8 ms·

Why is it so hard to share links on LinkedIn?

137 points by shortformblog 2y ago

nickdothutton 2y ago
Cancer on top of cancer. Please someone better this platform and end it.
- bdw5204 2y ago
  I think you'd either need a better job market or a platform appealing to an audience that isn't on LinkedIn to better it and end it. Right now, you aren't moving the white collar recruiters because LinkedIn caters to them so people who want jobs aren't going to your alternative. Maybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf.
  - matrix87 2y ago
    > Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf. Probably won't work because of classism
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  Now that this is the second comment is added to your comment, wait for another 5-7 minutes, then edit your initial comment adding something short and witty about life, the universe, and everything, and see the comments and karma exploding!!! :)
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  Speaking as someone who worked on doing exactly that for a while [1]: as long as all the jobs are there and all the job seekers are there, it's very hard to dislodge. Empirically, users want "all the jobs" more than they want UI improvements or lack of engagement-bait posts. One of the very first things I wrote down for my current company was "build a service, not a product", where "product" here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
  - mock-possum 2y ago
    With the current hiring landscape in web dev I’m not even sure all the jobs are there. :/
  - mgkimsal 2y ago
    Some users want 'all the jobs'. Many other users would prefer access to job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment, perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers, etc. Many job posters don't like dealing with it either, but "that's where all the job seekers are!". No, they're really not. It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party.
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      ...is all very easy to say, but empirically didn't work. Or at least, our specific attempt at it didn't. One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of words long, and it doesn't even cover all the big points of how complicated actually trying to build something better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked on the problem for years, in the interest of being only a twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of the complexity of working on a problem in its full complexity. ---- > job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is. Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or direct apps on your company website (which tend to be higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry bye now". If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if not actioned on in a short period of time and send a message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up? ---- > perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually (limiting the number of messages they could send candidates). In practice, this didn't make the average message significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of their precious message credits. They stopped being willing to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even though in the vast majority of cases they weren't exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior is frequently irrational or uninformed!). Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect. That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the first place). That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational, which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a result. And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since those are the ones that don't get matched through default channels). And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things - when you know they're problems. But those solutions create problems of their own, often in unexpected ways. ---- > It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party. This is true, but what's implicit in your argument here is the claim that "being a marketplace optimized for good outcomes" is in fact the primary criterion for being a successful platform. I'm not saying LinkedIn is good for job searching. It isn't. I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and that building a better solution is harder than it seems. I don't mean to say it can't be done, or even that people shouldn't try. I'm trying again (just not with a platform), so obviously I think there is some degree of solution to be had here. I just think that this kind of comment betrays a kind of "one simple trick" attitude that just is not engaging with the complexity of the problem or with the fact that incentive structures often do not point to "make a thing that doesn't suck".
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  LinkedIn grew because of massive spam. They bought spammers from India. That phase of the internet has gone so I do not think this is possible anymore.
- volkk 2y ago
  actually doing some contract work for a competitor that is tackling job searching/candidate searching from a referral/recruiting perspective and i am very optimistic. i think if the execution goes well, it's going to be huge. they've raised a fairly sizeable seed round. somebody needs to kill linkedin--it's awful.
EGreg 2y ago
You know, there is this maddening trend on HN to bemoan how networks owned by large centralized corporations with profit motives enshittify everything (Skype, Reddit, LinkedIn) But then as soon as an open, decentralized alternative not driven by the profit motive is introduced, it’s knee-jerk criticized and downvoted. How do you expect anything to change if you won’t support any solutions? (Other than, let’s use the government regulations / antitrust / whatever). Here is a free and open alternative that I have been working on for 12 years: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform Here is exactly how it would reinvent the profit-driven ecosystem behind the current centralized social networks: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem It does to LinkedIn, Twitter et al what the Web did to AOL, MSN etc. Putting the control in the hands of the community. Here is what that looks like: https://qbix.com/communities https://qbix.com/communities And here is an application of the technology in one vertical, that I’m building using it. You can build your own: https://rational.app https://rational.app There are other solutions too, like Mastodon and Matrix. I just think they are much further behind and people expect features comparable to Facebook and Twitter, much like they expect the Impossible Burger to be as good as a meat burger as possible before they can switch. It’s not easy, but we need to support open source projects that get that done, rather than tear them apart. Just my 2c. PS: If anyone with any sort of skills wants to contribute to this, more than happy to talk. My email is greg at the domain qbix.com
- skrebbel 2y ago
  HN doesn’t have a single opinion. These are different people.
  - Archelaos 2y ago
    The OP speaks of a "trend". No matter whether he is right or wrong with his observation, his wording leaves room for diverse opinions.
  - pmdr 2y ago
    Yeah... about that...
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
rjurney 2y ago
I have no trouble sharing links. Even multiple links in one post, although the first one will define the preview. Nor do I have a problem sharing images and including urls in the post body. Nor do I understand why people only share the link in the top comment. What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful? I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an expert is how I get work. The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group... one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.
- ianbicking 2y ago
