This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
> pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example
Pricing can definitely be marketing and is crucial to the company. The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.
Otherwise I agree bullshitting can be interesting and analytical, when looking at a full campaign promoting a life style or solely aimed at imprinting the brand, it's full on the fuzzy side but it is all extremely thought out, and grounded in relatively solid research when it comes to the bigger players.
> The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.
Marketing is not advertisement.
It definitely has a significant overlap with operations. I mean it’s in the name really: it’s about how you go to the market.
Every time someone wonders if they would make more by going for a subscription or a lump sum payment and how they should structure their pricing tiers and what should be put in them, they are unknowingly doing marketing.
Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.
You can market products that people need. A big part of this is explaining and educating someone about what your product does, another part is just getting the word out there. Every website homepage is more-or-less a marketing page.
If no one is marketing a product, then nobody knows about it.
Yes, that's my take. I'm of the opinion we should outlaw advertising. If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.
But then, I don't exist to do business. Acquiring profit isn't my goal. Acquiring status, rank, or advantage over my fellows isn't my goal. Its the goal of those we let run roughshod over the rest of us justified by phrases like "well its just human nature to be greedy; nothing to be done!" or "If I don't do it someone else will!"
This is how low we've sunk: lying is so normalized that we can't envison a world without it.
> If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.
Not necessarily. First, you somehow need to reach the initial batch of customers - whether by free samples or talking to power users, you're already engaging in marketing. Then, even when they like your product, they have no obligation to do the advertising for you, for free.
And it's possible the company folds before the product reaches the critical mass to rely just on word-of-mouth.
I mean I don't disagree. One of my favorite quotes I've been saying for years is "Advertising shits in your brain."
But at the same time I think only relying on word of mouth is a bit biased against people who aren't starting with an advantage of a pre-existing network for whatever worthwhile service they could be offering.
That being said, plenty of successful service based freelancers will tell you most of their business is from referrals at a certain point. It's just hard to get to that point. (I say this as someone who only gets business from referrals right now, but wants that to not be the case.)
Yea idk, I totally agree with you in spirit. But I care about practicality and I have found worthwhile services from solo-freelancers via marketing.
Good marketing doesn't have to equal garbage. But I feel ya. Most marketing is mind numbing.
I think if we strengthened fraud provision we eliminate many societal problems, including marketing. If marketers were required to be completely honest and transparent, a lot of this goes away.
It can be this, but there are a lot of things that people actually do need, and they have choices in what to buy. Good marketing will catch their interest and convert it to sales.
Because a megacorporation hires psychologists (in the form of marketers) to gin up scenarios where class mobility is implied as a subtext in the acquisition of their goods? I mean, who doesn't want to have the fun/get the girls/get the money because they bought {insert product here}?
How is one to defend one's self against the constant onslaught of bullshit meant to part fools with their money? How is an individual supposed to have any defenses against that? When they're raised in an endless din of lying noise?
Yours is the classic _abusers take_. "If only you were a better person you could stand up for yourself"
I took it to mean my take an implied lack of agency when evaluating advertisements in one's life and if one should act on it.
My take would be that one does indeed lack the agency to be able to evaluate ads that way. The environment itself makes it impossible. SNR is way too low to find valid signals to evaluate. The number being purely honest and informative with zero spin must be close to zero.
no,thats true and honest marketing. If the iPod stopped working after a year (low quality), or was easily hackable (low effort) - and they didn't include that in the marketing - then it would be lying (Windows).
Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
I have noticed that, at least in the Java world, people lie a lot about stuff going "faster", and I think it's just justification to not fix their terrible code.
I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.
For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.
All technical fields sure have their bullshit, wrapped in a layer of something else.
Another one pretty common backing decisions with bullshit or misleading numbers. Like A/B tests that don't cover the whole behavior spectrum or metrics that don't match the point we're making but sound close enough.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
> You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
My impression was all 'content' that does well on LinkedIn (including the stuff I like), is because people want to engage with the creator in hopes they get in their good graces which will somehow help them land a job, or they're in a pact with others and like each others' content.
Recommending others and getting recommended by folks whose word means something might be meaningful, but that's about it.
Regular (and often painfully below average) rubes with a dozen self-appointed titles (SaaS platform evnagelist, Innovator, Tinkerer, Father), who post articles like 'Here's what murdering a homeless man taught me about b2b sales'
are the definition of cringe.
I think you're quite right that most content gets likes and engagement from people promoting their company, their mates in the industry and people whose attention they want to attract, and usually doesn't spread much beyond that. That's the case whether it's genuinely interesting or generic promotions.
But the "viral" content seems to be something else entirely: as you point out a lot of the people are rubes running pre-product start-ups or consulting, and surely there are more people wanting to impress people with actual budgets and teams and products. Feels like they're successfully catering to an algorithm calibrated for bored but easily impressed scrollers (as well as other rubes and bot-operated accounts that want to share their equally unlikely takes on B2B sales) rather than their network.
Recently I saw a recruiter posting side by side screenshots of the engagement with a high effort collection of industry info she'd compiled with infographics and links, and a copy/paste of an unfunny meme with a tagline applying it to her industry. You'll never guess which one had 10x the engagement...
Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area.
Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain experience as engineers, but I wouldn't expect them to be particularly good ones.
On the other hand, I know a couple of outstandingly good engineers I have worked with, who also have some mindshare on private blogs and conferences, but nowhere near the thought leaders, and definitely not on LinkedIn
Now here's the question then...do you wish those outstandingly good engineers (who do seem to want to share their thoughts hence the blogs and conferences) were sharing some of their good thoughts on LinkedIn?
Do we wish more worthwhile people were posting on LinkedIn? Or do we think that posting on LI is incompatible with sharing worthwhile thoughts?
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing.
The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
That's why engineers are engineers. As a profession, they are trained to find the optimal answer to the questions they are asked.
The problem is, people are independent agents and generally prioritize their own outcome. If "being humbled" by some nonsense on LinkedIn gets you a high paying job that you perform poorly at, that's a win -- for you. Even if you get fired, you just roll with it and move to bigger and better things to fail up with.
Is it the best way to solve the problem the company has? No. But linkedin guy dngaf and is not asking that question!
To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.
I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.
How about invoices by telex and payments received by telegraphic transfer to the bank? No cookies though. I'm not sure how the invoicing method or payment channel affect the marketing discussion.
In the case of the shipping company I then worked for the marketing process was somewhat old school and involved pubs.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.
But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]
I try to avoid resorting to ad hominem, but maybe it's just you? In general, no marketing would dial back the economy drastically, which I think is a good idea. Depends on your goals of course.
I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says.
So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.
Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.
I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.
Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.
But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.
I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?
Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.
I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)
So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.
The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.
LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections claiming they get those fabled six and seven figure client engagements where the client “doesn’t care about the code, they just care about business results” and a lot of other buzzwords.
I do data consulting part time, I do very much provide business centric solutions and measurable results (alongside code that your tech team won’t hate) and am an expert in marketing technology, applied AI and a bunch of other “hot” subjects like that.
In my work with huge, billion dollar companies, the consulting dream that LI influencers sell feels like a fantasy world. I have to provide and justify a day rate, and when my clients do have a big CAPEX project I’m bidding against Accenture, Palantir, etc. and I don’t expect to win it.
If anyone really consistently lands these amazing, big pocket clients, please let me be your intern.
LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.
People might have envy for others success which would hurt their ego, but they are greedy enough to stroke someone else's ego, just so that they can get internet points or some "value creation" so that one day others can stroke their egos too.
Haven't the boomers more or less aged out of jobseeking at this point? Even the youngest of the Baby Boomers are around 60 and most of them are in their 70s.
Boomer is now used to refer to a mindset and not just a generation.
Gen X very much became the boomers they hated. Half of the millennials I've known for years have become identical to the boomers they complained about 10 years ago. The millennials I know complain about zoomers being lazy and not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and using strange lingo and being addicted to things their generation wouldn't have tolerated. And they things they like suck but the thing millennials liked were "good".
Basically, boomer is anyone older than you and acts like a grumpy or entitled old person. Zoomer is anyone younger than you who makes you uncomfortable with your age.
The ironic thing is that boomers--the generation that threw off dress codes and produced the anti-war, civil rights, environmental, women's, and LBGT+ movements didn't have that mindset, but their parents and grandparents did.
Retail - most of the good jobs are impossible to get. That's probably what I'll have to do when my current company finishes firing me with my disability. I have used a bunch of the regular job search boards - Dice, Ladders, Indeed, etc. I've also used LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Blind, Hackajob. The tech job market in my location seems abysmal.
gen-x here ... I'd say: anywhere/everywhere but LinkedIn. Be observant and creative.
Personally, I think that using any service that claim to deliver, for which in the real world I just can't find much supporting evidence and otherwise mostly claims from (direct or indirect) stakeholders (incl. users themselves), feels rather dumb. LinkedIn, and the ecosystem developed around it, has every incentive to be dishonest. In such cases, the burden of evidence that proves otherwise needs to be high. I've not seen that bar ever reached for LinkedIn; not even remotely. At least not where I live.
If my perspective leads to people claiming I'm "denying reality" (heard that a few times), it only suggests me how (practically or emotionally) invested some people apparently must be. To me it still looks and feels mostly like a huge fraud-machine. Nothing particularly new specific to LinkedIn though. Before LinkedIn, I've seen how recruitment and hiring agencies wiggled their way into the employment market, where I grew up in. It did not see it do any good. I'd say it shared plenty of characteristics with cancer.
It may take considerable effort, but I'd recommend doing your own due diligence and find potential employers yourself, to then approach them directly. Still works quite well, even today and without needing questionable middlemen/services.
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
Yeah, the thing is that if one person starts doing it, everyone else must as well if they want to compete, regardless of intentions, so it becomes a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
If someone has a legitimate need, they will look for a solution in appropriate locations (directories, search, magazines, what have you) and do not need someone to scream their marketing blurbs into the void in hopes of being noticed.
And marketing folks would be involved in getting the product into directories, search, magazines, etc. What is it that you think marketing people do? They don't write ad copy all day.
Or, far more likely, they'll reach out to someone in their network. To land in that network, you have to market your services. LinkedIn is somewhat useful for that, but less so nowadays.
Right??? Why did Uber ever advertise! Everyone who needed a cab but was tired of cab companies could’ve just like, searched the internet for “service to connect me with normal people who will take me places in their own car” which was also obviously a solution that existed and everyone would’ve known to search for!
As a counter example to the logic, not saying linkedin is this, smashing up someone's stuff could also make them need to buy new stuff to solve a need but wouldn't in any way provide value.
They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.
I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.
All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.
It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.
For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.
>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.
> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.
>Building in public
Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".
I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.
In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.
What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.
Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.
At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?
We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
I really want to incentivize such honesty and morals in general
It seems that you have your company listed in the about page of hackernews so that is nice.
Not sure that post demonstrated any particular morals, but thanks :) So far I've had the luxury to get by well with mostly only doing what I think is right. I consider that a luxury indeed, I don't mind paying for it, much like I pay for other luxuries.
LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.
Okay, but maybe recruiters aren't up on rust iconography. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate a preference (vs it being a shibboleth with the GP).
I mean, unless the recruiter is a rust programmer they're going to have a hard time distinguishing your profile vs just "positions only - or get blocked" (ie don't contact me unless it's about recruitment).
That was very much the intention. I think good tech recruiters should know their field and I know some that do. It's just that LinkedIn is a swamp of bad ones and my little experiment proofed to me that signal noise ratio there is so low that it is useless for me.
Yes. If I want a job without a prior relationship there’s plenty of sites for that like indeed. I’m only interested in job offers from people who have read and valued my work.
Edit: and clearly this is the case because it’s not “Google bot”, it’s a robot pretending to be human like “Amy Bushwack from google” but really it’s a bot
TBH automation for finding/filtering candidates, but preferably personal email to my inbox. I can tell when you’ve used some cruddy software to send automated follow-ups four times after I didn’t respond to the first message.
That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.
As a general rule, if you’re an engineering candidate that made a profile years ago and is missing updates and haven’t put in much description about your work experience beyond “I worked here from this date to that date”, you’re probably a good engineer.
When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.
Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
that sounds a bit rough on graduates. we all start from the bottom and some people are not born with well connected parents or schools with wide networks. I actually think linkedin is a good way to pay it forward (although NOT for low effort graduates who send the same template spam message to everybody)
The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.
The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.
Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.
Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”
I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.
LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.
The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.
Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
which music skills? you can learn enough music theory and pop-song writing skills in a few weekends to pump out club/pop music. Sure, playing instruments is a skill that takes a long time to hone, but anyone can download openMPT or something and toss out music. If money comes in and they want orchestra, there's been things like the Vienna Symphonic Library and the like for decades.
i've written and recorded about a dozen hours worth of music in my life and i assuredly did not go to school for it. The quote is about education, not practice. It also mentions "half-assed job" which is what you get in "six weeks" of work.
Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
This thread is headed by defensive comments alleging that they have benefitted financially from LinkedIn.
These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.
It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.
Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.
The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.
It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".
This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.
Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1
That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)
It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad
HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.
Unfortunately, however, people at many companies, who are responsible for hiring people, are running around on LinkedIn and believe things of value being communicated there, living this strange parallel world or bubble of self-marketers and make believe that is LinkedIn, becoming part of it themselves with their mediocrity. The signal of excellence entirely drowns in a stream of mediocrity on LinkedIn.
Because LinkedIn makes your employment front and center it encourages status games .
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
Yes — I (as somebody who posts to promote my startup) wonder what the true goal is sometimes, as it’s ambiguous.
Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.
My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:
It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.
Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.
It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
"it encourages status games". I think most social media does this. Read a Facebook feed and everyone is either on a beach, had a baby, or got promoted. Nobody is home sick or doing laundry or dealing with a terrible boss.
I was using LinkedIn a couple months ago to look for jobs and the problem was that the feed was really hard to avoid and kept sucking me into wasting my time.
When I did the above two things, it completely nerfed my feed so that I could just focus on jobs.
