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LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI think we're still learning how to deal with abusive relationships in the tech world. Consider this scenario: Act 1: When I'm not paying attention, my friend says, "hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'" Act 2: When I'm not looking, this friend goes through my address book and spams all my contacts with whatever they're selling under my name. What would you advise me to do after that? You'd probably say, this person is not your friend by most definitions of the word, you should cut them out of your life and ask them to not contact you anymore. To which I may say, but this friend is well connected, they might be able to get me a job in the future. (Although I've never gotten a job or even a lead through LinkedIn personally.) What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you. And that's why I closed my account and added a "delete on sight" filter for their emails.
- MereInterest 6y agoMy first experience with LinkedIn was being spammed by them, after a friend signed up with them. Asking, he had no idea why they were sending emails to me. A few years later, it came out that LinkedIn was using lots of dark patterns to trick users. With that as a first impression, I have no intention of using LinkedIn.
- toast0 6y agoMy first experiences were getting these because I was in the corporate address book at a big corp, and I guess people were looking for work. At the time, Linked In wouldn't even let you opt out of mail without making an account, which is definitely never happening. (Thankfully, they eventually added a way to tell them to not contact me again, but I'm going to carry my grudge)
- blablabla123 6y agoAs mentioned by another poster, not in every area or situation (covid...) it's feasible to find jobs without LinkedIn. I kind of agree with you, however I just keep my contact list small. Probably I miss some opportunities with that but at the same time it mostly consists of people who have little interest to traverse my contacts. As soon as there's an equally well working alternative for job hunts, I'm off but I don't see that yet. I'm curious about honeypot.io etc. but I don't like the idea to put people with price tags online
- ready2order 6y agoI have used WeAreDevelopers for my job hunts since I prefer curation over quality. On LinkedIn anybody can post a job ad. On WeAreDevelopers you atleast know that there is a selection process behind it.
- jcelerier 6y ago> What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you. I don't really understand how you make the jump to this part
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThe benefits are calculable, but the consequences of abuse are unpredictable, and if someone has crossed your boundary once, you don't know how far they will go. With the abusive relationship example, if someone's gone as far as snoop through your phone and text your friends without your knowledge, there is no telling what they'll do next. It's common for someone who does this to also be a verbal and physical abuser, which is rarely worth sticking it out for, regardless of how well-connected they are. With the specific LinkedIn example, they may e.g. sell your data to third parties, leak your data publicly via irresponsible data storage, and allow employees to access your data without authorization. Not to mention spamming your entire contact list with LinkedIn invitations in your name. Is that worth it to you in exchange for some networking?
- jameshart 6y agoBut right there is where the power of your metaphor breaks down. It is quite unusual for a website to also be a verbal and physical abuser (recent eBay cyberstalking being the incredibly rare exception).
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI think the idea of a metaphor is that it is not literal, do you not agree?
- bonoboTP 6y agoI grew up with the Internet and learned to navigate fake "download" buttons, ads etc. Not to brag too much, but I don't find it hard to use LinkedIn without accidentally consenting to spam my friends. I've never accidentally spammed my contacts via LinkedIn nor ResearchGate nor Academia.edu. If you use it right, it can be useful. LinkedIn isn't your friend, but you can use their platform for your advantage.
- dorgo 6y ago>"hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'" At some point I spent some hours to investigate how they did it and trying to tell google (gmail) to not let Linkedin do it (again?). Not sure how much success I had. I think it is a mistake/problem of Google to allow such things.
- neilv 6y agoOne nice thing about recently joining LinkedIn is to reconnect with colleagues from many years ago, but without getting sucked into one of the more-infamous social media sites, where people seem to need to have a presence, if they are to exist in other people's minds. Though I will say that finally getting an HN account was a gateway drug to LinkedIn.
- nunez 6y agoUsing LinkedIn for social networking? It's basically Facebook in a suit, i.e. _filtered_ trash. Using LinkedIn Jobs for finding a new opportunity? It's slightly better than Indeed et. al., at least in my experience. Using LinkedIn to network with interesting people and potentially engage in new opportunities with them? It's amazing. Using LinkedIn Recruiter? Nothing else compares. That's basically how I see LinkedIn.
- tempsy 6y agoOf all the categories of social media apps I genuinely believe an entirely new professional networking app reimagined from the ground up could very easily “disrupt” a legacy app like LinkedIn. I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen anything yet (or maybe just not paying attention).
- alexeichemenda 6y agoI’m curious how many users (%) are annoyed by this. My gut feeling tells me only HN/Reddit/tech is annoyed by this, most people aren’t. Which is why we haven’t seen a competitor arise
- tempsy 6y agoLots of people find LinkedIn to be silly.
- daxfohl 6y agoSnowflake requires a LinkedIn profile on their careers site. Seems so weird. I made an empty one just to apply. Got rejected.
- okareaman 6y agoYou want to know how to make LinkedIn even worse? Retire. You might as well be dead because you are now useless to LinkedIn. How about some cool projects other retirees with your interests are working on? Nope. You're suddenly in a graveyard.
- tomcam 6y agoOK now I realize I need to mark myself as retired somehow
- mhh__ 6y agoOr dead (as shown in the post above)
- KineticLensman 6y agoI actually retired and changed my status and it has worked perfectly - very few contacts. Superb! My new LinkedIn job title is ‘space Marshall’, partly because my new role as a conservation volunteer sometimes involves enforcing social distancing. Also channeling Mark Watney.
