LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe

Here’s a fun thing that happened to me on LinkedIn:<p>A few years back, I was job hunting, using LinkedIn at bit to find leads. During this ongoing process, my father, who’d been receiving chemotherapy treatments passed away.<p>Being the “technical one” it fell to me to manage his various accounts. I logged into his gmail from the same browser I’d used LinkedIn, and started to contact people he knew but was out of touch with.<p>The next day, I started receiving email, from my dead father, from LinkedIn. Claiming he’d just joined the service and wanted to connect to me.<p>I still don’t have the words for this, years later.<p>What exactly is wrong with these folks at LinkedIn? They seem like caricatures of actual humans to me now, and I no longer even bother to visit the site.<p>If anything positive comes from cancel-culture, canceling LinkedIn would be my preference.

Imagine you have a friend. A good friend.<p>One day, when you&#x27;re not paying attention, your friend says to you, in a tonguetwister, &quot;ifyoudontmindmelookingthroughyouraddressbookandcallingeveryonesaywhat?&quot;<p>&quot;What?&quot; you reply.<p>&quot;Nothing.&quot;, says friend.<p>Later that day, when you&#x27;re not looking, your friend copies all the numbers out of your address book and starts calling everyone. If they pick up the phone, friend says:<p>&quot;Good afternoon, Friend&#x27;s Name, Your Name said you&#x27;d be interested in my new social network, would you like to sign up?&quot;<p>If you found out that this had happened, would you still be friends with this person? Would you still talk to them? Would you still want to know what they have to say?

LinkedIn taught me, back in 2005, to never link my address book to anything. This has been so helpful because any time an app wants to do anything with my address book, I assume that they will do the dumbest, most embarrassing thing possible.<p>Also, I used to have the “I don’t care if people see what I do setting” turned on, because why not. Then LinkedIn started emailing people because I moused over their post and stuff. Some contact emailed me to ask what I needed from her and it was so weird. And the email it sent her was super incorrect and stupid and said something like “Prepend wants to get back in touch with you.”

Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you &quot;get&quot; online networking.<p>- If you see it as a place to mostly transact with recruiters, Yes, your feed is absolutely going to be crap. If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.<p>- If you see online networking as shouting-from-rooftops self promotion, of course you&#x27;ll notice the worst of the worst shouters. If you realize anyone you&#x27;ll ever need to engage with professionally is basically a click away, you start looking at what on these people&#x27;s mind. You don&#x27;t care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it&#x27;s a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points.<p>- &quot;Performing professionalism&quot; is the best. Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users&#x27; fear for their own reputation. Being an ass might end up costing real dollars, so maybe best avoided, the logic goes. You don&#x27;t see trolling; you don&#x27;t see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There&#x27;s a lot to like in that.<p>Plus, LinkedIn is nerdy. Text posts actually perform better than links. Attention is fairly aligned with follower count. (I&#x27;ve collected data for a year, and some pretty clear trends emerge)<p>So yeah, it&#x27;s good that we have this variant of a social network, if anything I wish there were more like it.

LinkedIn is like every large internet gathering (Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, etc): 80% is a sea of thoughtless garbage, 15% is trivial but entertaining, and the remaining 5% is genuinely useful information and functionality that didn&#x27;t exist 15 years ago. The stuff the article points out--hilariously--is the equivalent of browsing r&#x2F;politics (or r&#x2F;wallstreetbets the past 2 weeks).<p>For useful 5% LinkedIn my principles are:<p>- I unfollow all companies and people so the newsfeed is totally empty.<p>- I don&#x27;t post, like, follow, or any other kind of interaction<p>- I add everyone I meet professionally (school, work, networking, etc) immediately after meeting them.<p>- I keep my profile updated with essentials only (pictures, work history, etc).<p>This has some nice benefits that are hard to replicate:<p>- In the event I need to reach out to that one person I used to work with, for whatever reason, I have a way to reach them without ever having to get personal contact info like an email address or phone number.<p>- If I need to put a name to a face for someone in a professional network, I can do a glance through LinkedIn. I think everyone appreciates when someone takes the time to remember you, so this is really valuable.<p>- The occasional &quot;what is that one friend doing 5-10 years later&quot;. Just the other day I was browsing alumni from my school and saw a friend I haven&#x27;t seen in about 10 years. Turns out, we both changed careers and went into software engineering!

