Teens Love LinkedIn | Hacker News Reader

Teens Love LinkedIn

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36 pointslaurex60 comments

LinkedIn positivity seems a bit artifical to me. Everybody is passionate about their jobs and seems so happy to be laid off on Christmas Eve because it will lead to better things.

Of course it's just personal marketing, but I still find it a bit exaggerated.

Most of it is artificial. The term people seem to use to describe this is toxic positivity.

a bit exaggerated? it's downright unhinged. I read some of the most insane takes on LinkedIn and never, ever post, but it's highly entertaining, if kind of horrifying sometimes.

an example: a whole thread of managers and HR people celebrating a proposed Slack plugin that does sentiment analysis on every message & automatically reports you to HR if you're insufficiently enthusiastic (or god forbid, use sarcasm) when talking to your boss or reports

did I post about what a horrible idea that is? hell no! that might affect my livelihood!

and so the deranged circlejerk went on unchallenged, as I closed my tab and quietly prayed I would never have to work with any of these absolute maniacs

Current job keep me occupied more than I'd like otherwise I'd parable the shit out of every minute of work day. Linkedin seems heaven for parody loving, sarcastic people like me.

I hope you can find the time. I really wish all social media could go back to being unserious places for unserious people to say unserious things, rather than the totally serious and important mess we have now.

> LinkedIn positivity seems a bit artifical to me.

Every time somebody participates in a community, they take on a role in that community's story and that role has a certain shape.

Many people behind the posts here on HN are far less serious than what's suggested by their posts because the community sees humor as too easy a way to derail curiosity and intellectualized dialog. And people are generally more contrarian here than off-site because the community celebrates a good and interesting debate as a way to raise and explore questions. etc etc

Is a HN user being artificial when they choose not to be snarky? Are they being artificial when they pick into an argument they'd have shrugged off elsewhere.

It's no different at LinkedIn. It's tone of positivity may not suit you, but it's not really a different kind of behavior than you see here or on Facebook or Reddit or whatever.

HN is mostly anonymous, so the debates are more authentic/honest. LinkedIn is where you share HR approved messaging.

The stakes are a lot lower with Hacker News.

For ordinary participants, HN means a fun conversation, inspiring articles, maybe a life-changing job offer or FOSS collaboration for a small percentage of those who comment, already a small proportion of HN's readers. Y Combinator effectively runs HN on a shoestring for a small amount of public relations influence, and I would guess that HN's existence doesn't even make the agenda at YC board meetings.

With LinkedIn, every post and association is directly linked to your professional image. You can't view LinkedIn posts without an account, so passive consumption of interesting articles simply cannot happen by design. Microsoft runs LinkedIn to legally* extract vast amounts of personal information in order to exert influence on job markets for their paying customers, and they clearly thought the control was worth purchasing for US$2620000000.

The point I would like to make is that although the forced positivity isn't a fundamentally different dynamic from HN's forced intellectualism, almost everyone on HN voluntarily participates, but opting-out of LinkedIn's positivity proletariat can have dire consequences for one's livelihood.

* where law is defined as 'might is right'

Please use thousands separators - I have no idea how absurdly big that price tag is because my eyes just slip right over those zeroes like a greasy fat kid down a slide

Here you go :) $2,620,000,000.

Ah I could never post this on LinkedIn. But spot on. It is a big no no to be critical on LinkedIn. Not that you will be met with a torrent of backlash - worse you will be silently ignored and "remembered" as not-teamplayer offline. The only way you will know about it is if you had a kind friend who told you that your comment may have been too against the flow.

I almost feel like if you are not praising your oppressors on li you might as well be silent!

LinkedIn is frankly ridiculous nowadays. The Reddit LinkedInLunatics is good for a laugh.

StateOfLinkedIn too: https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn

100%. Everyone is portraying this corporate image of positivity, which is always above and beyond what is normal for a person because corporations (sorry, US Supreme Court) are not people and don’t have feelings and emotions. It’s said a million times but your employer is not your family, but it should also be said a million times that your work colleagues and industry connections aren’t your friends, either.

