Thinking that I've got at least 18 years of professional experience, and I've had my own website for years (maybe a different domain a decade back), with my work, experience and email address publicly available. With a few keystrokes, I can still find genuine conversations I had with people 15 years ago and if I want message them.
Of course that not everyone keeps the same email address, and plenty of companies disappear. But if you're genuinely interested in finding someone, it's surprisingly easy to find them.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be different if I'd had a LinkedIn account. Maybe someone would have reached out 15, 10 or even 5 years ago, especially when some of my skills were in demand! Not everyone has access to the same opportunities, so maybe I shoot myself on the foot. But I remember the times I had a lot of recruiters contacting, sometimes offering free lunch, dinner or beer. Felt special! Maybe that's why I didn't want to have a Linkedin account. I was happy focusing, working, had my humble salary just enough to pay the bills. Or, I didn't know I could get paid much more...
But isn't it strange how we pretend to care about people, while so much of what we actually care about is visibility, connections, status and what someone can offer us? We've become worse at remembering people for who they are, what they're good at, or the conversations we once had with them. Preferring to look for exaggerated achievements, job titles, ghost jobs in fake companies, navigating a horrible looking website. Sort of a 1999 amazon.
Everyone complains, but few people are willing to leave it, because they know what happens when you disappear...
We're just replaceable profiles in the noise, and very few people will put in the effort to look beyond all the BS!
A recruiter on LinkedIn once reached out to me and sent me to an interview about a Java position. They interviewed me about JavaScript instead. I haven't used LinkedIn to find a job since then.
This old blog [0] post about recruiters and LinkedIn is fascinating as:
- recruiters used to claim they had "proprietary algorithms" for finding candidates
- it really boils down to them just spamming LinkedIn
- the mechanism the author used to determine the above was via "honeypot" profile
Also, I've been VERY active on Twitter and have written many thread (indexed here [1]) and have written extensively about SRE/technology etc. In the grand scheme of things I've gotten 4 jobs from recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn and only 1 from Twitter threads. The funniest part was that the job offer was downstream of a thread about Satellite TV piracy [2]
What I find hilarious about linkedin as I was recently looking for work a few months prior. I whipped up a job search agent to browse the site and others and find jobs that may interest me and match my resume skills.
They intentionally obfuscate the site with all kinds of JavaScript bs which makes it hard for an agent to navigate. All this while the entire site is devoted to praising AI.
Probably originally to prevent scraping. It's clear the same way back in the day sites didn't want you scraping they want you using their interface. This is extremely common, and none of these types of sites offer apis or automation. None of them want ai bots there either. So I don't understand how this whole agentic commerce thing is going to take off.
It could have been done ages ago with simple scripting and a viable api, but it's obvious they do not want you doing that.
So all of a sudden these types of sites are going to allow agent access? We're already seeing this between meta and Amazon.
Agentic commerce is going to be a shit show if it ever happens at all.
I'm not clear why people who hate LinkedIn stay on it. If it is not useful to you, leave. If you want an account but hate the feed, don't read it.
I agree that it has problems. I've also gotten multiple jobs from it. But more importantly, it is my digital rolodex. I absolutely get back in contact with people from prior gigs and we talk, catch up, act as sounding boards for each other's ideas. That has value to me.
But it is just a web site. If you don't like it and it has no value to you, don't use it. Seems like a waste of energy to put this much effort into hating it.
Quitting it completely would solve. The problem is it’s trying to be both a social site and a job utility. You may want the job utility and not the social feed. But they aren’t so disconnected. You land on the site, you’re on the feed. It’s engaging enough to catch your attention, but sloppy enough for you to not like it.
Because recruiters have turned it into their platform and if your industry requires recruiters, they're all now on linkedin and that's where you have to go. You can try getting a job via other routes, but connecting to recruiters, it's the lowest effort/least friction.
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.
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?
Even connections won't save you anymore. I have an account with over a hundred connections but now they want to see a government ID for whatever reason. Won't let me do anything on the website until I do.
nitter.cf is a controversial one because (a) it's not real Nitter - it's an AI translation into Rust and (b) - it's run by a person who also runs a child porn site
You can use twiiit.com or xxcancel.com to redirect you to any nitter that's currently working.
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.
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.
This is one of the services the AI companies provide: presenting you a distilled, ad-free, version of the information they've scraped. At no payment to those providing it.