I treat everything on LinkedIn as a press release. Not just content from organizations, but especially that from individuals representing themselves or their (small) businesses.<p>It&#x27;s all just a dishonest representation of their &#x27;best self&#x27;.<p>The LinkedIn Crowd is just as bad as the Instagram influencer crowd and I hate what the internet is becoming.

I enjoy using LinkedIn<p>Why? My timeline is exclusively about professional interests. Blog posts, interesting papers, etc. Sure there&#x27;s marketing crap in there, but that&#x27;s also nice as I get to see what my contacts are building &#x2F; hustling. I find it inspiring. After all, most of them I know as actual people doing cool stuff.<p>Meanwhile Twitter&#x2F;Facebook are negativity cesspools, it&#x27;s hard to spend much time there.

I think we&#x27;re almost at the point where the predictive text bots could all chat with each other in the LinkedIn echo chamber. I look forward to the day where I get a notification from &quot;me&quot; on LinkedIn saying we just had a great interview and start at the new company next Monday.

Perhaps the author is in an alternate universe.<p>Unlike what the author thinks linkedin revenue isn&#x27;t largely fueled by recruiter business. It is driven by where he thinks they are weak: linkedin marketing solutions, or in friendlier words &quot;feed interactions&quot;. See the most recent microsoft earnings report:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;view.officeapps.live.com&#x2F;op&#x2F;view.aspx?src=https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c.s-microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;CMSFiles&#x2F;PressReleaseFY21_Q1.docx?version=cdf5530f-8dd6-85aa-4e21-78ebf85c610b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;view.officeapps.live.com&#x2F;op&#x2F;view.aspx?src=https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c....</a><p>And unlike what the author thinks linkedin navigated the current climate around social networks pretty well. Not only they&#x27;ve succeeded in keeping the network out of the political environment, and showed strong growth in user base and engagement (see above report), they also ranked as the most trusted social network consistently according to Business Insider Digital Trust study:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;us-digital-trust-study-from-insider-intelligence-2020-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;us-digital-trust-study-from-...</a><p>I&#x27;m not going to argue the author does not have valid points, but the main argument doesn&#x27;t connect with actual results.

Here’s my take on linkedIn,<p>1) If you are looking for a job then it’s great to use linkedIn since a lot of companies put their listings on the platform and its also perfect to remain in touch with your old colleagues<p>2) If you are a passionate technologist&#x2F;programmer who loves to discover new technologies ,software , tools or what’s happening in the industry then I must say linkedIn might not be a great place since its more like filled with people who are just posting content to gain likes or visibility just like every other social media.<p>Using LinkedIn does become depressing when you start seeing posts from people saying “ohh they landed their dream jobs while you might be searching for jobs and then you start comparing yourself with other people on linkedIn. You become depressed.<p>And that’s one of the reasons I stopped using LinkedIn its nothing but a place full of people who are chasing likes<p>LinkedIn is great for marketing and looking for jobs but if you are technologist&#x2F;programmer who wants to learn something new or expand their knowledge I would suggest using specific programming related subreddits or hackernews<p>Honestly I have gained so much knowledge just by using these platforms and I’m really thankful to people who contribute to hackernews with amazing links

I exclusively use LinkedIn to find new jobs.<p>I set it to &quot;Open to Finding New Jobs&quot;, and then get 1 to 2 applications per week. I found my last two jobs by recruiters contacting me.<p>It works great for that. I never had any use for all the social networking.

My recent &quot;LinkedIn is annoying&quot; story:<p>I rarely ever log in to LinkedIn, but do have their app on my phone (which I also rarely use). And I always ignore whatever stupid notifications it triggers (it seems they are almost as needy as Facebook). About a month ago, this LinkedIn notification pops up on my phone:<p>&quot;Ding! You&#x27;re distracted (again). Here are tips for staying focused.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not distracted. I&#x27;m using my phone. And interrupting what I&#x27;m doing to tell me I&#x27;m distracted is...impressively oblivious.

