? If criminals can't use your app, no one can."

I think about this every time I see a thinkpiece about how a public forum's gone south after incentivizing attention seeking.

LinkedIn has always been a mess. It's a weird mix of absolute narcissists who all spend time trying to make inspirational posts and teaching forced life lessons, and people desperate for attention seeking a bigger network than FB probably is for. After all, adding some rando is probably taboo on FB, but more acceptable on LinkedIn.

Talking about the posters, of course. Most people I know with LinkedIn just use it as an online resume for recruiters, and that actually works OK. Unsure why they added a social element at all, to be honest.

> Unsure why they added a social element at all, to be honest.

Ads.

retention of course

Social media is really great for the companies who own the platforms. They just end up off-loading the work of content-generation to the users, who also do the work of attracting and retaining other users, all so that the platform-owner can advertise to them or track their behavior.

> After all, adding some rando is probably taboo on FB, but more acceptable on LinkedIn.

To me this makes LinkedIn pointless. The whole point, at least in the beginning, was to create a network of people you've worked with.

If you start adding random people it becomes like yet another social network without any added benefit.

Well, maybe not completely random.

Recruiters are generally random and have no qualms about adding people.

People also will add people at the company, even if they don't work together, or even colleague of colleague type connections are pretty standard. Doing so on FB I think would be weird, especially across genders.

The purpose of LinkedIn is small propaganda, same as Facebook or Twitter. Any other use is mostly drowned out by the posters.

It's wall-to-wall virtue signaling. And no amount of "I don't want to see this" seems to move the needle.

“You don't like Duff? Okay, here, try Duff Lite”

I've always treated LinkedIn as Facebook for people that want to appear serious. Does it provide any value?

It allows you to maintain a network of people you have professional ties with.

> Most people I know with LinkedIn just use it as an online resume for recruiters, and that actually works OK.

Yeah, it seems there are two linkindins: one where you post your resume, look up people you’re about to meet with, message friends whose email address you no longer have in the hope they’ll write back, get messages from recruiters, and that’s about it.

There’s also this weird thing with posts and follows and such but It’s basically invisible. Not that LinkedIn doesn’t try to spam you with it, but back when there were cigarette and liquor billboards I didn’t really see them either. Brain just filtered it out as visual spam.

So when I read articles like this I am fascinated. They are like descriptions of a web site I’ve never visited. I wonder who actually gets value from it.

> LinkedIn has always been a mess.

Given the shady, spammy shenanigans LinkedIn used to get their network off the ground, I'm not surprised the place has continued to be a mess.

I deleted my account fifteen-odd years ago, and I've never regretted it.

LinkedIn feed has become unreadable due to what has been mentioned in the article. I keep muting such content, aiming to train the algorithm, but they keep appearing. And that leads to unfollowing people posting or liking that kind of content.

How do you mute content on LinkedIn? I was recently trying to block a few words to improve the quality of my feed, and found that I could only “unfollow” individuals. A mute word function, a la twitter, would be great but I don’t think it exists.

There's no effective way. On mobile web they limit you even more in terms of the choices of why you want to hide a post. Regardless, the algorithm seems entirely intransigent. It still shows me posts in which someone I barely know 'likes' that someone I will never meet graduated from college. I am 40, so it's not even a good guess that I would know a recent graduate (from a university I've never visited).

I think they don't give ways to modify the feed because it would be nearly empty for most people once they opted out of the various post types they aren't interested in. Then people would realize there was no value and leave.

It has a couple options (although it depends on the ab test they run as i usually get different ones sometimes :)).

- I am not interested in the author (that my connection liked): yeah ok i have a few more hundreds thousand to mute

- I am not interested in the topic: this could be relevant, but no matter how much i click, i still get the same topic. Probably their nlp topic modelling doesn’t work great?

- This post is too old/i have seen this post before: Yeah i now have a few tens similar of these to mute

- Unfollow/remove connection (who liked the post): and this is what you are left with.

I don’t know, as somebody else mentioned, if i could train their algorithm they wouldn’t have any relevant posts to show, so they just show whatever? In any case, the feed is unreadable.

