Slightly off topic. I've had exactly one consulting engagement come from LinkedIn, back in 2013. Someone met with a VC, was told they needed a Ruby on Rails developer, found me, and it was off to the races. That was it. No lead since, in any format. I paid for Premium for a while and eventually stopped.
I have connections, and friends occasionally like a comment when I share something. I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform, even in the comments. That makes it really hard to share a good blog post.
Honestly, I get more engagement on Facebook. My mom and in-person friends find what I do slightly interesting, at least when the algorithm decides to show it. Same story there, though. Links to a blog get buried compared to native content.
> I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform
This has been proven, they absolutely penalize off site links. The workaround is to put it in the comments, which they do not demote (yet). But engagement still matters for appearing on feeds. If you're not saying something controversial, you probably won't get a lot of engagement.
I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform
Interesting...why do you think that? I was on LI the other day and it struck me that probably half my feed was "look at this thing on this other site". Admittedly, the link was usually under the fold in the comments, which maybe is a cheat code to get around some real or perceived blockage? Not that any sort of user-hostile behavior from LI would surprise me, I just made a mental note of it at the time.
I got my current job (which I love and am being paid incredibly well for) by cold-firing a DM to someone at the company who I thought would be responsive who then put me down as a referral.
It's a whole song-and-dance, absolutely. The 'game' is to post enough (once/twice a week) with genuine, non-AI generated content to get your co-workers liking your posts and engaging. General, pro-social musings about layoffs, coworkers, job prospects, etc.
Recruiters started hitting me up fairly quickly after I started doing this even with my paltry engagement numbers (5k~ views per post) - half a dozen DMs a week for pretty decent roles in my city while I kept it up (and still a handful now after I stopped posting). And it also made my profile relatively 'attractive' for hiring managers, too, which is to say I didn't seem like a total sociopath with anger problems.
It helps that code-switching is pretty easy for me given my personal history so it doesn't feel like I'm somehow fundamentally betraying who I am by posting fluffy things on one social media platform. I imagine if you're more sensitive about your identity or how you engage socially, it can be very difficult to put any effort into your LI profile.
I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
Does this suggest an opportunity (maybe a business opportunity) for a service that, by crawling and scraping paywalled sites, presents to the human user what bots get to see? What if this service could somehow correlate all the socials you mentioned in a single, less horrible user interface?
archive.is, when google served cached pages you could get the actual content from the cache, not sure if other engines still serve the page they crawled as a cache.
The problem is really the unpredictability: some LinkedIn pages can apparently be accessed publicly without a login, others cannot. But perhaps that fact alone would be reason enough to block it entirely in Google searches?
Back when expertsexchange was consistently in the top search results, google had instituted a rule that said that the page must show content without requiring being logged in otherwise the site would be deranked. Guess they quietly dropped that rule
I still remember the days when Google saw it as 'cloaking' when you showed different content to users and search engines. And to be honest, I'm annoyed they don't seem to do that anymore.
Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.
But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.
You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
Good on you for doing this and I hope you get promoted. But I can imagine a lot of people are like me and just don’t want to engage in office politics on or offline. Not that I don’t sometimes, but I’d much rather just work and be paid to do a job and live my life.
I use LinkedIn as another place to post my photos. My goal is to post 5 a day though sometimes I do more and sometimes I do less. I wouldn't really be doing it just to post to LinkedIn but since I am to posting 6 other social sites I am already doing all the work. The average visibility I get is atrocious but once in a while I get a hit and get 500+ views.
What? It's how the job market works. It's like 90% connections and bullshit. I use GP somewhat similar to GP. Not as directly, but still targeted at helping my career. I've got a few people who write a lot of buzz that are also actually good for a couple of interesting comments back and forth. Once in a while they'll share someone new and I'll link up with them. This keeps you in the algorithm and it doesn't require you to be fake.
Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.
Sometimes I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.
Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill. It've never actually gotten a job through linkedin though, but then again, all the jobs I've gotten after my first one has been through my real world network some of which have grown out of linkedin relationships.
I do wish the corporate larping platform our society has decided to use was decentralised though.
I don't think it's quite as black and white. LinkedIn is just one channel, but I imagine you're going to have a hard time finding a workplace where social credit isn't a big part of internal politics. Whether that's being charming, great at your job or using SoMe, it's all about people.
I doubt any company primarily uses LinkedIn for promotions, but it does help your career if you are known for something positive by the people who run the company you work for.
Of course social credit is a big part of internal politics, but if you have to resort to an external social network for your internal signaling, something is very broken. This whole subthread is about someone claiming they have to be active on LinkedIn to prove their worth to someone inside their organization.
They're saying it's not the only way, it's just one way. Some people post on LinkedIn, other people have shared hobbies w/ their management chain, it's just looking for any edge you can find.
> Nobody:
> LinkedIn Influencers:
> Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
I love when people complain about X being in their feed on social media, and I see none of X. Do they not understand the basics of the algorithms? The more you engage with X, the more they show it to you.