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
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 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. If you've never had to put on a mask to fit in then the first wear can be very uncomfortable.
Yeah, in part my issue is recruiters are completely unaligned with my interests. Anytime I have ever replied that I am available for a corp-to-corp consulting contract the contact dies. They are only about placing people in full time employment, which has been an anathema to me because to do that I would have to turn my back on all my current clients and leave them high and dry. Growing the business has always been the better path for me.
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 have not run a controlled study, but I have shared topics here on this website that made it to the front page quickly and had a lively comment section and on LinkedIn the same was had very limited impression numbers. I did an experiment with an ATLRUG announcement where I did not include the URL and the numbers were slightly higher than one that did, but still not great. I have connections on the platform with relevant interests but its not showing it to them.
One thing that has always hurt me is I have never once in my career been on the traditional job market. I was self employed as a teenager and have always just kept growing and pivoting and growing. I have never sought or taken a job via the normal market. LinkedIn has always been a bit of a odd place for that mode of work.
> 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.
As someone who sometimes helps companies figure out content strategy, I am sorry to say that it is not true that linking in comments is safe -- this tends to penalize your post nowadays.
LinkedIn isn't alone here -- virtually every platform with an algorthmic feed penalizes both links and the obvious workarounds.
Not to defend the practice -- it's unfortunate because it trains younger users that attribution isn't important, it enables and incentivizes outright theft of content (good luck chasing down original sources after convincing yourself that it wasn't AI in the first place)
I've got my current, amazing, job from a recruiter cold messaging on LinkedIn. Honestly for job seeking, from what I could gather among my laid off colleagues, it's very decent. None of us had any real LinkedIn activity either, except filling in the profile and job history
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.
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.
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.
Really? Apart from the one at the Moulin Rouge, I had a great time at all of the Christmas parties I've been invited to by my current employer. Of course getting with the vast majority of my colleagues helps.
> 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.
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 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 is the performative professionals social network. 100% shallowness in every interaction. Yet we all do it because that's how we've done it in the past.
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 quit LinkedIn in protest of the permanent ban of Dr. Robert Malone back in 2022, during the massive censorship and suppression of COVID-19 heterodoxy. I have had no regrets since then, especially when I saw the recent "BrowserGate" scandal revealing that the platform was illegally scanning its users' browser extensions.
Good riddance, if you are such a high profile person and spread misinformation causing deaths of children and elderly, then you deserve no voice online.
I assume you think that yelling fire in a theater is also a heterodoxy?
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.
It's like YouTube. It likes to try to send you down rabbit holes. It thinks maybe there's one type of post you want to engage with, so it will keep feeding you that type of post because it is running a big ol classifier with computer vision as a category
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.
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.
I do not have LinkedIn and to contact a person off the site to apply for a job and they told me that “for this role LinkedIn is mandatory” it has nothing to do with marketing it is a tech job. Why does it matter where their source came from?
Indian recruiter multiple layers of obfuscation garbage. I am sure they are simply resume and connect harvesting. I cannot see how a tech job recruiter wouldn’t try to get their opening filled in any way possible.
Some people use public social media accounts as face value for an individual or for filtering out spam.. Those people are not the most technically savvy so you probably dodged a bullet there if it was for a tech position.
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.
LinkedIn was always bad. There was never a time when LinkedIn was good.
The thing I hate the most is LinkeIn "notifications". They are entirely meaningless.
Those guys MADE KAFKA. And for what. To deliver "someone at some engineering company has viewed your profile" and "10 of your colleagues played Zip this week"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’re looking at feeds and posts on LinkedIn hoping to get great content, you’re using it wrong. That is not what the site is for, that was just a sad attempt to emulate Facebook.
Here is how you use LinkedIn: you mark yourself as looking for work. You search for job postings and set up alerts. You apply for jobs. You respond to recruiters. If your friends share a post about a job you’re interested in, you apply. If you have a job opening, you post it.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much people can be blamed for this, especially because there are a lot of students. Many, semi-unfortunately, believe posting projects like these are a huge positive signal for recruiters.
And maybe they are, who knows besides a recruiter. I just want to see something unique occasionally.
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 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.
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...
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?
Thinking that I've got at least 18 years of professional experience, and I've had my own website for years (maybe a different domain a decade back), with my work, experience and email address publicly available. With a few keystrokes, I can still find genuine conversations I had with people 15 years ago and if I want message them.
