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Comment by rjurney | Hacker News Reader

I have no trouble sharing links. Even multiple links in one post, although the first one will define the preview. Nor do I have a problem sharing images and including urls in the post body. Nor do I understand why people only share the link in the top comment.

What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful?

I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an expert is how I get work.

The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group... one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.

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> What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful?

It’s explained in multiple parts but often sharing a link will “downrank” your post simply because it contains a link.

This is also very common on social media sites, not just LI.

lol which is funny because i think twitter updated their post rankings to boost those with images/links...but i guess that makes sense considering twitter is mostly text-based trying hard not to get left behind the other more video/media-centric socials like tiktok.

edit: maybe not links but just media

Author here. You seem to be intentionally conflating the ability to post a link with my critique of how LinkedIn affects its reach through the algorithm.

To be clear: Your links will physically “work,” as in you can post them. But they lose much of their organic reach, in part because LinkedIn treats links as second-class citizens. It wants you to stay engaged on the platform.

(The guy I quoted in the piece says he figured this out through research.)

The result is that, if you’re trying to build an audience on that network, you have to spend inordinate amounts of time building lengthy content that is built for the network itself, which is why every LinkedIn post seems huge.

It’s the difference between a handful of likes and comments and hundreds, possibly thousands. Think of it this way: You are driving a car that cannot switch gears, and using that to dispute the claims of a post that is critiquing the inability to switch gears.

To be clear, you may be OK with that, but the problem is, it intentionally does not play fairly with the open internet, and it means that people have to do a lot of additional busywork to use this service that they prefer to spend on something else.

There’s a difference between being able to do something, which is what you’re describing, and it actually functioning to the best of its capabilities. Sure, you can run with a sprained ankle, but you’re going to go a lot slower and feel a lot more pain than someone who doesn’t have that impediment.

LinkedIn is artificially adding impediments to linked posts, just like every other platform. But they appear to be doing so in ways more dramatic and extreme than some of their competitors.

Thank you for taking the time for this thoughtful reply. I did not mean literally posting works. What I meant was I do get followers for my link posts but... actually one where I posted just a photo did 10x better than any of my previous posts. The best posts I've done have been LinkedIn Blog Posts.

I'm not an expert at this, and you are, so tell me... should I really not use images? Like, I often post a link to a paper and then I will summarize it and rather than a link I will post one of the figures from the paper. What's a better strategy than that?

Reading the article, I guess he's just saying that sharing a link will make the algorithm rank your post lower. This has been happening everywhere, I suppose, recently on Twitter, quite a while ago on Facebook... a combination of social networks wanting to keep readers captive on the platform, preferring content that's been adapted for the platform, and some (probably justified) suspicion that links are more promotional than informative.

So what's "hard" is using SEO-style tricks to share a link without your post being pushed into obscurity. And for people without the time or desire to hack the algorithm, it means sharing links on LinkedIn isn't very effective.

It’s not the trouble of sharing links, it’s the fact that the post is downranked, did you even read the article?

Yes, and I don't get it. Why would people read a post without a link? My link posts do fine.

> Why would people read a post without a link?

Huh? People would read a post to understand its content. People read novels. Those don't have links.

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