I don&#x27;t find much value in the LinkedIn timeline, for reasons well-described by this article.<p>However, LinkedIn has been of tremendous value to me as a founder of an enterprise software company. I see two primary areas for value:<p>1) Sales - LinkedIn allows me to quickly understand who I&#x27;m dealing with. Size of company, positions, org chart, etc. This is important information to know when trying to move along the sales process.<p>2) Recruiting - LinkedIn profiles are essentially a public resume directory. When folks are recommended or referred, I can often get a good sense of their resume by checking LinkedIn. This saves time for everyone when the connection does not need to be made due to lack of fit.

&quot;what happens when you have a literally captive audience and the company can do whatever they want in terms of data abuse and features&quot;<p>If you are employed, you cannot fathom how dependent on linkedin some people are. It is when you are most vulnerable that they get that $5 to see who viewed your profile (I didn&#x27;t even know they had that feature until some out-of-work friends were talking about it)

LinkedIn weirds me out. It&#x27;s like there&#x27;s a machine somewhere churning out bubbly young blondes and they all wind up as recruiters on LinkedIn. There was even one that billed herself as part of a combination job-search and matchmaking service: get an interview and a date! It&#x27;s not surprising that some guys are getting confused, because there are users who are intentionally recreating an &quot;enterprise&quot; version of the thirst&#x2F;influence dynamic of other social networks.

I don&#x27;t like LinkedIn as a <i>social network</i> but as a hiring manager, there&#x27;s nothing else close to it. Sometimes we wish there were, but it definitely fills a niche.

I like LinkedIn. It&#x27;s one of the few places on the internet which still has this &#x27;wild west&#x27; vibe. I enjoy the random connection requests and scam attempts. It&#x27;s the only social network which actually allows me to meet smart interesting people outside of my immediate network.<p>Maybe LinkedIn doesn&#x27;t work so well if you&#x27;re a rich person, but as a regular person I really like it. I&#x27;ve established many successful personal and business connections through LinkedIn.

I dropped my LinkedIn years ago because they either tricked me into connecting my email contacts or did it without my permission.<p>Every time I logged in it would ask &quot;Do you want to find new connections from your mail list?&quot; Every. Time.<p>One day it stopped asking. Week or so later I got a suggestion for random people I emailed once years earlier. Got curious and checked settings and saw it was connected to my email contacts.<p>No idea how, maybe I accidently clicked it? Maybe they decided they knew better than I did. Whatever caused it I closed my account that day.<p>Couple years later (I think?) MS purchased linkedin and I smiled to myself safe in the knowledge it was only a matter of time until MS ruined it and every abandoned the platform. I was mistaken on that one.

My experience with LinkedIn is remarkably positive. I am contacted a few times a month for professional opportunities and two of my most recent jobs started from recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a chance to put forward your best self to the professional world. It is a serious force multiplier - do the work once to make your profile really shine and reap continual benefits.<p>Knowing who is looking at your profile (and hence who might be interviewing you for a new job) is incredibly useful information. Does this person have a technical or a business background? Do we know the same people from previous jobs? Do we have similar interests or did we go to the same school?<p>All of that information is very powerful when meeting someone for the first time and can give you that 5%-10% edge during an interview. It&#x27;s the kind of information that allows you to make a great first impression.<p>I am not affiliated with LinkedIn but would recommend it to anyone struggling to find the right opportunity in the technology world.

Social networks are just vacuums of interest and I think they&#x27;ll continue on that trajectory until an inevitable societal disinterest in centralized information sharing platforms.<p>The internet <i>will never</i> reflect reality.<p>- If you walk around venting to everyone all the time, you will have no friends.<p>- If you walk around virtue signaling and one-upping people all the time, you will have no friends.<p>- If you walk around telling people all the prestigious companies and schools you&#x27;ve attended, you will have no friends.<p>Except on the internet all of the above is totally acceptable and even encouraged. People love to share information about themselves, there&#x27;s a psychological component to this. It feels good.<p>- It feels good to let people know exactly how frustrated and slightly nihilistic with the world you are.<p>- It feels good to unload on the political opposition and get likes and shares in return.<p>- It feels good to have reductionist arguments that get cited on mainstream news.<p>You can delve into plenty of reasons why people do this stuff. Personally, I don&#x27;t think it matters and I say that as someone who detests social media so much that I stay off of it. People come to the internet for different reasons and those reasons find an intersection on social media. I love IRC primarily for this but also because it couples anonymity with the service. We get some abusers and manipulators but even the stalking and harassment attempts that people have tried on me are worth the stay. I can speak freely and relate to people in a way that would not be possible otherwise, and largely I thank the culture of Freenode and it&#x27;s channels for that. Yet, Freenode is also a vacuum of interest, just one designed for nerds that communicate over ASCII anonymously.<p>Join the network that&#x27;s right for you, just like you would in real life.