- okareaman 6y agoI put retired in my profile as well, but didn't come up with a snappy title like space Marshall (I'll work on that.) My actual complaint is hat I expected to get sent stuff about other interesting things retirees were doing. I mean, a lot of people in the tech field retire relatively young with a lot of money and they just don't sit home watching wheel of fortune. LinkedIn is really missing the boat IMHO. I'm happy looking elsewhere, but it would be cool if LinkedIn did a smooth transitions for retirees. I wrote to the CEO about but got no response, which only heightened my feeling of being a ghost on LinkedIn LOL
- KineticLensman 6y agoPerhaps because post-retirement activities (such as volunteering for charity) are usually unpaid, so there is little if any incentive for recruiters to engage. Not sure how LinkedIn supports charity work. I'd check that out, except that it would mean logging in.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoI deleted my account when it stopped allowing me to update anything in my profile without providing a city.
- arwhatever 6y agoI appended "(Remote Only)" to my first name, just to amuse myself. I now receive continuous emails "Hi Steve (Remote Only) Jones, I have this open position in Omaha .."
- input_sh 6y agoNeat little trick is to put emoji in front of your name. Automated tools refer to you as "Hi <emoji>", making them easy to ignore.
- emerged 6y agoHaving an online network of professional contacts makes sense. LinkedIn has that. But on top of that it also has unbelievable amounts of toxic profit seeking garbage which makes us abhor the thought of even logging in. The network effect makes it almost impossible to compete with it. If anyone did manage to compete, they are likely to be sucked into recreating the same abhorrent garbage layers over time. This is social media in a nutshell. I doubt blockchain is going to solve it, so wtf will?
- nikolay 6y agoYeah, like their obscene in term of pricing Job Seeker fee.
- visarga 6y agoNothing will fix social networks, everyone has their own goal and they often don't line up, so you get self promotion and bullshit.
- berkes 6y agoI'm working on flockingbird (dot social), which is a federated professional network. No blockchain, just activitypub (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed et.al.) The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves' No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'. Is that naive?
- temp_4010 6y agoI use Linkedin mainly for two reasons: 1. As a digital resume which recruiters/other people can find on their own, and can contact me if they really need to. 2. As somewhat of a soft sign that I "know"/"have been accepted as a connection by" people who work(ed) in the same company/area in the past. Kind of a signal that "maybe this guy is who he says he is". Everything else on Linkedin is treated as trash. People I connect to are manually unfollowed almost immediately. Notification settings are modified so that I don't get any emails except inmails and connection requests. I thankfully haven't seen much spam from that till date. Here are some firefox ublock origin filters I use to make the site a lot more bearable (basically removes the feed, the "news" sections, and other things which don't directly relate to the home page or connectivity). Only bad thing about this is that your list of connections won't show up; I haven't had the time to fix that yet. www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.feed-shared-navigation-module.overflow-hidden.Elevation-2dp.left-rail-container www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.pv3.feed-shared-news-module www.linkedin.com###launchpad-wormhole www.linkedin.com##.right-rail www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.sticky www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper www.linkedin.com##div[class^="feed-shared-update"]
- sneak 6y agoIt’s bad at #1, because LinkedIn causes unauthed viewers to hit a signup/loginwall. You’re better off putting it on your own website, because then even people who don’t subscribe to Microsoft’s user-hostile bullshit can read and view it.
- Proven 6y agoRecruiters don't search your own site
- rmason 6y agoThe good ones do. I've got friends with blogs who post twice weekly with programming examples and tutorials. You wouldn't believe the jobs they get offered unsolicited. It sorts out the chaff because most recruiters don't know about blogs or can't be bothered.
- nikolay 6y agoI was hopeful that after Microsoft got its hands on the stinky pile, it would revamp it. But, no, it's still the ridiculous place for irrelevant recruiter spam!
- tasogare 6y agoMicrosoft made it worse, at least UI-wise, after buying it. The other website I hate by I’m registered on because of coworkers is ResearchGate. Spam, gamified portal, with only value being allowing non computer savvy people to build a publication list online.
- dash2 6y agoYeah, researchgate is a shame. There ought to be a niche for an academic website, but it hasn’t worked out. I get more value from connecting on Twitter. Turns out that plus biorxiv/arxiv/[insert your discipline’s version] works better.
- tasogare 6y agoYes, but again you’ll see there is pattern here: *rxiv are still kinda geek oriented, in addition to being for preprints. Twitter is indeed more accessible to people in other fields like humanities, but that’s another silo that has even bigger problem and more disgusting behavior.
- hnxs 6y agolinkedin use cases: former coworker rolodex spamming internal recruiters to bypass portal applications flexing on people who previously rejected you by adding them after you get a job at a way better employer
- mokarma 6y agoYeah I mostly have a LinkedIn account just to have one. I feel like a professional social network is a bit of an oxymoron. Social networks tend to amplify unprofessional voices. "Hey guys, today I went to work and did my job" is not intriguing content.
- kirillzubovsky 6y agoA few people have endorsed me for “time travel” on LinkedIn. A few more and I might be able to fix it for you ;)
- comprev 6y agoThat has made my day. Thank you.
- Tade0 6y agoWhich brings the question: is this a 0-1 thing, or can you be e.g. an expert time traveller?
- anshumankmr 6y agoExpert Level Time Traveller with over 25 years of experience, Specialized in travelling to one second in the future every second.
