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Comment by gemstones | Hacker News Reader

Elon’s product thinking really shines here, huh? /s

He thinks LinkedIn is cringe (fair) but has a position where he can ignore lots of professional norms. LinkedIn is cringe because people are deliberately trying to respect professional norms and post weird, sanitized, work-appropriate content.

Imagine you’re a recruiter. The selling point of X jobs is that they will give you access to people who found professional norms too hard to follow? And probably some specialists who would be hard to recruit, but maybe they get income that’s a multiple of several boutique recruiting agencies from that.

This isn’t like stackoverflow jobs where the base is correlated with technical expertise - X jobs is correlated with people who are terminally online who think being polite in their work-facing lives is something that people don’t actually want. What hiring manager wants to draw from that pool?

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It's weird to admit, but ever since Twitter jumped the shark LinkedIn has become my main replacement. Closest thing to vaguely broad views and updates from people most of which I know to some degree.

It _is_ cringe, but not the stuff my "network" writes, and not really based on writing style, for the most part. It's mostly just the sponsored and boosted stuff. That also wasn't my favourite content on Twitter.

If X tries to become LinkedIn, it sounds like their major opportunity is to become the worst of both worlds. And what Elon thought was "cool" in the past was, at least in my opinion, mostly not.

Bloomberg wrote an article on this recently:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-22/instagram...

I'm humbled to hear that you have announced the LinkedIn has replaced Twitter as your firehose of nonsense. That is a significant shift that realigns your media consumption with strategic goals.

Thank you, it's great to get positive feedback after investing so much energy. Reach out to me if you need help with your sales strategy!

Yeah, me too. It's boring, but after the last decade I'm more than willing to accept that "cost" for the benefit of having a sense of what's going on with my contacts.

Does anyone know how to efficiently unfollow large numbers of people though? I was way to promiscuous in the early days and want to winnow down to someone I've actually worked/socialized with.

>If X tries to become LinkedIn, it sounds like their major opportunity is to become the worst of both worlds. And what Elon thought was "cool" in the past was, at least in my opinion, mostly not.

Wouldn't the impact largely be on how people looking for jobs on X would have to clean up their profiles/history?

Not sure. I rather envision lots of thinly veiled self promotion and bad con-artistry with a "cool" tone spamming all kinds of threads. At least with LinkedIn I know to run for the hills based on post length and the first sentence, I feel on Twitter, or X or whatever, that kind of stuff would be more of a sucker punch.

LinkedIn is a perfect social media. Does exactly what it says on the box. You post a profile, and recruiters will hit your inbox. You can post if you want, and the feed is full of sometimes cringe posts, but it's not super algorithmic, they don't really care if you're spending a lot of time on the site. I've spend this last year curating my feed, muting annoying connections, following people that post genuinely interesting content. I probably check it twice a week, check in with people, then I get bored and log off.

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