That said, there's an insane amount of garbage self promotion on LinkedIn for individuals and companies which amount to your mom putting up your messy crayon drawing of you pet cat on the refrigerator as a kid. It's only impressive to you and your family, and it's not a remotely accurate picture of your cat.
Tech Instagram is worse they just like looking at flashing colors on screen with no meaning. I once saw like this dude flexing about how complex his code is by showing like this obsidian ass diagram like dude what am I supposed to appreciate here? how coupled your code is?
People told me I was supposed to be on LinkedIn but I found it too silly a place to make an account. Then again, I was laid off from my job a while ago and I don’t really have a “network” irl nor online through which to find a new job, so maybe I am the sucker after all.
I got away with not needing LinkedIn to find jobs up until last year. It's for me hard to tell if things have actually changed in terms of job postings elsewhere because the main constraint I have now is working fully remotely (due to my wife having an autoimmune condition that would make commuting/office work on a regular basis needlessly risky) and technically living within the boundaries of New York City (a weirdly large number of places with offices here require hybrid if you're in the city boundaries, which is ridiculous because I'm probably twice as far from Manhattan as any point in Hoboken, but Brooklyn counts as New York). Compared to when I had looked for a job in late 2023, there were far fewer remote positions, and many of them that did technically allow remote had constraints like the New York one I mentioned or even entire time zones ruled out (a number of Bay Area companies seem to require remote to be in either Pacific or Mountain time, and the fact that I already prefer working 11-7 instead of 9-5 is irrelevant I guess because it's probably a compromise between the factions that don't want any remote and the ones that want to allow it unilaterally). I ended up taking around six months of actively looking to land a new role, and out of a couple dozen interviews over that time (most of which didn't end up panning out because they weren't really as open to remote as they initially indicated or wanted me to fly to the west coast every few months, which is a great way to have me only like 80% productive from losing a week to travel and another to jet lag; I don't think either side would be happy with that tradeoff in the long run), only a couple came from applications or connections I had outside of LinkedIn.
I absolutely abhor it the "newsfeed" because it's never once had anything interesting on it, and my inbox resembles what I've heard described from women about using dating apps in terms of how so many recruiters will spam boilerplate messages to anyone with the most tenuous connection to what they're recruiting for, making it a lot of effort to sift through to find anything of substance. I've gotten messages that literally just refer to me having a "background in IT" as evidence that I'd be a good fit for their positions, which is somewhere between "you know how to write code in some programming language" and "you've touched a computer before" in terms of relevancy (and that's not even getting into what I've also heard from women about how men will try to DM them on LinkedIn like it's a social networking app; I have to imagine the experience is even worse for them). It honestly feels like companies have just become overly reliant on it for recruiting nowadays, and it doesn't even end up even working well because too many places can't be bothered to even properly describe the jobs they're hiring for (e.g. tagging them as "fully remote" and then putting in the description that they require 3 days a week in the office), and at least half of the postings aren't even from the companies themselves that are hiring but just from generic recruiting firms that describe a position but don't specify the name of the company. If you can avoid making an account, it's definitely preferable not to, and I envy you, because I wish I had that luxury, but unfortunately I just didn't have any other good prospects for finding a job.
I feel that LinkedIn has a lot of similarities with late stage Quora. Though linkedin has handled the its descent into Instagramization a lot better than Quora did.
LinkedIn used to be a half-decent social network. There weren't too many updates, some were grift of course, but you'd also see former colleagues doing interesting things like startups or academic papers.
Then ChatGPT happened and dear lord did LinkedIn ever fall off a cliff. So, so many low-effort, zero-value updates. Far worse than any other social network I use.
I don't know, it was pretty bad before then too. Famously memed for the near psychosis level of shared performance art, where everyone had to present themselves as hobbyless, status hungry work machines. Maybe it was different if you already had a great network. Everyone I knew job searching hated it.
I joined a call once to meet a guy and he was all energetic and speaking in tongues of an LLM hitting epic one liners and I thought he was just a coke addict. Turns out his reality is basically linkedin. Like how the hell can you be like this unironically?
I am finding a niche on LinkedIn by calling out the larping, clichés, fake projects, AI experts, and the general stupidity of the whole thing. Kind of eliminates me from being considered for some positions, as commented by a recruiter.
I'm glad that LinkedIn's bullshit "inspiration porn" has finally gotten the hatred I always felt it deserved [1].
It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.
I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.
Reducing it to this assessment misses a lot of nuance. Sci is probably one of the better engineering boards on the internet today. There's probably a lot of overlap between HN users and 4chan users actually.
Trolls posting absolute garbage /b/ are at least trying to evoke some feeling in you. Hard to say the same from the ‘I had dinner with my wife on a yacht. Here’s what it taught me about Series A VC relationships’ posting full of Claudisms and emojis.
Finance LinkedIn is filled with slop posts about "Look at the trading terminal I built. Real math. Here's why it matters." and it's some clearly vibecoded pointless app. Comments are all "Insane project <name>!"
It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
As far as larping goes, quantitative finance is currently the hottest field for that. I'm sure that close to 100% of the people on social media that market themselves as quants are in fact not professional quantitative analysts / researchers / developers.