- datenhorst 6y agoHow do you do that? I can only give endorsements from a pre-populated list, sadly
- carrozo 6y agoFor me it’s “spiritual warfare”. :)
- nynx 6y agoUnfortunately, I find that many companies, especially in engineering it seems, require a linkedin account to apply for internships. Honestly, I don't really mind having it, probably because I don't get much spam. On the other hand, having a linkedin doesn't seem to be helping me get a job, but that may just be confirmation bias.
- sneak 6y agoI get spam to my username+linkedin@myaccountdomain.com email address constantly. I think LI used to let your connections download the email lists of people they’re connected to on the platform, and I got added to innumerable “hustler” brand-building nonsense lists.
- dpc_pw 6y agoI keep calling LinkedId "the saddest social network". Create an account to list yourself in a CV catalog. Add connection with people you worked with to build credibility. Otherwise only ever open it when you're looking for a job. Otherwise you're risking getting cancer from looking at all that shameless self-promotion and posturing.
- locusofself 6y agoI'm a mid-level software engineer/SRE. I get tons of recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn, and it's how I landed my last 2 jobs ultimately. So while I'm not a huge plan of using the platform, I can't say it's not worth having a profile on.
- pram 6y agoYep, this and sorting jobs with the “easy apply” thing enabled. Makes casual job hunting that much less of a hassle.
- tempsy 6y agoThe main point of the post is not that LinkedIn isn’t useful, it’s that it is useful but takes advantage of your professional need to be on the service whether you want to or not that is akin to a hostage-like situation. The hostage dynamic allows it to get away with really annoying and awful features that you put up with anyway because you have little choice.
- st1x7 6y agoHow is it a hostage situation if I don't have to read all the nonsense, didn't know that most of their features are a thing, can restrict my notifications and only need to really use the site for a few weeks every couple of years?
- tempsy 6y agoYou’re still creating a profile on a site where you admit is full of nonsense. You’re just saying you ignore it as best you can. That is still a situation where you’re using something even though you realize there’s a lot of nonsense because there’s value to you. LinkedIn still takes advantage of this dynamic whether you choose to ignore it or not. I liken it to the fact that porn sites can get away with extremely intrusive ads because people demand their service and have little alternative. Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
- 6y ago
- yotamoron 6y agoI deleted my linkedin account. Still employed, no problem in finding new jobs. LinkedIn had negative value for me, took my time and attention and gave nothing back.
- kfarr 6y agoThere's a lot of hate on LinkedIn here, sorry to say I find it a highly useful tool and it appears to be the defacto way most companies hire so embrace the monster or some other pithy phrase but you get the idea
- tempsy 6y agoBut the point of this post isn’t that LinkedIn isn’t useful, it’s that it does have value but at the same time takes advantage of your need for their service in a hostage-like way by using lots of dark patterns and psychological tricks to get you to do things like pay for it and put up with being stalked by unsavory people (particularly if you’re female). It’s a story about how a useful service that is difficult to quit for professional reasons takes full advantage of that dynamic to get away with doing really annoying or awful things.
- devtosales 6y agoWhat? It’s just an online CV which has got me all of my jobs except my very first one. There are no dark patterns if you only engage with it as that.
- tempsy 6y agoI'm not talking about whether you individually choose to ignore the bad parts. I'm saying that LinkedIn takes advantage of your need to be on their site whether you actually want to or not to introduce some very annoying features that they know will not churn you because, again, you "need" to be on it. The fact that certain individuals are more deft at ignoring or blocking or turning off the annoying parts of the service does not change the dynamic at all.
- loraa 6y agoThe stalking thing did come up quite a bit but unfortunately this does often come back to the not so professional profile pictures.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
- gamblor956 6y agoLinkedIn was invaluable in finding a (new tech company non programming) job. OTOH, I do the kind of work you don't do fizzbuzz tests for in an interview, and soft skills are a larger part of my job.
- blargmaster42_8 6y agoIt's full of leftist virtue signaling BS, and you can disagree du to HR are full of leftist.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- comprev 6y agoFor me, like many I'm sure, it turned recruitment completely on it's head. Previously I would spend hours trawling job boards, composing cover letters and get excited at the prospect of one successful reply. It was soul destroying. Now I can construct a post, complete with trendy hashtags, and passively watch _hundreds_ of recruiters reach out to me in 24hrs. Now I can sit with a coffee and easy filter out the crap. It's taken some time to build up the 8,000+ contacts, mostly of senior tech people amd recruiters. Every job in the last 5yrs has been through LinkedIn and due to the ease by which I could change jobs, salary has sky rocketed too. Maybe I am in the minority of people who use it as a tool this way? Edit: I also have an emoji as the first "letter" in the string of my first name. This instantly allows me to visually/programmatically filter out genuine "human" messages from bots. I also reply to these messages, as let's be honest, a human took time to compose the message to me. A quick "thank you" (one button click!) goes a long way.
- nynx 6y agoThat's incredible! Do you have any advice for how to build a network like that?