I hate that this is the only option available. I want to follow my connections, for their own posts, if any. What I don't want is to see everything they like, share, and comment on -- but LinkedIn won't let you turn that part off.
Can't agree. While there are some evergreen postings, LinkedIn job applications still landed me a couple of interviews (and much more compared to cold applying on the company website). And then there's recruiters reaching out which landed me even more interviews + my current - genuinely great - job.
The recruiters reaching out to me are all for terrible companies or for non-remote roles in other areas of the country. It seems Glassdoor and others have better job boards than LinkedIn.
How else are you going to liquidity-stalk that company you left with some options or even shares?
I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.
LinkedIn is a great place to talk to recruiters still. If you're not picky about where you work, you can find a job pretty fast by working with recruiters directly and skipping the cold apply.
The content that feels so vapid (and unfortunately makes a high percentage of what's on there) are the ones where the post itself is the entire body of work. The Photoshop a quote on the wall types.
But there actually IS good content on LinkedIn. It's professionals doing interesting work and posting about it. One user that springs to mind for me does UX for the automotive industry and posts concepts, designs, and experimentations. Its fun and fascinating to watch. And I think it has much more traction to the folks that matter than any post he could do about what his weekly grocery trip taught him about the creative process.
Maybe put another way, build a content brand and not a personality brand. You can still get meaningful, career changing traction. Or do what this author does and just set up your own small tent miles outside the fairground because that's what makes your soul happy. I love the indie web.
To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.
LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.
I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.
And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.
LinkedIn seems like the natural home (origin?) of those oh-so-inane "Motivator" management posters that were so popular in the 1990s. Now if only there were also an outlet there for the "Demotivator" posters that followed. THOSE I liked.
Yeah, it's horrible; I deleted my Facebook a decade ago because I hated what social media interaction was becoming and it was doing a number on my mental health. I deleted my old Twitter a few days ago, and I haven't done anything on Bluesky in months and I never used it much. The only social media I use regularly now is HN and SomethingAwful.
I would so love to just delete my LinkedIn, but you can't do that now. A lot of job applications require you give your LinkedIn. So I am stuck logging in occasionally. It's dystopian.
Unless its a safe enough disagreement. Lynching on an overconfident but incorrect post for example. As long as correcting it makes you look smart, hard working, a leader.
Agreed. The level of mediocrity and group-think on LI is freighting. It’s no wonder so many companies / brands struggle.
Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.
It probably gets that way because nobody wants to be the one to argue back, as it puts them in a bad light. So what's left are cheap platitudes and confirmations.
I understand the unwillingness to argue. But we’re talking foundational flaws in the advice being offered. Even passive aggressive “Are you sure about… ?” Would be 10x better than shameless group-think.
Unlikely as it sounds, being normal is a strategy that works on LinkedIn.
The quality bar is very low. People post so much fluff and AI thought leadership that the algorithm has recently started rejecting it, and LinkedIn essentially ran out of content.
For the past couple of months it's been showing people posts from two or three weeks ago due to the lack of suitable material.
What I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to stand out and build an audience if you just post honestly and thoughtfully about the interesting little puzzles or dilemmas you face during your workday.
Some posts of mine that have hit it off:
> Why is it hard to find clothes for men?
> Why do people think it's weird when I drink milk on Zoom?
> Should I post on X, or do people still frown on it?
Try posting about what you don't know, rather than what you do. People like that more.
> I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity. A seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing.
It took me approximately 5 minutes to install uBlock Origin and create a filter that removes the feed. No more toxic mediocrity to see because there are no posts to see. It makes Linkedin a lot more bearable for me.
What bothers me most is how "fake" it all is. I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices.
Companies with fake job posts that keep on getting recycled (clicking "report this job" does not help at all) aso aso.
It's sort of a parallel universe where everything is nice and dandy... sort of a Barbie universe.
> I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices.
Devil's advocate: what else are they going to say? They're trying to land new business so they can pay those invoices. "We're really struggling and desperately need your money now!" is unlikely to help...
I'm a data scientist and ml engineer, used to be in tech sales before transitioning to a technical role.
I've spent most of my adult life using using linkedin for business development and job search. What people don't realize, it's the worlds most accurate business database. Highly effective for networking, where you can see peoples interests and interaction and match up with like minded peers and contemporaries.
I agree that the user generated content is indeed mediocre.
When it comes to posting content, I subscribe to Cal Newport's theory, if you produce something that is valuable and rare, people will find you. People spending their time posting large amounts of content are not creating anything valuable or rare.
I love LinkedIn as a founder/developer. It's become my main social network after the Twitter acquisition.
Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.
Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).
I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.
I try not to fall into posting generic content. Instead, I focus on sharing real things I’ve built or done, hoping they’re actually useful for someone. For example, my last post was about a weekend app I put together, and I always try to include a link to the app or a github repo so people can try it out for themselves.
Totally agree that LinkedIn rewards toxic mediocrity, but do believe there are ways to avoid those parts of the platforms.
For example, stop following toxically mediocre connections.
LinkedIn will show you things based on what you follow/like/engage with. In my experience, there's troves of real operators posting genuine and helpful advice.
LinkedIn borrowed all the growth and engagement tactics from modern social media, becoming more of an engagement product and less of a professional network.
The only reason to have a LI is to have an online resume, but if that’s the only reason then make a website. You’re better off interacting socially or blogging on your own site, which may have a commenting feature. You can use agents to post your blogs to various places for exposure.
I wouldn't know what LinkedIn rewards, because they banned me the day after making my account for no stated reason and then rejected my appeal. I just complied with their request to see my passport for the third time earlier today. I suspect I triggered a flag originally verifying my identity because it took me two phones to realize their verification bullshit will never load without Play Services and a third, stock android phone to get through it.
I'm sure someone else has said this, but Corporate America (I cannot speak to Corporate $AnywhereElse with any depth) and large parts of the entrepreneur ecosystem reward mediocrity. In this sense, LinkedIn is just a symptom of a larger disease.
They also hustle theatre. For every startup job mentioning role impact there is one that doesn't but tries hard to get across how much of Saturday and Sunday you should be working to be consider moral enough to work for them. Then on LI pictures of staff on 24h+ working stints that might kill them.
The nice thing about LinkedIn posts is that it’s clear that everything is an ad. Reddit, Facebook, etc started with people just posting to communicate and socialize, then were (mostly) taken over by ads / influencers pretending. With LinkedIn there’s no pretense and no wheat to sift from the chaff.
It’s just marketers marketing to each other. If that’s useful you can join a mutual promotion group and auto-comment on each others’ posts without damaging anything of value. If not you can stay away and completely ignore any posts when you come back for an occasional job search.
The mediocrity (and "hacks" like LinkedIn broetry[0]) make it super-easy to stand out just by talking plainly about interesting stuff!
I have a (subjectively) high (self-imposed) bar for posting on my blog, but my bar is much lower for LinkedIn. I also have a much larger audience there.
I sometimes turn the LI posts I'm really happy with into blog articles, so they also serve as a kind of preprint for me.
Basically, I use it like I'd use Twitter if it still existed and allowed for somewhat longer posts, and BlueSky if it had any users.
I don't disagree with the fundamentals of the post (most stuff is vapid, not just on LinkedIn but other platforms as well). But I still personally have benefitted the most from LinkedIn for grass roots for my business most recently, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/02/20/linkedin-is-the-best-s.... It is higher quality referrals than I ever got from X for example.
>There’s some decent stuff on there in amongst all the noise. But, for whatever reason, that good stuff gets lost amongst a million posts of washed out nonsense.
That's the problem with all social networks anyway. The algorithm would encourage content that reaches a wider audience, not target niches.
Also add the LinkedIn pods (which is a group of people that will like and comment nonsense on posts to boost), same concept of bots in other social networks.
That said, LinkedIn is still the only social network where I have real people that I know and have done business with.
8<-------
What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor.
8<-------
in other words, linked in the resume hosting and career networking site doesn't reward the behaviour, linked in the random social network that happens to be hosted on the same site does. just ignore the latter.
I see zero value in the LinkedIn feed. That’s ok, just ignore it. In the groups I’ve joined (naively thinking I’d learn something useful) it’s mostly infographics explaining things I already know or engagement bait “polls”.
I update my job when necessary, and from time to time a recruiter sends me a decent job posting.
I hate when people tell me I can't piss in the street. "Go to a bathroom," they say. "That's not appropriate here." Screw that, my junk is rated E for Everybody.
One of the most obnoxious things about LinkedIn are the games that people play. Fake engagement over a series of my posts only to drop their pitch in my messages.
That, and it's so rare to find real content on the site that isn't just some mimetic rehash of the same thing other people are saying.
Frankly, it's a very ominous network to interact with—it's very unsettling to see how quickly and deeply people have adopted a performative mask that's uniquely a "LinkedIn character."
Endless droves of "think pieces" from people you can tell have never really been challenged in their field, have limited experience, and insist that they are the expert missing from your sheathe.
The saddest part is that the mediocrity will only ever increase, not decrease, in a world that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence.
LinkedIn is useful to check someone’s career history.
Beyond that it’s mostly a bunch of folks spending time on LinkedIn trying to impress people that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. Which ironically drives away the people folks seem to be trying to impress. Spend time there if you wish, but you’re “marketing” to people that mostly aren’t there.
The whole “influencer” thing on LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters claiming to be experts at things they’re not really experts at. When someone starts off by saying they’re a “top influencer” on LinkedIn I run the other way, quickly. If you have to market yourself as an influencer then newsflash you’re probably not. If you are, you just are.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. You’ll get less views and less engagement but there’s less temptation to post nonsense just for likes. You’re going to have a harder time getting people to stick around and read what you’re writing but that additional pressure raises the bar.
Telling people to “raise the bar”, and then suggesting they should aim for less engagement just sounds strange. Who decides where the bar is, and why should hitting it require fewer people to see what you made?
I agree that a lot of LinkedIn content is cookie-cutter garbage, but advising others to invest serious effort into thoughtful writing with the expectation of no reach feels deeply unhelpful.
Instead, you could encourage others to write content on LinkedIn that sounds less "what X taught me about B2B sales" and improve the culture of "toxic mediocrity".
LinkedIn is a long-form billboard not a blogging site. It’s meant for getting attention, not for thought provoking discussion. Or at least, I’ve not really seen honest discourse on any recent social platform. There are plenty of reasons to be on a billboard, but most billboards are boring.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity in the same way that the rest of the world does. It does so for the exact same reason: good networking is more often than not more important than being exceptional.
As a recently laid off tech worker, I was excited to have a recruiter contact me regarding what seemed like a dream job. After passing an initial phone screen, a face to face interview was scheduled. I spent several days preparing. On the day of the interview, I took the train into the city and had a 4 or 5 block walk to the new company's office. While walking, I noticed a scraggly dog laying in the alley. I was pressed for time, but stopped to get some food and water to give to the dog. He was very appreciative, barked playfully, and licked my face. I continued on my way. When I got to the office, I signed in, took the elevator to the 7th floor, and opened the door. Imagine my shock, the dog was the interviewer. <-- This is the kind of nonsense I generally see posted on LinkedIn, perhaps only slightly exaggerated.
It doesn’t seem that bad to me. Certainly not “toxic”. A lot of it is quite relevant to my industry. Perhaps because I am selective with who I link (only people I have worked with and could vouch for)).
I look at LinkedIn as a purpose-built tool for marketing my brand (my dev experience). It works well. Just like any tool LinkedIn has some problems. But it is the best in that niche.
Seems like a market has emerged for a LinkedIn-like service that does everything LinkedIn does, minus the public posts. Resumes and direct messages only.
Full of people sucking each other BS. And then recruiters unable to understand the most basics of a profile.
Nevertheless I update my own from time to time, it can still be useful if you navigate through the garbage. Also it helps me to cross-check a bit some people if they have a contact that you both know and you trust.
More than once I encountered people with 100% fake profile and fake work history. Maybe LinkedIn should only allow to add that you worked somewhere doing something with some kind of verification process.
I've lost count how many first-line engineering managers I've actively worked alongside change their LinkedIn title to "Engineering Leader" or something like that. They'll be a manager of 6 ICs in Org X, which itself is comprised of 400 people, but on their profile they'll put "leading Org X". It's some of the clearest evidence I've seen that LinkedIn is toxic sludge.
Ironically, this post and comments here feels like it could be on Linkedin. Catchy title with low effort content. Nowhere in the blog he answers this question and the comments here just go with the title and common hate against Linkedin and "owned by Microsoft" as author calls it.
I wish LinkedIn wasn’t seen as a valid background check tool.
Now that we have HR going whole hog on AI processing of job applications, up to and including the first round interview, can we please get rid of LinkedIn?
Instead, I would much rather see job applications come in three parts. A cover letter, a human resume overview page, and then the deeper multi page CV that is primarily for AI processing.
This is precisely why I deleted my LinkedIn profile all together.
While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.
I don’t think anyone bothers to read cover letters anymore. Recruiters don’t even seem to read resumes very closely, judging by the number of times I’ve been asked questions that are literally in the first paragraph of my resume.
Semi-related — why don’t we create a service in which people make employment “claims” and other people (their managers/customers) sign these claims with their own keys, so these claims can be cryptographically verified by a third party in a distributed fashion?
This way, Linkedins basic premise of being a centralized “CV as a service” would become obsolete, leaving just the social network, which I personally would gladly abandon.
> Dynamically communicate prospective opportunities and proactive technologies. Efficiently aggregate interactive materials before state of the art collaboration and idea-sharing. Credibly supply cross-media metrics via leading-edge solutions.
Linkedin is a dumpster fire of spam and aggressive, low intelligence/high effort marketing tactics.
I would never use their site for anything, though I've seen coworkers apply for jobs using it. Personally I've found the other nonsocial platforms and email to be the best for getting a high paying position.
The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager"..
They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror, pulls a strip down and sticks her phone back to the tape.
Seems like she's a bad manager. Obviously tape doesn't go over the mirror, well she's leveled up her skills in the next few seconds. She installs the brilliantly designed mirror-mount-phone-holder-multi-axis.png (TM).