They all post vids of their vibe-coded dashboards where agents are doing market research and executing trades, while they kick back as collect to profits.
I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.
After tech layoffs started, the get-rich-quick folks looked on what other fields pay well, and the decided that the absolutely most selective, the most credentialed and gatekept niche role in finance, that's the one to impersonate.
Slightly off-topic, but I interviewed at one of the two companies above, plus Bridgewater, and never felt so stupid in my entire life. Real geniuses in some interviews, people who know what they are talking about and have zero need for selling courses or videos. On the other hand, if they _did_ need to sell something, I doubt they would be able to, as charisma was sorely lacking.
What sucks abut these types of people and the latest get rich quick scheme of the day is that they are generally rewarded mightily by society and investment. Part of it is greater fool theory playing out lucratively, part of it is also these crypto bros or ai bros or what-have-you bros finding themselves with an ear to actual government power directly shaping the trajectory of nation states into their favor.
Yes. I must use it within sandbox and single signon MFA and a password that questions my sanity to login. Even with this it regularly manages to sucks the soul dry occasionally.
I don't mind the projects. Its the grandiose self-important posting that is insufferable. Not everything you experienced today is an epiphany on productivity or team-building.
When searching for a job, it almost feels irresponsible not to use the site, but boy is it one poor execution. Why are jobs like the fourth tab? Why is there a feed populated entirely by people I don’t know and have never connected with in any way? Are people really just sitting there hiring strangers based off of cool comments? I literally hate like 10,000 things about this site. I rank it similarly to Discord in terms of quality:popularity ratio.
LinkedIn is such a shit fest. First they push AI generated posts, now you can mark posts as slop but guess what: you're not flagging that content, you're labeling it.
I am thankful that I am not yet important enough to have to spend time spamming there. Which most of my feed seems to be. Just another marketing channel. Just corporate spam. I suppose it generates some leads for some people...
Every time I convince myself to use LinkedIn because I keep getting told it’s where business opportunities are (not jobs, business connections), no matter how I try to be cringy, something deep inside keep preventing me and I feel like a fraud just by posting anything there. Don’t use it now and happy to lose these opportunities, until we get a better platform to replace it.
Years ago I worked with people who does "remarketing", tracking, online ads and sales funnels. Some of them ended up as LinkedIn connection. Their understanding of the internet, IT and the world in general is something to behold. They post the weirdest shit and would have zero moral issues jamming a radioactive AI tracking chip up your butt if it increased "conversion" by 0.5%.
Something like: "I have been looking for a QA middle role with 2 years of experience for six months. Here is the stuff I won't be doing: relocating to a different city, commuting more than 30 minutes, ...". Most of the comments say, "Good luck. You will definitely find a job". Only a few mention that it's time to update your worldview.
I often get notifications to play LinkedIn games, Zip or whatever. The games are very trivial and on a timer, where you end up on some kind of network leaderboard. I never play them party because they're boring, but also, I'm utterly scared that they use them as a intelligence signal in recruiting or selling it to 3rd party ATSs. There are so many companies hungry for arbitrary "smartness" indicators, this wouldn't even chock me.
I know there's a lot of hate for LinkedIn here on HN but it really is the only place to see where ex-colleagues are working at and what competitors say they are up to. It's kind of like a boring version of TwitterX, but essential to those of us in normie jobs.
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
That's the reason I use LinkedIn, and I have zero complaints about it in that form. Tho for me is more about keeping the connection rather than see what they work on.
OTOH I do see the performative posting "I bumped my pinky toe on the cupboard and here's what it taught me about leading teams" and I genuinely don't understand who they're writing for. Isn't it obviously bullshit for everyone? Who cares about that?
LinkedIn is where you, if you work in IT, can broadcast that you're looking for work. It depends on you, your skillset and networking abilities, but it's still pretty good at getting you interviews and recommendations.
The entertaining part, for me, is seeing social media or sales people trying to get a job via LinkedIn. For IT, replies are normally: "I'll call you", tagging someone who is actively hiring or "Reach out to so-and-so at company X, tell them I said hi.". For people who should be experts in sales and social media the replys are "To bad we're not hiring right now", "Best of luck" or "Shared".
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.
I hate LinkedIn so much I made a slop cannon for it. I have Claude research a topic and post an extremely LLM slop post about BuSiNeSs twice a week, and of course everyone comments with slop comments and I reply in kind.
Ironically I think these are insightful. If you want to produce true slop, you need to dumb down your topic selection, or have Claude pick the topics. The stuff about the incompatible goals of "data strategy" I think is genuinely useful perspective, for example.
Claude does pick the topics! I worry I did too good a job steering it. I found a few of them insightful too, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that they're same old "They were doing a thing. It failed." Claude writing you see everywhere, intensifying the feeling that nobody on LinkedIn has a pulse.
On the bright side, if everyone is burning credits mining generic but helpful knowledge out of the LLM training data in bite-size packages, I don't need a subscription of my own!
