It used to be a lot of those things. For me it's still an extended business card/resume, but the part of being just business networking and professional interes

It used to be a lot of those things. For me it's still an extended business card/resume, but the part of being just business networking and professional interests had been a bit deprecated. It may depend on your profile, but I get a lot of contact spam (just to have more followers), headhunters messages, motivational or other kinds of non exactly professional interest posts because contacts of contacts or just "promoted" content, and that is after being very selective on who you are connected to and muting/disconnecting the noisiest contacts. I can't put a finger on who's responsible, the users community as a whole or how it is built/promoted, but the end result is having too much noise and not enough signal.