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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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”

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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