No she's a good manager, she's meeting her employees in the middle, both passenger and driver can pull the phone right next to their face in case they need to see the map. Good managing! Fractional leadership!
I do wonder when the next car digs itself into a ditch, whether putting the phone in front of the drivers face was ideal. But hey, I'm just a lay-engineer struggling to form a sentence with an aw shucks look, far from the hallowed halls of what an MBA or fractional CTO could know.
> The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know
The two common failure points for developers using social media are getting triggered at the first instance of content they dislike in the feed and not following sources of content they want to read.
Nobody should feel compelled to use any social media if they don’t want or have to. If you actually want to understand what other people see in the platform, though, you have to understand how they use it.
Any social media with a feed requires an ability to skim and filter. If you stop and read the obviously low quality content to either hate-read or to get triggered then you won’t make it far on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Hacker News comments.
Second, you have to curate your sources. If you strongly dislike a post then use mechanisms to see less of it. If you want to see more of something then like it. Follow people who produce good content. Once you’ve given the algorithms some signal the content improves to your liking, even though it’s not perfect.
For many years I went without looking at LinkedIn at all. I even deleted my LinkedIn account for couple of years in mid '10s.
I have found a lot of value in LinkedIn recently after I started interacting with news, posts, and people that have something interesting to say. It is as if you tell the algorithm what you like, it will show more things like that.
I also proactively flag things I don't like to see. That also helps a lot in improving my feed, I assume.
Th "updates" feed with all the opentowork, hiring, promotions doesn't bother me much. it has it's uses, and its easy to just eyeball and move on.
What I don't understand is the grandstanding about how LinkedIn and its users are all dumb. You can always timebox your interactions with LinkedIn and ignore it rest of the time if you cannot afford to NOT have a LinkedIn account.
Oh! and learn to use the notification settings. Turn off email alerts etc.,
I think it's a perfect mirror of the corporate world, which in itself rewards and thrives on mediocrity. Mediocrity is safe and predictable.
Sure, let's hear the counter-example of the noble startup, taking massive risks to build The Coolest Thing. Like the enthusiastic wiggly sperms, one in a million succeeds -- and the consequences of initial success are to grow mediocre over time.
LinkedIn is marketing slop, aimed at the lowest common denominator, because that's the most numerous denomination of the walking wallet. Of course it is saturated with family friendly, inoffensive, endless streams of softcore corporate propaganda.
Disaster stemming from the deadly combo of Dunning Kruger effect + network effect + recommendation algorithms floating similar BS up top.
Most who post absolute BS on such "professional" forums as a way to gain a larger "network" easily attract similar ones with relatable mediocrity index. The network effect kicks in and mediocrity gets amplified.
Everyone thus gets forced to either to act insanely ridiculous or just GTFO to retain whatever little sanity they have left in them.
Most corporate jobs are just mediocrity-maxxing absolutely BS jobs. It is only natural that the most popular corporate SM amplifies and promotes BS and mediocrity at scale.
Mediocrity is everywhere—on every platform. Even on blogs. Even in scientific publications. But if you’re creating something worth reading, why hesitate to post it on LinkedIn or anywhere else? Valuable content doesn’t lose its quality just because of where it’s published. Dumb comments don’t change that either.
I actually think creators who produce valuable work should be just as visible as the mediocre ones, so that over time, the difference becomes clear and mediocrity slowly fades. Sure, the marketing and self-promotion side of things might feel uncomfortable, especially for developers. But in a society where the ignorant are bold, if the thoughtful and knowledgeable don’t show the same courage, that society is doomed.
No matter what kind of nonsense you come across, let science and reason be your guide—and keep creating and sharing.
He as point. And it's probably annyoing because: One wants to post "substantial content" and being acknowledge, but one cannot rise against this "flood" of nonsense.
Question is: What can you do? We can't stop this trend. People are looking for "reach". And you can achieve that using differet approaches. What we experience at LinkedIn is the simplest approach: Spam the system with your AI generated "nonsense" posts, add a selfie and people will follow. It's not even bad content, it's positive content, emotional content, touching content. But first it's way easier to create than writing long technical articles or analysis. And seconds it's easiere to consume - people want short messages.
And it's not only LinkedIN, it's everywhere. Medium, Facebook, you name it.
Sad for everyone trying to communicatae more than just "calendar mottos". But true.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I've gotten two good jobs from posting on LinkedIn. Mutual connections see your posts, and recruiters can find and contact you. When you list it on your resume, people do look at it. So yes it "changes" your career, by helping you get jobs.
Yeah it's full of drivel. All social media is full of drivel. Stop paging through the drivel and use it as a tool. Collect good connections, keep up with old colleagues, network. That's what it's for.
What annoys me the most in my LinkedIn feed is low-effort visual AI slop, in particular based on fads such as the bland 4o comic style with text bubbles.
As a "visual animal", I find it very hard to tune out this kind of noise. I consequently try to hide such content from my feed, but the LinkedIn algorithm will not budge.
LinkedIn also rewards absolutely sickening PR spamming. All the corporate feelgood PR bullshit that people willingly repost, it makes me sick to my stomach.
People must have no spine or self-worth to be reposting all their employer's hot air like that.
But yeah Microsoft is all about mediocrity. Their game is becoming the biggest common denominator, not the best.
In a corporation-dominated economy, LinkedIn can't produce anything different... People are limited in what they can say. On LI, you are representing your employer to some extent. You can't just post all your juicy gossip or crazy takes.
At best, you can nerd-out in your subject area, but even that's limited as you risk being seen as either a show-off or you may make a mistake one day and be shuned for it. It's kind of high-stakes. It's like social networking but with your employer potentially scrutinizing your posts.
On LI, people are always one bad post away from losing their income. You're never going to get fully honest takes in such environment.
The only people who can share everything honestly on LI are people who are very predictable and basically don't have any opinion about anything... Not the most exciting kinds of people.
Though at least this self-censorship boringness ceiling does make it easier to get eyeballs for your content if you're willing to get risky. It's easier for content to stand out.
LinkedIn isn’t a professional network, it’s a slave auction with a newsfeed. Workers line up to show their teeth - “failure is just learning in disguise”, “kindness is leadership”, all that drivel - while hoping to be picked by a master who won’t beat them too hard.
The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.
Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.
It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.
The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.
If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.
There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.
The problem is that even reviews from verified purchasers get gamed in the real world, and aggregated reviews can only cover simple information because people don't have the expertise for a proper review (e.g. try to find basic information like idle power consumption for computers. Or whether some part has working or broken pcie power management). So the problem is that you need morally unassailable competent reviewers.
In theory, you'd need consumers to fund such an organization only until they had so much sway that a review from them became essentially mandatory for anyone to consider your product, at which time they could charge a fee to review a product without becoming beholden to the companies paying the fees.
They are a charity funded by subscribing consumers. They don't get paid by the sellers so the incentive structure benefits the consumer. I trust what they write.
The whole Internet is like this now--it's a victim of its own success. "Dead Internet Theory" is correct, I believe. There must be some kind of sociological term for what happens with popular websites that become victims of their own success, like Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, all of them follow the same predictable pattern. When they are small and unknown, they are useless. Then they hit some critical mass and a wave of new adopters show up and it's amazing--for awhile--then as the inevitable grifters and thieves arrive, the whole thing becomes a turd of astronomical proportions. Then the good people disappear, leaving only the trash behind.
Craigslist hasn't sold out ever and eBay is still useful for its original purpose if you look for genuinely used things. You're confusing them with the Etsy dumpsterfire.
Craigslist never sold out, but it went through a big scammer phase (and largely lost me). Looking for an apartment in SF in 2016 was a mix of property management co spam and outright fraudulent listings trying to scam you. Not sure if they ever corrected this.
I’ve since moved to Portland, OR, where Craigslist seems to get about 10% of the listings compared to FB marketplace.
I generally love Craigslist and want it to succeed, but it hasn’t been “thriving” anywhere I’ve lived in a loooooong time.
Sounds like "enshittification" to me: During the growth phase the offering is good, but as growth inevitably slows, most companies will extract value by other means: Cutting costs/quality and raising prices are the most obvious and perhaps least nefarious tactics. There's companies that don't fall too far into this, but I think most successful ones do.
The problem of evil. The grifters and thieves always show up, late but inevitably, to the party. The game needs a patch to potentially fix though it's unclear what that patch would be and what could be it's unintended side effects
> The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels.
This couldn’t be more incorrect. In Smith’s day your sources of information would be interpersonal, or one of your local newspapers. Newspapers in the 18th century wore their bias on their sleeves and had very particular world views, they were anything but neutral. You might also learn about commercial interests in coffee houses where stock markets first developed. This was a place where people were trying to sell you something, like shares in a commercial shipping business.
I’m always astonished that people make these claims about Smith’s work without having read his books or any relevant history.
Smith's book sits on my bedside stand as I write this. In the hypothetical society he uses in the book (the one with the butcher and the baker), the flow of market information is indeed interpersonal (though he never explicitly states this, to my recollection) and therefore not only carries some level of trust, but is generally peer-to-peer. The state of 18th century news papers and marketing actually supports my point, which is a point that applies to any society with a high level of economic power asymmetry, not just to the modern era.
This is a general phenomenon. People form associations through casual encounters with something or other without actually trying to understand what is actually the case.
I think it’s the certainty that’s bothers me. It also concerns me that people underpin a larger anticapitalist worldview based on ahistorical and incorrect understandings of capitalism.
For an increasing set of product attracting attention and midshare is the product. Creator economy; open source projects that have many stars safer to use then ones that don't. AWS better to use than some small competitor because you know many others are in that same boat. "Not fired for using Microsoft" etc.
Widely used and viewed is value; less and less does a product evaluation work in isolation. So very difficult to evaluate products fairly in that sense. Something may be better but it's only in so far that your review agragation / index is a fair market for attention.
Think GitHub stars and amazon reviews for products or product hunt for new startups, or YouTube or LinkedIn views; all have their game of gathering attention / marketing that plays into products visibility and viability.
The phrase was originally "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", which, ironically, did not save IBM once the cost effectiveness of alternatives was too overwhelming to ignore. The effect of mindshare isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I've thought about this quite a bit, and my conclusion is that the ultimate missing component here is trust. I don't trust star reviews, they can be bought, and platforms don't care about that too much as long as they're making good money.
I trust three things: Recommendations from competent acquaintances, actually good review sites, and brands I've been happy with in the past.
My acquaintances and the review sites I frequent are pretty niche. If they weren't so niche, they'd probably inevitably become corrupted and promote the offering of whoever pays the most. I think it would be amazing if this could be scaled without the corruption, but I don't know how.
That leaves the brand recognition as the one thing that scales. And that mostly happens through marketing. You hear about something and eventually build enough trust to invest, and if the offering is good, you found a good supplier and they found a potentially loyal customer. I think that mechanic isn't so bad, though far from ideal.
None of those work, because they inevitably become vectors of the problem they're supposed to solve.
This is yet another disproof of the nonsense belief that markets reward efficiency, which is good for consumers.
Markets are fundamentally about gaining advantage over others, and it's far easier and cheaper to gain advantage through manipulation and questionable forms of persuasion than by any other means.
Which is why everyone and everything is now drowning in toxic sludge.
Markets, lacking any sense of the collective good, inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons for the benefit of a small number of the most successful, persuasive, and least ethical predatory manipulators.
This is supposed to be "rational", but that framing is itself a manipulation.
There's nothing rational about drowning in toxic sludge. It's a specific moral policy choice, with predictably negative consequences that have played out over and over again.
> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.
This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.
I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.
That's the thing with activities anyone can do - pretty much anyone does. And 90% of everything is... not great. I think a lot of those doofuses on LinkedIn just portray some level of success when in reality they're desperate for business, at least some folks I spoke to that are very active there were like that. But that's anecdotal evidence. Depressingly, just how some folks succeed with just a good offering, some folks just succeed with good marketing. But I suppose if you manage to be reasonably good at both, you have a good chance to succeed.
It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
It literally contains as much information as anybody could potentially hope for (public information anyhow - excluding interviews and the like). If they happen not to be able to distinguish between a “page does not exist” (90%~ of cases IME, ie no GH account), or their ego is so inflated that they cant be bothered to spend 2mins asking their CTO (or dont even have one or trust them), thats a different story and its on them. The signal is there.
I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.
> I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.
It is contrived, but it’s usually contrived on behalf of the person who signs your checks, in my experience. Process exists to serve the owners not the worker bees.
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.
Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.
But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.
Almost, but that's the gist. Letting people know about your product creates value if and only if the product itself brings them positive net utility for buying it and there were no other even better products that you distracted them from. Convincing someone to buy your product doesn't show that it's actually good (surely you have regretted a purchase before).
Additionally, essentially no marketing is a dry list of facts informing people of products to help them make rational choices. A great deal of marketing contains no explicit facts at all. A large amount of effort is spent getting people to buy things they don't even need (or worse: harms them) and/or throw out perfectly usable items they already have or otherwise participate in conspicuous consumption, which is frankly quite grim against the backdrop of climate change being a (the?) top problem being shouldered onto our successors.
What? Your project might be good or bad, if it's bad/low quality/low effort and you take sales away from a better option by abusing human biases (such as recency bias), then you're destroying (potential, not actual) value.
The point of marketing is to remove and subvert that agency, disconnect buying decisions from real value, and to limit the consequences of flaws and underperformance.
The point of marketing is to provide the signal - you can use your agency and decide whether that signal is valuable or not.
If I'm shown an advertisement for a watch from a well known company with some detailed specs I'm inclined to believe it based on the brand reputation. This signal (the specifications) is valuable to me but not necessarily completely accurate. I'm better off with the signal than without. The reason being there are more instances of truth than lies across all advertisements.. otherwise they wouldn't work.
Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.
Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.
I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.
The specs are not objective in the correct sense. They are just signals that you can later verify.. like all things. Everything has an accuracy number beside it - what makes you think the specs are to be believed?