  Reading the article, I guess he's just saying that sharing a link will make the algorithm rank your post lower. This has been happening everywhere, I suppose, recently on Twitter, quite a while ago on Facebook... a combination of social networks wanting to keep readers captive on the platform, preferring content that's been adapted for the platform, and some (probably justified) suspicion that links are more promotional than informative. So what's "hard" is using SEO-style tricks to share a link without your post being pushed into obscurity. And for people without the time or desire to hack the algorithm, it means sharing links on LinkedIn isn't very effective.
- redrove 2y ago
  It’s not the trouble of sharing links, it’s the fact that the post is downranked, did you even read the article?
  - rjurney 2y ago
    Yes, and I don't get it. Why would people read a post without a link? My link posts do fine.
    - recursive 2y ago
ghusto 2y ago
My only guess as to why people put so much effort in trying to use platforms that are so obviously user-hostile, is the fear of missing out — not being where everyone else is. If the company you're applying for cares whether you're on LinkedIn, consider withdrawing your application.
- nicbou 2y ago
  It's where the audiences are. There's not really a way around it.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    "When Network Effects Attack", the new zombie thriller.
  - ghusto 2y ago
    There's an argument for it being where _an_ audience is, but my point is that it's probably not the audience you want.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- UmYeahNo 2y ago
  My previous employer's evil HR director weaponized employee Linked In profiles. The hr department would actively monitor employee linked in pages. You were expected to regularly post positive stuff about the company (it would come up in reviews), BUT if it looked like the employee was buffing their resume they would have the employee's manager bring the employee in to try and figure out if they were getting ready to quit, and in certain cases use those updates as the impetus for us to "find a reason" to PiP/fire the employee. Or, if you were a manager on HR's shitlist as someone they wanted gone, they would use employees updating their profile it as cause for the manager's manager to investigate if the manager should be fired for low staff morale, since the employees were seen as getting ready to quit, and so it must be the managers fault. The company's position was, you should only use your linked in profile to talk about how good the employer was, and anything else to promote the employee or look for a job was a trigger for "finding a reason to fire". It was horrible. Glad I'm not there anymore.
redrove 2y ago
I hate LinkedIn from the bottom of my heart. It’s absolute crap, just utter crap. It’s exactly where all the LLM, SEO, “LeadGen” spam goes to and comes from. Social networks are awful but I think I despise this one the most.
- criddell 2y ago
  I don’t really like LinkedIn either, but I think this is one of the things they get right.
- gwervc 2y ago
  It was bad, then Microsoft bought it and it became even worse.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
I do think Cory Doctorow has done an unwitting disservice with the word "enshitification". It's great to name a phenomenon, but after that it serves to hide more than it reveals. Far less often discussed is the emotional dynamics around 'social media'. Way I see it, most all BigTech social media is bitterness and resentment. The platform owners have as much contempt for the users as the users have for the platform. That is no basis for a 'community'.
jmyeet 2y ago
I honesstly don't understand why anyone posts on LinkedIn. It seems like such a pick me move from anyone who can't build an audience on Twitter. The only people who I see post on LInkedIn are wanna-be "thought leaders" and people who are looking for a job. LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social proof and never think about it otherwise. As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  They hope it will make them money
- rjurney 2y ago
  Twitter is how I built my entire network in the Bay Area... it was amazing at flattening hierarchies, I could talk to anyone. Then at some point the recommender system changed and people in my network never saw tweets from one another. At that point it became useless for my career. Concurrently, LinkedIn sharing grew from nothing to awesome. I get most of my news about the latest developments in my field from LinkedIn. I get jobs by posting blog posts on LinkedIn, or summaries of interesting recent papers.
  - simonw 2y ago
    Which field? I'm still trying to get a feel for what kind of fields are active on LinkedIn these days.
    - rjurney 2y ago
      Computer science. More and more researchers are on LinkedIn, and if you post a paper and @ their account, you are instantly on their radar since most are never recognized like that. Pro tip ;)
DebtDeflation 2y ago
I've never been a big user of LinkedIn but started writing the occasional blog post a few months back after my employer said I needed to increase my "external eminence". I was pleasantly surprised at the number of reactions and comments I got. More recently I have shared a few external links along with some commentary on them and hardly gotten any reactions or comments. I guess that explains it.
- lainga 2y ago
  Can I ask why the employer wanted this of you? Were you compensated for your eminence embiggenment?
  - cut3 2y ago
    It typically helps with recruitment in my experience.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  LinkedIn is a safe place for raising eminence. Praising each other could safely be mandatory by the T&C with the retaliation of locking you out for life while keeping your profile public but clearing all your achievements and contacts except the very first one, very very few people would trigger that clause.
- sys_64738 2y ago
  I’ve told my employer they can bugger off when daft things like that come up.
liendolucas 2y ago
Not only that. LinkedIn is now plagued by these little diagrams posted and re-re-posted that tell absolutely nothing about a topic, useful just to some people that only want to get traction/attention on the platform. Then you have all these annoying suggestions of topics that at least for me 99% of the time I'm absolutely not interested in wasting my time on. Suggestions and posts that are from someone on the other side of the planet that I have absolutely no relation to. When I negatively posted about these diagrams, after few days my critic "magically" dissapeared from the platform. Gone. Then you are also invited to answer random questions I have zero interest on. I lost the count how many times I clicked "Not interested in topic" only to see it coming back over and over again. The list goes on and on. It is an absolutely rotten platform. Many many years ago LinkedIn was something completely different, and was quite enjoyable to use. Big companies really know how to ruin products.
- throwaway8481 2y ago
  LinkedIn was never perfect. It worked for some who had extensive people networks to bring to the platform, but the platform itself was always hot garbage. I still tell younger folk about the days when they would spam your entire address book. I'm still seen as the loony in my peer circle for having no LinkedIn presence. It's an industry standard of hot garbage.
whalesalad 2y ago
I deleted my linkedin account around the beginning of covid and haven't thought about it since. That place was a disaster zone.
burnte 2y ago
I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it didn't exist, but have a profile because you have to play the game. I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is what you did (a short resume) and your connections number. If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. The quality of those connections does not matter to the people who look at that number. So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with 19 out of 20 users there against their will.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  i bet this one anecdote is from the time when those companies hired a bunch of people who then proceeded to post their lifestyle of do-nothing all day on tiktok.
- lockedinspace 2y ago
  That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume? Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing. Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
