Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshhart | Hacker News Reader

I'm a tech lead working on the feed backend at LinkedIn. I work both on storage and feed relevance. Happy to answer any questions if I can. I will say we're always looking for passionate engineers, especially those with a background in machine learning or information retrieval.

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Could you please add an unsubscribe from the linkedin updates email - I've been told by customer service the only way to stop getting that is by deleting my account : (

Not 100% if this is what you're asking, but if you go to settings (hover over the triangle near the top right corner) there's a "email preferences" tab near the bottom left. You can change the frequency and kinds of emails you receive there.

Thanks, you can unsubscribe from some emails there, but the linkedin update and a bunch of other email communications are not covered.

I've solved the problem by marking it as spam.

That's obviously NOT ideal. I'm not sure myself but I know who to ask. Will try to let you know more soon.

What do you see as the primary goal of the news feed?

LinkedIn's mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

In that light, there are a few things that I consider the goal to be: 1. Keep you informed of relevant news, articles, and changes in your network. There are examples of where it's difficult to do a perfect job. Connection updates are one - some people absolutely want to see them all and some don't. We're trying to be smarter by collapsing them together, which saves a lot of vertical space, and we're working on algorithms to identify the most "interesting" ones. Fortunately, it's very easy to tune which types of updates you receive in your settings if you really want to. 2. Give you the opportunity to interact with news, articles, shares etc and hence demonstrate authority or interest in a topic among your network.

We obviously look at the traffic we're generating to publishers and to other LinkedIn verticals like groups, but those aren't numbers that we're trying to optimize.

How are you evaluating feed relevance?

There are a lot of metrics we look at. The most straightforward are engagement numbers, particularly the social variety (like, comment, reshare, etc), normalized by various measures like impressions or sessions.

LinkedIn does a fair bit of user studies as well, and we're hoping to go further in this are for feed relevance.

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