True, agreed. But thats besides the point. For the purposes of this thread, if an ad contains text/information thats well defined enough to be verifiable/falsifiable in principle, thats better than 98% of the “ads” I see on Linkedin (or anywhere else for that matter). “We focus on building reliable, trustworthy AI” is not an example of that unless the CEO finds a way to, or makes an effort towards, providing a method for us to verify that.
How would they even discover that though? Every single customer would have to buy both products and test for themselves. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Its bringing the signals closer to me than I would have otherwise had. The agency part is for me buying it but not necessarily for me to do the research so in that case you are right.
But in practice it is beneficial (for both parties) to sometimes bring the signal closer. If you truly believe in agency then you must trust that the person who buys it after being shown the advertisement was better off being shown the advertisement.
where is the concern for my agency when an advertiser steals my time and attention. when they call me on the phone, send texts, prisesopen my email account, and plaster ads all over the streets.
in what sense is an ad for hair products different from a person pretending to be a little old lady in South Africa who just wants to make sure her late husbands millions go to a random person on the internet - its not
I have made my choice to try to remove myself as far as possible from your 'product discovery', but that's one choice you're not willing to let me have. there are innumerable people in the world who just want a chance to make me listen to their pitch. what do I owe them that I should have to.
>Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.
They can't. Your shit blogspam is all over the internet. You've been using LLMs to advertise it everywhere. You've been using bots to post fake reviews online. You've been selling them on platforms that don't give a shit about customers and will never take returns. Either by being first or having more money, or time to blow into it, you can easily drown out any potential threats. The only way another product comes out on top is by doing the same things as you are.
Which is fun and all, but there's external consequences to this behavior. The internet is worse, product reviews are worse, and overall, you're destroying trust in society.
You are completely exaggerating and pointing out edge cases. Sure sometimes advertising can be harmful and there are laws against false advertising. But in general it is helpful and provides value. For instance I personally like it when I 'm shown a relevant advertisement which actually convinces me to purchase it. Just recently I saw some advertisement on Instagram related to some concert near where I live. It was actually relevant and I considered purchasing a ticket.
You can always exaggerate and cherry pick bad instances from anything. What you are doing is similar to this. There were a few Samsung phones that blew up and caused injury. You now characterise all phones as being harmful and dangerous to society.
Not an edge case at all - phones blowing up is not what we're talking about. The absence of "we spent less than 10% of our budget on cyber security (in fact, we proud ourselves in having less than 5 cyber security experts on the team, and our release cycle is very quick - we don't really listen to the nerds when they say they need more time!), so unless you'd rather avoid a 15 year old kid from Russia completely owning all of your personal data, our product is the most cost effective option! Also, we used existing circuit boards, so our phone's innovation is mostly on the cost side - we managed to make it dirty cheap for you. What are you waiting for?" is what we're talking about.
"When an incompetent developer stumbles onto a successful idea an infinity of shit is
created."
I agree with you. Sometimes simply being the first mover businesses/solutions/software get name recognition and an unfair(?) advantage that greatly diminishes overall value by blocking better products from emerging.
To put if fairly, some things are so bad it'd be an improvement NOT to have them, so someone else could do a better job and everyone would be better off. Examples.. Emscripten, Python, Bluetooth, Chromecast, any IoT device so far created..
No its about product discovery. It is in fact essential to a rational market. Imagine you create a really good product. You actually believe in it and you think people would want to buy it. Please tell me how you will practically get it noticed? I would like actual practical advice.
Product discovery is one facet of it, certainly. It’s also about pursuading people to buy a product / service they don’t really need, creating demand where none (or not as much) existed previously, of convincing people that their product / service is better than that of others when this might not in fact be the case.
In the exact same way as if you had a godawful product and you want to sell it.
Promote it, talk about it on social media, possibly contract some marketing services, find out who is more prone to purchasing it and focus on that group, etc etc.
I think you are agreeing with me. This process is valuable - it brings your product to people who benefit from it. It does not diminish just for the reason that there might be godawful products some times.
This is actually a pretty solid example of a flaw in free market economics. Marketing can increase and decrease knowledge and there's not a strong market force pushing things the right direction.
I thought about what you said and I think you are correct. But since we don't live in an ideal rational world do you agree that without advertisements the market can fail? How would new products even enter the limelight?
Without advertisements? Word of mouth, neutral databases of information (these are hard to create in practice without at least some gaming, but i think things like the yellow pages or government operated lists of services get close)
Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.
Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..
I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.
But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?
Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!
Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!
Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!
Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_
I didn't want it to sound intelligent but I mean I was mentioning a quote so we do need to place a quote inside quotes afterall lol.
I was just sharing something that I felt relevant to the discussion in the sense that greed is one of the most major causes of suffering, and it is our greed that we are ready to write linkedin mediocrity slop.
'You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.'
No. _history has unequivocally proven_ that people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. Or at least they should, if they were aware of the full extent of damage typical products cause.
Its about the numbers. Sure sometimes they are stupid and make stupid decisions but the extent matters. Take your own example - if I ~reach~ read your purchase history can I characterise you as inherently stupid?
No so much "stupid", just full of biases and somewhat lazy. This is a well-researched and documented fact. Knowingly abusing these biases to get them to buy or use something that they either don't need - or, worse, buying a low quality/low effort product when better alternatives exist - that's extremely detrimental. That's how we end up with the enshittification of everything.
Yes there are biases sometimes and it can get exploited and this is an exception that proves the rule. But the rule is that people know what they want to buy and know what they are getting into. You are trying to get in between by suggesting you know more than the buyer and seller.
They mostly don't know what they are getting into though. You can't trust advertising, obviously. You can't trust reviews. You have no way to tell if there is actually a better product than the one you are seeing the ad for. You better hope there is a good return policy.
You can't trust advertising completely nor can you trust reviews completely but they are signals. Treating things as binary will not get you anywhere. Signals exist and are useful if not 100% accurate.
This is... an understatement. I would agree advertising is a useful signal, but I would say that not only can you not trust advertising, you should put negative weight on advertising - i.e. whenever you see an ad, that means the company is putting some amount of money into trying to convince you by means other than an honest comparison/spec table, and therefore is likely to have an inferior product. So personally, I generally avoid any companies/people whose presentations contains no information about the objective characteristics of their work.
Id like to believe people have enough agency to do a google search to at least figure out their options, but granted, I might be wrong about that.
Edit: I do agree you should have a google-findable website which lists the objective characteristics of your product. If you call that advertising (I call it a "release", and I reserve the word "ad" for anything that has emotional appeal and caters to the indifferent/uninformed), then I agree.
exception? I couldn't disagree more. I can think of one or two specific examples "fair" or even "useful" advertising, and that's being generous, among thousands or tens of thousands of examples. I'm not claiming I know more than the buyer or seller, I'm claiming the seller "knows" much more than the buyer, and has vastly more resources and vested interest in the transaction than the buyer (because of the scale, and the fact that people are mostly very similar to each other - economies of scale, essentially). Note I'm restricting my argument to the case of big companies selling to consumers, or big companies buying from other big companies, although the latter is comparatively less damaging to society overall, still pretty bad tho.
The seller knows how much effort/resources were put into the product, knows (or has enough resources to figure out) how to nudge/mislead the consumer, has teams of brilliant people working on that - see the ad industry. I would definitely agree that the consumer has some responsibility, too, to stay informed, and if it weren't for the fact that this causes externalities to society, I wouldn't give a crap about the fact that some corporate director was duped into buying a terrible product. Unfortunately, that causes companies that particularly good in misleading people to outcompete companies who spend their money elsewhere.
Why do you accuse me of things I've not said, and drift away from the extremely stupid thing you said ? Value creation is not the only thing that matters, and has extremely harmful results if taken to its extremes. Trying to put the blame on "people" and their "agency" is such a destructive behavior that it shouldn't be tolerated. People buying things does not absolve you of the responsibility of creating said product, or of the process used to make them buy your crap. If your marketing process actively makes society worse, you're responsible for it. If your product has consequences for centuries, you're responsible for it. If your advertisement for a gun is "hey it makes really nice holes in your shooting target. And the neighbor you don't like", you're not off the hook when it gets used to shoot someone. In the same way, if your advertisement technique results in hundreds of thousands of people reading your shitty content that actively makes them dumber, you're not off the hook for making society dumber, even if it "creates value"
To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.
Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.
There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.
The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.
This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
> pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example
Pricing can definitely be marketing and is crucial to the company. The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.
Otherwise I agree bullshitting can be interesting and analytical, when looking at a full campaign promoting a life style or solely aimed at imprinting the brand, it's full on the fuzzy side but it is all extremely thought out, and grounded in relatively solid research when it comes to the bigger players.
> The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.
Marketing is not advertisement.
It definitely has a significant overlap with operations. I mean it’s in the name really: it’s about how you go to the market.
Every time someone wonders if they would make more by going for a subscription or a lump sum payment and how they should structure their pricing tiers and what should be put in them, they are unknowingly doing marketing.
Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.
You can market products that people need. A big part of this is explaining and educating someone about what your product does, another part is just getting the word out there. Every website homepage is more-or-less a marketing page.
If no one is marketing a product, then nobody knows about it.
So what are the people with worthwhile products and services supposed to do then? Just not engage in marketing? Sincere question.
Yes, that's my take. I'm of the opinion we should outlaw advertising. If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.
But then, I don't exist to do business. Acquiring profit isn't my goal. Acquiring status, rank, or advantage over my fellows isn't my goal. Its the goal of those we let run roughshod over the rest of us justified by phrases like "well its just human nature to be greedy; nothing to be done!" or "If I don't do it someone else will!"
This is how low we've sunk: lying is so normalized that we can't envison a world without it.
> If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.
Not necessarily. First, you somehow need to reach the initial batch of customers - whether by free samples or talking to power users, you're already engaging in marketing. Then, even when they like your product, they have no obligation to do the advertising for you, for free.
And it's possible the company folds before the product reaches the critical mass to rely just on word-of-mouth.
Lets say you're a freelancer, why is a company supposed to hire you then.
You are the product, how do you suggest to sell yourself?
Companies aren't going to waste time looking into Github, if that is your take.
I mean I don't disagree. One of my favorite quotes I've been saying for years is "Advertising shits in your brain."
But at the same time I think only relying on word of mouth is a bit biased against people who aren't starting with an advantage of a pre-existing network for whatever worthwhile service they could be offering.
That being said, plenty of successful service based freelancers will tell you most of their business is from referrals at a certain point. It's just hard to get to that point. (I say this as someone who only gets business from referrals right now, but wants that to not be the case.)
Yea idk, I totally agree with you in spirit. But I care about practicality and I have found worthwhile services from solo-freelancers via marketing.
Good marketing doesn't have to equal garbage. But I feel ya. Most marketing is mind numbing.
I think if we strengthened fraud provision we eliminate many societal problems, including marketing. If marketers were required to be completely honest and transparent, a lot of this goes away.
you can lie (advertise) by omission... I see no way one can legislate all the things that marketing campaign must tell you about the product/service
It can be this, but there are a lot of things that people actually do need, and they have choices in what to buy. Good marketing will catch their interest and convert it to sales.
Classic zero accountability take.
Why are you getting suckered into buying something you don't need because a commercials says so?
Because a megacorporation hires psychologists (in the form of marketers) to gin up scenarios where class mobility is implied as a subtext in the acquisition of their goods? I mean, who doesn't want to have the fun/get the girls/get the money because they bought {insert product here}?
How is one to defend one's self against the constant onslaught of bullshit meant to part fools with their money? How is an individual supposed to have any defenses against that? When they're raised in an endless din of lying noise?
Yours is the classic _abusers take_. "If only you were a better person you could stand up for yourself"
People still have agency. It's like when you were a kid and your mother asked you - "would you jump off a cliff too?"
Because you are a generally honest and trusting person and so you believe them when they lie to you.
What? What does it mean for a comment on the internet to be non-zero accountability?
I took it to mean my take an implied lack of agency when evaluating advertisements in one's life and if one should act on it.
My take would be that one does indeed lack the agency to be able to evaluate ads that way. The environment itself makes it impossible. SNR is way too low to find valid signals to evaluate. The number being purely honest and informative with zero spin must be close to zero.
“1000 songs in your pocket.”
Was that a lie when Apple said it about the iPod?
no,thats true and honest marketing. If the iPod stopped working after a year (low quality), or was easily hackable (low effort) - and they didn't include that in the marketing - then it would be lying (Windows).
Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.
We have to, if we want to stay in business.
> Many devs don't like "bullshitting”
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
I have noticed that, at least in the Java world, people lie a lot about stuff going "faster", and I think it's just justification to not fix their terrible code.
I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.
For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.
All technical fields sure have their bullshit, wrapped in a layer of something else.
Another one pretty common backing decisions with bullshit or misleading numbers. Like A/B tests that don't cover the whole behavior spectrum or metrics that don't match the point we're making but sound close enough.
> > Doing work that matters might.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement.
Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
> You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
My impression was all 'content' that does well on LinkedIn (including the stuff I like), is because people want to engage with the creator in hopes they get in their good graces which will somehow help them land a job, or they're in a pact with others and like each others' content.
Recommending others and getting recommended by folks whose word means something might be meaningful, but that's about it.
Regular (and often painfully below average) rubes with a dozen self-appointed titles (SaaS platform evnagelist, Innovator, Tinkerer, Father), who post articles like 'Here's what murdering a homeless man taught me about b2b sales' are the definition of cringe.
I think you're quite right that most content gets likes and engagement from people promoting their company, their mates in the industry and people whose attention they want to attract, and usually doesn't spread much beyond that. That's the case whether it's genuinely interesting or generic promotions.
But the "viral" content seems to be something else entirely: as you point out a lot of the people are rubes running pre-product start-ups or consulting, and surely there are more people wanting to impress people with actual budgets and teams and products. Feels like they're successfully catering to an algorithm calibrated for bored but easily impressed scrollers (as well as other rubes and bot-operated accounts that want to share their equally unlikely takes on B2B sales) rather than their network.
Recently I saw a recruiter posting side by side screenshots of the engagement with a high effort collection of industry info she'd compiled with infographics and links, and a copy/paste of an unfunny meme with a tagline applying it to her industry. You'll never guess which one had 10x the engagement...
Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area.
Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain experience as engineers, but I wouldn't expect them to be particularly good ones.
On the other hand, I know a couple of outstandingly good engineers I have worked with, who also have some mindshare on private blogs and conferences, but nowhere near the thought leaders, and definitely not on LinkedIn
Now here's the question then...do you wish those outstandingly good engineers (who do seem to want to share their thoughts hence the blogs and conferences) were sharing some of their good thoughts on LinkedIn?
Do we wish more worthwhile people were posting on LinkedIn? Or do we think that posting on LI is incompatible with sharing worthwhile thoughts?
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing.
The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
is it unsolved? they seem to be doing very well for themselves.
That's why engineers are engineers. As a profession, they are trained to find the optimal answer to the questions they are asked.
The problem is, people are independent agents and generally prioritize their own outcome. If "being humbled" by some nonsense on LinkedIn gets you a high paying job that you perform poorly at, that's a win -- for you. Even if you get fired, you just roll with it and move to bigger and better things to fail up with.
Is it the best way to solve the problem the company has? No. But linkedin guy dngaf and is not asking that question!
To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.
How about invoices by telex and payments received by telegraphic transfer to the bank? No cookies though. I'm not sure how the invoicing method or payment channel affect the marketing discussion.
In the case of the shipping company I then worked for the marketing process was somewhat old school and involved pubs.
Which is very cute, but where'd you put her after she started spouting conspiracy theories?
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.
But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]
[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
Thanks! Handy that you put it all together.
Just going to throw this out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.
> If you're in marketing, "kill yourself"
is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks
I try to avoid resorting to ad hominem, but maybe it's just you? In general, no marketing would dial back the economy drastically, which I think is a good idea. Depends on your goals of course.
I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
> Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt
and funnily enough, this is still marketing
"build it and they will come" doesn't work
But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says.
So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
Are you an employer or an employee?
I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.
Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.
I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.
Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.
But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.
I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
Great take, would love to see your Ln profile for the context in case this HN account is not Anon
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!
I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?
Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.
I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
This was going to be my comment, but I was going to be a lot more rude
Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?
Yeah that was my first thought as well.
Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)
So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.
The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.
LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections claiming they get those fabled six and seven figure client engagements where the client “doesn’t care about the code, they just care about business results” and a lot of other buzzwords.
I do data consulting part time, I do very much provide business centric solutions and measurable results (alongside code that your tech team won’t hate) and am an expert in marketing technology, applied AI and a bunch of other “hot” subjects like that.
In my work with huge, billion dollar companies, the consulting dream that LI influencers sell feels like a fantasy world. I have to provide and justify a day rate, and when my clients do have a big CAPEX project I’m bidding against Accenture, Palantir, etc. and I don’t expect to win it.
If anyone really consistently lands these amazing, big pocket clients, please let me be your intern.
Engineering leader | ex-something
...
Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?
I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post
I’d love to see your “million dollar linkedin” if you’re willing to share it
TBH it's probably just lead-gen or sales outreach..
LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.
This has been my experience. Just a bunch of ego stroking
Because ego's are fragile.
People might have envy for others success which would hurt their ego, but they are greedy enough to stroke someone else's ego, just so that they can get internet points or some "value creation" so that one day others can stroke their egos too.
> its just a gathering of pretentious people.
Tell us more about HN...
Yea agree, same issue here.
Haven't the boomers more or less aged out of jobseeking at this point? Even the youngest of the Baby Boomers are around 60 and most of them are in their 70s.
If you want to see how true this is, visit r/linkedinlunatics[1] on Reddit.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
There are a lot of boomers out there though, and you won’t reach them on TikTok.
The boomers have retired.
are retiring
lots of phenomena that get incessantly overtheorized and misattributed these days can be simply explained by this
50-60% have retired. The rest soon will. In any case the claim I responded to is absurd.
Your second line is a non sequitur.
Gen X usually gets lumped in with boomers because they’re basically invisible. But Gen X DGAF either way.
Boomer is now used to refer to a mindset and not just a generation.
Gen X very much became the boomers they hated. Half of the millennials I've known for years have become identical to the boomers they complained about 10 years ago. The millennials I know complain about zoomers being lazy and not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and using strange lingo and being addicted to things their generation wouldn't have tolerated. And they things they like suck but the thing millennials liked were "good".
Basically, boomer is anyone older than you and acts like a grumpy or entitled old person. Zoomer is anyone younger than you who makes you uncomfortable with your age.
I'm a millennial and I think you summed it up pretty well.
The ironic thing is that boomers--the generation that threw off dress codes and produced the anti-war, civil rights, environmental, women's, and LBGT+ movements didn't have that mindset, but their parents and grandparents did.
That makes no sense and isn't relevant.
where are the non-boomers looking for jobs these days?
Retail - most of the good jobs are impossible to get. That's probably what I'll have to do when my current company finishes firing me with my disability. I have used a bunch of the regular job search boards - Dice, Ladders, Indeed, etc. I've also used LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Blind, Hackajob. The tech job market in my location seems abysmal.
gen-x here ... I'd say: anywhere/everywhere but LinkedIn. Be observant and creative.
Personally, I think that using any service that claim to deliver, for which in the real world I just can't find much supporting evidence and otherwise mostly claims from (direct or indirect) stakeholders (incl. users themselves), feels rather dumb. LinkedIn, and the ecosystem developed around it, has every incentive to be dishonest. In such cases, the burden of evidence that proves otherwise needs to be high. I've not seen that bar ever reached for LinkedIn; not even remotely. At least not where I live.
If my perspective leads to people claiming I'm "denying reality" (heard that a few times), it only suggests me how (practically or emotionally) invested some people apparently must be. To me it still looks and feels mostly like a huge fraud-machine. Nothing particularly new specific to LinkedIn though. Before LinkedIn, I've seen how recruitment and hiring agencies wiggled their way into the employment market, where I grew up in. It did not see it do any good. I'd say it shared plenty of characteristics with cancer.
It may take considerable effort, but I'd recommend doing your own due diligence and find potential employers yourself, to then approach them directly. Still works quite well, even today and without needing questionable middlemen/services.
Just my two cents; mileage may vary.
wow. you weaponized medicrity to save a few bucks on an actual marketing campaign. so unique. good for you.
> > Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> winning on linkedin
> push them to
* vomits *
> millions of dollars
dirty money.
</rant>
I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good
Yeah, the thing is that if one person starts doing it, everyone else must as well if they want to compete, regardless of intentions, so it becomes a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
If it leads to someone purchasing a solution that solves a need, how is that zero value?
If someone has a legitimate need, they will look for a solution in appropriate locations (directories, search, magazines, what have you) and do not need someone to scream their marketing blurbs into the void in hopes of being noticed.
And marketing folks would be involved in getting the product into directories, search, magazines, etc. What is it that you think marketing people do? They don't write ad copy all day.
Or, far more likely, they'll reach out to someone in their network. To land in that network, you have to market your services. LinkedIn is somewhat useful for that, but less so nowadays.
Right??? Why did Uber ever advertise! Everyone who needed a cab but was tired of cab companies could’ve just like, searched the internet for “service to connect me with normal people who will take me places in their own car” which was also obviously a solution that existed and everyone would’ve known to search for!
Brilliant.
Only a certain percentage of potential buyers activity look for a solution. Even Apple advertises.
Are you sure they actually needed it, rather than got sold on something that wasn't really a problem before?
As a counter example to the logic, not saying linkedin is this, smashing up someone's stuff could also make them need to buy new stuff to solve a need but wouldn't in any way provide value.
This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?
They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.
Turns out you can work on something you don't really believe in as long as the money is good.
I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.
All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.
It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.
For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.
>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.
> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.
>Building in public
Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".
I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.
In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.
What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.
Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.
At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?
We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
A guy who has morals in this age? Sign me up,
I really want to incentivize such honesty and morals in general It seems that you have your company listed in the about page of hackernews so that is nice.
I wish your company all the best! Seriously!
Not sure that post demonstrated any particular morals, but thanks :) So far I've had the luxury to get by well with mostly only doing what I think is right. I consider that a luxury indeed, I don't mind paying for it, much like I pay for other luxuries.
LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.
A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.
Cool idea. I used to have
"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"
in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.
Okay, but maybe recruiters aren't up on rust iconography. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate a preference (vs it being a shibboleth with the GP).
I mean, unless the recruiter is a rust programmer they're going to have a hard time distinguishing your profile vs just "positions only - or get blocked" (ie don't contact me unless it's about recruitment).
That was very much the intention. I think good tech recruiters should know their field and I know some that do. It's just that LinkedIn is a swamp of bad ones and my little experiment proofed to me that signal noise ratio there is so low that it is useless for me.
Telling someone not to contact you in a way you expect them not to understand seems like a mostly philosophical exercise.
Is it bad to use automation?
Yes. If I want a job without a prior relationship there’s plenty of sites for that like indeed. I’m only interested in job offers from people who have read and valued my work.
Edit: and clearly this is the case because it’s not “Google bot”, it’s a robot pretending to be human like “Amy Bushwack from google” but really it’s a bot
TBH automation for finding/filtering candidates, but preferably personal email to my inbox. I can tell when you’ve used some cruddy software to send automated follow-ups four times after I didn’t respond to the first message.
I agree - I would expect all follow-ups to be personalized. If my job was a recruiter, I would probably use templates for FAQs to save time.
Good idea! Thank you
LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.
Yeah, it was never going to be a forever solution, but it's served me well for the last few years.
Given the average LinkedIn recruiter, filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters is a decent value add.
That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.
As a general rule, if you’re an engineering candidate that made a profile years ago and is missing updates and haven’t put in much description about your work experience beyond “I worked here from this date to that date”, you’re probably a good engineer.
That’s how I find LinkedIn useful.
That doesn't jive with my experience.
When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.
Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
That is in danger of being a typical "weird heuristic" that linked in loves to post about (with high p values).
I have seen people say for recruiting advise.
* They recommend you hustle. E.g. deliver your resume pretending to be a food delivery
* Don't follow up if explicitly not told to by your recruiters instructions.
* You must have an up to date linked in.
Usually in hot take format that if you dont do that you got no chance.
So everyone stick to measuring for the role!
that sounds a bit rough on graduates. we all start from the bottom and some people are not born with well connected parents or schools with wide networks. I actually think linkedin is a good way to pay it forward (although NOT for low effort graduates who send the same template spam message to everybody)
The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.
I think I heard about something similar happening in the web search market too...
> Typical motivational/marketing stuff
Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.
The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.
Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.
Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.
trys way to hard to be a social platform
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
To combat LinkedIn spam, I exclusively write wizard-themed LinkedIn posts: https://dungeonengineering.com/i-could-have-cursed-him-inste...
Well that made my day. Fantastic satire.
To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”
I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.
I did laugh at loud at "They lift others up. Literally, in my case."
This is fantastic!
Sorry, ahem:
#Inspiring #CastTogether
Well done, sir!
LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol).
I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.
What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.
Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.
LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
I like it as a “place that hosts resumes in a standardized format that can be imported to other applications correctly”
Also good for “hey whatever happened to that guy from high school”
Yup, agreed heavily with your take.
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.
The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.
Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
which music skills? you can learn enough music theory and pop-song writing skills in a few weekends to pump out club/pop music. Sure, playing instruments is a skill that takes a long time to hone, but anyone can download openMPT or something and toss out music. If money comes in and they want orchestra, there's been things like the Vienna Symphonic Library and the like for decades.
i've written and recorded about a dozen hours worth of music in my life and i assuredly did not go to school for it. The quote is about education, not practice. It also mentions "half-assed job" which is what you get in "six weeks" of work.
Someone like you is likely not intended to be the subject of that quotation...
Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
This thread is headed by defensive comments alleging that they have benefitted financially from LinkedIn.
These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.
It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.
Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.
The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.
It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".
This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.
Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866666
That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)
It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad
HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.
Unfortunately, however, people at many companies, who are responsible for hiring people, are running around on LinkedIn and believe things of value being communicated there, living this strange parallel world or bubble of self-marketers and make believe that is LinkedIn, becoming part of it themselves with their mediocrity. The signal of excellence entirely drowns in a stream of mediocrity on LinkedIn.
Because LinkedIn makes your employment front and center it encourages status games .
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
Yes — I (as somebody who posts to promote my startup) wonder what the true goal is sometimes, as it’s ambiguous.
Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.
My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:
It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.
Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.
It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
You nailed it. And of course the platform solving for engagement then enshittifies but we have no alternative...
back to posting on LinkedIn I guess..
"it encourages status games". I think most social media does this. Read a Facebook feed and everyone is either on a beach, had a baby, or got promoted. Nobody is home sick or doing laundry or dealing with a terrible boss.
If you find reading posts on LinkedIn as annoying as I do, there’s actually a nice solution that will literally wipe your feed blank:
1) Change your preferred feed view to “Most Recent Posts” : https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/preferred-...
2) Unfollow all of your connections. You’ll stay connected but won’t see their annoying posts anymore.
…and there you have it! Focused peace and zen on an otherwise excruciating website.
Or just don't visit your feed?
I was using LinkedIn a couple months ago to look for jobs and the problem was that the feed was really hard to avoid and kept sucking me into wasting my time.
When I did the above two things, it completely nerfed my feed so that I could just focus on jobs.
Use an ad blocker!
> Unfollow all of your connections
I hate that this is the only option available. I want to follow my connections, for their own posts, if any. What I don't want is to see everything they like, share, and comment on -- but LinkedIn won't let you turn that part off.
LinkedIn is a vanity fair, and I'm not sure why it even matters in 2025 — it's just a job board when you need it.
It's not even a good job board anymore because it's filled with junk and evergreen postings.
Can't agree. While there are some evergreen postings, LinkedIn job applications still landed me a couple of interviews (and much more compared to cold applying on the company website). And then there's recruiters reaching out which landed me even more interviews + my current - genuinely great - job.
The recruiters reaching out to me are all for terrible companies or for non-remote roles in other areas of the country. It seems Glassdoor and others have better job boards than LinkedIn.