It will be really fascinating to see what happens with the potential for LLM-generated output to become a dominant component of new training data.
It used to be the case that if you wanted a new job, you could strategically update your profile and over the next several days you would get bombarded by recruiter messages, some of which would actually be high-quality leads.
I once got a cold LinkedIn message that got me a job that I loved. When I was looking this year though it did NOT have the same results. Lots of bots and just recruiters who see a open to work and just add you out of no where with nothing. I did get help from people I actually know on LinkedIn, but other than that it was definitely not helpful in the job search.
I suspect any positive results here are due to training on the test set. (Their training data collection script uses their feed, which is then also used for the slop detector demo vid.)
Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
I'm an EE so The Algorithm tailors my feed differently. Instead of a million computer vision Hello World slop posts, I get a million "I designed a PCB with three components on it using ChatGPT" slop posts.
Also I'm constantly getting friend requests from randos all over the world. I thought you had to have some kind of 2nd or 3rd tier actual connection first?
Slightly off topic. I've had exactly one consulting engagement come from LinkedIn, back in 2013. Someone met with a VC, was told they needed a Ruby on Rails developer, found me, and it was off to the races. That was it. No lead since, in any format. I paid for Premium for a while and eventually stopped.
I have connections, and friends occasionally like a comment when I share something. I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform, even in the comments. That makes it really hard to share a good blog post.
Honestly, I get more engagement on Facebook. My mom and in-person friends find what I do slightly interesting, at least when the algorithm decides to show it. Same story there, though. Links to a blog get buried compared to native content.
> I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform
This has been proven, they absolutely penalize off site links. The workaround is to put it in the comments, which they do not demote (yet). But engagement still matters for appearing on feeds. If you're not saying something controversial, you probably won't get a lot of engagement.
I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform
Interesting...why do you think that? I was on LI the other day and it struck me that probably half my feed was "look at this thing on this other site". Admittedly, the link was usually under the fold in the comments, which maybe is a cheat code to get around some real or perceived blockage? Not that any sort of user-hostile behavior from LI would surprise me, I just made a mental note of it at the time.
I got my current job (which I love and am being paid incredibly well for) by cold-firing a DM to someone at the company who I thought would be responsive who then put me down as a referral.
It's a whole song-and-dance, absolutely. The 'game' is to post enough (once/twice a week) with genuine, non-AI generated content to get your co-workers liking your posts and engaging. General, pro-social musings about layoffs, coworkers, job prospects, etc.
Recruiters started hitting me up fairly quickly after I started doing this even with my paltry engagement numbers (5k~ views per post) - half a dozen DMs a week for pretty decent roles in my city while I kept it up (and still a handful now after I stopped posting). And it also made my profile relatively 'attractive' for hiring managers, too, which is to say I didn't seem like a total sociopath with anger problems.
It helps that code-switching is pretty easy for me given my personal history so it doesn't feel like I'm somehow fundamentally betraying who I am by posting fluffy things on one social media platform. I imagine if you're more sensitive about your identity or how you engage socially, it can be very difficult to put any effort into your LI profile.
I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
> Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault
It is, they’re darkpatternmaxxing.
There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..
Anyone else does that and Google downgrades you, but LinkedIn and Pinterest do it, and Google keeps them at the top.
If you use kagi you can block those pages. Doesn't mean you find the information you're looking for but it does make me feel better
Increases probability if you downrank enough of the noise.
LinkedIn was more open earlier I think they closed down much more. It seems that Google didn’t delist the profile pages.
Linkedin, reddit, instagram, pinterest, x, bluesky, threads, facebook... they provide a better experience to web crawlers than logged-out humans.
Does this suggest an opportunity (maybe a business opportunity) for a service that, by crawling and scraping paywalled sites, presents to the human user what bots get to see? What if this service could somehow correlate all the socials you mentioned in a single, less horrible user interface?
Xcancel before it got cancelled and I doubt anyone would have paid for it anyway
archive.is, when google served cached pages you could get the actual content from the cache, not sure if other engines still serve the page they crawled as a cache.
That’s how paywall unlockers work
they would all try to sue you and you'd be fighting constant rate limits
If you like, you can block it from coming up with an extension: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
The problem is really the unpredictability: some LinkedIn pages can apparently be accessed publicly without a login, others cannot. But perhaps that fact alone would be reason enough to block it entirely in Google searches?
X is the same. "Check out what [politician/celeb] said on X!!" And it's the login page.
The answer is not to sign up to X, but to learn to suppress your FOMO. Chances are it was drivel anyway. Especially true for LinkedIn.
Just replace x.com with nitter.cf
that's neat thanks
Back when expertsexchange was consistently in the top search results, google had instituted a rule that said that the page must show content without requiring being logged in otherwise the site would be deranked. Guess they quietly dropped that rule
Oh! Does that play on words bring back memories. Along with Pen Island!
Try Kagi. It's definitely worth it. And you can block sites in search very easily. None of the closed content farms show up in my search results.
Second. Kagi is worth paying for, and they keep adding features that are actually useful.
