To 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

To 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.