  - b112 2y ago
    so it's a dumb metric I have to ask, have you interacted with many recruiters?
    - lockedinspace 2y ago
      Fortunately quite many, maybe cause my sector is highly demanded, but having 1k,2k or whatever number of connections is not a metric for a lookable candidate. Years of experience, your github projects, open-source contribs are valuable metrics IMHO. Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.
simonw 2y ago
> “Back in the day, people used to sort of get around LinkedIn stuff by just dropping a link in the comments and saying, ‘Hey, check out the comments,’” Jung explains. “Problem is, LinkedIn actually parses if you're the first person to comment in your post, if you're the first person to add a link, even if you actually write, like, the website, but remove the .com and say ‘dot com,’ this algorithm is on to you. It's immediately going to take your post and downrank it.” Is that really true? It sounds like the kind of superstition that shows up in opaque systems like LinkedIn and TikTok all the time. But maybe it IS true? I'd love to see experimental confirmation of this, but it's hard to design transparent experiments like that without the risk of burning a valuable LinkedIn account.
- meowtimemania 2y ago
  Sounds spam detection
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    As if most of the people who post prolifically on LinkedIn trying to be seen as “thought leaders” aren’t spamming the site regardless of whether it has a link.
- hyperpape 2y ago
  Hillel Wayne asked this on LinkedIn, and people came out of the woodwork to suggest they'd personally measured it. It does sound like something that could be a superstition, but it seems to be real.
- apwheele 2y ago
  So I am tiny fish, https://www.linkedin.com/company/crime-de-coder/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/crime-de-coder/, so not quite sure what typical impressions look like for the big influencers (currently my company webpage has 2700 followers). LinkedIn lets you grab your stats for posts over the past year -- have only recently heard the thing about urls, I pretty much always shared posts with URLs. (My company webpage for along time was not indexed at all on Bing, but my LinkedIn posts did come up.) Here are my stats aggregated to domain for impressions for all domains I posted 2+ over the past year. I suspected youtube links are not promoted, and this confirms this. Also the local Raleigh newspaper is not doing so hot. But otherwise my NO URL posts don't do any better offhand than the linked ones. | domain | count | mean | std | min | 25% | 50% | 75% | max | |:--------------------------------------|--------:|-------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|------:| | crimede-coder.com | 61 | 1304 | 1261 | 345 | 625 | 854 | 1380 | 7179 | | andrewpwheeler.com | 53 | 1309 | 820 | 481 | 813 | 1074 | 1501 | 4463 | | NO URL | 13 | 937 | 489 | 453 | 692 | 850 | 909 | 2413 | | www.tandfonline.com | 6 | 1655 | 682 | 967 | 1119 | 1572 | 1960 | 2764 | | journals.sagepub.com | 6 | 1613 | 983 | 669 | 839 | 1363 | 2207 | 3134 | | link.springer.com | 5 | 3029 | 2810 | 1478 | 1722 | 1753 | 2154 | 8038 | | github.com | 5 | 873 | 170 | 658 | 838 | 864 | 874 | 1134 | | www.newsobserver.com | 5 | 496 | 144 | 363 | 365 | 459 | 626 | 670 | | www.crimrxiv.com | 4 | 1990 | 1678 | 489 | 585 | 1871 | 3275 | 3730 | | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | 4 | 1851 | 1258 | 817 | 1276 | 1452 | 2028 | 3684 | | www.carolinascrimeanalysis.org | 4 | 988 | 198 | 799 | 850 | 956 | 1094 | 1241 | | www.youtube.com | 3 | 457 | 160 | 281 | 388 | 496 | 545 | 595 | | theconversation.com | 2 | 2308 | 1151 | 1494 | 1901 | 2308 | 2715 | 3123 | | crimesciencejournal.biomedcentral.com | 2 | 2158 | 987 | 1460 | 1809 | 2158 | 2507 | 2856 | | papers.ssrn.com | 2 | 1719 | 387 | 1445 | 1582 | 1719 | 1856 | 1993 | | alexchohlaswood.com | 2 | 1505 | 585 | 1091 | 1298 | 1505 | 1712 | 1919 | | www.jratcliffe.net | 2 | 1349 | 552 | 958 | 1153 | 1349 | 1544 | 1740 | | osf.io | 2 | 1138 | 465 | 809 | 973 | 1138 | 1303 | 1468 | | academic.oup.com | 2 | 874 | 379 | 606 | 740 | 874 | 1008 | 1143 | | asc41.org | 2 | 841 | 665 | 371 | 606 | 841 | 1076 | 1312 | | www.amazon.com | 2 | 803 | 151 | 696 | 749 | 803 | 856 | 910 | | americansebp.org | 2 | 798 | 627 | 354 | 576 | 798 | 1020 | 1242 | So no experiment, but some hard numbers at least!
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> an organic audience on LinkedIn Is there such a thing? Are there people actually interested in reading Thought Leader Posts? > the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success I have no idea how one defines such a thing, but is... is it at all correlated with anything? Or is it just warm fuzzy feelings, equivalent to Reddit points? Anyway, this reinforces me view that LinkedIn is a bad company that has not fundamentally changed its dark patterns in any significant way, and I'll be staying off of it until I'm on the brink of homelessness.
meindnoch 2y ago
I'm bemused by the fact that there are people who actually engage with LinkedIn.
- personalityson 2y ago
  Like Facebook, you use it to check on people's background
holoduke 2y ago
Why is so fking hard to use the web version of the site on my mobile. Constant popups to force installing the app. I dont want apps. I only want websites. I hate you linkedin product owners.
staticshock 2y ago
In defense of linkedin: there are different strains of toxicity and malevolence running rampant on every other major social media platform (body shaming, bullying, harassment, predation, scams, various kinds of radicalization, etc.), and many of those strains are rather subdued on linkedin. Linkedin, of course, has some strains of its own (e.g. workism), but, surprisingly, I find it to be by far the healthiest social network out there. That's probably owing more to self censorship than to moderation or algorithmic curation: your "professional" persona is more on display here than anywhere else. So, yeah, sure, seems reasonable to suggest that linkedin has an anti-link bias, and the incentives for that bias are fairly intuitive. That being said, is it actually a bad thing, or does it also function as another tenet of their quiet but, in my mind, reasonably effective moderation approach?
elashri 2y ago
To me, LinkedIn is another social media website where I find people posting achievements every month and get the feeling that I'm leftover with me doing PhD and wasting my time doing some less cool research. I find people getting titles, posting about their new certificated, moving to another job. Some are participating in some events in their company that I don't know about because the only events we have is seminars with some free food. I also find people from the same field of research posting about a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm that is going to change the world. All of that while I sat down and debug some weird CUDA bugs and do fits for a data that will measure some elementary particle and improve our physics understanding of the world (which actually seems much less cool that my writing made it sound). I don't know if that is just me or that people on LinkedIn are really those super cool people who have all these achievements and cool stuff to share. I updated my LinkedIn twice in a decade. One of them after I got my Masters, and the other one was reposting a post by mistake. Yes, I hate LinkedIn and I hate that many people in industry and academia expects you to have presence there. And I hate that networking is the first thing you should focus on to have a job. I don't want to be famous or influencer or grow an audience. I'm not interested about all marketing yourself aspect and keeping track of how do algorithms changes affect that. I really wish that I didn't have to create an account. I don't like visiting the algorithmic timeline with this all probably fake/not-very realistic posts.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  People want to sell themselves. But in the stiff competition the way to remain in the race is by lowering their price (value), and so they easily get far from this (where thoughts could be exchanged with value produced): https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3bdb31644d5f165aa6342d169c487584.webp https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3bdb31644d5f165aa6342... Concerning LinkedIn I lower the ammount I believe the way and extent it is told.