I still remember the days when Google saw it as 'cloaking' when you showed different content to users and search engines. And to be honest, I'm annoyed they don't seem to do that anymore.
Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.
But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.
You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
I didn't expect there would be a Christmas party in hell.
Corporate christmas parties are the 2nd circle of hell
Yeah, hell seems like the kind of place that'd be into celebrating easter. (oh, I'm deff going to hell for this one)
Good on you for doing this and I hope you get promoted. But I can imagine a lot of people are like me and just don’t want to engage in office politics on or offline. Not that I don’t sometimes, but I’d much rather just work and be paid to do a job and live my life.
You do you. When I see someone posting on LinkedIn, my only thought is "Can I get away with unfollowing?"
I guess a few posts a year are ok if they don't sound angry or delusional. But zero is really best.
I use LinkedIn as another place to post my photos. My goal is to post 5 a day though sometimes I do more and sometimes I do less. I wouldn't really be doing it just to post to LinkedIn but since I am to posting 6 other social sites I am already doing all the work. The average visibility I get is atrocious but once in a while I get a hit and get 500+ views.
Nobody would accuse me of performative normality
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-houle-a18809320/
Students at my Uni are still LIONs and will mostly accept my follow requests but other people in my town don't, I am gradually building up my network.
LinkedIn wants to reconnect me to my old friends in the knowledge graph industry but I could care less.
but just... why?
I do photography as a character to get better reactions from people. If people have some familiarity with my character they respond better to do it.
It's like I am a cast member at Disney and people already saw the movie.
I an connected to at least 10% of the students on campus so I know I get some visibility thanks to LinkedIn.
Is this for real? If so, that's a major institutional and managerial failing.
What? It's how the job market works. It's like 90% connections and bullshit. I use GP somewhat similar to GP. Not as directly, but still targeted at helping my career. I've got a few people who write a lot of buzz that are also actually good for a couple of interesting comments back and forth. Once in a while they'll share someone new and I'll link up with them. This keeps you in the algorithm and it doesn't require you to be fake.
Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.
Sometimes I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.
Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill. It've never actually gotten a job through linkedin though, but then again, all the jobs I've gotten after my first one has been through my real world network some of which have grown out of linkedin relationships.
I do wish the corporate larping platform our society has decided to use was decentralised though.
Non dysfunctional workplaces don’t require you to be a prolific LinkedIn poster to get on the radar of the person who decides your promotions.
I don't think it's quite as black and white. LinkedIn is just one channel, but I imagine you're going to have a hard time finding a workplace where social credit isn't a big part of internal politics. Whether that's being charming, great at your job or using SoMe, it's all about people.
I doubt any company primarily uses LinkedIn for promotions, but it does help your career if you are known for something positive by the people who run the company you work for.
Of course social credit is a big part of internal politics, but if you have to resort to an external social network for your internal signaling, something is very broken. This whole subthread is about someone claiming they have to be active on LinkedIn to prove their worth to someone inside their organization.
They're saying it's not the only way, it's just one way. Some people post on LinkedIn, other people have shared hobbies w/ their management chain, it's just looking for any edge you can find.
If only these could be identified before you've spent 6 months in them
It is, and sometimes you can use those failings to your personal advantage.
That's just how life works, generally. People in power are largely social engineers of some variety.
My wife got into a car accident.
On a sunday.
I didn't go to the hospital.
I had a client, and a project.
Ready to go.
On a sunday.
You don't give up when life challenges you, you move faster.
Keep building [ROCKET EMOJI]
Everytime I see shit like this on LinkedIn, I assume it is rage bait. Hat tip to the GOAT of LinkedIn trolls: Lumko Solwandle.
I cannot find his original post, but here is cross post: https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/ve8iyw/me_irl/
LinkedIn plot twist: the client IS the wife.
Your wife and kids are holding you back. Your clients are your family now.
I love when people complain about X being in their feed on social media, and I see none of X. Do they not understand the basics of the algorithms? The more you engage with X, the more they show it to you.
That said, there's an insane amount of garbage self promotion on LinkedIn for individuals and companies which amount to your mom putting up your messy crayon drawing of you pet cat on the refrigerator as a kid. It's only impressive to you and your family, and it's not a remotely accurate picture of your cat.
LinkedIn is truly an odd place. I think it’s more performative than Instagram.
Depends on your definition of more.
You can absolutely find non-performative posts on Instagram. There is value in a sincere post - ex. sharing pictures of your cat to your friends.
Whereas in LinkedIn no such value exists in my experience - I can't imagine myself posting there for any other reason than to be performative.
So in terms of % of posts being performative I don't think anything tops LinkedIn.
Tech Instagram is worse they just like looking at flashing colors on screen with no meaning. I once saw like this dude flexing about how complex his code is by showing like this obsidian ass diagram like dude what am I supposed to appreciate here? how coupled your code is?
>showing like this obsidian ass diagram like dude what am I supposed to appreciate here?
The mighty second brain of course. https://youtu.be/6NukGtwJb7Y?si=yg09jegXRM4C-hFE
Like bro totally
The only reason I have LinkedIn is because I think I'm supposed to.