- webmaven 6y agoIt's fairly simple: Find people you would like to connect to, find their email address, send a request. It helps if you have a "weak ties" connection to them, even if you don't really know them: you may be connected via someone else (in which case, asking for an introduction will almost certainly work), you may both be alumni of an org or institution, you may both have attended the same event (this works in a sort of 'missed connections' fashion), and so on. One somewhat counterintuitive tip: you don't need to connect to a lot of hyper-connected folks, probably just one or two that are actually in your industry. Intros through indiscriminate folks like that tend to be disregarded unless there is a highly targeted ask simply because most of the folks they are connected to don't actually have an existing relationship or particular affinity with them. Similarly, so called "LinkedIn Open Networkers" that accept all incoming connection requests are also something of a red flag, unless you are actually in an industry like recruiting, marketing, or PR, where a 'reach' numbers game is a viable strategy. Once your network starts growing, you'll start to get more incoming requests from folks trying to do the same thing you are. Don't accept the ones that don't make any sense (eg. If you are a medical software dev in the Midwest, feel free to decline that random connection request from an accountant in Azerbaijan), or you'll start to get a lot more of those (because folks who connect to lots of random folks tend to be mostly connected to others who do the exact same thing). Absolutely reject and report requests that are outright spam. If you aren't sure, you can reply to ask what led them to try and connect with you before you make the decision to accept ignore or reject the request (saying "Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry, but I have a terrible memory, and I don't recognize your name or profile image. Did we meet at an event last year?" will work without being insulting). It all boils down to this: if you want to have a large but high quality/relevance network, you need to be prolific but not indiscriminate in making connection requests.
- keyle 6y agoI cringe when I open linkedin (for work opportunities). I cry when I read linkedin (for work opportunities). I feel like vomiting when closing linkedin (for work opportunities). (PS, looking, fullstack UX/UI/Vue/Node/Go/Python/Swift etc. Aus.)
- Jorengarenar 6y agoUntil not so long ago I was astonished how such big site can be made so poorly. You had to reload five times to get all elements to load (navbar especially). I tried to use mobile app, which... hadn't allowed me to log in. Now at least this problem with website is fixed. I don't know whether app already works.
- arwhatever 6y agoI visit LinkedIn whenever I suspect that I might be experiencing slow Wi-Fi service - their site is so bulky it seems ideal for manually detecting connectivity issues.
- wolframhempel 6y agoIMO LinkedIn provides decent value as an address book for business contacts and as a way for people (recruiters, investors, potential partners) to find you and get in touch with you as a "semi warm" introduction via mutual contacts. None of this requires the timeline feed. But as long as you ignore the inspirational posts and pictures of wolfs walking in a line, it provides easy networking for people with little natural propensity to do so (like myself)
- hyko 6y agoPeople were hired before LinkedIn and they will be hired long after LinkedIn. LinkedIn has incredible lock in though, far beyond mere network effects; they have convinced many people that you might miss out big time if you leave. In a society where the only endpoint that matters is your career and productivity as measured within it, missing an opportunity is effectively suicide. In other words, they exploit people’s tendency towards regret minimisation. Leaving is now equivalent to quitting the lottery after having bought the same numbers for the past thirty years. The kicker is that practically all the value LinkedIn provides comes from its users. LinkedIn didn’t win you a job, you did! Probably best to give it up by not taking it up.
- natchy 6y agoI created a fake linkedin account a couple years ago using one of those AI face generators. Made myself a Senior Director of Engineering at a major company with an impressive background. I've had lots of recruiters reach out to me from most major companies and I've even had some conversations just for kicks. The unexpected outcome... I swear doing this made me more confident. I see so many FAANG recruiters wanting "me" to run a team that I don't even open the message because I'm decensitized. It gave me a glimpse into someone 10 years ahead of me. I've been meaning to make a compilation of my conversations.
- 38932ur98u 6y agoPlease do this, I'd love to read it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- op03 6y agoIt would only be interesting if you survived an interview round. Which obviously didn't happen. Getting a callback based on fiction is called Salesmanship. Translating that callback into a profitable deal/gig is what separates the wheat from the chaff. So nothing to see here. Don't kid yourself that you got a glimpse into anything. HR is just doing their job finding people with impressive backgrounds.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- waheoo 6y agoYour faith in the human ability to avoid priming bias is unwavering.
- kitsune_ 6y agoIn my case the big tech interview was simultaneously harder and easier than I expected. As long as you are somewhat smart, I think it should be doable with enough preparation and a lot of it has to do with nerves. I made it to the committee but wasn't extended an offer. I know which two problems tanked me and it was a mixture of nerves, bad attitude by one interviewer and lack of preparation on my side. Fun experience tho.
- ulfw 6y agoLinkedIn like Hackernews too has been infiltrated with the Facebook populace. The amount of random discussions that have nothing to do with the focus of the site is staggering. I have a rule to unfollow anyone on LinkedIn who posts something non-work, non-job related.
- gcatalfamo 6y agoI agree with all the criticism in the article, but people always forget the world is not the USA. You should try going to Italy and the social influence LinkedIn has it’s unparalleled whereas Twitter is just for politicians and journalists. Just in case it wasn’t clear, I am emphasizing how BAD this is but also how forced we are to play by a specific platform’s rules. A note: making fun of people using Skype in 2020 makes YOU out of touch with reality and not the opposite...the non Bay Area business world has just embraced teams, zoom and unfortunately also webex, and they are still complaining how NEW all this shit is for them.
- baxtr 6y agoI said this here before: LinkedIn has become a very sad place for me. I use it only two communicate with recruiters or other leads. The news feed is utterly useless. Everyone else seems to be happy and excited and successful. There is no real value in most feed posts. Rather, they’re usually a variation of this: ”#supergrateful and #blessed for meeting super inspiring %SomeoneImportant today #growth #entrepreneurship %hipsterstartup #nopause”
- nullsense 6y agoI don't think I've ever even remotely thought about posting anything to the feed in LinkedIn in. I visit LinkedIn only when I have to, and I do see this kind of thing you're talking about. I always wonder... are they actually using it non-ironically as social media???