matrix87 2y ago
Is it just me, or is LinkedIn giving priority to job postings from M$ and their subsidiaries? I get the impression that they are, and I'm a little skeptical of the legality of it
osrec 2y ago
I only go to LinkedIn when I feel the urge to cringe. Everything about it is utterly cringeworthy. Even the marketing tools (which I was forced to use by a marketing company we hired) were so bad they made my skin crawl. The link related functionality only adds to the hell of this vile, spammy platform.
mihaaly 2y ago
The UX of LinkedIn is terrible. Once I went into a futile debate with a support person (yes, it was that ancient time couple of years ago), so I had to conclude the 'support' is even worse. I do not use it that much like when I thought it would be good for finding a job (I did eventually, but not there) and memories fade, but I recall that searching for keywords is like triggering a random number generator, search profile gives notifications about dozens of new positions but when I trigger manually the very same search then it is 0 results, and whenever I did something then I got a notification that I just did that, very useful thanks, and it stayed there until you manually close it, also you have more and more otherwise, very annoying. Feels like genuine Microsoft quality.
- hbn 2y ago
  LinkedIn straight up stresses me out when I think about using it. So many things that work counter-intuitively to the way you'd expect any social media platform to work. From the emails they send you, with the sender set to the name of someone you know, and the subject written in first person asking you to add them, even though all they did was click an "add" button. Obviously because they get better engagement if their automated emails look like they were hand-typed by a person reaching out to you specifically by name. Or the fact that viewing someone's profile notifies that person that you did so. I'm too scared to just click around, let alone post because last time I snooped on what some ex-coworkers were up to now they started sending me messages to try and recruit me for their startups. And now I look like I've committed an act of rudeness by snooping the profile of a guy I knew but not taking the time to reply to his messages.
  - codr7 2y ago
    That's why they were a perfect fit for Microsoft, both creepy as hell. I refuse to keep an account, if that's a deal breaker I'm not interested.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  The UX of LinkedIn may be bad, but it isn't remotely as horrible as the UX of Facebook.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bagels 2y ago
They want to maximize the time you spend on linkedin, one way is to make it less likely you'll click on a link to take you somewhere else.
imagetic 2y ago
Because LinkedIn is a cancer.
netman21 2y ago
All of my business comes from Linkedin. I get inbound leads from content I post to Substack. I then promote it with a pithy summary on Linkedin. I don't encounter any of the stuff in this article. I typically get 5-30K views of my posts and have 38K followers. I was in the first cohort of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator program which was held the three months before I launched my SaaS. The secret to hacking the algorithm is no secret. Post original content four times a week. Because my SaaS is a data platform on cybersecurity and 95% of my followers are in cybersecurity I get tremendous engagement. I remember all the hacking community deriding Twitter when it launched. Back then the cool kids were on Digg. Now they are on Twitter deriding LinkedIn where they cannot pose as something they are not.
janalsncm 2y ago
For people who complain about the LinkedIn feed, I agree it’s almost entirely useless, but I wonder what people would prefer as an alternative? If your answer is “no feed” you can accomplish that by exiting the app when you’re done with it. It’s pretty clear the only purpose for the feed is to deliver ads, but I wonder how much revenue that really makes. I would prefer the app was rearranged though. It’s core functionalities are 1) update my profile 2) chat with recruiters and 3) search for jobs. It doesn’t need a feed, it doesn’t need a video tab.
smusamashah 2y ago
Do people here know that LinkedIn now has games. Currently for me I only see word games but I think they are a/b testing more games probably for mobile too (saying this based on a tweet I saw).
mijustin 2y ago
Everything said here about LinkedIn is also true on X.com (Twitter). As Elon posted in 2023: > "Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform." Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1709244708533264592 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1709244708533264592
MichaelRo 2y ago
Well. I have multiple LinkedIn profiles, a regular one where I list my job history, current company I'm working for, education, achievements etc. I check it from time to time and it's useful like every 5-10 years when I change jobs :) And a "hustle" account where I promote my website and eventually RIA (registered investment advisor) business. Quantitative finance and trading tutorials on the website, proprietary strategies on the RIA: https://www.aquarianz.com/ https://www.aquarianz.com/ Why two accounts? First, I don't particularly want employers to find about my hustle (although I don't particularly care) but mostly, I did got my hustle account suspended. Maybe someone didn't like what I said and ratted me, maybe LinkedIn algorithm marked me as spam, I dunno. I did manage to get my account reinstated but yeah, I don't don't wanna lose my "putting bread on the table" account.
Havoc 2y ago
Everyone I know just uses it as a glorified Rolodex and recruiter messaging platform. Hell company policy literally prohibits me from posting to it. (Whether this includes likes is widely debated)
alok-g 2y ago
I had read somewhere that LinkedIn does this to favor content that's on LinkedIn itself rather than going to a third party website. So if the links are going to LinkedIn itself, they won't be penalized. I personally do find this to be a hassle. E.g., how should I cite references that are outside LinkedIn? Now that LinkedIn has some popularity, I think this Link policy should be reversed. And what's with needing to Like your own post? I refuse to do that in spite of it supposedly making the 'algorithm' happier. Between Google and Yahoo, et al, the Philoposhy Google search held was to let the users get what they were looking for and move out as soon as possible, whereas the other search providers were making portals to offer more and more on their own website. I cannot say whether this should apply to LinkedIn as well, however, surely alternate approaches have been there.
dommer 2y ago
Just a continuation of internet companies breaking open standards.
CM30 2y ago
Honestly, regulators should probably step in already when it comes to anti competitive practices on social media sites. It's clear they're doing everything in their power to kill off the open web and stop people using their platforms for anything other than self posts, and a few future legal guidelines saying platforms with X number of users or more can't limit posts based on corporate interests would do a lot to fix it. Of course, LinkedIn's other issue is that the only content I've seen do well there is meaningless fluff about 'the hustle' and 'how millionaires/large companies have the right mindset to succeed'. If you're a Tony Robbins/TedX kind of person, then LinkedIn's probably a great place. If you actually want to share your knowledge about a subject you're qualified in/have experience in, then you're better off on Twitter/Substack/Hacker News/niche specific forums and Discord servers.
Martin_kRussell 2y ago
[dead]
naveen99 2y ago
Hijacking copy paste in apps is pointless now that phone ocr on screenshots works so well to seemlessly reenable text selection and copy.

