When Did LinkedIn Become the Dorky Social Network? | Hacker News Reader

When Did LinkedIn Become the Dorky Social Network?

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20 pointsQuinzel54 comments

I would not consider LI to be a fun/dorky social media platform. At least for me, it's mostly forced positivity with a side dish of scams and a bunch of recruiter spam.

Remember you can hibernate[1] your LI account if you want. It can spare you the nonsense while still allowing you to easily return to the platform when you're out looking for work.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1336653/hiber...

LinkedIn is the social network your current and future employers/clients will see and as such, it's every bit as anodyne and synthetic as that would entail.

It's a social network in the same way team-building excursions are recreation - seemingly so, but actually not.

I'm not sure about 'dorky' or even what that really means, but the 'toxic positivity' from there can be really draining and fills me with dread that this is now what you are expected to be like.

Just an example:

  I am thrilled to share some exciting news with all of you today!
  I am overjoyed to announce that I have recently started a position as a XXXX at XXXX. This new role presents a fantastic opportunity for growth, and I am incredibly grateful for the chance to contribute to an exceptional team of talented professionals.
  First and foremost, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to my current line manager, XXXX
  I am truly grateful for the trust he has placed in me and for the numerous opportunities he has provided to hone my skills and expand my knowledge.
  Secondly, I would also like to express my gratitude to my incredible colleagues and friends who have supported me throughout my career journey.
  Your unwavering belief in my abilities and your encouragement have been invaluable, and I am honoured to have such an amazing network of individuals by my side.
  Lastly, I am thrilled to embark on this new chapter and contribute to the growth and success of XXXX.
  I look forward to collaborating with talented individuals as ..., leveraging new technologies, and driving impactful results that will make a difference in people's lives ...
  Thank you all once again for your continuous support, and here's to a new and exciting chapter ahead!

I mean I'm genuinely happy for this person, but is this really the new normal for got-a-new-job announcements? It's more like an Oscars award speech.

It reads like this:

“Me me me [trendy buzzword] me me me [gratitude]. [positive statement with no substance] me me me [another trendy buzzword]. Me me me [statement that implies I am exceptionally successful, without explicitly stating that because that would be arrogant and narcissistic] me me me [more buzzwords]. [Token statement to acknowledge others] me me me. [buzzword buzzword buzzword] [insincere gratitude].

And do you know whose employee’s are the worst for doing this… GOOGLES!!(from my perception anyway). They drive me nuts. With their posts that read pretty much exactly like how you just described, with a picture of themselves next to a big G.

I have never read a good post on LinkedIn. Not one, ever. For me, it has always been motivational quotes and self-applauding stories.

One time somebody actually drunk LinkedIn a whole bunch of shit on their coworkers, that was pretty funny. The post was obviously deleted afterwards.

They did what? That sentence was hard to understand, sorry

I think the author is drunk HN a whole bunch of shit on this site. They may soon delete their post and you will never get your answer! ;)

So you don't follow Hank Green on LinkedIn? He's conquered most other social media sites, and now has his sights set on LinkedIn. He's brilliant.

Is he still posting there? I would’ve guessed that project is on halt with him having cancer and all.

“I’m humbled to announce that I was nominated as one of the ‘40 under X top Y in the USA. I’m reminded of the famous quote from Dr Martin Luther King, where he said: ‘Yes’.”

I find that the “LinkedIn experience” has a direct, causal relationship to the people you connect to and follow. Turns out, when you connect to the kind of people who post Facebook memes, you’ll end up seeing a lot of Facebook memes. When you connect to, and follow, nothing but recruiters, you end up with a lot of bad recruiter-spam.

When you do neither, and when you actually meet and connect with thoughtful people, you can find thoughtful content.

I only post useful links, tutorials, cool demo videos, actual best practices or lessons learned.

You do have to adhere a bit to the "house style" (lots of exclamation points! And emojis! And "shoutouts"!)

The real problem is LinkedIn is happy to ignore my own posting style in figuring out what I want to see. Everybody else wants chicken soup for the spul nonsense so that's all I get served.

It's already hard enough to find genuinely useful blogs and content, burying it in pap and self-promotion is algorithmic malice.

I hate it, in a way which feels distinct from other social media on the surface since the users are so different, but which has the same root cause: they encourage some form of bragging and immodesty as the default communication style.

