It feels like complaining that the strip bar has alcohol and nudity everywhere, why are you there?
ChatGPT takes on $globalevent are not examples of that. But they seem to be more favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm because of rather than despite how generic they are and how artificial their engagement boosting is.
At one of my past companies, I recall a recruiter disqualifying a candidate for a SWE role solely for having a "weird" headline banner image on their LinkedIn profile.
The "weird" image was a benign screenshot of a landscape backdrop of some Miyazaki film. No characters, no action sequences -- literally just trees, mountains, shit like that.
This is the kind of lunacy you're up against.
Nothing necessarily wrong with watching anime, but choosing to broadcast that on LinkedIn would generally demonstrate severely lacking judgement.
I think many if not most people will have negative associations when they think of adult anime enthusiasts, therefore most people with good social skills would not put anime on their LinkedIn.
I also probably wouldn’t want to hire someone who’s holding a gun in their LinkedIn photos (unless it was related to their work), even though I’m a hobbyist shooter myself. I think shooting is a cool hobby, but I understand that for many people it’s a weird enough hobby that it would be downright stupid to advertise it in an unrelated professional context.
The problem isn’t anime (or guns), it’s the poor judgement demonstrated by adding pointless question marks on what might otherwise be a good profile.
Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"? (I don't know; I've never used LinkedIn in any capacity.)
I think it really depends on the film. I doubt the expected value of putting a special background on your LinkedIn profile is very high.
Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?
English speakers don't experience this, but in my language LinkedIn-speak has so many calques from English that, in order to understand it, I often have to translate words one by one to English and then the result back to my language.
people want to socialise in all sorts of contexts. think of it as hanging out at the bar after hours at a conference.
As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.
Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.
Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.
Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.
LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.
But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting. My block list is vast, and my threshold for blocking is incredibly low.
Ultimately, it's probably only a community of about 100 experts that post informatively on the energy industry.
So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from (although admittedly I should probably be using Bluesky instead).
I've also had tens of people tell me they really enjoy my posts on LinkedIn - I tend to post slightly against the mainstream opinions in my industry, and with humour, so I may not have developed a particularly professional reputation, but I've gained more publicity than anyone else in my company outside of the Exec level.
I think big business it's also a way of keeping in contact with former colleagues so that when you're interested in jumping to another company you can do it easily in one place.
Otherwise it's a place for sales people to pump out garbage posts.
If feels cringy and disgusting, apologies to engineers here who worked hard on that but that has no place in anything related to professionals and careers. I go there once every few years, do accept meaninglessly on all new connections and log off, ignoring all other parts. If I lose the job I'll update profile but otherwise the same.
In any case, the best advice I got on LinkedIn was from a mentor helping me find my first SE job who told me: You don't have to like it, but you would be stupid not to use it.
"As a third-year student in Computer Science at the University of Tzatziki, I would never use unwrap, I'd use expect, so then the error log that I skipped over would be accurate..." blahblahblah
And investors.
Then, it is like, things that are not good for you, but you do anyway like drinking sugary beverages, staying awake too late in the night, drinking that last couple beers that you didn't need to drink and didn't enjoy but then give you this morning headache.
My issue with LinkedIn goes beyond the cringeworthy content. It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT. Unlike other platforms where you can have some nicknames etc., you are most likely to have legit info in there. I wouldn't be surprised later if digital ID in smartphones will be required to update/sign up there, "to make sure we fight fake accounts!!"
It's the main platform of interest if you ever talk to data brokers just because of the richness of personal information, employment history, and social network (connections) information present there. Microsoft is sitting on a goldmine of personally-identifiable information, and the platform is aggressively scraped every millisecond for new data.
then you find their profile and you're left with the question "Have they really been a manager at Arby's for twenty years, or were they a manager twenty years ago and then forgot they had a linkedin?"
Unfortunately I tend to miss people reaching out to me because I dont check it otherwise.