137 points by shortformblog 2y ago

nickdothutton 2y ago

Cancer on top of cancer. Please someone better this platform and end it.

bdw5204 2y ago
I think you'd either need a better job market or a platform appealing to an audience that isn't on LinkedIn to better it and end it. Right now, you aren't moving the white collar recruiters because LinkedIn caters to them so people who want jobs aren't going to your alternative. Maybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf.
- matrix87 2y ago
  > Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf. Probably won't work because of classism
HenryBemis 2y ago
Now that this is the second comment is added to your comment, wait for another 5-7 minutes, then edit your initial comment adding something short and witty about life, the universe, and everything, and see the comments and karma exploding!!! :)
rachofsunshine 2y ago
Speaking as someone who worked on doing exactly that for a while [1]: as long as all the jobs are there and all the job seekers are there, it's very hard to dislodge. Empirically, users want "all the jobs" more than they want UI improvements or lack of engagement-bait posts. One of the very first things I wrote down for my current company was "build a service, not a product", where "product" here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
- mock-possum 2y ago
  With the current hiring landscape in web dev I’m not even sure all the jobs are there. :/
- mgkimsal 2y ago
  Some users want 'all the jobs'. Many other users would prefer access to job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment, perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers, etc. Many job posters don't like dealing with it either, but "that's where all the job seekers are!". No, they're really not. It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party.
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    ...is all very easy to say, but empirically didn't work. Or at least, our specific attempt at it didn't. One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of words long, and it doesn't even cover all the big points of how complicated actually trying to build something better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked on the problem for years, in the interest of being only a twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of the complexity of working on a problem in its full complexity. ---- > job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is. Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or direct apps on your company website (which tend to be higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry bye now". If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if not actioned on in a short period of time and send a message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up? ---- > perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually (limiting the number of messages they could send candidates). In practice, this didn't make the average message significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of their precious message credits. They stopped being willing to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even though in the vast majority of cases they weren't exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior is frequently irrational or uninformed!). Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect. That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the first place). That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational, which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a result. And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since those are the ones that don't get matched through default channels). And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things - when you know they're problems. But those solutions create problems of their own, often in unexpected ways. ---- > It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party. This is true, but what's implicit in your argument here is the claim that "being a marketplace optimized for good outcomes" is in fact the primary criterion for being a successful platform. I'm not saying LinkedIn is good for job searching. It isn't. I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and that building a better solution is harder than it seems. I don't mean to say it can't be done, or even that people shouldn't try. I'm trying again (just not with a platform), so obviously I think there is some degree of solution to be had here. I just think that this kind of comment betrays a kind of "one simple trick" attitude that just is not engaging with the complexity of the problem or with the fact that incentive structures often do not point to "make a thing that doesn't suck".
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
LinkedIn grew because of massive spam. They bought spammers from India. That phase of the internet has gone so I do not think this is possible anymore.
volkk 2y ago
actually doing some contract work for a competitor that is tackling job searching/candidate searching from a referral/recruiting perspective and i am very optimistic. i think if the execution goes well, it's going to be huge. they've raised a fairly sizeable seed round. somebody needs to kill linkedin--it's awful.

EGreg 2y ago

You know, there is this maddening trend on HN to bemoan how networks owned by large centralized corporations with profit motives enshittify everything (Skype, Reddit, LinkedIn) But then as soon as an open, decentralized alternative not driven by the profit motive is introduced, it’s knee-jerk criticized and downvoted. How do you expect anything to change if you won’t support any solutions? (Other than, let’s use the government regulations / antitrust / whatever). Here is a free and open alternative that I have been working on for 12 years: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform Here is exactly how it would reinvent the profit-driven ecosystem behind the current centralized social networks: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem It does to LinkedIn, Twitter et al what the Web did to AOL, MSN etc. Putting the control in the hands of the community. Here is what that looks like: https://qbix.com/communities https://qbix.com/communities And here is an application of the technology in one vertical, that I’m building using it. You can build your own: https://rational.app https://rational.app There are other solutions too, like Mastodon and Matrix. I just think they are much further behind and people expect features comparable to Facebook and Twitter, much like they expect the Impossible Burger to be as good as a meat burger as possible before they can switch. It’s not easy, but we need to support open source projects that get that done, rather than tear them apart. Just my 2c. PS: If anyone with any sort of skills wants to contribute to this, more than happy to talk. My email is greg at the domain qbix.com

skrebbel 2y ago
HN doesn’t have a single opinion. These are different people.
- Archelaos 2y ago
  The OP speaks of a "trend". No matter whether he is right or wrong with his observation, his wording leaves room for diverse opinions.
- pmdr 2y ago
  Yeah... about that...
nonrandomstring 2y ago

rjurney 2y ago

I have no trouble sharing links. Even multiple links in one post, although the first one will define the preview. Nor do I have a problem sharing images and including urls in the post body. Nor do I understand why people only share the link in the top comment. What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful? I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an expert is how I get work. The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group... one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.

ianbicking 2y ago
Reading the article, I guess he's just saying that sharing a link will make the algorithm rank your post lower. This has been happening everywhere, I suppose, recently on Twitter, quite a while ago on Facebook... a combination of social networks wanting to keep readers captive on the platform, preferring content that's been adapted for the platform, and some (probably justified) suspicion that links are more promotional than informative. So what's "hard" is using SEO-style tricks to share a link without your post being pushed into obscurity. And for people without the time or desire to hack the algorithm, it means sharing links on LinkedIn isn't very effective.
redrove 2y ago
It’s not the trouble of sharing links, it’s the fact that the post is downranked, did you even read the article?
- rjurney 2y ago
  Yes, and I don't get it. Why would people read a post without a link? My link posts do fine.
  - recursive 2y ago

ghusto 2y ago

My only guess as to why people put so much effort in trying to use platforms that are so obviously user-hostile, is the fear of missing out — not being where everyone else is. If the company you're applying for cares whether you're on LinkedIn, consider withdrawing your application.