Narcissism is even more intolerable on a professional context because there’s a parallel universe of business culture bullshit people can draw upon.

It’s honestly so cringe worthy I can hardly bring myself to login to it anymore.

It’s for that reason they started the subreddit /r/LinkedInLunatics.

LinkedIn is an exceptional negative filter and will forever appreciate that about it.

If a company willingly self-identifies itself with things like blockchain, AI, or even just feel-good word salads, I know not to apply there.

There are companies that don’t associate with feel-good word salads on LinkedIn? Not sure I’ve seen any. Or at least any company that’s ever posted on there seems to have that.

All unmoderated social networks are either dorky or abusive. Dorky is actually the best case scenario.

Hacker News is dorky/abusive, too. Have you noticed?

When strangers interact with each other, that’s what happens.

What's your definition of unmoderated? Did you mean uncurated?

I mean no human moderators to break up fights and assure adherence to terms and conditions. Algorithms don't cut it, for me. "Voting" is no substitute, either.

Both HN and LinkedIn have moderators that do just that, they're not algorithms. LinkedIn sucks imo, but to claim that either but especially HN is unmoderated or has no moderators is certainly untrue.

You say it's untrue. I guess you are technically, right, because the word "moderator" appears in the FAQ a few times.

So, I should be more specific. In the years I have been using HN and commenting, I have never seen a moderator visibly intervene to enforce the submission guidelines for comments. Perhaps they intervene by silently killing threads in extreme cases?

I've never seen a moderator write anything AS a moderator to improve an interaction. The guidelines say don't be snarky. But I've gotten a lot of snark from people in comments. I've dished out the snark, as well. Nobody stops them. Nobody stops me. This is what I'm talking about.

The few forums I'm on that are consistently professional and non-dorky have visible moderators. We know who they are. They comment on what's happening. They give warnings. That's what I mean by moderation.

I just ran across this by accident (ironically?) whilst posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36753185.

I've written* tens of thousands of moderation comments over many years—you can find them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang. As you can see, I've written a ton as a moderator to try to improve interactions on HN. The interesting thing is that even after all that, some users (who knows how many, but probably quite a few) have no idea. It's tempting to overinterpret that, but it's explicable by randomness alone. Even in a rainstorm, a few spots stay dry because no raindrop hits them.

In any case, please don't dish out snark, regardless of how badly other commenters are doing that or you feel they are. We eventually ban accounts that keep doing that! even if randomness gives them a long run beforehand.

* (I'm using the first person here because I'm currently the only mod who posts publicly to HN. There used to be another (sctb) but he's back to being a civilian. Ditto for pg before that of course.)

I actually hadn’t noticed that HN is dorky/abusive.

Where else can you find people disagreeing with each other starting their post with "False."?

Or the use of words like disingenuous or orthogonal? I mean I keep coming back, but there is a distinctive 'flavor' of discourse (for lack of a better word) here.

You haven't noticed... I guess you aren't taking a stand in your comments and getting people trying to rhetorically gut punch you in return, in the sense of instantly dismissing whatever experience you may have or ignoring the thrust of your argument and siezing upon a small thing and acting as if that's the only thing you said?

See what happens when you go against the cultural grain around here, man.

Or maybe I'm the only one experiencing it... But it's not all the time, or else I would stop commenting altogether.

(FWIW, the challenge you just made is reasonable and not any sort of abuse.)

Well, I guess I see people assert their beliefs as though they are an authority on any given topic on here for sure and any comment that challenges their belief is seen as an insult, or a threat to someone else’s position of authority or their expertise. It’s all relative though I don’t mind if people disagree with me or challenge my assumptions or whatever, sometimes people can be rude about it, that says more about them than the person they are being rude/abusive to.

Over the last few years, I've found myself needing to block/mute/unfollow with increasing regularity. There's much, much more irrelevant noise polluting LinkedIn than there used to be. The key appeal of LinkedIn used to be that it was a place to maintain your professional network (keyword: professional). I don't give a flying fuck about your kids, your cancer, your politics, your motivational quote of the day or your vacation. The further LI stray from their core value proposition, the less relevant they are.

When was it not? Only reason to go on for me is when looking for work. You can see available offers, chat with recruiters, see if anyone you know is working in a potential company, and that's about it.

