7 ms·

Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking. - If you see it as a plac

by he11ow 6y ago

Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking. - If you see it as a place to mostly transact with recruiters, Yes, your feed is absolutely going to be crap. If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content. - If you see online networking as shouting-from-rooftops self promotion, of course you'll notice the worst of the worst shouters. If you realize anyone you'll ever need to engage with professionally is basically a click away, you start looking at what on these people's mind. You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points. - "Performing professionalism" is the best. Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own reputation. Being an ass might end up costing real dollars, so maybe best avoided, the logic goes. You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that. Plus, LinkedIn is nerdy. Text posts actually perform better than links. Attention is fairly aligned with follower count. (I've collected data for a year, and some pretty clear trends emerge) So yeah, it's good that we have this variant of a social network, if anything I wish there were more like it.

Bakary 6y ago
For me the experience is bad not because I don't understand how the platform works but because it represents some of the soullessness of modern culture and online media. Most of the content that it posted there, even by real people doing real things, often sounds like self-parody or a TEDx talk. The platform itself warps the way people relate to the world. The point you raised about reputation is a good one: it's not just reputation in itself but also a certain culture and way of thinking that is unofficially enforced. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the usefulness of it but I can feel something dying inside of me each time I use it as well. I cannot for the life of me relate to someone who enjoys LinkedIn for its own sake.
- he11ow 6y ago
  What I meant by "understand how online networking works" is not that you - or anyone else - has struggled to grasp which button to click to connect with someone. Hundreds of millions of people use LinkedIn, and yet that's not quite the use case I'm talking about, so let me be clearer: Most of the value lies in the messaging. You connect with someone. You read their stuff, or they read yours. You strike a conversation. You continue that conversation here and there. You hop on a call to get to know each other a little more. You continue chatting here and there. It could be a week, it could be two months, but do you see how easily now you're not "a vendor" or "a jobseeker", but, YOU? So your CV doesn't need to compete with a gazillion other CVs, before people start asking you if this opportunity is of interest. And clients come to you because they trust you. That's the kind of networking I'm talking about. Yeah, I like it. It gets me business. I get to engage with really nice people in my industry, who self-select because they find the stuff I write interesting. It's not dependent on my physical location or whether I got entry into some event.
  - tobmlt 6y ago
    This is pretty much my experience with linked, to the extent that I use it at least. I see my friends from my old job posting about wind turbine projects using our software. See my last big project get released into the wild. Give them a thumbs up; keep in touch, keeps doors open. Find new doors. Not a time sink, more high quality data than googling jobs. Seems mostly helpful. I get spammed invites from many kids coming into industry/almost graduating, but I mostly like it - if they seem honest I accept and get to watch them take their first steps in the job world too. I’ve had seniors asking for advice on how to break into computational mechanics and try to help with project advice / sending resumes along. ...Make friends and influence folk. Not bad.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    Thanks for this. I always had the impression that it was just for recruiting and transactional networking. I'm gonna give it a try.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    To clarify, I was indeed talking about understanding the culture, and it is the culture itself that invokes a reaction of nausea. Engagement metrics, Medium-style "lessons learned" posts, growth hacking, hustle porn, the word "influencer" taken at face value, "storytelling", hashtag optimization, "adding value" etc. I live in the real world and I accept and understand that this stuff makes money and that it's not gonna change any time soon but the economic reality of it does not lessen the feeling of postmodern horror. I know there are plenty of genuine conversations about real, non-marketing projects interspersed around this but the general culture is disturbing on a profound level.
folkrav 6y ago
> Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own reputation. I've seen so much blatant bigotry and thinly veiled sexism on LinkedIn that I'm having a lot of trouble relating to this one. > You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. Same here, I've seen plenty of shitty self-serving or downright condescending comments get rewarded with "claps" or whatever emoji they use on there.
- gowld 6y ago
  Bigotry and Sexism aren't reputation-threatening for large swaths of the business world.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    If true, kind of supports my point that "LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism" isn't very accurate.
- jcims 6y ago
  Unfortunately it's slowly turning into another Facebook content-wise. That and the Business Insider links. Does everyone else pay for a subscription or something?
notahacker 6y ago
> You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points. They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or posted memes about work ethic. Knowing what your client's PR line is can be useful, but there's a world of difference between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing actual pain points. Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met, forums which seem designed to not result in interesting conversation.
- he11ow 6y ago
  > They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content. They really do. Mind, not ALL of them. If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS. I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results. https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-linkedin-382a029e6e04 https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-... > dark patterns everywhere. Not disputing that, unfortunately.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points and relating it to your solution. I don't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for that (including some of the content put out by companies I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting. But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!
rmason 6y ago
Personally I would rather build things of value in my spare time. Personally LinkedIn world reminds me too much of a big corporate HR department. If you work in HR fine, but for the rest of us? Guess if your ambition is to climb the corporate ladder contributing a lot to open source and building a GitHub resume would more likely attract the companies you might want to work for in real life.
Silhouette 6y ago
