I use LinkedIn to search for background of people and companies, and follow companies that seem to be engaged in something I may be interested in the future. In

I use LinkedIn to search for background of people and companies, and follow companies that seem to be engaged in something I may be interested in the future. In the past, I also joined groups that interested me but I found majority of them devoid of anything of value. I typically don't follow people not connected to me, actively remove attention whores from my connections and feed, and people who don't respond when contacted or respond rudely. This keeps my feed and connections pretty clean. Only few times, I have been approached by recruiters for potential jobs and those leads have never panned out. I find recruiters to be good if you are looking at same type of work as in the past but rarely anything different or interesting. And, such direction changes are frequent in my profile so recruiters tend to stay away.