One thing I have noticed from influencers is shameless copy and pasting of what other influencers have said, or even more shamelessly, some influencers going around after seeing some trite bit of wisdom and claiming they were the original source and demanding credit.
A shamelessly copied and posted post was circulating LinkedIn a few days ago, and someone shared screengrabs how these bottom-feeders are copying and posting content. The content of the post makes matter worse.
A bunch of recruiters posted like this- "generic name was a recent college grad he/she was really talented. they asked for X amount of money. But I gave them Y (Y quite > X). This is the time for human solidarity and being honest and rewarding people for their talent, blah blah blah."
In some screenshots, the name, tech stack, and amount of money were all same.
Yes and no. On other media platforms your behaviour and activities(both posts and add clicks) are the product. On other hand on LinkedIn you yourself is the product. And not in the influencer way.
Your communication metadata, your choices, you age, gender, location, and many other things are indeed products of companies like Facebook. But in a way, you are, too. Because the mere presence of yours draws some other people to that platform.
And celebrities who are famous outside of social media, are definitely more products themselves rather than the data associated with them.
On the other hand, on dating apps like Tinder, you yourself are the product in addition to any other information they might monetize in numerous ways.
Nice article. Those "I passed some 2 min XYZ certificate" posts really get to my nerve. I usually use the news feed eradicator [0] on such websites. It is like jumping across the valley of the newsfeed attention river.
There is this cool podcast [0] i heard on authenticity and bragging and how to not be shameless. Especially useful when you are an introvert (like me).
I know what you mean but at least those certs are work related and fairly factual. I rather see that than people bragging about how amazing they are in contrived scenarios.
That much is true, but the tragic comedy is in what people seem to think will actually be taken seriously / make others see them in a good light -- see https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn for evidence.
This propensity for gaming everything is a very good and useful capability, when applied to the environment - to nature, to physics, to our own bodies. Roads and cars and boats exist because we've gamed our stamina. Planes and rockets exist because we've gamed gravity. Farming and drugs and vaccines exist because we've gamed microbiology.
The problem starts when people are trying to game each other. This is bad, because it turns what should be a PvE game into a PvP one. With the shitty cards nature/evolution gave us, we have plenty of external challenges left to overcome; it's really sad to see and deal with people who instead want to abuse others to get ahead.
The same exists on nearly every social media site, sadly. Natural progression I would assume. On Twitter, in dev circles, we have "Junior Dev Porn" where the same poll/questions are asked, the same anecdotes are recycled, and the same code snippets posted, all in the name of empowering junior developers. But at a high altitude it's glaringly obvious the majority are for engagement and follower gain. Especially so when those internet points are leveraged for favor.
I agree - it seems that all social media platforms suffer from this. Original/useful content seems to lose out in the battle for user engagement. I wonder if you could create a new type of social media platform that overcomes this problem?
How are you going to overcome a problem that we are structurally ingraining into our youth? If the kids are on TikTok by 10 years old, you know, this is a losing fight. The next 3-4 generations will not even recognize that there is a severe vanity and narcissism problem.
Personally I don’t have a problem with repetitive content that is overtly aimed at beginners and junior devs, since there is a constant flow of new beginners and junior devs joining social media.
Seems like it could be a constructive exchange: newbies get useful basic content; posters get likes and followers. But, only if the content is actually good.
Couldn't it be more useful to distill that repetitive content into a durable medium, instead of relying on the online equivalent of handing down an oral history of development practices?
LinkedIn has too much "advice" from "experts". Shut up and make me laugh instead. Everything they post is either self-congratulatory "advice" or just sycophantic worship.
In my case I need to build a network to find jobs as it is more niche and I refuse to work for fin-tech or ad sellers (for now, this may clearly change if I need money).
Is anyone who isn‘t doing it for work (recruiting, PR, …) or looking for jobs/work/employers/employees even unironically using this pathetic shitshow mix of early facebook culture and corporate-lies-fake-feelgood-culture bullshit?
Many use it to just peek into other people's lives and get background info - where they work at, where they're from and where they had studied, etc. Worst case, even stalk.
> The Medium is the message, and the message is "it's time we make this official".
I’m not sure I understand. To me medium is just an easy way to get a blog started. Nothing more to it. People often complain about their business model, but then people here always complain about any business model, or lack of a business model.
Why would you even want to use it? Seriously, the only time people are using it is when they are looking for a new job, and this is usually a relatively a short time. After that you just turn off all notifications and basically mute the site for the next few years. I have to admit I created an inbox rule for automatically archiving all LI mails without reading as they were using all dirty tricks to send mails even after telling them not to (I hope this changed after the GDPR, but I'm not removing my rule just in case).
My favourites are the posts by those who have had accidental success, who feel qualified to hold court as though they have some magic technique.
I say this as someone who had accidental success, and ran that successful business for over a decade, completely aware that luck and timing played a far larger part than quality.
Just like Facebook: ignore the ”newsfeed” part, and the rest of the service is pretty decent.
For Facebook that means e.g using the events functionality. For LinkedIn that’s private messages and network graphs (“do I know someone at X company”).
The “feeds” that are front and center on both sites is the worst feature and in no way necessary for using the service. It’s their easiest method of ad delivery though, which is why they want you to view it.
For Facebook the newsfeed is full of viral crap, ads, and if you are unlucky, toxicity. On LinkedIn it’s recruiters and workfluencers pushing posts that seem like parody but isn’t.