I rejoined LinkedIn a while back after quitting years ago. I've since had numerous connection requests from people I didn't know who didn't even reply to a short, friendly message back. I joined some popular groups related to my professional interests, and their content turned out to be close to 100% bad-subreddit-quality self-promotion. The valuable connections I do have on LinkedIn invariably originated with some encounter elsewhere and then one of us looking the other up, not through LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn has produced, to my knowledge, 0 useful opportunities either for me or for someone in my network through me. Not a single one, ever. Meanwhile, I've been an active participant in many other online forums for decades, from old-school Usenet to HN. The opposite of everything I wrote above about LinkedIn applies with many of these other forums: I have enjoyed countless worthwhile discussions with interesting and/or professionally relevant people, replies or private messages I've received have been genuine and relevant, from time to time useful opportunities have been found for me or someone I was talking to, I've often found external material via those forums that was interesting or informative, etc. So am I bad at online networking, or is LinkedIn just a bad forum for useful online networking? IME, it's very obviously the latter, and that doesn't appear to have changed much during the extended period when I wasn't using it. The more I write here, the more I think it's time I got around to deleting that account (again).
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  This 100%. Don't waste time on linkedin. Online networking? Sounds like BS, sounds like another self help book, or some dumb TedX talk that says you aren't successful because you cross your legs when you sit. It's all nonsense and BS. There's a sector of society that is conned into believing the white collar koolaid and LinkedIn is the social network for that. Anyone who's really doing anything doesn't spend time there, ime.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking. No, it's largely about me, as a reasonably tech-literate person, understanding abusive design and dishonest behavior.
idolaspecus 6y ago
I think the obvious objection is that LinkedIn sees itself in the way you say reflects not "getting" it.
kube-system 6y ago
> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. Pick any of the news stories in the sidebar which are related to social issues, and expand the comments.
drewcoo 6y ago
Or maybe the burden on appealing to customers* is on the business providing the service. * Or product, depending on point of view.
Sodman 6y ago
> If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content. Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? LinkedIn largely markets itself as an employee <-> recruiter <-> employer connection platform, and almost all of the posts I see reflect that. Let's say I mute the posts advertising job openings or blatantly pushing company PR. Most of what's remaining is just buzzword regurgitation by self-proclaimed "thought leaders" trying to make a name for themselves before they jump ship for a better title. There's a reason we don't see many LinkedIn links getting to the front page of HN - there's very little good original content there. If I want to get an honest opinion from professionals in my community, I'll follow them on twitter, read their blogs on their own platforms (or the likes of substack), or even reach out directly. Everything posted on LinkedIn is implicitly poisoned by the filter of "This post exists mostly to make me look good to future employers/employees", which rarely makes for good content.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  > Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? Definitely not. No one I know uses LinkedIn except when they are looking for a new job. The ones I've found who are using it a lot are either: paid to, or desperate for work and try to fluff up and BS their way into a job.
  - tomatocracy 6y ago
    While I largely agree, the direct messaging function is also very useful - sometimes I can't find the email/number for the person I want to speak to because they've moved on since I last had their details and for whatever reason I didn't get the new details - in that case LinkedIn messaging is often a good backup and often a fair bit quicker than asking a series of mutual acquaintances for details.
a_shane 6y ago
I totally agree with your take. I didn't like LinkedIn for a long time (I much preferred Twitter) but since becoming a business owner I've appreciated having a place where I can go and "talk shop" and connect with other business owners going through the same things I am. Maybe it's just that I've cultivated the right community, but at least 90% of the content I see on LinkedIn is interesting, personal, and thoughtful. I much prefer it to every other social network I use.
Freeboots 6y ago
> its users' fear for their own reputation Lol, the OP article inspired me to go see whats on my Linkedin feed. In the top few items there was someone I dont know posting what I will generously call 'politically charged content'. Same shit different platform.
hvocode 6y ago
“If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.” No. LinkedIn is where your feed will be full of people trying to sound like super productive “thought leaders” to people who think the phrase “thought leader” means something. Then again, if someone is the kind of person that thinks TedX talks have great content, or a sketchy business seminar in the local Hilton ballroom has great content, then I guess it’s fine.
reiichiroh 6y ago
“The best content” is performative crap
Balgair 6y ago
Personally speaking, my experience has not been this. Perhaps it is the circles I run in, but the content that is posted tends to be sparse and of low quality. To me LI is much less as described. My feed tends to be more BestOfLinkedIn than anything your descriptions: https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin
ta988 6y ago
> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that. yes you see a lot of positivist comments... But I believe they are just mostly noise, in a way it reminds me of the crowds we can see in official videos of dictatorial countries, all trying to weep or more than their neighbor when their great leader dies or cheer more when they do another military advance... For me the timeline of Linkedin is just that, lots of noise, really little practical information. I agree with you however, the networking potential outside of the circles of a real-life network is tremendous, and I've used that quite a few times. Reminds me a bit of IRC friends and channels where you can quickly reach people with the right expertise without being a big figure of the topic...
recursive 6y ago
Sounds like Pascal's Wager for social networks. "It's rational to believe it's good, because the act of believing will improve your experience. Also a bit like the emperor's clothes. "If you don't like, it you just don't truly get it like I do."
XargonEnder 6y ago
What you've said doesn't reflect how I feel about LinkedIn, but it does reflect how I want to feel about it
hodgesrm 6y ago
> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking. It also helps to have some empathy for people on the network. I get a lot of LinkedIn connection requests from people who want to sell me something. They add a message to the connection request--explaining what they are offering. I usually ignore them but don't get emotional about it. For the most part these are people trying to make a living like the rest of us. You can't blame them for trying. I wish them success.