It's not like I'm going there for entertainment or insights into the nature of the universe.

> Even though you’re increasingly being annoyed by recruiters LinkedIn does little to stop it.

... I joined LinkedIn to connect with recruiters.

Why would anyone want a professional social network if you aren't specifically job searching or seeking clients?

I don't feel the author has made a clear point here. Yes, the model has switched from companies posting content to individual posting content, but I don't understand how that is a problem. It's a mechanism for businesses and professionals to connect. What does the author expect it to be?

I think it's mostly about signal to noise ratio.

Plenty of shotgun recruiters (probably working for agencies with unrealistic targets) find some keyword to latch onto and go full shotgun approach.

I have had _for_the_same_profile_ people asking me to do contract work for: PCB design, FPGA design, DSP algorithms, Regulatory Affairs, Computer Vision.

I can assure I do not have that breadth of experience.

You've read my profile and found my past experience relevant for a contract gig or FTE? Great!

You are keyword searching and spamming, yeah that is really not high-value and a bit of a time sink for the people getting contacted.

> Why would anyone want a professional social network if you aren't specifically job searching or seeking clients?

Sales. Which is (one of the reasons) why there is so much cringe on linkedin.

Is Yammer still a thing? It’s like LI but imagine it being run by HR busybodies not trusted to do anything else.

LinkedIn is strictly for business, unlike all other social media. My business is best conducted within certain confines so I never post, or reply to posts on LinkedIn. The people that start posting opinions on politics or or any of a number of topics are risking career suicide.

I don’t believe that objectively you can call LinkedIn “strictly for business” these days. Unless you want to count “pretending to do business” “lying about the business you do/have done” “pretending you have job offers” and all the other performative business LARPing at business positivity that goes on as “business”… at best it’s puffery at worst it’s fraud… and that’s arguably the most business part of LinkedIn, the people trying to scam other people into their business books and training courses… but it’s basically just scams at the end of the day.

How can this be called “strictly for business”?

I’ve recently been pushed back into the toxic cesspool that is LinkedIn due to trying to work with aerospace companies and other industries where I don’t have established personal connections and relationships to rely on, and I hate every time I visit the website or open the App… it literally oozes insufferably fake, toxic mental health damaging stuff…

You are right on the motivation though, it’s recruitment spam or fake bullshit business cult stuff because anything else will absolutely hurt your career… which is why even I’ve been tempted to get chatgpt to write some positive shit for me (because I refuse to try and make myself think up that kind of shit, however I have had to read enough of it I can proof read some and decide if I’m comfortable posting it)

Re politics: it really depends. I work in a field tightly linked to policy, and have contacts in other fields linked to the ecological transformation. Lots of them post politically loaded posts related to their area of expertise (some even selfies in demonstrations), and I think it actually serves them. Basically, it gives trust in their commitment to their topic, and that they are not only there for the paycheck.

LI postings feel as if some people looked at Despair posters and decided to put a positive spin on them.

https://despair.com/collections/posters

I think Despair has been lampooning the LI mindset before LI even existed! I had an LI account for about three months 10 years ago. Could not stomach the unironic Babbitty codswallop that was on it.

These are great!

When it became popular enough that your boss started trying to follow you

LI is an interesting data source for the pulse of economy (at least in my echo chamber :). I don't even need to log in, just a quick glance in my LI email folder would tell a lot.

LinkedIn reminds me of a dog doing tricks for its master to win treats, but in this case, the employees and job seekers are the dogs and corporate HR departments are the master.

When I joined it?

I don't spend a lot of time on it. It has proven useful to me, in that cousins and I have found one another on it, and a college friend or two found me.

> Let me preface this LinkedIn execs — if any of you come a calling with a job, I’ll shoot someone.

The audacity of this is peak LinkedIn.

It's all stories of motivation with an unexpected twist at the end.

Or people announcing they got a certification.

Usually people you don't know.

I would say right from the beginning, even before MS bought it, it was always at the very best second tier

I thought it was useful until you had to log in before you could see most pages any more.

I’m not sure it’s dorky. It’s more strained humblebragging wrapped in a CV viewer.

using https://read.cv/ as my 'online resume' now

Worse, it's all bullshit.

It always was.

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