I think the news that teens love LinkedIn is as much of a reflection of the toxic positivity of LinkedIn, which to kids without life experience could be seen as “maturity”, as it is a reflection of the toxicity of other social media. LinkedIn is kind of a mix of what happens when you keep kids out, but also, the consequences for what you post and share and comment are immediately impactful to your employment. You don’t hide your LinkedIn from an employer like you do TikTok or Instagram. So you have to be much more careful about what you post.

I havent seen linkedin in forever, but I looked and it's become an emotional vortex.

Watching people plaster crying faces and poetry over the 'washing machine' sucking the negative emotions out them, is something else.

No wonder the rules about expression are strict, their getting stripped of real emotional security by engaging with that.

I still prefer shining my shoes, dusting up my personal website and putting on a nice suit to look good for a job.

No heart-slurping profilicity, thanks. Ugh I feel dirty even posting this...

I quit LinkedIn because it brought too many hucksters, idea people who got in the way of execution, and salespeople who couldn't sell into my life. BUT: it is one of the most emotionally positive places in social media.

My son, aged 21, swears by Craigslist, however.

... for what?

Forums

I still have resisted signing up for LinkedIn because I'm so salty about how they used to spam everybody's contact list on sign-up. At one point I would get 3-5 e-mails per day from LinkedIn.

Maybe set a filter or a rule to send their emails to junk or another mailbox? Rules for email services are the best.

I was complaining about someone smacking me in the head and you recommended I wear a helmet. It's not wrong, it just misses the main thrust of my comment.

I don't think rules are akin to helmets in your analogy, I think more like having a dummy head that gets hit instead :)

Teens must love having a network of recruitment consultants offering them candidates and management consultants offering them cost savings. Teens must really need a FX dealer and a new phone system. Maybe they need digital transformation?

That is all LinkedIn is to me. Service businesses slapping each other on the back

I think a key is that you need to provide your real identity and you are discouraged from trolling/being a jerk since future employers and coworkers will see it on display.

My literal face every time I read LinkedIn: o_O

People (mostly from past jobs) who I have experienced as perfectly normal human beings you can have a normal conversation with (otherwise I wouldn't have connected them) evolve into completely fake engagement robots.

For reference, I'm German, most of my contacts on LI are also German and this seems like some special hell usually reserved for super sweet artificial Americans with pretend niceness. (Not a dig at Americans in general, just in a professional public setting, if you ever heard about the "Germans are too brutally honest" meme you know what I mean.)

Everything is super awesome and shallow, there's nothing social about it.

Namaste :praying_hand_emoji:

LinkedIn has spent the last few years becoming the same kind of engagement hype-trap as anywhere else and as a result it's just an awful place.

Back when it first launched it was nice to have just as a way to maintain contacts and occasionally message someone or keep in touch.

But clearly nobody was going to make money that way, so they're pouring on the same crap as propagated by Facebook and friends.

It's a depressing place to go, full of fake positivity and MBA-speak. And yet I'm compelled to go there to keep on top of what my peers are doing.

And for people who are unemployed or out of the job market for any amount of time, it can be positively (see what I did there?) soul crushing. They tune in there and look and see all these people they used to know or work with showing off their fancy job titles and daily affirmations, while they struggle to get their resume in front of the faces of people. And what they originally came there for was to get in touch with connections or look for jobs, they go away discouraged.

I'd like something to take hold closer to what the original LinkedIn seemed to be poking at. Contact lists, basic messaging, and job postings. And just charge a very basic annual fee or something instead of dumping ads and engagement algorithms on me?

(Oh, and go off the beaten track and click down the wrong path and you'll quickly find the same pile of QAnon-ish garbage as every other barely-moderated engagement hacking social media site ...)

I keep waiting to see labor organization and unionization efforts using linkedin. It seems like a great place to form alternative organizational structures and advocate for them.

This does raise the question, especially since more people are being laid off: what is the best website for technical talent to advertise their availability?

Probably this one, if you've built something you can show off.

If not, you're just fucked. (I'm fucked.)

You're not fucked if you don't post projects to HN. Tons of tech workers don't use HN and get along just fine.

LinkedIn helped me network and find new roles after both of my recent layoffs.