by he11ow 6y ago

Bakary 6y ago

For me the experience is bad not because I don't understand how the platform works but because it represents some of the soullessness of modern culture and online media. Most of the content that it posted there, even by real people doing real things, often sounds like self-parody or a TEDx talk. The platform itself warps the way people relate to the world. The point you raised about reputation is a good one: it's not just reputation in itself but also a certain culture and way of thinking that is unofficially enforced. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the usefulness of it but I can feel something dying inside of me each time I use it as well. I cannot for the life of me relate to someone who enjoys LinkedIn for its own sake.

he11ow 6y ago
What I meant by "understand how online networking works" is not that you - or anyone else - has struggled to grasp which button to click to connect with someone. Hundreds of millions of people use LinkedIn, and yet that's not quite the use case I'm talking about, so let me be clearer: Most of the value lies in the messaging. You connect with someone. You read their stuff, or they read yours. You strike a conversation. You continue that conversation here and there. You hop on a call to get to know each other a little more. You continue chatting here and there. It could be a week, it could be two months, but do you see how easily now you're not "a vendor" or "a jobseeker", but, YOU? So your CV doesn't need to compete with a gazillion other CVs, before people start asking you if this opportunity is of interest. And clients come to you because they trust you. That's the kind of networking I'm talking about. Yeah, I like it. It gets me business. I get to engage with really nice people in my industry, who self-select because they find the stuff I write interesting. It's not dependent on my physical location or whether I got entry into some event.
- tobmlt 6y ago
  This is pretty much my experience with linked, to the extent that I use it at least. I see my friends from my old job posting about wind turbine projects using our software. See my last big project get released into the wild. Give them a thumbs up; keep in touch, keeps doors open. Find new doors. Not a time sink, more high quality data than googling jobs. Seems mostly helpful. I get spammed invites from many kids coming into industry/almost graduating, but I mostly like it - if they seem honest I accept and get to watch them take their first steps in the job world too. I’ve had seniors asking for advice on how to break into computational mechanics and try to help with project advice / sending resumes along. ...Make friends and influence folk. Not bad.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Thanks for this. I always had the impression that it was just for recruiting and transactional networking. I'm gonna give it a try.
- Bakary 6y ago
  To clarify, I was indeed talking about understanding the culture, and it is the culture itself that invokes a reaction of nausea. Engagement metrics, Medium-style "lessons learned" posts, growth hacking, hustle porn, the word "influencer" taken at face value, "storytelling", hashtag optimization, "adding value" etc. I live in the real world and I accept and understand that this stuff makes money and that it's not gonna change any time soon but the economic reality of it does not lessen the feeling of postmodern horror. I know there are plenty of genuine conversations about real, non-marketing projects interspersed around this but the general culture is disturbing on a profound level.

