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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I honesstly don't understand why anyone posts on LinkedIn. It seems like such a pick me move from anyone who can't build an audience on Twitter. The only people who I see post on LInkedIn are wanna-be "thought leaders" and people who are looking for a job.

LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social proof and never think about it otherwise.

As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.

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It's cancerous how important "building an audience" and "engagement" has become to chronically-online people, and how it's seeping into meatspace, even into job applications.

I hereby swear to never set out to "build a personal brand" in my life. Total toxic waste. I wish humanity could get over itself.

Twitter is how I built my entire network in the Bay Area... it was amazing at flattening hierarchies, I could talk to anyone. Then at some point the recommender system changed and people in my network never saw tweets from one another. At that point it became useless for my career.

Concurrently, LinkedIn sharing grew from nothing to awesome. I get most of my news about the latest developments in my field from LinkedIn. I get jobs by posting blog posts on LinkedIn, or summaries of interesting recent papers.

Which field? I'm still trying to get a feel for what kind of fields are active on LinkedIn these days.

Computer science. More and more researchers are on LinkedIn, and if you post a paper and @ their account, you are instantly on their radar since most are never recognized like that. Pro tip ;)

They hope it will make them money

Because LinkedIn is where people bring their "professional" persona and can actually write in-depth on a subject. Which means those who know what they're talking about can actually write something worth reading.

Twitter is a flaming toxic dumpster fire whose only purpose seems to be to post hot takes, or to gang up on and bully people who disagree with you 280 characters at a time.

The problem is that Twitter has also been enshittified and the audience is dwindling.

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