- spc476 6y agoI post links to my blog entries to my LinkedIn timeline. I figured why not? I'm already doing that on Facebook, and hey, it's probably different enough from the regular content to be refreshing.
- jdhn 6y agoI've done it a couple of times. Once was to advertise a project where I was the lead designer, and another time to advertise a job opening that my company had.
- xtracto 6y agoThe only thing I post is about job openings that I have on my team.
- __boos 6y agoThe last 3 jobs I found, in two different countries in Europe, in the time span of 10y are due to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great platform that gives the opportunity to look on how the market is evolving and what roles are more and more requested. It allows to find jobs and to be found. Not everyone is in NYC, SanFra, or any other technological hub of the world, the opposite. The majority of the people live in average cities if not villages where the opportunity to networking are rare if not absent. Not to mention that if you want to relocate in other countries leveraging your skills, you cannot spend time joining events on the other side of the world unless you are rich.
- Mysterise 6y agoThere's a couple of hidden treasures in the form of satire accounts, most notably Chad Profitz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-profitz-977536159/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-profitz-977536159/ I aggressively block LinkedIn users that post garbage, as well as connections who engage with these posts. I find the only point of the LinkedIn feed is to serve as white-noise for your brain when you need to recharge.
- krupan 6y agoI agree with so much of this article, and yet, when I desperately needed a job at the start of this pandemic, LinkedIn was there for me. I got more interviews than I would have thought possible at a time when most companies were going into hardcore “wait and see” mode. I ended up getting a great job. So yeah, like for many folks, it feels like a very weird but essential place.
- conradfr 6y agoGood summary (I didn't even know about stories or audio posts). It's amazing that the fake Skype story has almost 800k likes! At this point the LinkedIn feed is for entertainment only, with all the "and then everyone clapped" stories and the deep business lessons gained by all these generic business persons' 6yo ingenuous sentences. But as she says, there's not much harm in keeping a profile for job search, just disable as much notifications as possible.
- xyzelement 6y agoTo echo others here, LinkedIn is responsible for my last job and a bunch of interesting opportunities. I can definitively say that it is the only social network that has made me wealthier and better off than otherwise. That's worth putting up with a lot. That said, I talk about LI's timeline as an example of a terrible product thinking. It definitively devalues the platform. Specifically - it seems that whenever any of my several thousand contacts Like some post, it shows up in my feed - ie Like is equivalent to Share/Retweet. This is a huge problem because people don't filter themselves as much when Liking vs explicitly sharing. Thus the timeline fills up with "X liked some feel good fluff from an influencer" - stuff that X definitely did not intend to broadcast when they engaged with it. I think this has the inverse effect on engagement. I am keen on maintaining my network and I find it valuable when LinkedIn tells me who has a new job or promotion or even just an anniversary. I would log in periodically just for that. However, that stuff is now drowned out by total nonsense. If I had to guess, their metrics are something like "X things liked" and "Y things seen by an average user" and I guess they are doing well on those, but if the metric was more related "are we giving quality engagement to our best users - ones that recruiters are paying LinkedIn in order to be able to reach" - I think the answer would be no. I am not an expect in consumer web/social media so there might be an angle to the game I am not getting (hard to accept that it actually is just that dumb) but I can't figure it out.
- bambataa 6y agoThey seem to be going for pure volume of engagement. Left to its own devices, it would send you notifications for anything. The last few times I’ve looked for a job, I’ve started on LinkedIn but always ended up speaking to recruiters about some mediocre roles and then finding something better through my actual network. LinkedIn seems to prefer to generate so much noise that I’m not sure how useful it really is.
- erikrothoff 6y agoI keep running into a weird issue where i scroll through my Linkedin timeline, don’t interact with any posts, then when I check my ”Activity log” I’ve liked a bunch of those posts. It’s been happening for months now. Anyone else seen this? It would really explain why my network likes so many weird posts.
- robga 6y agoI’ve used LinkedIn for 15 years. Used as in looked at twice a month. What gets me is there are at least 2 dead people in my contacts and every year the platform asks me to congratulate them for sticking around so long at one employer. The avalanche of Congrats! they receive is nauseating and speaks to the shallow nature of LI relationship.
- djhworld 6y agoOne of my favourite twitter account [1] seems to surface the worst of LinkedIn, the braggards and the false stories etc. Highly entertaining. I deleted mine a few years ago, my most recent job did not seem to mind. My CV is hosted on my website and I'm happy to talk to people via email. [1] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn?s=09 https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn?s=09
- rusty-rust 6y agoMy experience on LinkedIn seems to be radically different from what most people experience. It might be because I quite aggressively unfollow connections if they post content I don’t want to see on LinkedIn - I.e. memes and political content. My feed usually consists of job opportunities, business news, academic articles, tech blogs and recommendations for new data science/data engineering/ml tooling.
- intended 6y agoThis is funny, but at the end it veers into the early years of coders dissing excel. GitHub, drizzle, academic publishing and oddly twitter? These are the new resume sites ? For a few professions, what about the rest ? Plus LinkedIn is a great reflection of workplace reality.
- Aeolun 6y ago> Resumes are old scrolls of a bygone era. Yeah, we’ll have to disagree there. The resume is still the first and most important piece of information I see.