How else are you going to liquidity-stalk that company you left with some options or even shares?
I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.
LinkedIn is a great place to talk to recruiters still. If you're not picky about where you work, you can find a job pretty fast by working with recruiters directly and skipping the cold apply.
The content that feels so vapid (and unfortunately makes a high percentage of what's on there) are the ones where the post itself is the entire body of work. The Photoshop a quote on the wall types.
But there actually IS good content on LinkedIn. It's professionals doing interesting work and posting about it. One user that springs to mind for me does UX for the automotive industry and posts concepts, designs, and experimentations. Its fun and fascinating to watch. And I think it has much more traction to the folks that matter than any post he could do about what his weekly grocery trip taught him about the creative process.
Maybe put another way, build a content brand and not a personality brand. You can still get meaningful, career changing traction. Or do what this author does and just set up your own small tent miles outside the fairground because that's what makes your soul happy. I love the indie web.
To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.
LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.
I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.
And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.
LinkedIn seems like the natural home (origin?) of those oh-so-inane "Motivator" management posters that were so popular in the 1990s. Now if only there were also an outlet there for the "Demotivator" posters that followed. THOSE I liked.
Yeah, it's horrible; I deleted my Facebook a decade ago because I hated what social media interaction was becoming and it was doing a number on my mental health. I deleted my old Twitter a few days ago, and I haven't done anything on Bluesky in months and I never used it much. The only social media I use regularly now is HN and SomethingAwful.
I would so love to just delete my LinkedIn, but you can't do that now. A lot of job applications require you give your LinkedIn. So I am stuck logging in occasionally. It's dystopian.
There is no benefit to be gained from disagreement or debate. Any such discourse looks problematic to a potential employer.
True, aside from the exceptional employers that’ll actually provide a good career.
Unless its a safe enough disagreement. Lynching on an overconfident but incorrect post for example. As long as correcting it makes you look smart, hard working, a leader.
Agreed. The level of mediocrity and group-think on LI is freighting. It’s no wonder so many companies / brands struggle.
Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.
It probably gets that way because nobody wants to be the one to argue back, as it puts them in a bad light. So what's left are cheap platitudes and confirmations.
I understand the unwillingness to argue. But we’re talking foundational flaws in the advice being offered. Even passive aggressive “Are you sure about… ?” Would be 10x better than shameless group-think.
Unlikely as it sounds, being normal is a strategy that works on LinkedIn.
The quality bar is very low. People post so much fluff and AI thought leadership that the algorithm has recently started rejecting it, and LinkedIn essentially ran out of content.
For the past couple of months it's been showing people posts from two or three weeks ago due to the lack of suitable material.
What I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to stand out and build an audience if you just post honestly and thoughtfully about the interesting little puzzles or dilemmas you face during your workday.
Some posts of mine that have hit it off:
> Why is it hard to find clothes for men? > Why do people think it's weird when I drink milk on Zoom? > Should I post on X, or do people still frown on it?
Try posting about what you don't know, rather than what you do. People like that more.
That's too normal for me it makes LinkedIn sound like Facebook. If it were "why I didnt choose Kubernetes for my current project" then maybe.
Hah, I would actually like to know why finding clothes for men is so hard.
> I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity. A seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing.
It took me approximately 5 minutes to install uBlock Origin and create a filter that removes the feed. No more toxic mediocrity to see because there are no posts to see. It makes Linkedin a lot more bearable for me.
ah cool great idea, I've now done the same
www.linkedin.com##[aria-label="Main Feed"]
What bothers me most is how "fake" it all is. I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices. Companies with fake job posts that keep on getting recycled (clicking "report this job" does not help at all) aso aso. It's sort of a parallel universe where everything is nice and dandy... sort of a Barbie universe.
> I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices.
Devil's advocate: what else are they going to say? They're trying to land new business so they can pay those invoices. "We're really struggling and desperately need your money now!" is unlikely to help...
Exactly — depth is the new authenticity . #Reflecting #ThoughtLeader
Damn — HN strips emojis, putting my pastiche in danger of looking sincere
I think the hashtags save you from looking pretentious
In a sea of down to earth people, strive to stand out with pretentiousness #differentiate
I'm a data scientist and ml engineer, used to be in tech sales before transitioning to a technical role.
I've spent most of my adult life using using linkedin for business development and job search. What people don't realize, it's the worlds most accurate business database. Highly effective for networking, where you can see peoples interests and interaction and match up with like minded peers and contemporaries.
I agree that the user generated content is indeed mediocre.
When it comes to posting content, I subscribe to Cal Newport's theory, if you produce something that is valuable and rare, people will find you. People spending their time posting large amounts of content are not creating anything valuable or rare.
I love LinkedIn as a founder/developer. It's become my main social network after the Twitter acquisition.
Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.
Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).
I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_client-side-rende... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_resource-download...
If you say this it means you probably have tuned who you connect to and your settings well to avoid spammy content. I'm amazed it is possible.
I try not to fall into posting generic content. Instead, I focus on sharing real things I’ve built or done, hoping they’re actually useful for someone. For example, my last post was about a weekend app I put together, and I always try to include a link to the app or a github repo so people can try it out for themselves.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/biltahir_sometimes-i-get-into...
Totally agree that LinkedIn rewards toxic mediocrity, but do believe there are ways to avoid those parts of the platforms.
For example, stop following toxically mediocre connections.
LinkedIn will show you things based on what you follow/like/engage with. In my experience, there's troves of real operators posting genuine and helpful advice.
1. Self-Aggrandizement-as-a-Service 2. Tied to corporate status games 3. Delivered as an algorithmic feed
I'm obviously being provocative but those are the dynamics
LinkedIn borrowed all the growth and engagement tactics from modern social media, becoming more of an engagement product and less of a professional network.
The only reason to have a LI is to have an online resume, but if that’s the only reason then make a website. You’re better off interacting socially or blogging on your own site, which may have a commenting feature. You can use agents to post your blogs to various places for exposure.
I wouldn't know what LinkedIn rewards, because they banned me the day after making my account for no stated reason and then rejected my appeal. I just complied with their request to see my passport for the third time earlier today. I suspect I triggered a flag originally verifying my identity because it took me two phones to realize their verification bullshit will never load without Play Services and a third, stock android phone to get through it.
It has been like that for quite a while, people talk a lot and say nothing; and get rewarded for it.
People read linkedin?
Everyone I know just use it as a glorified Rolodex
r/LinkedInLunatics for the best of hits.
I'm sure someone else has said this, but Corporate America (I cannot speak to Corporate $AnywhereElse with any depth) and large parts of the entrepreneur ecosystem reward mediocrity. In this sense, LinkedIn is just a symptom of a larger disease.
They also hustle theatre. For every startup job mentioning role impact there is one that doesn't but tries hard to get across how much of Saturday and Sunday you should be working to be consider moral enough to work for them. Then on LI pictures of staff on 24h+ working stints that might kill them.
The nice thing about LinkedIn posts is that it’s clear that everything is an ad. Reddit, Facebook, etc started with people just posting to communicate and socialize, then were (mostly) taken over by ads / influencers pretending. With LinkedIn there’s no pretense and no wheat to sift from the chaff.
It’s just marketers marketing to each other. If that’s useful you can join a mutual promotion group and auto-comment on each others’ posts without damaging anything of value. If not you can stay away and completely ignore any posts when you come back for an occasional job search.
The mediocrity (and "hacks" like LinkedIn broetry[0]) make it super-easy to stand out just by talking plainly about interesting stuff!
I have a (subjectively) high (self-imposed) bar for posting on my blog, but my bar is much lower for LinkedIn. I also have a much larger audience there.
I sometimes turn the LI posts I'm really happy with into blog articles, so they also serve as a kind of preprint for me.
Basically, I use it like I'd use Twitter if it still existed and allowed for somewhat longer posts, and BlueSky if it had any users.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...
I don't disagree with the fundamentals of the post (most stuff is vapid, not just on LinkedIn but other platforms as well). But I still personally have benefitted the most from LinkedIn for grass roots for my business most recently, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/02/20/linkedin-is-the-best-s.... It is higher quality referrals than I ever got from X for example.
>There’s some decent stuff on there in amongst all the noise. But, for whatever reason, that good stuff gets lost amongst a million posts of washed out nonsense.
That's the problem with all social networks anyway. The algorithm would encourage content that reaches a wider audience, not target niches.
Also add the LinkedIn pods (which is a group of people that will like and comment nonsense on posts to boost), same concept of bots in other social networks.
That said, LinkedIn is still the only social network where I have real people that I know and have done business with.
I think the key point is this one
8<------- What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor. 8<-------
in other words, linked in the resume hosting and career networking site doesn't reward the behaviour, linked in the random social network that happens to be hosted on the same site does. just ignore the latter.
I see zero value in the LinkedIn feed. That’s ok, just ignore it. In the groups I’ve joined (naively thinking I’d learn something useful) it’s mostly infographics explaining things I already know or engagement bait “polls”.
I update my job when necessary, and from time to time a recruiter sends me a decent job posting.
Oh so it is OK to post mediocre stuff on your own blog where no one reads.
But trying to show it to people is not.
I like „content guardians” everywhere saying „oh this does not belong to HN”, „oh this doesn’t belong to linked in.
Fuck that - let people do what they want and express themselves even if it is mediocre shoveling of ideas
I hate when people tell me I can't piss in the street. "Go to a bathroom," they say. "That's not appropriate here." Screw that, my junk is rated E for Everybody.
/s
Why Mastodon is so much better: https://mas.to/@skeletor
My customers and market are not in these obscure channels, they are on LinkedIn (and Facebook). None are on reddit or x.
One of the most obnoxious things about LinkedIn are the games that people play. Fake engagement over a series of my posts only to drop their pitch in my messages.
That, and it's so rare to find real content on the site that isn't just some mimetic rehash of the same thing other people are saying.
Frankly, it's a very ominous network to interact with—it's very unsettling to see how quickly and deeply people have adopted a performative mask that's uniquely a "LinkedIn character."
Endless droves of "think pieces" from people you can tell have never really been challenged in their field, have limited experience, and insist that they are the expert missing from your sheathe.
The saddest part is that the mediocrity will only ever increase, not decrease, in a world that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence.
LinkedIn is useful to check someone’s career history.
Beyond that it’s mostly a bunch of folks spending time on LinkedIn trying to impress people that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. Which ironically drives away the people folks seem to be trying to impress. Spend time there if you wish, but you’re “marketing” to people that mostly aren’t there.
The whole “influencer” thing on LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters claiming to be experts at things they’re not really experts at. When someone starts off by saying they’re a “top influencer” on LinkedIn I run the other way, quickly. If you have to market yourself as an influencer then newsflash you’re probably not. If you are, you just are.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. You’ll get less views and less engagement but there’s less temptation to post nonsense just for likes. You’re going to have a harder time getting people to stick around and read what you’re writing but that additional pressure raises the bar.
Telling people to “raise the bar”, and then suggesting they should aim for less engagement just sounds strange. Who decides where the bar is, and why should hitting it require fewer people to see what you made?
I agree that a lot of LinkedIn content is cookie-cutter garbage, but advising others to invest serious effort into thoughtful writing with the expectation of no reach feels deeply unhelpful.
Instead, you could encourage others to write content on LinkedIn that sounds less "what X taught me about B2B sales" and improve the culture of "toxic mediocrity".
LinkedIn is a long-form billboard not a blogging site. It’s meant for getting attention, not for thought provoking discussion. Or at least, I’ve not really seen honest discourse on any recent social platform. There are plenty of reasons to be on a billboard, but most billboards are boring.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity in the same way that the rest of the world does. It does so for the exact same reason: good networking is more often than not more important than being exceptional.
As a recently laid off tech worker, I was excited to have a recruiter contact me regarding what seemed like a dream job. After passing an initial phone screen, a face to face interview was scheduled. I spent several days preparing. On the day of the interview, I took the train into the city and had a 4 or 5 block walk to the new company's office. While walking, I noticed a scraggly dog laying in the alley. I was pressed for time, but stopped to get some food and water to give to the dog. He was very appreciative, barked playfully, and licked my face. I continued on my way. When I got to the office, I signed in, took the elevator to the 7th floor, and opened the door. Imagine my shock, the dog was the interviewer. <-- This is the kind of nonsense I generally see posted on LinkedIn, perhaps only slightly exaggerated.
If you don't like linkedin just don't use it. It's that easy. Hasn't hurt me so far.
It doesn’t seem that bad to me. Certainly not “toxic”. A lot of it is quite relevant to my industry. Perhaps because I am selective with who I link (only people I have worked with and could vouch for)).
Use the best tool for the job.
I look at LinkedIn as a purpose-built tool for marketing my brand (my dev experience). It works well. Just like any tool LinkedIn has some problems. But it is the best in that niche.
Seems like a market has emerged for a LinkedIn-like service that does everything LinkedIn does, minus the public posts. Resumes and direct messages only.
Full of people sucking each other BS. And then recruiters unable to understand the most basics of a profile.
Nevertheless I update my own from time to time, it can still be useful if you navigate through the garbage. Also it helps me to cross-check a bit some people if they have a contact that you both know and you trust.
More than once I encountered people with 100% fake profile and fake work history. Maybe LinkedIn should only allow to add that you worked somewhere doing something with some kind of verification process.
I've lost count how many first-line engineering managers I've actively worked alongside change their LinkedIn title to "Engineering Leader" or something like that. They'll be a manager of 6 ICs in Org X, which itself is comprised of 400 people, but on their profile they'll put "leading Org X". It's some of the clearest evidence I've seen that LinkedIn is toxic sludge.
Ironically, this post and comments here feels like it could be on Linkedin. Catchy title with low effort content. Nowhere in the blog he answers this question and the comments here just go with the title and common hate against Linkedin and "owned by Microsoft" as author calls it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9aDtJWW2qs
I wish LinkedIn wasn’t seen as a valid background check tool.
Now that we have HR going whole hog on AI processing of job applications, up to and including the first round interview, can we please get rid of LinkedIn?