Of course that not everyone keeps the same email address, and plenty of companies disappear. But if you're genuinely interested in finding someone, it's surprisingly easy to find them.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be different if I'd had a LinkedIn account. Maybe someone would have reached out 15, 10 or even 5 years ago, especially when some of my skills were in demand! Not everyone has access to the same opportunities, so maybe I shoot myself on the foot. But I remember the times I had a lot of recruiters contacting, sometimes offering free lunch, dinner or beer. Felt special! Maybe that's why I didn't want to have a Linkedin account. I was happy focusing, working, had my humble salary just enough to pay the bills. Or, I didn't know I could get paid much more...
But isn't it strange how we pretend to care about people, while so much of what we actually care about is visibility, connections, status and what someone can offer us? We've become worse at remembering people for who they are, what they're good at, or the conversations we once had with them. Preferring to look for exaggerated achievements, job titles, ghost jobs in fake companies, navigating a horrible looking website. Sort of a 1999 amazon.
Everyone complains, but few people are willing to leave it, because they know what happens when you disappear...
We're just replaceable profiles in the noise, and very few people will put in the effort to look beyond all the BS!
> Maybe someone would have reached out
A recruiter on LinkedIn once reached out to me and sent me to an interview about a Java position. They interviewed me about JavaScript instead. I haven't used LinkedIn to find a job since then.
This old blog [0] post about recruiters and LinkedIn is fascinating as:
- recruiters used to claim they had "proprietary algorithms" for finding candidates
- it really boils down to them just spamming LinkedIn
- the mechanism the author used to determine the above was via "honeypot" profile
Also, I've been VERY active on Twitter and have written many thread (indexed here [1]) and have written extensively about SRE/technology etc. In the grand scheme of things I've gotten 4 jobs from recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn and only 1 from Twitter threads. The funniest part was that the job offer was downstream of a thread about Satellite TV piracy [2]
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20120709210034/http://www.ewherr...
1 - https://alexpotato.com/threads/?hn=1
2 - https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1270423060097708035
What I find hilarious about linkedin as I was recently looking for work a few months prior. I whipped up a job search agent to browse the site and others and find jobs that may interest me and match my resume skills. They intentionally obfuscate the site with all kinds of JavaScript bs which makes it hard for an agent to navigate. All this while the entire site is devoted to praising AI. Probably originally to prevent scraping. It's clear the same way back in the day sites didn't want you scraping they want you using their interface. This is extremely common, and none of these types of sites offer apis or automation. None of them want ai bots there either. So I don't understand how this whole agentic commerce thing is going to take off. It could have been done ages ago with simple scripting and a viable api, but it's obvious they do not want you doing that. So all of a sudden these types of sites are going to allow agent access? We're already seeing this between meta and Amazon. Agentic commerce is going to be a shit show if it ever happens at all.
I'm not clear why people who hate LinkedIn stay on it. If it is not useful to you, leave. If you want an account but hate the feed, don't read it.
I agree that it has problems. I've also gotten multiple jobs from it. But more importantly, it is my digital rolodex. I absolutely get back in contact with people from prior gigs and we talk, catch up, act as sounding boards for each other's ideas. That has value to me.
But it is just a web site. If you don't like it and it has no value to you, don't use it. Seems like a waste of energy to put this much effort into hating it.
I think mostly because it's as ubiquitous as it is performative.
Also, as you point out it can be both useful and largely ridiculous.
Somehow I have a bit of reach on it. I don't really read the feed or even check messages anymore tho.
Applied for a contractor position the other day. CV was optional, LinkedIn mandatory.
> LinkedIn mandatory
Verified account with Persona?
Quitting it completely would solve. The problem is it’s trying to be both a social site and a job utility. You may want the job utility and not the social feed. But they aren’t so disconnected. You land on the site, you’re on the feed. It’s engaging enough to catch your attention, but sloppy enough for you to not like it.
recruiters find you through it, and if you want to apply for jobs they're all on there
Because recruiters have turned it into their platform and if your industry requires recruiters, they're all now on linkedin and that's where you have to go. You can try getting a job via other routes, but connecting to recruiters, it's the lowest effort/least friction.
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.
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?
> 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.
At least a Pinterest account is truly free. You're not asked to "build connections to prove your identity".
Even connections won't save you anymore. I have an account with over a hundred connections but now they want to see a government ID for whatever reason. Won't let me do anything on the website until I do.
When they inevitably do this to me, I will tell them to delete my account instead.