People told me I was supposed to be on LinkedIn but I found it too silly a place to make an account. Then again, I was laid off from my job a while ago and I don’t really have a “network” irl nor online through which to find a new job, so maybe I am the sucker after all.
Never being plugged into the matrix is an achievement to be proud of. Don't fall for the propaganda designed to lure you in.
I got away with not needing LinkedIn to find jobs up until last year. It's for me hard to tell if things have actually changed in terms of job postings elsewhere because the main constraint I have now is working fully remotely (due to my wife having an autoimmune condition that would make commuting/office work on a regular basis needlessly risky) and technically living within the boundaries of New York City (a weirdly large number of places with offices here require hybrid if you're in the city boundaries, which is ridiculous because I'm probably twice as far from Manhattan as any point in Hoboken, but Brooklyn counts as New York). Compared to when I had looked for a job in late 2023, there were far fewer remote positions, and many of them that did technically allow remote had constraints like the New York one I mentioned or even entire time zones ruled out (a number of Bay Area companies seem to require remote to be in either Pacific or Mountain time, and the fact that I already prefer working 11-7 instead of 9-5 is irrelevant I guess because it's probably a compromise between the factions that don't want any remote and the ones that want to allow it unilaterally). I ended up taking around six months of actively looking to land a new role, and out of a couple dozen interviews over that time (most of which didn't end up panning out because they weren't really as open to remote as they initially indicated or wanted me to fly to the west coast every few months, which is a great way to have me only like 80% productive from losing a week to travel and another to jet lag; I don't think either side would be happy with that tradeoff in the long run), only a couple came from applications or connections I had outside of LinkedIn.
I absolutely abhor it the "newsfeed" because it's never once had anything interesting on it, and my inbox resembles what I've heard described from women about using dating apps in terms of how so many recruiters will spam boilerplate messages to anyone with the most tenuous connection to what they're recruiting for, making it a lot of effort to sift through to find anything of substance. I've gotten messages that literally just refer to me having a "background in IT" as evidence that I'd be a good fit for their positions, which is somewhere between "you know how to write code in some programming language" and "you've touched a computer before" in terms of relevancy (and that's not even getting into what I've also heard from women about how men will try to DM them on LinkedIn like it's a social networking app; I have to imagine the experience is even worse for them). It honestly feels like companies have just become overly reliant on it for recruiting nowadays, and it doesn't even end up even working well because too many places can't be bothered to even properly describe the jobs they're hiring for (e.g. tagging them as "fully remote" and then putting in the description that they require 3 days a week in the office), and at least half of the postings aren't even from the companies themselves that are hiring but just from generic recruiting firms that describe a position but don't specify the name of the company. If you can avoid making an account, it's definitely preferable not to, and I envy you, because I wish I had that luxury, but unfortunately I just didn't have any other good prospects for finding a job.
You are a good servant. But you are a bad slave because you are not currently licking the soles of my feet.
It talks to that vain and insecure feeling that many of us have deep down.
Interestingly, unlike instagram the LinkedIn business model has nothing to do with it. It’s built around b2b sales and professional recruitment.
I feel that LinkedIn has a lot of similarities with late stage Quora. Though linkedin has handled the its descent into Instagramization a lot better than Quora did.
LinkedIn used to be a half-decent social network. There weren't too many updates, some were grift of course, but you'd also see former colleagues doing interesting things like startups or academic papers.
Then ChatGPT happened and dear lord did LinkedIn ever fall off a cliff. So, so many low-effort, zero-value updates. Far worse than any other social network I use.
It definitely fell off before ChatGPT by at least a few years.
Long before ChatGPT I would occasionally see a LinkedIn post and get suckered into clicking on it.
A waste of time. Every. Single. Time.
It wasn’t quite as needlessly performative. But it’s never been good.
I don't know, it was pretty bad before then too. Famously memed for the near psychosis level of shared performance art, where everyone had to present themselves as hobbyless, status hungry work machines. Maybe it was different if you already had a great network. Everyone I knew job searching hated it.
I joined a call once to meet a guy and he was all energetic and speaking in tongues of an LLM hitting epic one liners and I thought he was just a coke addict. Turns out his reality is basically linkedin. Like how the hell can you be like this unironically?
I am finding a niche on LinkedIn by calling out the larping, clichés, fake projects, AI experts, and the general stupidity of the whole thing. Kind of eliminates me from being considered for some positions, as commented by a recruiter.
God i hope this is satire
forgot the /s
LinkedIn "honesty" is the new thing now to get engagement.
I'm glad that LinkedIn's bullshit "inspiration porn" has finally gotten the hatred I always felt it deserved [1].
It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.
I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905664
I only had a LinkedIn because... recruiters
i deleted LinkedIn in 2017. nothing of value lost
Who really goes to Linkedin to get useful info? That's why I am in Hacker News.
And yet... the author just posted the same sloppy content here too! Nowhere is immune :)
I am not joking when I say that 4chan is a more rejuvenating and life affirming place than Linkedin
4chan is where people go to show who they truly are.