LinkedIn is nothing more than public reputation polishing and virtue signaling.

It is interesting/confounding to me because I think that most of us have some inkling that there is something valuable there. Some reason to maintain a profile and participate but we just can’t articulate it.

I don't maintain my profile or participate, but I have an account. It's so that people can contact me, primarily because it's impossible to do so via any other site because I don't maintain any other social media that's tied to my real name.

I've gotten several opportunities via Linked in through past people i've worked with, but only because it functions as a public rolodex.

One of the many reasons to look forward to retirement is to be able say what I really think on LinkedIn.

Flagged this easy to spot scan profile a month ago, and it is still up and thriving (100 connections added since)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-h-0b2519160

Between dark patterns, and an almost disregard to trust and security - I feel any product focus at LinkedIn has long ago been abandoned.

Was LinkedIn ever something worth talking about?

Agree? Thoughts? Comment for reach!

Linkedin's only utility to me is to keep in contact with past work colleagues and for recruitment purposes. Apart from that it's filled with the usual garbage all these social webpages have.

Extensive analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215033

I follow one of my 1990s Amiga coding heroes on LinkedIn, and he said the same thing only a few days ago and it really hit me. Let's keep it professional people!

No more of this nonsense about tangentially work related fluff to get likes, it probably won't land you a job!

I had a profile with 500+ connections, 3rd degree to 95% of Silicon Valley. It had no use because you would normally have zero engagement with contacts. You didn't want to change anything unless you did so constantly because companies were monitoring for sudden changes. And then there were the recruiters and bloggers. I swiped it to the trash can and haven't looked back.

Anyone use an alternative?

Only use Linkedin for resume discoverability. Couldn't care for all the circle jerking that goes on in there.

I've got an ever-growing "LinkedCringe" screenshot album on my phone. Always good for a mean laugh.

One thing that baffles me is the amount of connection spam. Mostly because they sell a competing product (InMail), but seem to really not care at all about people freeloading from them using spam in connection invites instead.

Fantastic. As a non-user of LinkedIn, any indication of its demise reduces my FOMO.

You are not missing anything but recruiter spam.

With positions that usually match at most 30% of our skills.

I get a torrent of recruiter spam in my InMail but I also got my current job through InMail; the person that reached out to me was a team technical lead at a company you've heard of that I very much wanted to work for, and I took the bait, and nearly doubled my pay in the process

And I've never posted or paid. I just have a profile, and it's not even a very good one

So apparently there is some value

I’m a early user and I don’t think I ever posted there. But I have to say : my last 3 jobs are 100% passive LinkedIn leads.

It’s convenient and I would miss that I think ? But I tends to be really … average positions. It’s a bonanza of shitty contracting companies. It’s takes filtering to get decent jobs.

2004 - 2012 it was used by professionals in-lieu or in-addition to business cards.

Bump! was also a thing for exchanging contact info by using geolocation and accelerometers. It unofficially died in 2014 after Google bought them and killed them for acquihiring purposes.

Facebook and Instagram are dying, so people are putting those things there.

There's pressure to use LinkedIn, even if you're not looking for work.

I recently joined a standards group. They wanted my LinkedIn URL, but not my Github URL.

They haven’t made it any better in a decade. Except to make it easier for Enterprise salespeople to spam me. Why doesn’t a competitor emerge?

Is there an alternative out there that has less of a social media element?

We're building something that will be similar

I hate when people post stories (often with pictures) about some sad or amazing or whatever story, and they make it seem like it's about them. These are always written in the first person, but if you read all the way to the bottom it will say "credit: somePerson", or something like that. Sometimes it's phrased to make it seem like it's a photo credit, which is the worst.

These stories get all sorts of traction and comments because people misunderstand that they're not the OP's story (and honestly, many of them are probably complete fabrications.

I wish there were a way to report such comments to LinkedIn, either as downright deceptive or specifically as a type of 'stolen valor'. Is it reportable as misinformation? Maybe so. But LinkedIn probably loves this stuff because it increases engagement and makes people feel good when they use LinkedIn.

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