Instead, I would much rather see job applications come in three parts. A cover letter, a human resume overview page, and then the deeper multi page CV that is primarily for AI processing.
That makes a lot of sense, but the inevitable result is an AI arms race, with AI tools for writing these, feeding AI tools for reading them.
I really feel as if I retired at the best time possible.
This is precisely why I deleted my LinkedIn profile all together.
While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.
I don’t think anyone bothers to read cover letters anymore. Recruiters don’t even seem to read resumes very closely, judging by the number of times I’ve been asked questions that are literally in the first paragraph of my resume.
toxic mediocrity is clever, on the other not sure if it is clever enough that he has to describe coming up with the phrase twice.
>I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity
four paragraphs later
>The vast majority of it falls into a category I would describe as Toxic Mediocrity.
He simply doesn't know how to use social networks.
I get a lot of useful information from LinkedIn because I choose who to follow and block.
Semi-related — why don’t we create a service in which people make employment “claims” and other people (their managers/customers) sign these claims with their own keys, so these claims can be cryptographically verified by a third party in a distributed fashion?
This way, Linkedins basic premise of being a centralized “CV as a service” would become obsolete, leaving just the social network, which I personally would gladly abandon.
If it works you'll have a bunch of people faking it for each other, and if it doesn't then it's no different than anything else.
How would they fake it? Their own identity claims would need to be cryptographically signed.
This is indeed in development although I’m not sure LinkedIn is involved yet. Look up:
Learning and Employment Records (LERs)
This is how you win on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcollison
> Dynamically communicate prospective opportunities and proactive technologies. Efficiently aggregate interactive materials before state of the art collaboration and idea-sharing. Credibly supply cross-media metrics via leading-edge solutions.
Linkedin is a dumpster fire of spam and aggressive, low intelligence/high effort marketing tactics.
I would never use their site for anything, though I've seen coworkers apply for jobs using it. Personally I've found the other nonsocial platforms and email to be the best for getting a high paying position.
I have a user script that just hides the LinkedIn feed. It's quite blissful.
I found it best to stay Linked-Out.
This post made me open linkedin..
The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager"..
They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror, pulls a strip down and sticks her phone back to the tape.
Seems like she's a bad manager. Obviously tape doesn't go over the mirror, well she's leveled up her skills in the next few seconds. She installs the brilliantly designed mirror-mount-phone-holder-multi-axis.png (TM).
No she's a good manager, she's meeting her employees in the middle, both passenger and driver can pull the phone right next to their face in case they need to see the map. Good managing! Fractional leadership!
I do wonder when the next car digs itself into a ditch, whether putting the phone in front of the drivers face was ideal. But hey, I'm just a lay-engineer struggling to form a sentence with an aw shucks look, far from the hallowed halls of what an MBA or fractional CTO could know.
This seems emblematic of something...
> This post made me open linkedin..
> The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know
The two common failure points for developers using social media are getting triggered at the first instance of content they dislike in the feed and not following sources of content they want to read.
Nobody should feel compelled to use any social media if they don’t want or have to. If you actually want to understand what other people see in the platform, though, you have to understand how they use it.
Any social media with a feed requires an ability to skim and filter. If you stop and read the obviously low quality content to either hate-read or to get triggered then you won’t make it far on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Hacker News comments.
Second, you have to curate your sources. If you strongly dislike a post then use mechanisms to see less of it. If you want to see more of something then like it. Follow people who produce good content. Once you’ve given the algorithms some signal the content improves to your liking, even though it’s not perfect.
For many years I went without looking at LinkedIn at all. I even deleted my LinkedIn account for couple of years in mid '10s.
I have found a lot of value in LinkedIn recently after I started interacting with news, posts, and people that have something interesting to say. It is as if you tell the algorithm what you like, it will show more things like that.
I also proactively flag things I don't like to see. That also helps a lot in improving my feed, I assume.
Th "updates" feed with all the opentowork, hiring, promotions doesn't bother me much. it has it's uses, and its easy to just eyeball and move on.
What I don't understand is the grandstanding about how LinkedIn and its users are all dumb. You can always timebox your interactions with LinkedIn and ignore it rest of the time if you cannot afford to NOT have a LinkedIn account.
Oh! and learn to use the notification settings. Turn off email alerts etc.,
I think it's a perfect mirror of the corporate world, which in itself rewards and thrives on mediocrity. Mediocrity is safe and predictable.
Sure, let's hear the counter-example of the noble startup, taking massive risks to build The Coolest Thing. Like the enthusiastic wiggly sperms, one in a million succeeds -- and the consequences of initial success are to grow mediocre over time.
LinkedIn is marketing slop, aimed at the lowest common denominator, because that's the most numerous denomination of the walking wallet. Of course it is saturated with family friendly, inoffensive, endless streams of softcore corporate propaganda.
Disaster stemming from the deadly combo of Dunning Kruger effect + network effect + recommendation algorithms floating similar BS up top.
Most who post absolute BS on such "professional" forums as a way to gain a larger "network" easily attract similar ones with relatable mediocrity index. The network effect kicks in and mediocrity gets amplified.
Everyone thus gets forced to either to act insanely ridiculous or just GTFO to retain whatever little sanity they have left in them.
Most corporate jobs are just mediocrity-maxxing absolutely BS jobs. It is only natural that the most popular corporate SM amplifies and promotes BS and mediocrity at scale.
Mediocrity is everywhere—on every platform. Even on blogs. Even in scientific publications. But if you’re creating something worth reading, why hesitate to post it on LinkedIn or anywhere else? Valuable content doesn’t lose its quality just because of where it’s published. Dumb comments don’t change that either.
I actually think creators who produce valuable work should be just as visible as the mediocre ones, so that over time, the difference becomes clear and mediocrity slowly fades. Sure, the marketing and self-promotion side of things might feel uncomfortable, especially for developers. But in a society where the ignorant are bold, if the thoughtful and knowledgeable don’t show the same courage, that society is doomed.
No matter what kind of nonsense you come across, let science and reason be your guide—and keep creating and sharing.
He as point. And it's probably annyoing because: One wants to post "substantial content" and being acknowledge, but one cannot rise against this "flood" of nonsense.
Question is: What can you do? We can't stop this trend. People are looking for "reach". And you can achieve that using differet approaches. What we experience at LinkedIn is the simplest approach: Spam the system with your AI generated "nonsense" posts, add a selfie and people will follow. It's not even bad content, it's positive content, emotional content, touching content. But first it's way easier to create than writing long technical articles or analysis. And seconds it's easiere to consume - people want short messages.
And it's not only LinkedIN, it's everywhere. Medium, Facebook, you name it.
Sad for everyone trying to communicatae more than just "calendar mottos". But true.
I don't need a reward from a beggar.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I've gotten two good jobs from posting on LinkedIn. Mutual connections see your posts, and recruiters can find and contact you. When you list it on your resume, people do look at it. So yes it "changes" your career, by helping you get jobs.
Yeah it's full of drivel. All social media is full of drivel. Stop paging through the drivel and use it as a tool. Collect good connections, keep up with old colleagues, network. That's what it's for.
What annoys me the most in my LinkedIn feed is low-effort visual AI slop, in particular based on fads such as the bland 4o comic style with text bubbles.
As a "visual animal", I find it very hard to tune out this kind of noise. I consequently try to hide such content from my feed, but the LinkedIn algorithm will not budge.
I did an Ask HN a while ago trying to find browser add-ons which will hide (or blur) such images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43833961), which turned out fruitless.
LinkedIn also rewards absolutely sickening PR spamming. All the corporate feelgood PR bullshit that people willingly repost, it makes me sick to my stomach.
People must have no spine or self-worth to be reposting all their employer's hot air like that.
But yeah Microsoft is all about mediocrity. Their game is becoming the biggest common denominator, not the best.
This reads like a developer trying to make a GUI be less effective....kind of like some maligned GIT client and other dev production tools...
In a corporation-dominated economy, LinkedIn can't produce anything different... People are limited in what they can say. On LI, you are representing your employer to some extent. You can't just post all your juicy gossip or crazy takes.
At best, you can nerd-out in your subject area, but even that's limited as you risk being seen as either a show-off or you may make a mistake one day and be shuned for it. It's kind of high-stakes. It's like social networking but with your employer potentially scrutinizing your posts.
On LI, people are always one bad post away from losing their income. You're never going to get fully honest takes in such environment.
The only people who can share everything honestly on LI are people who are very predictable and basically don't have any opinion about anything... Not the most exciting kinds of people.
Though at least this self-censorship boringness ceiling does make it easier to get eyeballs for your content if you're willing to get risky. It's easier for content to stand out.
It reflects society, everything rewards mediocrity and deception
Mediocrity can be measured.
Couldn't agree more
LinkedIn isn’t a professional network, it’s a slave auction with a newsfeed. Workers line up to show their teeth - “failure is just learning in disguise”, “kindness is leadership”, all that drivel - while hoping to be picked by a master who won’t beat them too hard.
The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.
Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.
You manage to see through the bs
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930602.
> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
> I find it deeply depressing
Please don't fulminate on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.
It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.
The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.
If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.
There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.
The problem is that even reviews from verified purchasers get gamed in the real world, and aggregated reviews can only cover simple information because people don't have the expertise for a proper review (e.g. try to find basic information like idle power consumption for computers. Or whether some part has working or broken pcie power management). So the problem is that you need morally unassailable competent reviewers.
In theory, you'd need consumers to fund such an organization only until they had so much sway that a review from them became essentially mandatory for anyone to consider your product, at which time they could charge a fee to review a product without becoming beholden to the companies paying the fees.
I use and pay for the professional review site https://www.which.co.uk/
They are a charity funded by subscribing consumers. They don't get paid by the sellers so the incentive structure benefits the consumer. I trust what they write.
My wife used Angie's List to find some really good, honest contractors.
Many years ago, when it was still fairly new.
I'd never recommend Angie's List, these days, though. It's pure garbage.
She also used to rely on Amazon reviews.
Again, it's a dumpster fire, these days. Absolutely worthless.
The whole Internet is like this now--it's a victim of its own success. "Dead Internet Theory" is correct, I believe. There must be some kind of sociological term for what happens with popular websites that become victims of their own success, like Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, all of them follow the same predictable pattern. When they are small and unknown, they are useless. Then they hit some critical mass and a wave of new adopters show up and it's amazing--for awhile--then as the inevitable grifters and thieves arrive, the whole thing becomes a turd of astronomical proportions. Then the good people disappear, leaving only the trash behind.
Craigslist hasn't sold out ever and eBay is still useful for its original purpose if you look for genuinely used things. You're confusing them with the Etsy dumpsterfire.
Craigslist never sold out, but it went through a big scammer phase (and largely lost me). Looking for an apartment in SF in 2016 was a mix of property management co spam and outright fraudulent listings trying to scam you. Not sure if they ever corrected this.
I’ve since moved to Portland, OR, where Craigslist seems to get about 10% of the listings compared to FB marketplace.
I generally love Craigslist and want it to succeed, but it hasn’t been “thriving” anywhere I’ve lived in a loooooong time.
Ironically, Facebook Marketplace is as or more useful than back-in-the-day Craigslist.
Most folks I know, use it, like they used to use CraigsList.
I don't use FB at all, so it doesn't matter to me.
Sounds like "enshittification" to me: During the growth phase the offering is good, but as growth inevitably slows, most companies will extract value by other means: Cutting costs/quality and raising prices are the most obvious and perhaps least nefarious tactics. There's companies that don't fall too far into this, but I think most successful ones do.
The problem of evil. The grifters and thieves always show up, late but inevitably, to the party. The game needs a patch to potentially fix though it's unclear what that patch would be and what could be it's unintended side effects
> The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels.
This couldn’t be more incorrect. In Smith’s day your sources of information would be interpersonal, or one of your local newspapers. Newspapers in the 18th century wore their bias on their sleeves and had very particular world views, they were anything but neutral. You might also learn about commercial interests in coffee houses where stock markets first developed. This was a place where people were trying to sell you something, like shares in a commercial shipping business.
I’m always astonished that people make these claims about Smith’s work without having read his books or any relevant history.
Smith's book sits on my bedside stand as I write this. In the hypothetical society he uses in the book (the one with the butcher and the baker), the flow of market information is indeed interpersonal (though he never explicitly states this, to my recollection) and therefore not only carries some level of trust, but is generally peer-to-peer. The state of 18th century news papers and marketing actually supports my point, which is a point that applies to any society with a high level of economic power asymmetry, not just to the modern era.
This is a general phenomenon. People form associations through casual encounters with something or other without actually trying to understand what is actually the case.
I think it’s the certainty that’s bothers me. It also concerns me that people underpin a larger anticapitalist worldview based on ahistorical and incorrect understandings of capitalism.
For an increasing set of product attracting attention and midshare is the product. Creator economy; open source projects that have many stars safer to use then ones that don't. AWS better to use than some small competitor because you know many others are in that same boat. "Not fired for using Microsoft" etc.
Widely used and viewed is value; less and less does a product evaluation work in isolation. So very difficult to evaluate products fairly in that sense. Something may be better but it's only in so far that your review agragation / index is a fair market for attention.
Think GitHub stars and amazon reviews for products or product hunt for new startups, or YouTube or LinkedIn views; all have their game of gathering attention / marketing that plays into products visibility and viability.
The phrase was originally "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", which, ironically, did not save IBM once the cost effectiveness of alternatives was too overwhelming to ignore. The effect of mindshare isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I've thought about this quite a bit, and my conclusion is that the ultimate missing component here is trust. I don't trust star reviews, they can be bought, and platforms don't care about that too much as long as they're making good money.
I trust three things: Recommendations from competent acquaintances, actually good review sites, and brands I've been happy with in the past.
My acquaintances and the review sites I frequent are pretty niche. If they weren't so niche, they'd probably inevitably become corrupted and promote the offering of whoever pays the most. I think it would be amazing if this could be scaled without the corruption, but I don't know how.
That leaves the brand recognition as the one thing that scales. And that mostly happens through marketing. You hear about something and eventually build enough trust to invest, and if the offering is good, you found a good supplier and they found a potentially loyal customer. I think that mechanic isn't so bad, though far from ideal.