It's pure Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[0] in action.
[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
Reducing it to this assessment misses a lot of nuance. Sci is probably one of the better engineering boards on the internet today. There's probably a lot of overlap between HN users and 4chan users actually.
Apropos, some of the most wholesome community spirit I've seen in recent years has been amongst the degenerate gamblers of wallstreetbets.
Trolls posting absolute garbage /b/ are at least trying to evoke some feeling in you. Hard to say the same from the ‘I had dinner with my wife on a yacht. Here’s what it taught me about Series A VC relationships’ posting full of Claudisms and emojis.
Who’s the target audience for that?
Can someone post the full thing instead of making a reader scroll up-and-down 'til the next block of text realizes it should load, please?
open, scroll to bottom, scroll back up, read everything without waiting for it to load. easy-peasy
Finance LinkedIn is filled with slop posts about "Look at the trading terminal I built. Real math. Here's why it matters." and it's some clearly vibecoded pointless app. Comments are all "Insane project <name>!"
It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
I'd like to think that the slop-alert button is for their own internal measurements and figuring out much of their userbase is just fake
As far as larping goes, quantitative finance is currently the hottest field for that. I'm sure that close to 100% of the people on social media that market themselves as quants are in fact not professional quantitative analysts / researchers / developers.
They all post vids of their vibe-coded dashboards where agents are doing market research and executing trades, while they kick back as collect to profits.
I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.
After tech layoffs started, the get-rich-quick folks looked on what other fields pay well, and the decided that the absolutely most selective, the most credentialed and gatekept niche role in finance, that's the one to impersonate.
Weirdly I’ve never seen Jim Simons or any Jane Street employees doing this. I wonder why?
Slightly off-topic, but I interviewed at one of the two companies above, plus Bridgewater, and never felt so stupid in my entire life. Real geniuses in some interviews, people who know what they are talking about and have zero need for selling courses or videos. On the other hand, if they _did_ need to sell something, I doubt they would be able to, as charisma was sorely lacking.
As all I had was charisma, alas, I failed.
I imagine that most of them are in it for making real money and not begging people to buy their ‘how to trade’ course online.
If you know something that's of value for making money you want to keep it a secret. Information isn't valuable but information differential is.
Well Jim has been dead for 2 years
Relatively good book about him and Renaissance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/073521798X?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
What sucks abut these types of people and the latest get rich quick scheme of the day is that they are generally rewarded mightily by society and investment. Part of it is greater fool theory playing out lucratively, part of it is also these crypto bros or ai bros or what-have-you bros finding themselves with an ear to actual government power directly shaping the trajectory of nation states into their favor.
Yes. I must use it within sandbox and single signon MFA and a password that questions my sanity to login. Even with this it regularly manages to sucks the soul dry occasionally.
I remind you of the better version ShlinkedIN! Unfortunately it seems to be dead these days.
I don't mind the projects. Its the grandiose self-important posting that is insufferable. Not everything you experienced today is an epiphany on productivity or team-building.
People look at me weird when I tell them I don’t have a LinkedIn account.
When searching for a job, it almost feels irresponsible not to use the site, but boy is it one poor execution. Why are jobs like the fourth tab? Why is there a feed populated entirely by people I don’t know and have never connected with in any way? Are people really just sitting there hiring strangers based off of cool comments? I literally hate like 10,000 things about this site. I rank it similarly to Discord in terms of quality:popularity ratio.
LinkedIn is such a shit fest. First they push AI generated posts, now you can mark posts as slop but guess what: you're not flagging that content, you're labeling it.
Best thing I read in a long long time.
Linkedin is a fucking cesspool. I refuse to participate.
Apparently my background is impressive enough that someone stole it and made a profile of me. To what end I do not know.
Wonderful read thank you!
Nothing like the good old trolling sites... Uh, I love internet...
Linkedin got saturated like a benchmark
I am thankful that I am not yet important enough to have to spend time spamming there. Which most of my feed seems to be. Just another marketing channel. Just corporate spam. I suppose it generates some leads for some people...
What the heck? Author just did the same thing they absolutely hate about LinkedIn, but posted it to their blog and hacker news. GTF outta here man.
Every time I convince myself to use LinkedIn because I keep getting told it’s where business opportunities are (not jobs, business connections), no matter how I try to be cringy, something deep inside keep preventing me and I feel like a fraud just by posting anything there. Don’t use it now and happy to lose these opportunities, until we get a better platform to replace it.
Never seen such posts, my feed contains different kind of larping.
Years ago I worked with people who does "remarketing", tracking, online ads and sales funnels. Some of them ended up as LinkedIn connection. Their understanding of the internet, IT and the world in general is something to behold. They post the weirdest shit and would have zero moral issues jamming a radioactive AI tracking chip up your butt if it increased "conversion" by 0.5%.
Select your connections carefully.
Working games mine is all layoff posts recently
Just scrolled now and saw like 5
I thought maybe that was just mine because I had been laid off in January so my algo got messed up.
Mine sometimes contains funny takes.