All the good points that social networks have, as noted in this thread, forums also have. You get to know people, you recognize them even if never seen in person, you may hire or be hired from there and you may discuss interesting or hot topic without being a pretender. I’ve seen it many times on local tech forums. These have less reach, but more meaning. ‘Social network’ thing that puts a profile first and topics second is what brings this madness: self-presentation, fake friends&#x2F;connections, viral idiocy, etc. We as a species are not ready to go full-public and stay ourselves. I think that the reason is in our deep history, when a leader or a current speaker that climbs up a rock has to behave and speak differently (publicly) than when we hunt or fight together. When everyone climbs their own rock, a tribe becomes a silly circus.

This could just be re-titled as &quot;Sometimes people turn their brain off when interacting online&quot;. Is it shocking anymore that people openly say bigoted stuff &quot;with their real name, alma mater and workplace all listed&quot;? They do this on Facebook as well.<p>&gt; In this story, straight from the weird world of LinkedIn, people use Skype in 2020, hiring managers give unsolicited feedback on performance at the end of an interview, and contracts are flourished and signed immediately.<p>This phrasing really left a sour taste. Perish forbid people use Skype for a job interview. What, they couldn&#x27;t FaceTime? This man living in a one-room apartment with his family couldn&#x27;t have the decency to have an iPhone or join the rest of the 21st century in installing Zoom?

While I love linkedin, as it makes it very easy to apply to so many jobs, the photos seriously need to be removed.<p>A person&#x27;s physical attractiveness should play no role in hiring, many people who are disabled might not be able to take photogenic pics. Those people are heavily disadvantaged, any person of color is heavily disadvantaged, I really hate the idea of social media creeping into LinkedIn.<p>For one it doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense for your political or social views to become a part of your employability. It&#x27;s a resume not a statement on who you are. Then again I generally hate social media because it leads to the least informed shouting the loudest.

&gt; The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars speaks for itself.

I enjoyed this article because I feel the same way about LinkedIn, and also really like the term &quot;performative professionalism&quot;.

I was turned down for a job I was fully qualified for due to not having enough contacts on linked in.<p>The hiring manager said he wanted a candidate with greater linked presence.<p>Actual scope of the job was fully orthogonal to linked in

We need a rethink of how we&#x27;re monetizing our privacy. We&#x27;re like chumps at the table.<p>So, current state of affairs is we get bunch of free services, with IRL lockin effects, and place control of social norms in the hands of a handful of companies.<p>In the aggregate, it&#x27;s fair to value these free services at say $1000.00 a year, if you paid for it.<p>Now, is our privacy really that cheap?<p>Shouldn&#x27;t LinkedIn-cum-Microsft being paying me to get an inside seat at my professional life? They pay me, and we exchange a strictly delimeted bits of information I am willing to part for payment.<p>I bet, lol, that one would <i>easily</i> make far more than a grand a year from <i>selling</i> specific bits of one&#x27;s personal and professional life to interested companies, maintain direct control of one&#x27;s privacy regime, and likely end up enriched, rather than sucker punched as is the case today.

I have actually had good experiences with LinkedIn. I use it to keep in touch with co-workers and there’s more to it than recruiter-prospect communication:<p>• Using LinkedIn to contact old co-workers when I need a reference.<p>• An old boss of mine at one point needed someone for a contract he just got, with gave me the perfect short-term gig.

