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Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth would you train AI on that? In the social media world it's already the closest thing resembling boring, unreadable machine generated content.

No matter what you ask it, it'll brag about what a great job it's doing answering you, announce that it's having a baby, then tell everybody that it's being let go because there are better AI. It'll thank a few key people who it worked with, and tell you that it's actually thrilled with this opportunity to take a break from answering your question, and will spend more time on its old hobby of being an online resume.

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Because there is a huge market for resume builders and career guidance where AI can play a role. Using LinkedIn you can measure success and network performance and correlate that to the resume and posted content.

I'm guessing the real money linked in wants is in the hiring and firing, B2B. Now, every resume gets answered and your first interaction with a company is a poorly scripted AI who goes from manic enthusiasm to depressingly rote in the actual job requirements and probably will still ghost you and continue the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.

The converse will be true, but the price of AI will just make poor people have to suffer even more

Just the long march of wealth inequality and it's time sucking capitalism.

This seems to imply that machines would ghost humans to save on token fees. I wouldn't rule it out.

> the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.

A recent issue in the job application realm is AI application bots that will apply to 100's of jobs on your behalf, which is the opposite problem. Seems like both sides are racing to make applications as useless as possible as quickly as possible.

If you don't have a network, good luck in the future.

We're heading for the 1990's vision of agents negotiating on our behalf, except less exchange of reliable data and more attempts at bullshitting each other.

I was going to say that it's the streetlight effect but this makes even more sense.

LinkedIn, like GitHub and (to a degree) OpenAI are under Microsoft’s umbrella.

There's also real money in writing LinkedIn content that is believable enough for "influencers" to post. I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.

For me the bar for "reputationally safe" is really high because my market (cynical tech CTO's etc. don't respond well to things that sounds like ChatGPT) and so I don't expect to any time soon, but for many others that bar is pretty low as long as it's good enough for LinkedIn's algorithm to give it impressions.

I hope you realize that if everyone can do "computational influencing", everyone will.

A Nash Equilibrium of automated bullshit, it'll just make everything more miserable, programmatically.

I think if you read LinkedIn posts you get what you deserve

:insert Christoph Waltz meme: You're sheltering LinkedIn slop, are you not?

I don't think anybody said influencers don't put effort in it. The only argument is that the added value by influencers is zero, be it on Instagram or LinkedIn, so if AI can take that kind of job the net loss is also zero. Of course of course there's an audience for influencers, like there was an audience at Tupperware shows, but they'll be happy to move on to the next fad so again zero loss.

Once again, AI will automate checkboxing tasks—-things that some people think some other people value so it has to be done even though basically no on values it so no one wants to do the soulless task.

>I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.

If you need to pay the bills and this helps, good for you.

But boy howdy does this sound terrible. It's amazing to me that there are people out there who take anything on LinkedIn seriously. I mean, it's not like the posts are inherently bad, but the entire point of the site is to "influence" and sell to each other. It's horrible. If I were looking for talent, it'd probably be the last site I'd use.

Are you ok to accept that you're probably an outlier?

Because while I have kind of the same opinion as you, I also know lots of (good and generally smart) people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts.

Not everyone is at the same point in their career, or has the same level of knowledge and confidence in their craft or job position. For some folks, reading thoughts and writings from more senior people can actually be beneficial..

And yes there's a lot of platitudes and BS on LinkedIn, but some people do put real effort into sharing actually useful information as well.

> people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts

I suspect this says more about what the reader doesn't know and their mastery of info self-exposure than it says about the contentfulness of LinkedIn posts*.

* Not counting content originating elsewhere re-posted on or linked to from LinkedIn.

So all LinkedIn posts are of the same quality then? Would you also say that all HN comments are of the same quality too? You're painting with an awfully big brush.

Look I get it, there's a lot of crap on LinkedIn for sure, and it's pretty obvious this crowd is generally against "influencers".. I also see no value in them generally speaking.

But it's reductive, and inaccurate, to say that there's zero value across the board on there and that every post is low-value influencer-spam. Not everyone is trying to build an audience or push their newsletter.

Some people just want to share their knowledge and interact with their professional peers, and for better or worse LinkedIn is the most known place to do that..

You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?

> You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?

Not to preen or self-promote or "network". Most here are anonymous.

Both of us use names, and you have the meethn and I have a "we are hiring" ... Still, I don't think either of us is here just to meet people or just to hire. My profile has only said that for a couple of the more than a decade I've been here.

You also have your LinkedIn CV posted on your profile. ;-)

Anyways, I feel like we've gotten off-track.. Sounds like we both agree that all the brand-builders and influencers on LinkedIn provide dubious value.

But I still think there is other value on LinkedIn from people who just want to connect and discuss work topics with peers or other professionals in their circle.

I've personally had some good discussions, much like I've had on here, in comment threads on LinkedIn.. Definitely not as much as HN, but if you're smart about the content you engage with (like any other social network) then it can still be useful and rewarding.

Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.

I have seen a number of CVs over the past few months that fall into two eye-rolling categories. First, those that have the same set of skills in the exact same order, and routinely sport identical expressions. Over time I've come to associate them with low-grade content farms. Second, a smaller set of exceptionally polished ones that feel unique and really want me to interview the candidate. These candidates will then utterly bomb in the interview, to the point where I'm often asking myself whose CV it was they had submitted.

Signal-to-noise ratio is tending towards zero.

>Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.

This is why "I've submitted 1000 resumes in 3 weeks and can't get an interview!" posts on social media are rampant.

Can't wait 'til it gets raunchy in everybody's DMs unprompted, just like the training data...

I don’t know why you’re downvoted here, it’s pretty well known there’s a huge bunch of people trying to pick up using LinkedIn DM’s, for whatever reason.

I think they've "fixed" (read: hidden) this better, but it used to be the case that if you looked at the LinkedIn profile of an above average attractive woman, the sidebar used to show profiles people had also looked at and it would invariably almost only profiles of other women with above average attractive profile pictures. While needless to say it was a lot more varied for men. It was just very blatantly showcasing that a lot of people were looking at profiles for reasons that were not so professional. Now the sidebar is a mix of other features, and I wonder if that was because it was easier to do that than "clean up" the profile views.

That made me laugh. Thank you.

So you can make more boring, unreadable machine generated content.

Wouldn’t you want an ai to talk to recruiters for you?

A HR AI would be useful

I mean, write me a shitpost isn’t an empty customer set.

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