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Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

Let's be real, LinkedIn is full of LinkedIn Lunatics but pretty much all mainstream social media is pretty shit. They're just different flavors of shit. LinkedIn: bad. Facebook: bad. Twitter: I literally think it contributed to the collapse of discourse and rise of shallow thought / rejection of expertise. I'm not going to list more because the theme is, you guessed it, they're bad.

Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).

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Im pretty sure that is the current sentiment amongst the judicial body at the moment, Meta and Google have been taking blows left and right. They are also not allowing else to take shape that might make their business model obsolete. With all that we have more and more laws that are redistricting the use of social media by their own bad doing. So if another company wants to offer something innovative, now they have an unfair playing ground due to the enormous amount of regulation that are NOW being implemented. Another words the longer these large tech companies are able to keep their business the harder it is for innovation in this sector from other players. The spill over to polotics is dangerous and counter-productive to innovating technology.

When your definition of innovation includes "move fast, break things, ignore regulations until you can scale big enough for the lawyers hopefully to outpace the legal system" it is arguable that any of that should be allowed at all. There's room for leniency for innovation sake, then there's building the wrong damn thing and not taking no for an answer when you should. Tech is beyond that point by leaps and bounds.

Counterpoint, Meta just shutdown its VR project. And with all the data gathering, you aren't the customer, you are the product. You just don't realize that the market (marketing departments) said yes. Your vote is to either use a specific service or not. And if enough people vote yes, it stays even if you or me don't like/use it.

Social media being bad is partly because of shady business practices, and partly because a lot of people suck (in different ways, at different times, including us).

Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?

Mastodon, Bluesky, etc are neat - both in what they're trying to be and their technology. But ultimately these days I reject them in favor of more local socialization (again, not geographically). What this looks like is a constellation of private (or pseudo private) discord communities. If I make friends in one, I often get invited to another. I recognize the merit in broader social forums like Mastodon, but it is not worth the drawbacks to me.

As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but with community servers run independently. That is, there are some "federated" identity providers so community servers can agree on identity across servers, then each community server runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community server - private channels in a community server are not E2E encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays (with a special class of relay server for people who want to DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such high latency (even locally!).

A large part of the problem, imo, is that people haven't used the ability to talk to the entire planet as an opportunity to broaden their horizons, but to build themselves a transnational bubble of like-minded individuals.

Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the void was kinda understandable, but these days you can literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.

That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.

> That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.

A brutal reality to navigate if you're not acting in bad faith.

I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.

I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.

So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.

now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.

What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.

I got an email from Indeed for this today: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/doordashusa/jobs/7727512

About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and it's a mandatory field.

There are tons though.

> and it's a mandatory field.

It's also an EEO violation. Report them. I've never had a Li account and never will because of their slimy tactics early on and their eventual conversion into a narcissist circle jerk.

Software jobs for sure, but I've been applying for jobs with employers that have other types of jobs too (nursing, accounting, industrial engineering, etc.) and the requirement is not solely for their software jobs. Some have fields that pattern match (for these I put something like "https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN") while others use an integration that actually require you to sign in to Linkedin (some of these I've created accounts for and then deleted them, some I've managed to bypass by hacking on the POST a bit, and others I've decided not to apply for).

Do any of the workarounds ever result in interviews?

Yes! But I only know because someone mentioned it during an interview. It's not something I keep track of on a per-employer basis.

Agreed. There are lots of people posting shitty things on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but on LinkedIn, everyone is so fake. They're putting their best professional face on, heavily self-censoring themselves, and their content plays to the whole "employment culture". It's not even a little bit genuine.

I don't even know why they do it. Everyone knows it's fake and performative, this couldn't possibly actually help their careers could it?

AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.

>but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.

I haven't seen this at all, but I normally do provide my LinkedIn URL to companies that I apply to through that platform. I don't really see the problem, though: I don't post anything (I'm not a LinkedIn Lunatic, though I've seen this with some coworkers), so what's the problem? To me, LinkedIn is mostly just a way to find jobs, and also maintain an online resume of sorts, and also to stay in some sort of contact with previous coworkers. I've had a bunch of recruiters try to recruit me for jobs through it. So it is helpful IMO, but only for career purposes. But I sure as hell don't post opinion crap on there, esp. political drivel. I don't mind the posts from people pointing out, for instance, interesting stuff about Python, so sometimes I read those. I also find entertainment in reading the posts about how companies with ridiculous recruiting practices fail to find decent candidates.

Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?

well moderation is ubiquitous , but yeah -- personalization/targeting/social graph are essentially the things that people expect out of a social media platform.

I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.

I also know that's a naive view.

A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.

That'd be the thing indeed.

hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.

A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.

I think the distinction is pretty easy imo. HN is topic centered, Social Media is person-centered. Before MySpace there was a pretty big proliferation of forums and other topic centered discourse. The profile was such a minor part of those tools.

When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.

>On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self.

Huh? On LinkedIn, the only thing that's mandatory is to have a profile that maybe looks like your resume, and that's about it. A photo helps too. Lots of people do nothing more with it than that, and use it to find jobs.

https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement

8.1. Dos

Use your real name on your profile; and

8.2. Don’ts

Create a false identity on LinkedIn, misrepresent your identity, create a Member profile for anyone other than yourself (a real person), or use or attempt to use another’s account (such as sharing log-in credentials or copying cookies);

But profile pictures are here >

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1377087/profi...

> You can use an illustration, caricature, or other artistic rendering of yourself, but your profile photo must reflect your likeness. We may remove profile photos that don’t comply with our User Agreement and Professional Community Policies, including images that consist solely of the following:

I'm pretty sure even this has been updated to accommodate all the Ghibli AI avatars that people use.