Given how central LinkedIn is to many people’s professional careers, I find it shocking that their support department is not contactable via email.<p>Do they even have a support department?<p>Everything is fine until you have an issue. If your issue isn’t answered by one of their pre-written articles, then there isn’t much you can do about it.<p>There are a surprising number of “big” tech companies that do the same.<p>- Reddit support for example, I only ever get automated responses. They just got a $6 billion valuation, yet they have no support email.<p>- Substack doesn’t list its support email on their website, I only found their support email by searching Twitter, found a random tweet that mentioned it, and amazingly it was the right address.

When it comes to what school you went to, you can tell LinkedIn whatever you want. Just make sure you silently set it back to something true once you get that job offer and look confused when your recruiter thinks you went to school in Boston.

I&#x27;ve heard LinkedIn is very helpful when you&#x27;re looking to switch jobs, but unfortunately this has not been my experience.<p>I noticed that everyone on LinkedIn projected themselves as an &quot;expert&quot; on something and in their own way wanted you to believe (marketed themselves) as someone who could solve every problem they&#x27;d encounter. This left a particularly bad taste for me, so I didn&#x27;t seek out to network way too much on LinkedIn. People I know have 500+ connections on there, while I have about a few dozen. Perhaps this is the reason for my unsuccessful attempts at landing an interview from recruiters lurking on LinkedIn.

I had an amazing (amazingly bad) recruiter experience recently. They managed to make three screw-ups in the very first two sentences: &quot;We are looking for a talented Back End Engineer [1], and if you think you are ready, a Back End Engineering Team Lead [2]. Don’t worry that you don’t have healthcare experience, you get to learn that with us [3].&quot;<p>[1] I haven&#x27;t done hands-on coding in 10 years, as my LinkedIn profile clearly shows. [2] I&#x27;ve been in management and senior management roles, perhaps I am ready for a team lead role indeed :) [3] I do actually have healthcare experience.<p>We really need a tool that addresses copy-paste-driven recruiting.

Got a bunch of jobs via LinkedIn.<p>The recruiters only wasted my time, but I got a bunch of messages from CXOs and VPs that got me good gigs.

For some time I thought I was the only one with issues on LinkedIn. I&#x27;m happy to see I was wrong. My fundamental issue with it is that I believe it takes more from the society than what it gives back, it&#x27;s extractive. On a world where inequality is rising and unemployment is hitting records on multiple countries, LinkedIn keeps its approach of having to pay $29 to see more things and get advantages. If you&#x27;re based in countries where $29 is too much, too bad for you. Its purpose is to make money with my job search, not with the fact that I found a job.

Previous discussion from 2 months ago with 277 comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25320536" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25320536</a>

LinkedIn is where my totally unethical former employer offers me &quot;consulting opportunities&quot; at $500&#x2F;hr every 6 months to keep tabs on whether I still keep their shady shit confidential.

Originally I had linkedin in 2009 to keep track of my contacts (as that was what they were for at the time, afaicr).<p>Unfortunately I can&#x27;t easily export contacts anymore, so I&#x27;m kind of stuck. The number of dark patterns linkedin uses is ... rather large. And every few months I come back, it seems like there&#x27;s some new option to share my Personal data. Defaulted to &quot;on&quot; of course.<p>I keep meaning to hand-copy all the contact information I still need and delete my account, but it&#x27;s a lot of work so I keep putting it off.

I&#x27;ve muted most people in my network. The amount of self and mutual-mas2batory posting is nauseating.

OMG! i just realized that microsoft owns two social networks: linkedin and github. never thought of it that way before. always thought they were left out of the social network game.<p>interesting.

recent message: &quot;<i>we help founders focus on their work by offloading their repetitive tasks! Anything we can help you with?</i>&quot;<p>reply: &quot;<i>Can you help me outsource the repetitive task of deleting spam linkedin requests?</i>&quot;

The most awful thing about LinkedIn is that for most people you HAVE to use it, if you apply for a job and you don&#x27;t have a LinkedIn account or it isn&#x27;t up to date the vast majority of HR departments will ignore your application completely. Yes I hold both lazy HR people and LinkedIn for this. I&#x27;ve had women look me up on linkedin and refuse a date because of it too. Truly dystopian.

I have not logged on to LinkedIn for years. And when I do, it is only for its search engine for work. 75% of the ads forward you to the company&#x27;s website where I actually apply.<p>When I get my next piece of work, I add LinkedIn back to the AdBlock&#x2F;PrivacyBadger and leave it out the door. That &quot;platform.linkedin.com&quot; (and the share button) tends to pop up in other corners of the internet.