nicbou 2y ago
It's where the audiences are. There's not really a way around it.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  "When Network Effects Attack", the new zombie thriller.
- ghusto 2y ago
  There's an argument for it being where _an_ audience is, but my point is that it's probably not the audience you want.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
UmYeahNo 2y ago
My previous employer's evil HR director weaponized employee Linked In profiles. The hr department would actively monitor employee linked in pages. You were expected to regularly post positive stuff about the company (it would come up in reviews), BUT if it looked like the employee was buffing their resume they would have the employee's manager bring the employee in to try and figure out if they were getting ready to quit, and in certain cases use those updates as the impetus for us to "find a reason" to PiP/fire the employee. Or, if you were a manager on HR's shitlist as someone they wanted gone, they would use employees updating their profile it as cause for the manager's manager to investigate if the manager should be fired for low staff morale, since the employees were seen as getting ready to quit, and so it must be the managers fault. The company's position was, you should only use your linked in profile to talk about how good the employer was, and anything else to promote the employee or look for a job was a trigger for "finding a reason to fire". It was horrible. Glad I'm not there anymore.

redrove 2y ago

I hate LinkedIn from the bottom of my heart. It’s absolute crap, just utter crap. It’s exactly where all the LLM, SEO, “LeadGen” spam goes to and comes from. Social networks are awful but I think I despise this one the most.

criddell 2y ago
I don’t really like LinkedIn either, but I think this is one of the things they get right.
gwervc 2y ago
It was bad, then Microsoft bought it and it became even worse.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

I do think Cory Doctorow has done an unwitting disservice with the word "enshitification". It's great to name a phenomenon, but after that it serves to hide more than it reveals. Far less often discussed is the emotional dynamics around 'social media'. Way I see it, most all BigTech social media is bitterness and resentment. The platform owners have as much contempt for the users as the users have for the platform. That is no basis for a 'community'.

jmyeet 2y ago

I honesstly don't understand why anyone posts on LinkedIn. It seems like such a pick me move from anyone who can't build an audience on Twitter. The only people who I see post on LInkedIn are wanna-be "thought leaders" and people who are looking for a job. LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social proof and never think about it otherwise. As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.

daedrdev 2y ago
They hope it will make them money
rjurney 2y ago
Twitter is how I built my entire network in the Bay Area... it was amazing at flattening hierarchies, I could talk to anyone. Then at some point the recommender system changed and people in my network never saw tweets from one another. At that point it became useless for my career. Concurrently, LinkedIn sharing grew from nothing to awesome. I get most of my news about the latest developments in my field from LinkedIn. I get jobs by posting blog posts on LinkedIn, or summaries of interesting recent papers.
- simonw 2y ago
  Which field? I'm still trying to get a feel for what kind of fields are active on LinkedIn these days.
  - rjurney 2y ago
    Computer science. More and more researchers are on LinkedIn, and if you post a paper and @ their account, you are instantly on their radar since most are never recognized like that. Pro tip ;)

DebtDeflation 2y ago

I've never been a big user of LinkedIn but started writing the occasional blog post a few months back after my employer said I needed to increase my "external eminence". I was pleasantly surprised at the number of reactions and comments I got. More recently I have shared a few external links along with some commentary on them and hardly gotten any reactions or comments. I guess that explains it.

lainga 2y ago
Can I ask why the employer wanted this of you? Were you compensated for your eminence embiggenment?
- cut3 2y ago
  It typically helps with recruitment in my experience.
mihaaly 2y ago
LinkedIn is a safe place for raising eminence. Praising each other could safely be mandatory by the T&C with the retaliation of locking you out for life while keeping your profile public but clearing all your achievements and contacts except the very first one, very very few people would trigger that clause.
sys_64738 2y ago
I’ve told my employer they can bugger off when daft things like that come up.

liendolucas 2y ago

Not only that. LinkedIn is now plagued by these little diagrams posted and re-re-posted that tell absolutely nothing about a topic, useful just to some people that only want to get traction/attention on the platform. Then you have all these annoying suggestions of topics that at least for me 99% of the time I'm absolutely not interested in wasting my time on. Suggestions and posts that are from someone on the other side of the planet that I have absolutely no relation to. When I negatively posted about these diagrams, after few days my critic "magically" dissapeared from the platform. Gone. Then you are also invited to answer random questions I have zero interest on. I lost the count how many times I clicked "Not interested in topic" only to see it coming back over and over again. The list goes on and on. It is an absolutely rotten platform. Many many years ago LinkedIn was something completely different, and was quite enjoyable to use. Big companies really know how to ruin products.

throwaway8481 2y ago
LinkedIn was never perfect. It worked for some who had extensive people networks to bring to the platform, but the platform itself was always hot garbage. I still tell younger folk about the days when they would spam your entire address book. I'm still seen as the loony in my peer circle for having no LinkedIn presence. It's an industry standard of hot garbage.

whalesalad 2y ago

I deleted my linkedin account around the beginning of covid and haven't thought about it since. That place was a disaster zone.

burnte 2y ago

I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it didn't exist, but have a profile because you have to play the game. I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is what you did (a short resume) and your connections number. If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. The quality of those connections does not matter to the people who look at that number. So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with 19 out of 20 users there against their will.

1oooqooq 2y ago
i bet this one anecdote is from the time when those companies hired a bunch of people who then proceeded to post their lifestyle of do-nothing all day on tiktok.
lockedinspace 2y ago
That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume? Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing. Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
- b112 2y ago
  so it's a dumb metric I have to ask, have you interacted with many recruiters?
  - lockedinspace 2y ago
    Fortunately quite many, maybe cause my sector is highly demanded, but having 1k,2k or whatever number of connections is not a metric for a lookable candidate. Years of experience, your github projects, open-source contribs are valuable metrics IMHO. Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.

simonw 2y ago

> “Back in the day, people used to sort of get around LinkedIn stuff by just dropping a link in the comments and saying, ‘Hey, check out the comments,’” Jung explains. “Problem is, LinkedIn actually parses if you're the first person to comment in your post, if you're the first person to add a link, even if you actually write, like, the website, but remove the .com and say ‘dot com,’ this algorithm is on to you. It's immediately going to take your post and downrank it.” Is that really true? It sounds like the kind of superstition that shows up in opaque systems like LinkedIn and TikTok all the time. But maybe it IS true? I'd love to see experimental confirmation of this, but it's hard to design transparent experiments like that without the risk of burning a valuable LinkedIn account.