Something like: "I have been looking for a QA middle role with 2 years of experience for six months. Here is the stuff I won't be doing: relocating to a different city, commuting more than 30 minutes, ...". Most of the comments say, "Good luck. You will definitely find a job". Only a few mention that it's time to update your worldview.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. If it gets them a better job and more money, good luck to them.
I often get notifications to play LinkedIn games, Zip or whatever. The games are very trivial and on a timer, where you end up on some kind of network leaderboard. I never play them party because they're boring, but also, I'm utterly scared that they use them as a intelligence signal in recruiting or selling it to 3rd party ATSs. There are so many companies hungry for arbitrary "smartness" indicators, this wouldn't even chock me.
I never play then because I have better things to do with my time. Like closing the LinkedIn tab.
I know there's a lot of hate for LinkedIn here on HN but it really is the only place to see where ex-colleagues are working at and what competitors say they are up to. It's kind of like a boring version of TwitterX, but essential to those of us in normie jobs.
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
That's the reason I use LinkedIn, and I have zero complaints about it in that form. Tho for me is more about keeping the connection rather than see what they work on.
OTOH I do see the performative posting "I bumped my pinky toe on the cupboard and here's what it taught me about leading teams" and I genuinely don't understand who they're writing for. Isn't it obviously bullshit for everyone? Who cares about that?
LinkedIn is where you, if you work in IT, can broadcast that you're looking for work. It depends on you, your skillset and networking abilities, but it's still pretty good at getting you interviews and recommendations.
The entertaining part, for me, is seeing social media or sales people trying to get a job via LinkedIn. For IT, replies are normally: "I'll call you", tagging someone who is actively hiring or "Reach out to so-and-so at company X, tell them I said hi.". For people who should be experts in sales and social media the replys are "To bad we're not hiring right now", "Best of luck" or "Shared".
10 years ago my biz dev and I used LinkedIn for sales prospecting and it was enormously effective for finding leads to put into the top of the funnel.
Those people are what "Unfollow <name>" under the 3 dots on the posts are for.
I actually see posts from maybe 5-10% of my connections on LI, one strike for being boring or bland or performative and they're out of my feed.
Stalking ex-colleagues hasn't even been an essential part of what I would describe as a normie job.
I wouldn't mind LinkedIn at all if I could turn off the feed.
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.
I hate LinkedIn so much I made a slop cannon for it. I have Claude research a topic and post an extremely LLM slop post about BuSiNeSs twice a week, and of course everyone comments with slop comments and I reply in kind.
I immortalised the posts here:
https://thinkpieces.stavros.io/
I second that other comment - this is still above average in terms of LinkedIn content.
Damnit. I need to try harder to reach the level of the average poster. Sadly, downwards.
My edification is complete and through a process of thought leadership osmosis I have now ascended to B2B sales enlightenment
Don't try to increase your B2B sales. Instead, try to realise the truth: there is no B2B sales.
P2P > B2B. Grow strong relationship pipelines through human interaction and in-person thought leadership. Sponsored by [Conference Facility]
Ironically I think these are insightful. If you want to produce true slop, you need to dumb down your topic selection, or have Claude pick the topics. The stuff about the incompatible goals of "data strategy" I think is genuinely useful perspective, for example.
Claude does pick the topics! I worry I did too good a job steering it. I found a few of them insightful too, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that they're same old "They were doing a thing. It failed." Claude writing you see everywhere, intensifying the feeling that nobody on LinkedIn has a pulse.
On the bright side, if everyone is burning credits mining generic but helpful knowledge out of the LLM training data in bite-size packages, I don't need a subscription of my own!
It will be really fascinating to see what happens with the potential for LLM-generated output to become a dominant component of new training data.
Why would you visit LinkedIn nowadays to begin with? Like besides corporate clowns who is genuinely active there?
It used to be the case that if you wanted a new job, you could strategically update your profile and over the next several days you would get bombarded by recruiter messages, some of which would actually be high-quality leads.
I once got a cold LinkedIn message that got me a job that I loved. When I was looking this year though it did NOT have the same results. Lots of bots and just recruiters who see a open to work and just add you out of no where with nothing. I did get help from people I actually know on LinkedIn, but other than that it was definitely not helpful in the job search.
It’s part of the Microsoft network of properties that make everything harder to get up in the morning.
No one actually wants to go there, but they post the damn jobs there, so what can you do?
hey now, that pothole detection could come in handy for self driving cars, so let's not poo poo it right out of the gate!
All I want to know is, is it effective? If so, how much?
Fun project, but the blog trivializes ML.
I suspect any positive results here are due to training on the test set. (Their training data collection script uses their feed, which is then also used for the slop detector demo vid.)
Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
I'm an EE so The Algorithm tailors my feed differently. Instead of a million computer vision Hello World slop posts, I get a million "I designed a PCB with three components on it using ChatGPT" slop posts.
Also I'm constantly getting friend requests from randos all over the world. I thought you had to have some kind of 2nd or 3rd tier actual connection first?
The author did all this to identify the slop posts and yet hasn't learned a thing about B2B sales. What a larper.
/s