It doesn&#x27;t seem like the guidelines or FAQs mention this (so maybe the rule changed), but shouldn&#x27;t this have (2020) in the title?

The last couple of job searches I updated or recreated and this time around I again realized how pointless it is. It&#x27;s a circle jerk for HR, is jampacked full of terrible recruiters, the job search is beyond worthless. I see absolutely no reason to have an account there ever again<p>From my perspective it has been and is a ball of &quot;who gives a shit&quot;

I also have one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allagora.wordpress.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;technology-makes-it-easier-for-conversations-to-lose-their-soul&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allagora.wordpress.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;technology-makes-i...</a><p>I still don&#x27;t understand what the benefit of those standard text blocks is.

Interestingly Quora has also adopted the LinkedIn self-promoting hustling style crossed with positivity&#x2F;profundity porn.

&quot;He was the dog&quot; story was best :)

This -verbatim- in my email yesterday:<p>&gt;&gt; Hi, First Name,<p>I tried to reach out to you with a Linkedin Connection, but I had no luck, So I’m trying InMail! ... &lt;&lt;<p>Yup. Linkedin. And there&#x27;s still a part of me that believes I&#x27;m gonna get my next job from there.

I don&#x27;t care if people on LinkedIn want to marinade in their own sauce.<p>I believe most people keep their accounts for the same reason as me, which is to maintain network of people you worked with, contacts to recruiters, to get leads to potential job opportunities and to find people to recruit. It is nice to know when your colleague changed job or is looking for new one.<p>Other than those I completely ignore all other content.<p>I believe people who post those messages are either pressed to get some publicity or&#x2F;and misunderstand what LinkedIn is for.

A fairly unique and interesting feature of LinkedIn that I&#x27;ve noticed: posts seem to have a much longer tail than, say, Twitter or Facebook. If I share a text-based post with useful info, it&#x27;s often still getting engagement 15 or even 30 days later.<p>And because the median quality of LinkedIn posts is <i>so bad</i>, good, non self-aggrandizing posts really stand out. The algorithm is GREAT at elevating them.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m saying is, posting on LinkedIn in good faith is the new attention economy market inefficiency.

So often here on HN, things like: Object Orient Programming is absolute garbage! LinkedIn is the Devils social network! Python has all these WTFs, why aren&#x27;t we killing it in favor of Julia? Here I am, I found my job through LinkedIn, applied to places where my classmates ended up. That was nice. And I use classes in Python when it suits me and I even build stuff that people appreciate (how!?). Oh yeah, I also enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, take my Karma!

I use it to keep in some level of contact with a wide group of work contacts as they move around the industry. But it’s not an enjoyable experience. I wrote about how it could be improved in the hope someone would do it... so far still waiting. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eutopian.io&#x2F;building-a-better-linkedin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eutopian.io&#x2F;building-a-better-linkedin&#x2F;</a>

I have a linkedin account, but I only login when I&#x27;m thinking about getting a new job. I find the whole thing disturbing and annoying.

LinkedIn has provided a treasure trove of comedy material. I especially enjoy Joshua Fluke&#x27;s youtube channel [1] where he shows cringeworthy team building videos he culled from LinkedIn.<p>[1]. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UC-91UA-Xy2Cvb98deRXuggA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UC-91UA-Xy2Cvb98deRXuggA</a>

The vast majority of people have no reason to &quot;network&quot; professionally. They have nothing to give and nothing to take.

So if it&#x27;s so bad...which we can all mostly agree on. Why hasn&#x27;t a better solution taken hold of the market?