- __jf__ 6y agoThere should be a CIS [0] hardening guide for LinkedIn like there is for iOS, Safari and AWS. [0] https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-benchmarks/ https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-benchmarks/
- nixass 6y agoAnecdotal. I am male but my name in various countries around Europe (and probably world) is female, and people by default think I'm gal when they communicate with me over messenger, emails, etc. On one occasion I was asked to be talker on some event that is empowering woman in IT. The woman who asked me to do it didn't even look at my profile where my profile pic clearly show that I am a male (beard, moustache and stuff..). They've only seen the role I am on, experience and probably had some female name database where they filtered me out. On more serious note, I got contacted by every FAANG(M) company in last 6 years and got hired two of them through it. Nice tool, but not for every sector. Edit: words
- Ecstatify 6y agoProTip Download this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkedin-unfollower/neajhhdifbagcfeknjoejongjgoelcib/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkedin-unfollowe... It allows you to unfollow all your connections/companies in one click. Don't spend unnecessary time on LinkedIn reading rubbish. When I login now there's just two adverts on my newsfeed and nothing else.
- zed88 6y agoLinkedIn to me seems full of recruiters, self promoters and narcissist posts from middle level manager types.
- tgiba 6y agoLinkedIN should redefine it's connections definition. In my network I have people who 1) I know personally, close friends 2) professionally, where a friendship lasts as long as we work together 3) also people who I've seen on meetups etc., we both know we work in the same area of expertise, but never had a chance to talk 4) and people who look like we could do business together. I think it's good thing to keep up with all of them, but it also obscures professional network for all of us.
- neilv 6y agoI don't know whether it's well-known(?), but the parody story of the dog quoted in the article seems based on a better parable: Aspiring young monk is given the honor of joining a prestigious monastery. While traveling there, he is stopped on the road by a ragged-looking person who needs help. Monk says get out of my way, I'm important, and in a hurry to meet the head of the fancy monastery! When the monk gets to the monastery, well, you can guess that the head of the monastery was that ragged person, and that there's some remedial lesson in monk-ing.
- nicbou 6y agoI'm so glad we're finally addressing this nonsense. The LinkedIn bubble is so weird. It reminds me of those weird bird mating dances you see in nature documentaries. LinkedIn is the only social network where it's not acceptable to question these weird posts. Only politically correct, somewhat career-related content is allowed, and only positive responses are appropriate. Everyone is inspired and blessed and productive. It's a big circlejerk. That's not a surprise though. You're here to work on your business-oriented personal brand. If you don't need that, you have no reason to be there.
- zbentley 6y ago> Only politically correct, somewhat career-related content is allowed That's not my experience at all. The examples cited in the article ("president Obama wasn't really black") are, in my experience, the very tip of the iceberg. I don't have to look too far in LinkedIn comments to find people posting ... pretty politically-incorrect shit. It's more the asshole-uncle variety of shit (e.g. "I don't have gay friends because gay people always hit on me", or "I couldn't work for a woman CEO, they're not cut out for it") than the facebook variety (qanon/incohate rage at $phenomenon/etc.), but there sure is a lot of it. I mean, it's an N of 1 so take it with a grain, but LinkedIn definitely doesn't seem like a bastion of civility or professionalism to me.
- Aperocky 6y agolol I saw huge number of 5G or microchip conspiracist under Bill Gates post about coronavirus. The lurkers are there, they're just not mainstream enough on LinkedIn vs their respective Facebook groups.
- bonoboTP 6y agoThat's American culture expanding to every region. Even in Europe, now everybody is constantly excited to take on their next challenge and thrilled to announce something. I wonder when we get to the point where you must declare you are gasping for breath from the electrifying orgasm that another day in the office of MegaCorp Inc gives you.
- dakial1 6y agoLinkedin is as good as the network you have. Obviously nowadays is hard to be that selective with the people you add, but you can be with the people you follow. I use LinkedIn for 2 things mainly: 1) to build reputation, sharing articles I find interesting about my broad area of expertise and fostering some discussions. These articles are not set to create maximum engagement, because I care about my direct network creating a certain view of my experience based on diacussions with me. 2) to recruit. I use it actively to search for key profiles (lots of devs) for my team. As my big corporate HR department is very ineffective, I take my time to search for interesting candidates and send them to be contacted by HR for some straightforward filtering (interested in the position, salary, etc). For more senior positions, I contact the potential candidates myself (to avoid HR screwups). It is a very efficient tool for recruiting IMHO. So, if you don't like LinkedIn just build your profile and keep track of the inmail for contacts, as people will use it more and more to reach out to you.
- hef19898 6y agoThat is a nice summary of linkedin, thay just forgot the utter uselessness as a ad platform because the data to noise ratio just got so screwed up since COVID-19 hit. Nice that they brought up Gary. I already unfollowed people because they shared to much of his "influencer" and "entrepreneur" contant/spam.
- nbzso 6y agoFor me LinkedIn is a bottomless pit of despair sprinkled with UX mistakes. As a professional in my field I don't have time to participate, optimise content, post my views and loose my soul in virtual networking. If I want to invest my time in writing and sharing I will make a blog post. Better ROI. Better audience filter. Better everything.
- bluedino 6y agoI left all the groups I was in for programming languages, server technologies, other “devops type stuff”, because they just turned useless. People either spammed their terrible YouTube tutorials, Medium links, or job postings. I’ve found the job searching feature useful, but nearly every day I am spammed by recruiters from companies like TCS with horrible jobs that don’t fit my skills, aren’t matched to my skill level, are 300 miles away, and none of them pay close to what I currently make. And then my newsfeed is filled with reposted feel good stories like the old woman who wanted to withdraw money from her account and the bank forced her to use the ATM so she took her million dollars to another bank down the road.