meowtimemania 2y ago
Sounds spam detection
- scarface_74 2y ago
  As if most of the people who post prolifically on LinkedIn trying to be seen as “thought leaders” aren’t spamming the site regardless of whether it has a link.
hyperpape 2y ago
Hillel Wayne asked this on LinkedIn, and people came out of the woodwork to suggest they'd personally measured it. It does sound like something that could be a superstition, but it seems to be real.
apwheele 2y ago
So I am tiny fish, https://www.linkedin.com/company/crime-de-coder/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/crime-de-coder/, so not quite sure what typical impressions look like for the big influencers (currently my company webpage has 2700 followers). LinkedIn lets you grab your stats for posts over the past year -- have only recently heard the thing about urls, I pretty much always shared posts with URLs. (My company webpage for along time was not indexed at all on Bing, but my LinkedIn posts did come up.) Here are my stats aggregated to domain for impressions for all domains I posted 2+ over the past year. I suspected youtube links are not promoted, and this confirms this. Also the local Raleigh newspaper is not doing so hot. But otherwise my NO URL posts don't do any better offhand than the linked ones. | domain | count | mean | std | min | 25% | 50% | 75% | max | |:--------------------------------------|--------:|-------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|------:| | crimede-coder.com | 61 | 1304 | 1261 | 345 | 625 | 854 | 1380 | 7179 | | andrewpwheeler.com | 53 | 1309 | 820 | 481 | 813 | 1074 | 1501 | 4463 | | NO URL | 13 | 937 | 489 | 453 | 692 | 850 | 909 | 2413 | | www.tandfonline.com | 6 | 1655 | 682 | 967 | 1119 | 1572 | 1960 | 2764 | | journals.sagepub.com | 6 | 1613 | 983 | 669 | 839 | 1363 | 2207 | 3134 | | link.springer.com | 5 | 3029 | 2810 | 1478 | 1722 | 1753 | 2154 | 8038 | | github.com | 5 | 873 | 170 | 658 | 838 | 864 | 874 | 1134 | | www.newsobserver.com | 5 | 496 | 144 | 363 | 365 | 459 | 626 | 670 | | www.crimrxiv.com | 4 | 1990 | 1678 | 489 | 585 | 1871 | 3275 | 3730 | | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | 4 | 1851 | 1258 | 817 | 1276 | 1452 | 2028 | 3684 | | www.carolinascrimeanalysis.org | 4 | 988 | 198 | 799 | 850 | 956 | 1094 | 1241 | | www.youtube.com | 3 | 457 | 160 | 281 | 388 | 496 | 545 | 595 | | theconversation.com | 2 | 2308 | 1151 | 1494 | 1901 | 2308 | 2715 | 3123 | | crimesciencejournal.biomedcentral.com | 2 | 2158 | 987 | 1460 | 1809 | 2158 | 2507 | 2856 | | papers.ssrn.com | 2 | 1719 | 387 | 1445 | 1582 | 1719 | 1856 | 1993 | | alexchohlaswood.com | 2 | 1505 | 585 | 1091 | 1298 | 1505 | 1712 | 1919 | | www.jratcliffe.net | 2 | 1349 | 552 | 958 | 1153 | 1349 | 1544 | 1740 | | osf.io | 2 | 1138 | 465 | 809 | 973 | 1138 | 1303 | 1468 | | academic.oup.com | 2 | 874 | 379 | 606 | 740 | 874 | 1008 | 1143 | | asc41.org | 2 | 841 | 665 | 371 | 606 | 841 | 1076 | 1312 | | www.amazon.com | 2 | 803 | 151 | 696 | 749 | 803 | 856 | 910 | | americansebp.org | 2 | 798 | 627 | 354 | 576 | 798 | 1020 | 1242 | So no experiment, but some hard numbers at least!

pavel_lishin 2y ago

> an organic audience on LinkedIn Is there such a thing? Are there people actually interested in reading Thought Leader Posts? > the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success I have no idea how one defines such a thing, but is... is it at all correlated with anything? Or is it just warm fuzzy feelings, equivalent to Reddit points? Anyway, this reinforces me view that LinkedIn is a bad company that has not fundamentally changed its dark patterns in any significant way, and I'll be staying off of it until I'm on the brink of homelessness.

meindnoch 2y ago

I'm bemused by the fact that there are people who actually engage with LinkedIn.

personalityson 2y ago
Like Facebook, you use it to check on people's background

holoduke 2y ago

Why is so fking hard to use the web version of the site on my mobile. Constant popups to force installing the app. I dont want apps. I only want websites. I hate you linkedin product owners.

staticshock 2y ago

In defense of linkedin: there are different strains of toxicity and malevolence running rampant on every other major social media platform (body shaming, bullying, harassment, predation, scams, various kinds of radicalization, etc.), and many of those strains are rather subdued on linkedin. Linkedin, of course, has some strains of its own (e.g. workism), but, surprisingly, I find it to be by far the healthiest social network out there. That's probably owing more to self censorship than to moderation or algorithmic curation: your "professional" persona is more on display here than anywhere else. So, yeah, sure, seems reasonable to suggest that linkedin has an anti-link bias, and the incentives for that bias are fairly intuitive. That being said, is it actually a bad thing, or does it also function as another tenet of their quiet but, in my mind, reasonably effective moderation approach?

elashri 2y ago

To me, LinkedIn is another social media website where I find people posting achievements every month and get the feeling that I'm leftover with me doing PhD and wasting my time doing some less cool research. I find people getting titles, posting about their new certificated, moving to another job. Some are participating in some events in their company that I don't know about because the only events we have is seminars with some free food. I also find people from the same field of research posting about a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm that is going to change the world. All of that while I sat down and debug some weird CUDA bugs and do fits for a data that will measure some elementary particle and improve our physics understanding of the world (which actually seems much less cool that my writing made it sound). I don't know if that is just me or that people on LinkedIn are really those super cool people who have all these achievements and cool stuff to share. I updated my LinkedIn twice in a decade. One of them after I got my Masters, and the other one was reposting a post by mistake. Yes, I hate LinkedIn and I hate that many people in industry and academia expects you to have presence there. And I hate that networking is the first thing you should focus on to have a job. I don't want to be famous or influencer or grow an audience. I'm not interested about all marketing yourself aspect and keeping track of how do algorithms changes affect that. I really wish that I didn't have to create an account. I don't like visiting the algorithmic timeline with this all probably fake/not-very realistic posts.

mihaaly 2y ago
People want to sell themselves. But in the stiff competition the way to remain in the race is by lowering their price (value), and so they easily get far from this (where thoughts could be exchanged with value produced): https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3bdb31644d5f165aa6342d169c487584.webp https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3bdb31644d5f165aa6342... Concerning LinkedIn I lower the ammount I believe the way and extent it is told.