I would say yes, that's a good way to make the distinction. It's even more than that: the feed is different for every single user.

With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily determined by all users voting up articles or moderating them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that weights votes and flags differently based on some other criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags. And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if they load the page at the same time.

HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is centered around individuals and what they personally choose to post and promote.

There's a somewhat silly sense of superiority on this site over itself along with a deeply held belief that social media is bad, which makes commenters here try IMO in vain to distinguish HN from other forms of social media. After all, if you are the bad thing, how can you not fall prey to the same problems of the bad thing?

I think in reality "social media" is a set of properties all of which lead to different effects in the discourse on the site. This site may not have individualized ranking algorithms but it has open registration and crowdsourced ranking which gives it a lot of the same benefits and failure modes of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, HN has a professional (meaning: paid) mod staff, which leads to different behaviors than Reddit.

It's all just a spectrum and I think it's more rigorous to think of these things as a spectrum rather than trying to play this silly intellectual game of defitinioneering to make the social media you don't like sound bad and the ones you like sound good. Focusing on cause and effect can be a more effective way to craft intentional social spaces rather than finger pointing.

In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts. I do think it is an important distinction but I understand if others don't. At least we are all in the same reality on a forum board when we post. On a social media site, we see different sets of posts.

> In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts.

Isn't there an algorithm on HN to boost and downvote? It might be a different algo but there is one.

I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.

Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.

Nope. Google+ was a ghost town. They made the right call to shut it down and focus their efforts on YouTube.

The videos and comments on YT are superb training data, every bit as good as Google+ was.

In 2025, YouTube’s total revenue (advertising + subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60 billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies. Google+ would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular social network.

The videos are good training data, but the comments? The comment UX is so non-conducive to discussion, and the general quality is very low compared to what used to be on Google+ (to be fair, the self-selected users of Google+ were not representative of the general population).

> comments on YT are superb training data

This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a bit more effort into that side of their platform.

Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't want another fb or insta. The circles and community were great.

Oh they tried to - in a simple "please fill out the form" way. I'll link to my prev comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425198#46429370

IIRC they tried at some point incorporating G+ on youtube but that didn't work either

That's true. I was much younger back then to notice about privacy.

Yeah, it was pretty bad incorporating G+ account to everything. The way the G+ worked (at least in my friend circle), normal people had less business there. It was very hobby focused.

To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)

nah, their feed became algo driven just like FB... im constantly seeing things that I have no relation to

This reminds me. Google Reader had comments enabled from your friends on posts you shared. This was the best form of social media I have ever experienced.

> Google+ had promise

No ads was a huge plus. Take away the financial incentive and you get rid of most of the worst behavior.

Facebook didn't have ads when it started either.

If you don't have adv from platform itself it doesn't mean that site content is not flooded by endless spammers content. LinkedIn is great example where you have both.

I kind of love Linkedin tbh. It's where you get jobs. They created Kafka. Definitly don't spend a lot of time there though just more if you need a new job.

How often do people get jobs via LinkedIn? I have never.

Their "social media" aspect sucks. LinkedIn is 99% bullshit posts about people hyping up they have "learned lessons" or sucking up to whoever just hired them.

Kafka is a neat piece of engineering though, I'll grant you that.

A lot I guess or noone would use it. Personally two out of my last 4 jobs (contractor so switch often). All social media is bad by nature so just ignore that part. I much prefer having all recruiters in a single place rather than spread out in my email and even worse directly calling. I tend to reply to all requests there short but polite.

I got a job from LinkedIn in 2022 or so. Of course it only lasted about a year lol.

I’ve also gotten jobs via direct application a few times. Certainly not the greatest of jobs, but people often question if anyone gets jobs that’s way too.

The only reason I’m employed now though is basically nepotism. What a great future we’ve built for ourselves.

hackernews has a good signal to noise ratio, noise is bad

Honestly, HN has a lot of people getting infuriated by storms in teacups and spouting shit. Definitely an order of magnitude better than Reddit or Facebook but still not the same as IRL.

hackernews as a whole has the same issue software engineers have - overestimating one's wisdom and overapplying it with confidence to everything, resulting in horrible takes that might look like signals but are mostly noise

Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.

LinkedIn has aggressive anti-bot features. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of that 2.4G is that

I know but I think it's more of a 'feature' to prevent recruiters and advertisers from avoiding their overpriced subscriptions and scrape data.

Knowing that doesn't make LinkedIn a better platform in my eyes, on the contrary. It's more an 'if you pay you can do whatever you want' kinda thing.

>Twitter

social media is only bad if you don't curate what you're looking at. most the platforms these days have features to block posts containing certain words or hashtags.

i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.

It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.

I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.

Most social media is actively against that, feeding you recommendations to keep you on the platform.

The only site that actively funnels me with recommendations is Youtube at this point. In most cases that's fine for my taste because I use youtube as more of a learning platform for things like car mechanics, photography, etc. So it doesn't serve me anything toxic.

For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.

Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags. They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new content there.

Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.

Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.

Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.

So there's this "curation" for me.

It seems like a lot of your issues with the major platforms are from years ago?

Instagram and X never show me political topics or hype-related things because I am quick to enter related keywords into the filtering mechanisms.

Instagram can sometimes try to force through things but in general my feed has been pretty clean to the extent that rather than showing me random garbage it'll just say I've reached the end of the latest posts from people I follow. Besides, most people I want to keep up with these days post more often to stories. If anything the issue with stories is more frequent ads/sponsored posts but those are different from just recommendation junk.

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