- k__ 6y agoYes. I stopped using the groups too. Now, I just use my profile and share my blogposts there
- k__ 6y agoI didn't like LinkedIn a few years ago. Like the article says, it's a cesspool of bad recruiters and bussiness bullshit combined with a social network that doesn't know how social networks should work. But now it's okay. I don't get recruiter messages anymore, my last two projects I got via CEOs that contacted me via LinkedIn. I cleaned up notifications, now I only get then when someone wrote me. Added an emoji to the beginning of my name, so now I see who sends me automated bullshit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI take LinkedIn seriously, but not as a social platform. There be dragonnes, there... It's a business card. That's all. There are people that take it seriously. These are people I may want to work with, so I honor their commitment. I will occasionally post stuff there, and keep it up to date, but I spend most of my "social" time, right here (where I am careful in my interactions). I also tend to stay away from Facebook, and almost never tweet. I agree. It is a really strange place. There's a term, "broetry," that was created to define the way people write those pithy posts with the single-sentence "hook." Ironically, one of the true masters of "broetry" is a woman. I see her posts all the time (whether or not I want).
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoExactly. People who use linkedin regularly either have an inflated self ego or are desperate to find work. The times I use linkedin - to connect with someone who said "add me on linkedin" or when I'm searching for a job. That's it.
- dorgo 6y ago>People who use linkedin regularly either have an inflated self ego or are desperate to find work. Or people who use bots to automate their networking efforts...
- xenocratus 6y ago> it’s competing against all the places you can do this better. Developers have GitHub... While I do work on open source on GitHub for my job, I feel like most software engineers do not. Does that mean that you have to spend your free time writing FOSS on GitHub if you want to be employable? I'd like to read that line as a cheeky nod towards uploading all the code you write for your employer to GitHub when you start looking for a job. I'm actually not sure it hasn't happened somewhere yet
- alkonaut 6y agoLinkedIn is fine provided you follow some very simple rules. 1) never use the social features like the timeline. Don’t post things, don’t comment on things. It’s just a bad Facebook for people with ties trying to become workfluencers. People who think that by promoting their employers blog post they’ll rise in the ranks (and they probably will but I don’t want any part of that charade). 2) Only only ever connect with people you work or worked with. Never recruiters. Recruiters want to build a huge network of random people, and it ruins the fundamental idea where I can see if I actually have someone with a work relationship at a company. 3) Don’t reply to messages from people not in your network. Either connect with them (if not recruiters) or ignore. Do not say “no thanks” or “not interested”. 4) Disable all mail notification. You likely get enough email. Using it like this, I find it’s a pretty simple way to keep track of where my past colleagues are, without being spammed by recruiters or having to wade through message spam in LinkedIn. I check in a few times per year to see what old friends are up to.
- coldcode 6y agoI changed my employer's name to something like Random Large Company as people were scraping the company name and generating emails to my internal company email in order to spam me. But I still get emails anyway as some people scraped it before I changed it and clearly sold the info to other people.
- alkonaut 6y agoGood idea: “don’t use your primary email for LinkedIn at all” should also be on the list
- crispyambulance 6y agoThere's a twitter feed, @StateOfLinkedin, that links to the most hilarious examples of LinkedIn culture. It's like ngate but for LinkedIn. They made famous the "A new day begins" LinkedIn post... https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn/status/1098220880914771969?s=20 https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn/status/10982208809147719...
- palerdot 6y ago> https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn/status/1098220880914771969?s=20 https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn/status/10982208809147719... Thank you for this ... Incredible 'suit joke'
- 23B1 6y agoAmazing how many problems can still be solved, even today, by not typing a URL into your browser.
- atum47 6y agoI have recently deleted my lindekin account for many of the reasons mentioned in the article. But what really had me saying: that's enough, was the HUGE amount of unsolicited communication I was getting. From young professionals entering hackathons and looking for guidance to the "talent acquisition" people, who just dump on you all the openings they have to see if you respond to any of it. Hackernews is currently my social network. I use youtube to make low effort videos logging what I've been working on and HN to actually invite people to interact with things I build and get feedback. I still have an Instagram account, but I'm planning on deleting it also.
- sitzkrieg 6y agoi also deleted my linkedin last month or so. the amount of recruiter spam was so much, it would take more effort to filter through that vs using a job board. 10+ years of senior contacts gone i guess but if there are trust issues about prior jobs that means i made em doubt my capabilities
- atum47 6y agoi didn't had any contact to be honest. mostly people who saw one of my projects here and decided to send an invitation.
- gravypod 6y agoThe unfortunate part of this is gaining traction on an alternative platform is extremely difficult. The people who really love these features are recruiters - who end up spending a lot of money on the platform - to make use of the psychological-fuckery the platform has to offer. A no-nonsense LinkedIn alternative that was a public resume, a search engine, and a direct messaging system would be perfect but I bet it'd be hard to gain traction.
- carrozo 6y agoThe LinkedIn feed is a holding pen for our world’s overproduction of bootlicking elites.
- jasonv 6y agoI deleted my LinkedIn a few years ago. I had hundreds of contacts going back 20+ years. For “reasons” I made one again a couple of years ago. No title, just the current place where I work. When I switched jobs, I deleted the old job entry and updated with the new. It lets me say “yes” to connection requests from people I encounter in my day job, while keeping the rest of L.I. at arms’ reach.