LinkedIn was more open earlier I think they closed down much more. It seems that Google didn’t delist the profile pages.
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
nitter.cf is a controversial one because (a) it's not real Nitter - it's an AI translation into Rust and (b) - it's run by a person who also runs a child porn site
You can use twiiit.com or xxcancel.com to redirect you to any nitter that's currently working.
I see. Had no idea. Thanks for the alternate links. More the merrier.
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.
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
they would all try to sue you and you'd be fighting constant rate limits
That’s how paywall unlockers work
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.
This is one of the services the AI companies provide: presenting you a distilled, ad-free, version of the information they've scraped. At no payment to those providing it.
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!
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 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. If you've never had to put on a mask to fit in then the first wear can be very uncomfortable.
Congratulations!
Yeah, in part my issue is recruiters are completely unaligned with my interests. Anytime I have ever replied that I am available for a corp-to-corp consulting contract the contact dies. They are only about placing people in full time employment, which has been an anathema to me because to do that I would have to turn my back on all my current clients and leave them high and dry. Growing the business has always been the better path for me.
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 have not run a controlled study, but I have shared topics here on this website that made it to the front page quickly and had a lively comment section and on LinkedIn the same was had very limited impression numbers. I did an experiment with an ATLRUG announcement where I did not include the URL and the numbers were slightly higher than one that did, but still not great. I have connections on the platform with relevant interests but its not showing it to them.
One thing that has always hurt me is I have never once in my career been on the traditional job market. I was self employed as a teenager and have always just kept growing and pivoting and growing. I have never sought or taken a job via the normal market. LinkedIn has always been a bit of a odd place for that mode of work.
> 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.
As someone who sometimes helps companies figure out content strategy, I am sorry to say that it is not true that linking in comments is safe -- this tends to penalize your post nowadays.
LinkedIn isn't alone here -- virtually every platform with an algorthmic feed penalizes both links and the obvious workarounds.
Not to defend the practice -- it's unfortunate because it trains younger users that attribution isn't important, it enables and incentivizes outright theft of content (good luck chasing down original sources after convincing yourself that it wasn't AI in the first place)
I've got my current, amazing, job from a recruiter cold messaging on LinkedIn. Honestly for job seeking, from what I could gather among my laid off colleagues, it's very decent. None of us had any real LinkedIn activity either, except filling in the profile and job history
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.
Is this for real? If so, that's a major institutional and managerial failing.
That's just how life works, generally. People in power are largely social engineers of some variety.
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.
If only these could be identified before you've spent 6 months in them
Maybe check their employees linkedin feed?
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.
The person who only sees your contributions once a year should not decide on your promotion.
It is, and sometimes you can use those failings to your personal advantage.
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.
Everytime I see someone make a LinkedIn post it reeks of desperation or manipulation.
No one is real, they are all missing their soul. Thanks capitalism.
One of my IRL acquaintances is calling themselves a "thought leader" on Linked In and I've never seem them the same since.
You are probably already aware of https://shlinkedin.com/ but it is worth a mention just in case. I think you might enjoy it.
I didn't expect there would be a Christmas party in hell.
Corporate christmas parties are the 2nd circle of hell
Really? Apart from the one at the Moulin Rouge, I had a great time at all of the Christmas parties I've been invited to by my current employer. Of course getting with the vast majority of my colleagues helps.
getting on with, surely
Yeah, hell seems like the kind of place that'd be into celebrating easter. (oh, I'm deff going to hell for this one)
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]
Your wife and kids are holding you back. Your clients are your family now.
LinkedIn plot twist: the client IS the wife.
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/
Surely LinkedIn is just doing a "front page algorithm" and these are the posts he interacts with most? I've literally never seen a single one haha
yeah I never see any computer vision either, I think he clicked on 1 or 2 of those and now it's all he sees.
That's what I hate about TikTok btw, I interact with ONE video of a certain type and suddenly it's everything I see.
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.
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.
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?
Like bro totally
>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
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.
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.
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.
Never being plugged into the matrix is an achievement to be proud of. Don't fall for the propaganda designed to lure you in.
You are a good servant. But you are a bad slave because you are not currently licking the soles of my feet.
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.
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 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 is the performative professionals social network. 100% shallowness in every interaction. Yet we all do it because that's how we've done it in the past.
OP can be glad he’s in the tech space.
