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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is an business card / CV storage site, where you can find a job.

If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching function, it would still be LinkedIn.

But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.

Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed, so it's perfectly acceptable that it gets flooded with AI generated content. In effect, the content on LinkedIn is that picture of a happy family on your insurance brochure. You can't not have a photo of something on that kind of marketing document, and you can't be a social network without some sort of doom-scrollable content.

This is just a cheap way to generate some wallpaper.

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It is a shame. Twitter used to be quite a popular platform for (useful and interesting) networking in academia, but after it began to fall apart everyone started looking for alternatives. I felt that LinkedIn should be a decent alternative as it could strike that balance between professional and personal content, but there is just no way for a genuine community to develop on LinkenIn in its current form.

Even now LinkedIn is possibly the worst platform for being polluted with "AI slop", I cannot understand why they are looking to advance this further. Hell, when you go to write a post now there is a big flashing button saying "USE AI TO WRITE THIS POST"...?!?!

LinkedIn has turned into Facebook before it became irrelevant - people sharing their irrelevant life episodes and baby pictures.

As boomers, gen X and millennials took over Facebook, gen Z took over LinkedIn:

“Networking as a concept was highly intimidating to me, until I reframed it in my mind as ‘making friends’ instead of the traditional meaning which made me feel like I was using people as stepping stones.”

https://www.nysscpa.org/article-content/gen-z--now-networks-...

I agree this is how I (an engineer) use it too. But I suggest you talk to some more business people. They live on LinkedIn.

You've succinctly described how business people are part of the problem, not the solution.

If you’re not part of the primary user base, how would you know the problem?

Their culture and personality is the problem. I think there are very few people on earth that have never met one of these people.

It really make me think. If LI was just business profile, jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering would they need? I’m not saying to go Twitter mode and fire everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards something largely viewed as useless.

Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI’s case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40 hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay taxes and end up contributing to something like education because they have to, but it’s a pretty inefficient way of making the world better.

You should check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I should read this. I really struggle with doing work which falls into this category. It’s bad for me, and even worse it strikes me as seriously problematic to society. I don’t want to earn money for nothing, even if most people involved feel as though that in itself is worthwhile. It has been a fairly significant factor in any struggle I’ve had finding work. I have to ask myself, is this a bullshit job? The answer is often yes.

I’ve recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific and practical basis in the products and outputs. Unfortunately I’m not a scientist, only a programmer, so my utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup scene.

While I don't disagree with the notion of the existence of BS jobs, UBI is not needed. Instead we need more companies to take on more and more interesting and world-solving things.

We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care, spacecraft, etc...

I used to support UBI but I’ve soured on it. What people need isn’t income it’s opportunity. Housing, food, and healthcare are the basics we want people to have regardless of their dollar cost. Education and maybe cash to start a business would be other forms of opportunity.

My largest problem with UBI is that there will be a large percentage of the population that will just sit at home. There will be a growing demand for people to work, and prices will just skyrocket to pay the wages of the few willing to work. As those wages go up, more people on UBI will finally get off their butts because even they will no longer afford a cheeseburger at $45 each. but the cycle will just keep going.

In the end we have witnessed that we need stable inflation. If we have fast inflation, then unlimited numbers of people are left behind, for no fault of their own. If inflation is relatively stable, people can adjust slowly, carefully, and both companies and employees benefit from that.

I think UBI will lead to inflation, which is the main reason I prefer simply giving people the opportunities they need rather than having them buy them. This isn’t the same as food stamps, though, since food stamps are gated by income, leading to a cliff. Instead, we should gate essential goods by need.

And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article:

   A 2021 study empirically tested several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs were increasing over time and that they accounted for much of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.

Many jobs that appear bad are actually needed, often only because of regulatory requirements or because their importance is misunderstood.

>study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.

These people are self-reporting this. Quite frankly with the number of people in bullshit jobs who think they're doing work I wouldn't really put a lot of value in those types of self-reports.

"I Have People Skills! I Am Good At Dealing With People!"

Spoken like one of the six managers every single person needs to have.

These are self-reported, though.

I wouldn't tell my boss or my colleagues the job I do is useless for hopefully obvious reasons, but when I really think about it in the grand scheme of things it really is a Bullshit Job. Basically any SaaS is (with some exceptions of course) just a collection of Bullshit Jobs.

But there's also nothing really wrong with that. We live in the society we live in, which basically necessitates the existence of many Bullshit Jobs in order for things to keep working as they do. I'd even argue basically anything that isn't to do with Healthcare, Education or similar things along those lines count as bullshit jobs really.

>And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article

It's "probably junk" because some random EU survey in 2021 said so?

>often only because of regulatory requirements

Textbook "bullshit job" (that doesn't exist, of course).

In my opinion, in today's world most jobs (at least office jobs) are "movers". They take something from point A to point B.

Often you'll have a chain of movers A - Z. Each link can almost be it's own company depending on the industry. Naturally each thinks they're important, because someone has to move it around. Of course, you could go from A straight to Z and eliminate 25 companies.

Point is many, maybe most, companies don't actually produce direct value. They facilitate and they move. Now that's much harder to analyze.

Not commenting specifically on LI ranking, but Byrne Hobart wrote a terrific rebuttal of the main premise of this book https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-c...

Well I got invited to Twitter HQ back when it was still called that. It was some obscure team offering an app library of some sort, IIRC. It certainly wasn't something close to the main product.

I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.

LinkedIn also have tools for recruiters and sales folks to find people. I believe this is where a big part of their revenues come from (they are paid tools). Although, again I cannot imagine it being that complicated.

>Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed,

I mean, not nobody. I follow a lot of people that post very thoughtful things that spark discussion, and it's one of the only places I know of other than here where I can discuss topics related to my career or field with peers, and for me that's useful.

Lol, why is this getting downvoted? You want empirical evidence? You think this is made up? I’ve literally gotten contracts based on discussions I’ve had on my linkedin feed. Maybe your feed sucks or you have nothing interesting to say. It is far easier to curate a linkedin feed than ANY other social media app out there.

I don’t care that much for karma, but I have a feeling every comment on this entire article is getting downvoted

That’s a fair point. I don’t care about karma either but try to use it as a signal as to whether I’m making good contributions to the site or not, which is usually fairly reliable. Maybe I should have included a list of my favorite follows, had considered that, but it’d probably out me more than I’d like.

I really wish LinkedIn had features to filter out all the garbage from the feed. 90% is someome I know liking garbage that was posted by someone I neither know nor care about.

LinkedIn was changed over the years to promote users who write on the platform.

Not just about viewership - if you are applying to positions, LinkedIn gives preference to candidates who are more engaged ON the network (posts, likes, comments, Pulse) over lurkers. [1]

So this is only getting worse. You'll have to see a lower quality feed just because the algorithm is forcing everyone to boost their own metrics anyway.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi - See your own tracking, look at the metrics description

How is this different or worse than any other social media platform? again, this feed is far easier to curate than any other social media app.

You would build a resume/recruitment platform, which has revenue directly related to how well it connects both parties, and recommend candidates over others due to metrics completely unrelated to their proficiency and job match?

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