LinkedIn is absolutely useful in job hunting. If you have a big enough network you can likely find someone who know someone at any given company you might be interested in.

Real life usually works best IME.

github

Looking at LinkedIn makes me depressed and the only time I look at LinkedIn is when I'm dissatisfied with my job. It's not healthy for my brain.

Here's a ublock origin script that I lifted from another HN post (sorry can't remember which one). It makes LinkedIn less miserable to use:

    ! Hide LinkedIn feed only in the feed pages
    www.linkedin.com##.scaffold-finite-scroll--infinite.scaffold-finite-scroll:matches-path(/feed)
    www.linkedin.com##.feed-sort-toggle-dsa__wrapper:matches-path(/feed)

    ! Hide LinkedIn recommended
    www.linkedin.com##.scaffold-layout__aside[aria-label="Add to your feed"]

    ! Hide LinkedIn premium sponsor ads
    www.linkedin.com##.premium-upsell-link--extra-long

    ! Hide LinkedIn messages overlay
    www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-container-reflow.msg-overlay-container
    www.linkedin.com##.mb2.artdeco-card.community-panel

    ! Hide LinkedIn news module
    www.linkedin.com###feed-news-module

I think any social network where the content is curated by some meaningful metric is going to do well in general. LinkedIn is curated by expectations of the corporate culture. If your content is positive (not necessarily helpful as is the case with LinkedIn majority of the time) you look more employable. And with LinkedIn becoming the de facto standard for orgs in their due-diligence on potential employees, the quality of your content can really help or hurt your future prospects. Other social networks like HN and SO operate in a similar way but slightly different curation metrics.

There's nothing newsworthy or interesting here. This is some 'journalist's' creative writing project.

This might be the first time that an Instagram link has been posted on HN, but this LinkedIn parody made me laugh today - https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cw2_JREu_PY/

Love it!

Because children are naive and easy to trick?

Why do you think product marketing in general is focused on youth?

Don’t social where you do business.

It may dismay you to learn the amount of business which is social.

You’re totally right of course. Thanks for the feedback, just what I needed to hear.

If this means teens/Gen Z are moving past the irony and funny zingers on social media, I'm all for it.

I'm pretty tired of witty repartee at this point. LinkedIn is social media schmaltz, and sometimes schmaltz is good.

LinkedIn posts are even more clear about the incentives on why people post what they post, they just want to move up the ladder

https://archive.ph/rVso5

Is this part of a submarine advertisement campaign? I've seen three similar post in the last 24 hours.

social media is drying out and needs to get more growth. gotta flog it.

anecdotally, none of the under-20 folks I know (nephews, neighbors, etc.), touch it. tiktok and insta rule the roost, with FB marketplace taking over for craigslist, and reddit for most other stuff.

Can confirm, my daughter loves LinkedIn. For professional and social networking.

For teens, it's an entry to the real world of work. So this makes sense.

LinkedIn is great as an automatically updated address book.

Sounds similar to why I love it here.

I absolute hate how people behave on LinkedIn. Virtue signaling and humble bragging. With “the crying CEO” a prime example. It’s as fake as all the other social media.

What makes it worse is that it’s tied to your professional life, so you can either opt out (which is not without its downsides) or you have to play the game in the same ridiculously fake way.

Do you hate how people act in job interviews? Or how they craft their resumes? It's all the same to me, a neccesary type of play-acting designed to make it look like we are safe to hire and that there is no possible way anything is wrong with us or we would ever think or say anything negative, ever!

What do you expect to see on a resume or cv? DSM-5 like breakdown of personality traits and characteristics? Maybe some startup can sell that as a service. The toxic positivity or virtue signaling on LI posts crosses the border from "showing my best self" to delusional. The crying posts are particularly cringy.

I don't see it as any more or less cringey than the always-smiling interview bullshitter or the every-word-is-designed-to-make-me-sound-good resume writer. I don't enjoy it, but to imagine a world where it wasn't neccesary is to imagine a radically different world.

Resumes by design just focus on the positives/accomplishments. References cover the "maybe there are some areas of improvements" part.

.. both my 20-somethings agree with me, LI is a tired old joke in the facebook category.

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