In finance it’s even more unhinged. Lots of value creation through synergies while avoiding boiling the ocean and aligning priorities.
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?
> LLM hitting epic one liners and I thought he was just a coke addict.
sufficiently advanced coke addict is indistinguishable from LLM "one shot this project make no mistakes" true believer
or is it vice versa?
This is just as bad as the content / sentiment on LinkedIn just on the other side of the fence lol
I quit LinkedIn in protest of the permanent ban of Dr. Robert Malone back in 2022, during the massive censorship and suppression of COVID-19 heterodoxy. I have had no regrets since then, especially when I saw the recent "BrowserGate" scandal revealing that the platform was illegally scanning its users' browser extensions.
Good riddance, if you are such a high profile person and spread misinformation causing deaths of children and elderly, then you deserve no voice online.
I assume you think that yelling fire in a theater is also a heterodoxy?
> then you deserve no voice online
the good kind of censorship! it could never happen to me!!
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
the only reason I use linkedin is the phonebook aspect. other than that it's useless.
in germany one of the anoying aspects is that people turned political on it big time.
It's like YouTube. It likes to try to send you down rabbit holes. It thinks maybe there's one type of post you want to engage with, so it will keep feeding you that type of post because it is running a big ol classifier with computer vision as a category
I am not joking when I say that 4chan is a more rejuvenating and life affirming place than Linkedin
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?
Apropos, some of the most wholesome community spirit I've seen in recent years has been amongst the degenerate gamblers of wallstreetbets.
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.
I do not have LinkedIn and to contact a person off the site to apply for a job and they told me that “for this role LinkedIn is mandatory” it has nothing to do with marketing it is a tech job. Why does it matter where their source came from?
Indian recruiter multiple layers of obfuscation garbage. I am sure they are simply resume and connect harvesting. I cannot see how a tech job recruiter wouldn’t try to get their opening filled in any way possible.
Some people use public social media accounts as face value for an individual or for filtering out spam.. Those people are not the most technically savvy so you probably dodged a bullet there if it was for a tech position.
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 :)
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
I only had a LinkedIn because... recruiters
LinkedIn was always bad. There was never a time when LinkedIn was good.
The thing I hate the most is LinkeIn "notifications". They are entirely meaningless.
Those guys MADE KAFKA. And for what. To deliver "someone at some engineering company has viewed your profile" and "10 of your colleagues played Zip this week"?
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.
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 will forever remember Office Spider, THAT Secretary , and Vincent Adultman whose words I often think about:
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
reader mode: easier-peasier ;)
LinkedIn is like "playing" soggy biscuit together, yet you are the biscuit.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I wouldn't mind LinkedIn at all if I could turn off the feed.
Stalking ex-colleagues hasn't even been an essential part of what I would describe as a normie job.
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.
If you’re looking at feeds and posts on LinkedIn hoping to get great content, you’re using it wrong. That is not what the site is for, that was just a sad attempt to emulate Facebook.
Here is how you use LinkedIn: you mark yourself as looking for work. You search for job postings and set up alerts. You apply for jobs. You respond to recruiters. If your friends share a post about a job you’re interested in, you apply. If you have a job opening, you post it.
And stop whining about the feed.
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 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.
i deleted LinkedIn in 2017. nothing of value lost
Linkedin got saturated like a benchmark
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.
Why would you visit LinkedIn nowadays to begin with? Like besides corporate clowns who is genuinely active there?
It’s part of the Microsoft network of properties that make everything harder to get up in the morning.
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.
No one actually wants to go there, but they post the damn jobs there, so what can you do?
Best thing I read in a long long time.
Never seen such posts, my feed contains different kind of larping.
Working games mine is all layoff posts recently
Just scrolled now and saw like 5
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.
I thought maybe that was just mine because I had been laid off in January so my algo got messed up.
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.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much people can be blamed for this, especially because there are a lot of students. Many, semi-unfortunately, believe posting projects like these are a huge positive signal for recruiters.
And maybe they are, who knows besides a recruiter. I just want to see something unique occasionally.
Wonderful read thank you!
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 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/
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.
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]
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...
Then you go check the author's profile on LinkedIn and see that he also posts slop most of the time...
r/LinkedInLunatics
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.
We should talk, I have a stack of checks but can't cash them without your ID.
Nothing like the good old trolling sites... Uh, I love internet...
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.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. If it gets them a better job and more money, good luck to them.
All I want to know is, is it effective? If so, how much?
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!
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