I find LI is providing me with a daily feed of good material mixed with the silly stuff, but it took a long time.<p>Now I can&#x27;t look at LinkedIn because there are too many <i>good</i> posts about technically interesting things, conferences I find interesting, general industry commentary, and announcements about scientific and technical developments that I find novel and glad to have discovered. I just don&#x27;t have time to read them.<p>LI definitely learns over time from interactions and connections, and it seems to have learned what I want to see to make it addictive.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of guff as well, the self-promoting and nonsense puff pieces. But it&#x27;s easy to recognise and scroll past.<p>I&#x27;ve found some good thoughtful writing that I enjoy too, and activist pieces by people obviously promoting their own business and themselves, yet doing something decent for others in the process. Especially a few recruiters: There&#x27;s a few putting the time in to teaching people who are struggling at finding a job in a pandemic how to do it better, for example.<p>And in open source hardware, I&#x27;m seeing a lot of activist-style writing at the moment.<p>Mainly I wanted to say, for the HN audience, that there&#x27;s a surprising amount of interesting scientific and technology announcements to be found, if LI learns what kind you&#x27;re into and starts picking it out.<p>I&#x27;ve also met a small number of really interesting people via LI, with whom I now talk off LI, and ended up with some great contracts and now my current job through it. All of these through people who approached me. I&#x27;ve never applied for anything via LinkedIn.<p>And been to some great online conferences last year that I only discovered through people mentioning them on LI, leading to something of a minor career change (still in tech).<p>For me I can&#x27;t deny LI has been very helpful, though it took a while to get better.<p>I still refrain from posting, though, and I&#x27;m also rather conscious that people can see what I &quot;liked&quot;. So I&#x27;m a bit careful with those choices, while remaining genuine. I have been acutely aware of the &quot;professional appearance&quot; thing, not wanting to affecting job prospects by writing the wrong sorts of things, or even sensible things in the wrong sorts of drama zones.<p>Perhaps that carefulness and drama-subject avoidance worked out to tune LI&#x27;s feed towards better quality things for me to see.

&gt; The professional neg: Recruiters ask senior level employees if they’re interested in entry level roles or, better yet, internships.<p>Wait, this is a thing? Knowing this makes me feel a lot better. This always leaves me scratching my head when it happens. Kind of messed up that they do this.

This article makes it to the top of Hacker News every 2-3 weeks since it was published. It’s so weird.

All this and more is why I never signed up for LinkedIn, I think they&#x27;re a bunch of scammers and a very nice collection of dark patterns and there is no way I&#x27;m going to support a company like that with either my content or my presence.

&gt; <i>Many of us have profiles but don’t log in for months at a time.</i><p>Not those &quot;us&quot; who write articles like this, though.<p>Those actual &quot;us&quot; who actually don&#x27;t log in for months at a time don&#x27;t know anything about any of this stuff.

I get so many invites of recruiters; not to offer me a job, but to sell me their data science services and products.<p>And what about the &#x27;your expertise is required&#x27; messages that turn out to be questionnaires.<p>It&#x27;s getting a bit like FB.

I&#x27;ve never signed up for a LinkedIn account. As far as I can tell it hasn&#x27;t been a problem for me as I&#x27;ve been happily employed ever since I graduated from college.<p>Am I missing anything?

This resonates so well because LinkedIn is great and terrible.<p>To give it its due - both my current and previous role materialized because a determined internal recruiter did a thoughtful search and found me on LinkedIn. So: really important career development milestones happened for me because of LinkedIn.<p>Say it more bluntly - I make more money and have a broader skillset&#x2F;experience because of LinkedIn. From that point of view it&#x27;s the most valuable website I&#x27;ve ever visited.<p>On the flip side, the social elements of LinkedIn feel bolted on and are absolutely horrific.<p>The classic turd of LI is the &quot;influencer&quot; who crafts a virtue-signaling (I hate that term but it applies here) post of which the linked article has plenty of examples. It tends to be admonishment to either be kind or bold. Either &quot;A man came for an interview. I could tell he was exhausted and said he had kids at home. So I hired him even though he had none of he qualifications&quot; or &quot;Don&#x27;t be your own detractor - even if you know you aren&#x27;t remotely qualified for a job, apply.&quot;<p>The key thing here is it&#x27;s terrible advice. If anyone actually did this, they&#x27;d go out of business or be black-listed as a candidate. Nobody actually does this shit but it somehow resonates as &quot;feel good&quot; with enough people.<p>All of this is magnified by the worst feature LI could possibly have: when someone likes something, all of their network sees it - same as if they actually posed content. I guarantee you, when someone out of he kindness of their heart clicks &quot;like&quot; on the &quot;I hired the unqualified dad&quot; post, they aren&#x27;t intending to broadcast that post to their hundreds&#x2F;thousands of contacts, but that&#x27;s what happens.<p>There&#x27;s actually a non-trivial group of my contacts that I want to maintain contact with (key to industry, good friends from b-school) who are terribly guilty of this behavior and there&#x27;s nothing you can do to protect your feed. It&#x27;s actually gross.<p>I don&#x27;t understand LI&#x27;s strategy at all. LI is immensely valuable because it has a real deep, proven knowledge of real professionals, who leverage LinkedIn to recruit and be recruited - which are immensely valuable (see my example.) Similarly, it&#x27;s strategic to be up to date on where my former colleagues are ending up etc, so I&#x27;d be a regular LI user for those reasons. I&#x27;d even pay.<p>This bolted on social stuff MIGHT look good on some engagement metric, but it&#x27;s clearly such low trashy engagement that it detracts from the value of the business, and it&#x27;s so apparent to me as an outsider that I can&#x27;t understand what they are thinking.