folkrav 6y ago

> Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own reputation. I've seen so much blatant bigotry and thinly veiled sexism on LinkedIn that I'm having a lot of trouble relating to this one. > You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. Same here, I've seen plenty of shitty self-serving or downright condescending comments get rewarded with "claps" or whatever emoji they use on there.

gowld 6y ago
Bigotry and Sexism aren't reputation-threatening for large swaths of the business world.
- folkrav 6y ago
  If true, kind of supports my point that "LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism" isn't very accurate.
jcims 6y ago
Unfortunately it's slowly turning into another Facebook content-wise. That and the Business Insider links. Does everyone else pay for a subscription or something?

notahacker 6y ago

> You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points. They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or posted memes about work ethic. Knowing what your client's PR line is can be useful, but there's a world of difference between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing actual pain points. Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met, forums which seem designed to not result in interesting conversation.

he11ow 6y ago
> They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content. They really do. Mind, not ALL of them. If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS. I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results. https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-linkedin-382a029e6e04 https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-... > dark patterns everywhere. Not disputing that, unfortunately.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points and relating it to your solution. I don't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for that (including some of the content put out by companies I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting. But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!

rmason 6y ago

Personally I would rather build things of value in my spare time. Personally LinkedIn world reminds me too much of a big corporate HR department. If you work in HR fine, but for the rest of us? Guess if your ambition is to climb the corporate ladder contributing a lot to open source and building a GitHub resume would more likely attract the companies you might want to work for in real life.

Silhouette 6y ago

I rejoined LinkedIn a while back after quitting years ago. I've since had numerous connection requests from people I didn't know who didn't even reply to a short, friendly message back. I joined some popular groups related to my professional interests, and their content turned out to be close to 100% bad-subreddit-quality self-promotion. The valuable connections I do have on LinkedIn invariably originated with some encounter elsewhere and then one of us looking the other up, not through LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn has produced, to my knowledge, 0 useful opportunities either for me or for someone in my network through me. Not a single one, ever. Meanwhile, I've been an active participant in many other online forums for decades, from old-school Usenet to HN. The opposite of everything I wrote above about LinkedIn applies with many of these other forums: I have enjoyed countless worthwhile discussions with interesting and/or professionally relevant people, replies or private messages I've received have been genuine and relevant, from time to time useful opportunities have been found for me or someone I was talking to, I've often found external material via those forums that was interesting or informative, etc. So am I bad at online networking, or is LinkedIn just a bad forum for useful online networking? IME, it's very obviously the latter, and that doesn't appear to have changed much during the extended period when I wasn't using it. The more I write here, the more I think it's time I got around to deleting that account (again).

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
This 100%. Don't waste time on linkedin. Online networking? Sounds like BS, sounds like another self help book, or some dumb TedX talk that says you aren't successful because you cross your legs when you sit. It's all nonsense and BS. There's a sector of society that is conned into believing the white collar koolaid and LinkedIn is the social network for that. Anyone who's really doing anything doesn't spend time there, ime.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking. No, it's largely about me, as a reasonably tech-literate person, understanding abusive design and dishonest behavior.

idolaspecus 6y ago

I think the obvious objection is that LinkedIn sees itself in the way you say reflects not "getting" it.

kube-system 6y ago

> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. Pick any of the news stories in the sidebar which are related to social issues, and expand the comments.

drewcoo 6y ago

Or maybe the burden on appealing to customers* is on the business providing the service. * Or product, depending on point of view.