- the_only_law 6y agoA lot of people talk about how LinkedIn is still ok because recruiters just flock to them and it’s easy to get a job off it, but am I the only one who gets low quality recruiter trying to fill low quality jobs? I don’t think I’ve ever been contacted remotely by anything near the FAANG level. I do like their job board solely because it allows you to filter by both job function and company industry, but OTOH it tries to be too “smart”. Outside that the content is eyeroll inducing at best, at the article notes.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago99% of it is low level consulting crap, underpaid positions desperate because they can't keep people because underpaid, etc. LinkedIn is for the "desperate." Companies having trouble hiring, and people having trouble getting jobs. The rest is just business card maintenance and having a presence so real recruiters know you actually exist and have that job you said at X networking event.
- treis 6y agoFAANGs definitely use it. They need lots and lots of candidates to fill the roles they have since their hiring process is long and selective. They all have an army of recruiters to do so and those recruiters use every possible avenue to find people.
- KallDrexx 6y agoMost of the recruiters that reach out are for crappy jobs (I know you are a senior engineering, here's an entry level QA job, do you know anyone interested). Every so often I do get some decently sounding positions, but I've almost never seen how legitimate they are since I live in a low COL but work remotely for firms not located here, so most local areas can't match the pay. I can almost set my calendar based on the yearly recruiters from Amazon I get reaching out, and in the past I have had some conversations (on the phone too) with Facebook recruiters (though all ultimately end up not going anywhere due to relocation requirements).
- Nebasuke 6y agoI've gotten a FAANG job, multiple FAANG recruiters and an investment banking job through recruiters asking me via LinkedIn. I get maybe 2 low quality recruiters, for every decent recruiter. I used to get much worse messages from recruiters when I was junior, but since I've gotten experience and updated my profile well, the quality of messages has vastly improved.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoLinkedIn is a critical part of my professional life. Early on, it saved my company by leading me to connect with a business opportunity that I otherwise would not have known about. And it's become the worst user experience on the web. The primary, and I'd say only, value it has is maintaining current contact information of professional colleagues that I've accumulated over a lifetime. I'm connected with people I first met 50 years ago (no kidding). Facebook can provide that, but after 11 years of linking, the equity in that feature alone is too great for me to abandon. Like myself, my LinkedIn contacts have grown in their professional life and now have more responsibility and more resources (VPs, CEOs, technical domain experts) that could be useful for future hiring needs and business endeavors. On a more whimsical note, I've thought about making a bucket list item to buy coffee for everyone in my LinkedIn network after I retire. Given that they are strewn about the globe, and how many there are, it could be challenging and engaging way to spend retirement. Still... it's the worst user experience on the web.
- code4tee 6y agoLinkedIn seems to be populated mostly with people looking to impress other people on LinkedIn. Problem is the only people truly active are those trying to impress others and the people all these folks are trying to impress aren’t there (apart from logging in once a year to update their current position or profile.)
- fullshark 6y agoIt's only weird if you expect sincerity on a social network, which in 2020 seems naive, especially a network entirely based on fostering professional connections. People are there to build their personal brand and try to get a better job, not talk to their friends.
- zomg 6y agoi could not agree more with this article. everyone producing content on linkedin is passive aggressive and full of shit. it's perpetual apathetic back-patting. but with that said, i've got an account that i hold for maintaining professional connections... but i long for the day when i can use it for posting dank memes and shitposts! :D
- spacekitcat 6y agoI found myself without a job a few years ago and I really needed a lifeboat. A job just sort of came to me on Linkedin with very little effort and while it wasn't the best, it was what I needed at the time. It's worth having a Linkedin profile, but it's car crash of a social network.
- miked85 6y agoThis sums it up for me as well. The website itself is garbage, but I keep a profile on it just in case I need it down the road.
- Androider 6y agoNot every social network has to be the same. That's OK. LinkedIn is the professional network, the alternative to swapping business cards (remember those?). It's where you can add that one person you met at a conference so you remember their name and company if needed, or your colleagues. Would you rather add them to your real social network? Personally, I add everyone on LinkedIn and nobody except close friends and family to my real social network. Working as intended. LinkedIn is also approximately the only place in the world that I know of that you can go to and actually contact someone, when you only know their name. You can't find people's numbers (and nobody wants to call or be called anyway), there's no way to find their email, so unless you're already in their social circle there's nothing else except LinkedIn to reach out with.
- timbit42 6y ago> LinkedIn is the professional network I disagee. LinkedIn is a Mickey Mouse network of professionals.
- valuearb 6y agoThat audio feature sounds cool, can’t wait to hack it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- intellix 6y agoThought it was nice 12 years ago to land my first job abroad and get my foot into the door but now it's just spam from recruitment agencies that I've just muted all notifications entirely. I do still recommend it to others who are job searching though.
- bozzcl 6y agoAh, LinkedIn. This reminds me of a story. A few years ago, I had the very bad idea of replying to one of the typical "lol millennials amirite" posts. I called it unprofessional and told them to be more careful about the way they carried themselves because "this is not Facebook". This prompted a lengthy, downright insane reply from another person, who criticised me because "Facebook is a very big job searching platform" (huh? How does that change my point?) and called themselves "a world thought leader, according to my friends". At that point I just blocked that whole thread because it was actually giving me anxiety and I just didn't know how to reply to that without making things worse.
- TurkishPoptart 6y agoExcellent post. >The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars speaks for itself. That about sums it up!