None of those work, because they inevitably become vectors of the problem they're supposed to solve.
This is yet another disproof of the nonsense belief that markets reward efficiency, which is good for consumers.
Markets are fundamentally about gaining advantage over others, and it's far easier and cheaper to gain advantage through manipulation and questionable forms of persuasion than by any other means.
Which is why everyone and everything is now drowning in toxic sludge.
Markets, lacking any sense of the collective good, inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons for the benefit of a small number of the most successful, persuasive, and least ethical predatory manipulators.
This is supposed to be "rational", but that framing is itself a manipulation.
There's nothing rational about drowning in toxic sludge. It's a specific moral policy choice, with predictably negative consequences that have played out over and over again.
> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.
This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.
I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.
That's the thing with activities anyone can do - pretty much anyone does. And 90% of everything is... not great. I think a lot of those doofuses on LinkedIn just portray some level of success when in reality they're desperate for business, at least some folks I spoke to that are very active there were like that. But that's anecdotal evidence. Depressingly, just how some folks succeed with just a good offering, some folks just succeed with good marketing. But I suppose if you manage to be reasonably good at both, you have a good chance to succeed.
> This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing
What? No, it doesn't assume any such thing. The mere fact that marketing is necessary implies nothing about the skill of those attempting it.
It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.
If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.
Same reply as I wrote above:
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
Why would someone who isn't an engineer look at Github? That gives them no information about the quality of the product.
It literally contains as much information as anybody could potentially hope for (public information anyhow - excluding interviews and the like). If they happen not to be able to distinguish between a “page does not exist” (90%~ of cases IME, ie no GH account), or their ego is so inflated that they cant be bothered to spend 2mins asking their CTO (or dont even have one or trust them), thats a different story and its on them. The signal is there.
There's an assumption in here that Google works like a proper search engine anymore. Otherwise, you're right on.
I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.
> I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.
It is contrived, but it’s usually contrived on behalf of the person who signs your checks, in my experience. Process exists to serve the owners not the worker bees.
To play devil's advocate here, can any value be created if no one knows about your product?
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.
Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.
But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.
In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.
Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.
Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.
That’s like saying your product is good unless it is bad and there are other alternatives
Almost, but that's the gist. Letting people know about your product creates value if and only if the product itself brings them positive net utility for buying it and there were no other even better products that you distracted them from. Convincing someone to buy your product doesn't show that it's actually good (surely you have regretted a purchase before).
Additionally, essentially no marketing is a dry list of facts informing people of products to help them make rational choices. A great deal of marketing contains no explicit facts at all. A large amount of effort is spent getting people to buy things they don't even need (or worse: harms them) and/or throw out perfectly usable items they already have or otherwise participate in conspicuous consumption, which is frankly quite grim against the backdrop of climate change being a (the?) top problem being shouldered onto our successors.
What? Your project might be good or bad, if it's bad/low quality/low effort and you take sales away from a better option by abusing human biases (such as recency bias), then you're destroying (potential, not actual) value.
What if your product is good and you want people to purchase it?
Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.
The point of marketing is to remove and subvert that agency, disconnect buying decisions from real value, and to limit the consequences of flaws and underperformance.
The point of marketing is to provide the signal - you can use your agency and decide whether that signal is valuable or not.
If I'm shown an advertisement for a watch from a well known company with some detailed specs I'm inclined to believe it based on the brand reputation. This signal (the specifications) is valuable to me but not necessarily completely accurate. I'm better off with the signal than without. The reason being there are more instances of truth than lies across all advertisements.. otherwise they wouldn't work.
Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.
Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.
I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.
The specs are not objective in the correct sense. They are just signals that you can later verify.. like all things. Everything has an accuracy number beside it - what makes you think the specs are to be believed?
True, agreed. But thats besides the point. For the purposes of this thread, if an ad contains text/information thats well defined enough to be verifiable/falsifiable in principle, thats better than 98% of the “ads” I see on Linkedin (or anywhere else for that matter). “We focus on building reliable, trustworthy AI” is not an example of that unless the CEO finds a way to, or makes an effort towards, providing a method for us to verify that.
How would they even discover that though? Every single customer would have to buy both products and test for themselves. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Then they wouldn't need convincing?
Its bringing the signals closer to me than I would have otherwise had. The agency part is for me buying it but not necessarily for me to do the research so in that case you are right.
But in practice it is beneficial (for both parties) to sometimes bring the signal closer. If you truly believe in agency then you must trust that the person who buys it after being shown the advertisement was better off being shown the advertisement.
where is the concern for my agency when an advertiser steals my time and attention. when they call me on the phone, send texts, prisesopen my email account, and plaster ads all over the streets.
in what sense is an ad for hair products different from a person pretending to be a little old lady in South Africa who just wants to make sure her late husbands millions go to a random person on the internet - its not
I have made my choice to try to remove myself as far as possible from your 'product discovery', but that's one choice you're not willing to let me have. there are innumerable people in the world who just want a chance to make me listen to their pitch. what do I owe them that I should have to.
>Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.
They can't. Your shit blogspam is all over the internet. You've been using LLMs to advertise it everywhere. You've been using bots to post fake reviews online. You've been selling them on platforms that don't give a shit about customers and will never take returns. Either by being first or having more money, or time to blow into it, you can easily drown out any potential threats. The only way another product comes out on top is by doing the same things as you are.
Which is fun and all, but there's external consequences to this behavior. The internet is worse, product reviews are worse, and overall, you're destroying trust in society.
But sure, "agency".
You are completely exaggerating and pointing out edge cases. Sure sometimes advertising can be harmful and there are laws against false advertising. But in general it is helpful and provides value. For instance I personally like it when I 'm shown a relevant advertisement which actually convinces me to purchase it. Just recently I saw some advertisement on Instagram related to some concert near where I live. It was actually relevant and I considered purchasing a ticket.
You can always exaggerate and cherry pick bad instances from anything. What you are doing is similar to this. There were a few Samsung phones that blew up and caused injury. You now characterise all phones as being harmful and dangerous to society.
Not an edge case at all - phones blowing up is not what we're talking about. The absence of "we spent less than 10% of our budget on cyber security (in fact, we proud ourselves in having less than 5 cyber security experts on the team, and our release cycle is very quick - we don't really listen to the nerds when they say they need more time!), so unless you'd rather avoid a 15 year old kid from Russia completely owning all of your personal data, our product is the most cost effective option! Also, we used existing circuit boards, so our phone's innovation is mostly on the cost side - we managed to make it dirty cheap for you. What are you waiting for?" is what we're talking about.
The things they talked about are so common that I think it’s disingenuous to call them edge cases.
"When an incompetent developer stumbles onto a successful idea an infinity of shit is created."
I agree with you. Sometimes simply being the first mover businesses/solutions/software get name recognition and an unfair(?) advantage that greatly diminishes overall value by blocking better products from emerging.
To put if fairly, some things are so bad it'd be an improvement NOT to have them, so someone else could do a better job and everyone would be better off. Examples.. Emscripten, Python, Bluetooth, Chromecast, any IoT device so far created..
You don't need to drag Python into this now :P
What? No, it's obviously not the same statement.
The whole point of advertising is making the "free market agents" less rational. The most popular product is rarely the best.
No its about product discovery. It is in fact essential to a rational market. Imagine you create a really good product. You actually believe in it and you think people would want to buy it. Please tell me how you will practically get it noticed? I would like actual practical advice.
Product discovery is one facet of it, certainly. It’s also about pursuading people to buy a product / service they don’t really need, creating demand where none (or not as much) existed previously, of convincing people that their product / service is better than that of others when this might not in fact be the case.
In the exact same way as if you had a godawful product and you want to sell it.
Promote it, talk about it on social media, possibly contract some marketing services, find out who is more prone to purchasing it and focus on that group, etc etc.
I think you are agreeing with me. This process is valuable - it brings your product to people who benefit from it. It does not diminish just for the reason that there might be godawful products some times.
This is actually a pretty solid example of a flaw in free market economics. Marketing can increase and decrease knowledge and there's not a strong market force pushing things the right direction.
I thought about what you said and I think you are correct. But since we don't live in an ideal rational world do you agree that without advertisements the market can fail? How would new products even enter the limelight?
I'm not anti-marketing but it does point to a clear example of how consumer protection laws are needed for efficient markets.
Without advertisements? Word of mouth, neutral databases of information (these are hard to create in practice without at least some gaming, but i think things like the yellow pages or government operated lists of services get close)
Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.
Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..
I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.
But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?
Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!
Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!
Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!
Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_
I searched some greed quotes and here's one I'd like to share
"As long as greed is stronger than compassion, there will always be suffering"
"Can you make a sentence look more intelligent if you surround it with quotes?"
I didn't want it to sound intelligent but I mean I was mentioning a quote so we do need to place a quote inside quotes afterall lol.
I was just sharing something that I felt relevant to the discussion in the sense that greed is one of the most major causes of suffering, and it is our greed that we are ready to write linkedin mediocrity slop.
This was more an humorous side comment than a critic, I’m sorry if it looked like this.
Not sure what you mean. You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.
It’s not always like that and you are removing agency from the person purchasing the product.
'You think people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret.'
No. _history has unequivocally proven_ that people are inherently stupid and end up buying things they will regret. Or at least they should, if they were aware of the full extent of damage typical products cause.
Its about the numbers. Sure sometimes they are stupid and make stupid decisions but the extent matters. Take your own example - if I ~reach~ read your purchase history can I characterise you as inherently stupid?
No so much "stupid", just full of biases and somewhat lazy. This is a well-researched and documented fact. Knowingly abusing these biases to get them to buy or use something that they either don't need - or, worse, buying a low quality/low effort product when better alternatives exist - that's extremely detrimental. That's how we end up with the enshittification of everything.
Yes there are biases sometimes and it can get exploited and this is an exception that proves the rule. But the rule is that people know what they want to buy and know what they are getting into. You are trying to get in between by suggesting you know more than the buyer and seller.
They mostly don't know what they are getting into though. You can't trust advertising, obviously. You can't trust reviews. You have no way to tell if there is actually a better product than the one you are seeing the ad for. You better hope there is a good return policy.
You can't trust advertising completely nor can you trust reviews completely but they are signals. Treating things as binary will not get you anywhere. Signals exist and are useful if not 100% accurate.
This is... an understatement. I would agree advertising is a useful signal, but I would say that not only can you not trust advertising, you should put negative weight on advertising - i.e. whenever you see an ad, that means the company is putting some amount of money into trying to convince you by means other than an honest comparison/spec table, and therefore is likely to have an inferior product. So personally, I generally avoid any companies/people whose presentations contains no information about the objective characteristics of their work.
You have to advertise to some degree otherwise no one will even know what your product is
Id like to believe people have enough agency to do a google search to at least figure out their options, but granted, I might be wrong about that.
Edit: I do agree you should have a google-findable website which lists the objective characteristics of your product. If you call that advertising (I call it a "release", and I reserve the word "ad" for anything that has emotional appeal and caters to the indifferent/uninformed), then I agree.
Hoping people stumble on to page 3 of Google to find your thing isn't sustainable so you need some kind of advertising.
You need someway to get whatever your selling into a place where people buy things
exception? I couldn't disagree more. I can think of one or two specific examples "fair" or even "useful" advertising, and that's being generous, among thousands or tens of thousands of examples. I'm not claiming I know more than the buyer or seller, I'm claiming the seller "knows" much more than the buyer, and has vastly more resources and vested interest in the transaction than the buyer (because of the scale, and the fact that people are mostly very similar to each other - economies of scale, essentially). Note I'm restricting my argument to the case of big companies selling to consumers, or big companies buying from other big companies, although the latter is comparatively less damaging to society overall, still pretty bad tho.
The seller knows how much effort/resources were put into the product, knows (or has enough resources to figure out) how to nudge/mislead the consumer, has teams of brilliant people working on that - see the ad industry. I would definitely agree that the consumer has some responsibility, too, to stay informed, and if it weren't for the fact that this causes externalities to society, I wouldn't give a crap about the fact that some corporate director was duped into buying a terrible product. Unfortunately, that causes companies that particularly good in misleading people to outcompete companies who spend their money elsewhere.
Why do you accuse me of things I've not said, and drift away from the extremely stupid thing you said ? Value creation is not the only thing that matters, and has extremely harmful results if taken to its extremes. Trying to put the blame on "people" and their "agency" is such a destructive behavior that it shouldn't be tolerated. People buying things does not absolve you of the responsibility of creating said product, or of the process used to make them buy your crap. If your marketing process actively makes society worse, you're responsible for it. If your product has consequences for centuries, you're responsible for it. If your advertisement for a gun is "hey it makes really nice holes in your shooting target. And the neighbor you don't like", you're not off the hook when it gets used to shoot someone. In the same way, if your advertisement technique results in hundreds of thousands of people reading your shitty content that actively makes them dumber, you're not off the hook for making society dumber, even if it "creates value"
> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
Are you mind-hacking your friends when you text them “Good morning”?
It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.
To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.
Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.
There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.
The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.
I lurk LinkedIn for this guy's posts only https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-cheng-991849b6
Final sentence of this piece is missing a word.
Social media rewards mediocrity, LinkedIn is just the most button down.
> I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying
Oh wow, I’m sure this isn’t going to be an evenhanded look at the situation.
Another small annoying thing in LinkedIn are posts with different fonts. They look so lame, that I have "banner blindness" for such posts
Edit: grammar
is this the right Elliott Smith?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliott-smith-29707136
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The posts section always basically goes like: We did X but then what surprised us with X is something we did not see coming.
> My feed is mostly AI-generated slop
I see zero slop on my feed. Maybe because I only follow friends and former coworkers that I liked. How many people are you following?
linkedin is training data for tuning the corpo-speak, sycophancy and sociopathy tokens on microsofts AI models
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Please don't post shallow dismissals like this on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Some of the actual posts on wikipedia are more outlandish than the parody ones. It's entertaining.
I was not expecting that to be the top response but here we are
I’m more interested in what their content actually looks like if it’s that “successful”