Sodman 6y ago

> If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content. Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? LinkedIn largely markets itself as an employee <-> recruiter <-> employer connection platform, and almost all of the posts I see reflect that. Let's say I mute the posts advertising job openings or blatantly pushing company PR. Most of what's remaining is just buzzword regurgitation by self-proclaimed "thought leaders" trying to make a name for themselves before they jump ship for a better title. There's a reason we don't see many LinkedIn links getting to the front page of HN - there's very little good original content there. If I want to get an honest opinion from professionals in my community, I'll follow them on twitter, read their blogs on their own platforms (or the likes of substack), or even reach out directly. Everything posted on LinkedIn is implicitly poisoned by the filter of "This post exists mostly to make me look good to future employers/employees", which rarely makes for good content.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? Definitely not. No one I know uses LinkedIn except when they are looking for a new job. The ones I've found who are using it a lot are either: paid to, or desperate for work and try to fluff up and BS their way into a job.
- tomatocracy 6y ago
  While I largely agree, the direct messaging function is also very useful - sometimes I can't find the email/number for the person I want to speak to because they've moved on since I last had their details and for whatever reason I didn't get the new details - in that case LinkedIn messaging is often a good backup and often a fair bit quicker than asking a series of mutual acquaintances for details.

a_shane 6y ago

I totally agree with your take. I didn't like LinkedIn for a long time (I much preferred Twitter) but since becoming a business owner I've appreciated having a place where I can go and "talk shop" and connect with other business owners going through the same things I am. Maybe it's just that I've cultivated the right community, but at least 90% of the content I see on LinkedIn is interesting, personal, and thoughtful. I much prefer it to every other social network I use.

Freeboots 6y ago

> its users' fear for their own reputation Lol, the OP article inspired me to go see whats on my Linkedin feed. In the top few items there was someone I dont know posting what I will generously call 'politically charged content'. Same shit different platform.

hvocode 6y ago

“If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.” No. LinkedIn is where your feed will be full of people trying to sound like super productive “thought leaders” to people who think the phrase “thought leader” means something. Then again, if someone is the kind of person that thinks TedX talks have great content, or a sketchy business seminar in the local Hilton ballroom has great content, then I guess it’s fine.

reiichiroh 6y ago

“The best content” is performative crap

Balgair 6y ago

Personally speaking, my experience has not been this. Perhaps it is the circles I run in, but the content that is posted tends to be sparse and of low quality. To me LI is much less as described. My feed tends to be more BestOfLinkedIn than anything your descriptions: https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin

ta988 6y ago

> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that. yes you see a lot of positivist comments... But I believe they are just mostly noise, in a way it reminds me of the crowds we can see in official videos of dictatorial countries, all trying to weep or more than their neighbor when their great leader dies or cheer more when they do another military advance... For me the timeline of Linkedin is just that, lots of noise, really little practical information. I agree with you however, the networking potential outside of the circles of a real-life network is tremendous, and I've used that quite a few times. Reminds me a bit of IRC friends and channels where you can quickly reach people with the right expertise without being a big figure of the topic...

recursive 6y ago

Sounds like Pascal's Wager for social networks. "It's rational to believe it's good, because the act of believing will improve your experience. Also a bit like the emperor's clothes. "If you don't like, it you just don't truly get it like I do."

XargonEnder 6y ago

What you've said doesn't reflect how I feel about LinkedIn, but it does reflect how I want to feel about it

hodgesrm 6y ago

> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking. It also helps to have some empathy for people on the network. I get a lot of LinkedIn connection requests from people who want to sell me something. They add a message to the connection request--explaining what they are offering. I usually ignore them but don't get emotional about it. For the most part these are people trying to make a living like the rest of us. You can't blame them for trying. I wish them success.