matrix87 2y ago

Is it just me, or is LinkedIn giving priority to job postings from M$ and their subsidiaries? I get the impression that they are, and I'm a little skeptical of the legality of it

osrec 2y ago

I only go to LinkedIn when I feel the urge to cringe. Everything about it is utterly cringeworthy. Even the marketing tools (which I was forced to use by a marketing company we hired) were so bad they made my skin crawl. The link related functionality only adds to the hell of this vile, spammy platform.

mihaaly 2y ago

The UX of LinkedIn is terrible. Once I went into a futile debate with a support person (yes, it was that ancient time couple of years ago), so I had to conclude the 'support' is even worse. I do not use it that much like when I thought it would be good for finding a job (I did eventually, but not there) and memories fade, but I recall that searching for keywords is like triggering a random number generator, search profile gives notifications about dozens of new positions but when I trigger manually the very same search then it is 0 results, and whenever I did something then I got a notification that I just did that, very useful thanks, and it stayed there until you manually close it, also you have more and more otherwise, very annoying. Feels like genuine Microsoft quality.

hbn 2y ago
LinkedIn straight up stresses me out when I think about using it. So many things that work counter-intuitively to the way you'd expect any social media platform to work. From the emails they send you, with the sender set to the name of someone you know, and the subject written in first person asking you to add them, even though all they did was click an "add" button. Obviously because they get better engagement if their automated emails look like they were hand-typed by a person reaching out to you specifically by name. Or the fact that viewing someone's profile notifies that person that you did so. I'm too scared to just click around, let alone post because last time I snooped on what some ex-coworkers were up to now they started sending me messages to try and recruit me for their startups. And now I look like I've committed an act of rudeness by snooping the profile of a guy I knew but not taking the time to reply to his messages.
- codr7 2y ago
  That's why they were a perfect fit for Microsoft, both creepy as hell. I refuse to keep an account, if that's a deal breaker I'm not interested.
shiroiushi 2y ago
The UX of LinkedIn may be bad, but it isn't remotely as horrible as the UX of Facebook.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bagels 2y ago

They want to maximize the time you spend on linkedin, one way is to make it less likely you'll click on a link to take you somewhere else.

imagetic 2y ago

Because LinkedIn is a cancer.

netman21 2y ago

All of my business comes from Linkedin. I get inbound leads from content I post to Substack. I then promote it with a pithy summary on Linkedin. I don't encounter any of the stuff in this article. I typically get 5-30K views of my posts and have 38K followers. I was in the first cohort of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator program which was held the three months before I launched my SaaS. The secret to hacking the algorithm is no secret. Post original content four times a week. Because my SaaS is a data platform on cybersecurity and 95% of my followers are in cybersecurity I get tremendous engagement. I remember all the hacking community deriding Twitter when it launched. Back then the cool kids were on Digg. Now they are on Twitter deriding LinkedIn where they cannot pose as something they are not.

janalsncm 2y ago

For people who complain about the LinkedIn feed, I agree it’s almost entirely useless, but I wonder what people would prefer as an alternative? If your answer is “no feed” you can accomplish that by exiting the app when you’re done with it. It’s pretty clear the only purpose for the feed is to deliver ads, but I wonder how much revenue that really makes. I would prefer the app was rearranged though. It’s core functionalities are 1) update my profile 2) chat with recruiters and 3) search for jobs. It doesn’t need a feed, it doesn’t need a video tab.

smusamashah 2y ago

Do people here know that LinkedIn now has games. Currently for me I only see word games but I think they are a/b testing more games probably for mobile too (saying this based on a tweet I saw).

mijustin 2y ago

Everything said here about LinkedIn is also true on X.com (Twitter). As Elon posted in 2023: > "Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform." Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1709244708533264592 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1709244708533264592

MichaelRo 2y ago

Well. I have multiple LinkedIn profiles, a regular one where I list my job history, current company I'm working for, education, achievements etc. I check it from time to time and it's useful like every 5-10 years when I change jobs :) And a "hustle" account where I promote my website and eventually RIA (registered investment advisor) business. Quantitative finance and trading tutorials on the website, proprietary strategies on the RIA: https://www.aquarianz.com/ https://www.aquarianz.com/ Why two accounts? First, I don't particularly want employers to find about my hustle (although I don't particularly care) but mostly, I did got my hustle account suspended. Maybe someone didn't like what I said and ratted me, maybe LinkedIn algorithm marked me as spam, I dunno. I did manage to get my account reinstated but yeah, I don't don't wanna lose my "putting bread on the table" account.

Havoc 2y ago

Everyone I know just uses it as a glorified Rolodex and recruiter messaging platform. Hell company policy literally prohibits me from posting to it. (Whether this includes likes is widely debated)

alok-g 2y ago

I had read somewhere that LinkedIn does this to favor content that's on LinkedIn itself rather than going to a third party website. So if the links are going to LinkedIn itself, they won't be penalized. I personally do find this to be a hassle. E.g., how should I cite references that are outside LinkedIn? Now that LinkedIn has some popularity, I think this Link policy should be reversed. And what's with needing to Like your own post? I refuse to do that in spite of it supposedly making the 'algorithm' happier. Between Google and Yahoo, et al, the Philoposhy Google search held was to let the users get what they were looking for and move out as soon as possible, whereas the other search providers were making portals to offer more and more on their own website. I cannot say whether this should apply to LinkedIn as well, however, surely alternate approaches have been there.

dommer 2y ago

Just a continuation of internet companies breaking open standards.

CM30 2y ago

Honestly, regulators should probably step in already when it comes to anti competitive practices on social media sites. It's clear they're doing everything in their power to kill off the open web and stop people using their platforms for anything other than self posts, and a few future legal guidelines saying platforms with X number of users or more can't limit posts based on corporate interests would do a lot to fix it. Of course, LinkedIn's other issue is that the only content I've seen do well there is meaningless fluff about 'the hustle' and 'how millionaires/large companies have the right mindset to succeed'. If you're a Tony Robbins/TedX kind of person, then LinkedIn's probably a great place. If you actually want to share your knowledge about a subject you're qualified in/have experience in, then you're better off on Twitter/Substack/Hacker News/niche specific forums and Discord servers.

Martin_kRussell 2y ago

[dead]

naveen99 2y ago

Hijacking copy paste in apps is pointless now that phone ocr on screenshots works so well to seemlessly reenable text selection and copy.