LinkedIn is for recruiters. It is networking is a myth

My main issue with LinkedIn&#x27;s timeline is there is no way to only see content actually posted by your contacts.<p>I don&#x27;t care if someone I met at an industry conference <i>liked</i> something posted by someone I&#x27;ve never met. And 99% of the time, I don&#x27;t even care if they commented (especially if it&#x27;s a pre-written congratulatory &#x27;comment&#x27; that LinkedIn suggested to them).<p>Annoyingly, the only way to &#x27;improve&#x27; my timeline is to add more people&#x2F;companies to follow. That&#x27;s pretty much the exact opposite of what I want to do.

I guess most of these are consequences of trying to solve problems that doesn’t really exist.

At internet scale, Sturgeon’s Law is six-sigma.<p>For LinkedIn, add a couple more nines.

i would also want to burn linkedin to the ground, but i found pretty much most of my jobs through it so not sure how i would do otherwise

I fear people who enjoy using LinkedIn.

The description at the end about how it&#x27;s basically a hostage situation but with the hostage takers trying to be fun is the most excellent metaphor for anything I&#x27;ve ever heard.<p>It&#x27;s so fucking accurate, and explains why the site&#x27;s content trends towards a very corporate-friendly &quot;safe quirky&quot; that I personally find nauseating.

LinkedIn is a ghetto with no redeeming value.<p>It has close to 0 value for job seekers. In the past year I’ve received 5 real contacts from hiring managers (sadly all of whom wanted SRE, not DevOps. I find sre dull and I would rather be on the dole than waste my life in performance analysis).<p>I also received over 1,500 connection requests and 5,000 InMails from parasitic headhunters. None of those had jobs amenable to my location or skillset. 75% of them were from spam houses in India. The other 25% were from generally incompetent headhunting sweatshops in the usa.<p>I don’t give a crap about inspirational stories frok the head of DailyMail (I Hired a FELON), or other social media garbage. I just wanted a job.<p>I gave up on my search and deleted my linkedin protile for good this week. It was the most freeing feeling since deleting pagerduty and facebook.<p>I worked for Reid Hoffman about 20 years ago. If I could get him on the phone I would ask him if he had any idea what a piece of trash linkedin has become.

LinkedIn is useful to network with recruiters and have yourself be &#x27;available&#x27; in the job market - basically a phone directory for resumes. But I definitely do not care for its news feed or other social features, which are simply either marketing&#x2F;advertising posts or political posts these days. It has become especially bad with the overt injection of progressive politics into many companies&#x27; practices in this last year, particularly their outward-facing public relations, all of which is leaking into LinkedIn and turning it into Facebook or Twitter.

LinkedIn is malware. Any proper secured network that care about its users block it.

As a lawyer who depends on network building, especially a during no-contact world, LinkedIn is critical to me to stay up to speed, increase interaction with clients&#x2F;colleagues, source new hires, etc.

The best way to get out of the LinkedIn treadmill is to take control of your own presentation. At Leet Resumes, we write engineering resumes for free (premium hosting services coming this fall): www.leetresumes.com<p>Use us, or use someone else, or write your own resume and host it on your own personal site. It&#x27;s better to own your own presentation on the web than rely on a distant, and perhaps not friendly, corporation.