Every time I try to use Twitter to follow interesting companies I get annoyed and quit because of the same garbage. I've been thinking it's an age thing, where people with better eyesight than me or who grew up looking at low SNR information like that can filter through it more easily. They need to put ads and suggestions and such nonsense off to the side and attract your eye by being worth looking at, not inline pretending to be part of your desired info feed.
My uBlock Origin filters for linkedin which completely cut feeds and all sort of distracting things out (some filters might be outdated, but things work):
All this leaves out is the leftmost side (where your number of connections are seen), and the top blue row. The feed is entirely gone. You can still read and message people, see your connections, etc. But no more viewing the feed. It's made my linkedin visits so much easier to bear.
Edit:
Some HN searching shows a single filter which blocks out most of the home page, and is probably cleaner:
I find LinkedIn really cringy. And I haven't seen ONE post there that actually added value to my life.
It is also toxic as hell.
But I know people who got employment offers from LinkedIn. So it adds value in that sense.
I just mute and block those influencers. And check LinkedIn maybe twice a week.
One of the things I cannot find any excuse for is how fake people are. They are behaving in a fake manner even when they don't have to.
Like, someone makes an IoT project (usually copied from GitHub), and markets it like this- "I was having X problem. I though why not solve it with modern technology? So I made this innovative blah blah copy of something".
You can indeed curate, but I definitely get the vibe that cringe is the default mode on LinkedIn (which is still strictly better than Twitter’s default mode, toxicity).
Maybe curating LinkedIn is a skill that not many people desire to possess. I have an account because it's expected when you're looking for a job. I'm not interested in articles about business or whatever the good content on LinkedIn is supposed to be.
In two words: “thoughtful” and “good-faith”. Content should be interesting and thoughtful rather than optimizing for clicks (obviously this isn’t compatible with an ad-based model). Dialog should be civil, charitable, kind, etc and strong norms for objectivity and neutrality. Low tolerance for overt ideological advocacy, authoritarian rhetoric, flame baiting, etc.
That’s “what it should look like”. To get there, I expect it’s “establish the right norms from the start and incentivize the right content and behaviors along the way”. To monetize, I don’t know and I don’t especially care.
I don't think it would work on a platform on which people can organize to bully. That's an advantage of HN, it is hard to build such a community because of the lack of communication between users out of topics.
Off the top of my head, it would have the tone of Facebook before they allowed public accounts outside of schools and right after they introduced news feed, it would be aggressively moderated, and it would cost enough money per month that people would think twice before engaging in a behavior that led to an account getting banned or using bots. There would be an initial setup fee of at least $100 along with a monthly subscription fee, and getting an account banned would result in a total loss of your payments and deletion of your profile.
* Users would explicitly agree that their profile posts are subject to moderation.
* Profiles would be private and users would be heavily discouraged from using a real name. Friending someone else would require an out of band secret key exchange. A new key would be required to add each person to a group and the entire group would be informed when a new user was added. The only people with real visibility would be the mods.
* There would be no advertising or tracking.
* The service would be located in a country that doesn't immediately bend over for Five Eyes, China, or Russia.
* There would be no org pages or corp accounts.
* Anyone holding public office, running for public office, or affiliated with a political campaign would be explicitly banned from using it at the EULA level. Group pages with more than X members would automatically be flagged for periodic review, and obvious attempts at political organizing for a campaign or movement such as BLM or the Proud Boys (chosen purely as examples of political movements) would result in a ban for all affiliated accounts.
* Egregious (as in obviously intentionally hostile rather than ignorant or inadvertent) racism, sexism, bigotry, etc would result in a ban.
* Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
* Any attempt at bulk data collection would result in your account being suspended and flagged for review.
You get the idea. Social networks should be about sharing fun content with your real life social network. They should not be about self promotion, BS drama, politics, disinformation campaigns, advertising, influencing, branding, etc.
I pretty much don’t use unmoderated forums. (he said, on an unmoderated forum) But on any forum, the rotting stench of money draws many flies. That’s a lot of the problem.
BYW, how much do I get for posting this valuable wisdom?
I find it pretty easy to skip past the recruiters and connection requests when I pop in from time to time. I just generally ignore all the random recruiter request that are way off target. (Though, in all fairness, my LinkedIn profile is very scanty.) And I'll rarely respond--usually with a polite no--to on-target ones given that I'm not really on the market. (And have never gotten a job since grad school decades ago that wasn't a personal contact.)
Even if you’re only connected with your acquaintances, the algorithm ensures that many of the posts your connections like or comment on will show up in your newsfeed.
That's the bane of social media platforms where engagement is low (Twitter suffers from this too). There are very few content creators, and especial on a professional network, there isn't enough content generated to share daily, so to generate content, the platform needs to dig deeper into the bottom of the barrel and show you second-level engagement (ie friend of yours commented or liked some rando's content).
You say you haven't seen a single post there that added value to your life. Hypothetically, if you saw a post that DID add value to your life, what would that post(s) look like?
My bar for adding value to life might be lower than GP's but I do get value-adding posts in my feed. It's basically boring updates from people but made less boring because I know these people.
A friend from a previous job now leads a project for company X. Someone else switched their tech stack to Y. Another person migrates from cloud back to on-prem.
It might have to do with my policy of not adding random people as connections.
Many post on HN added value to my life, and it happens on a regular basis. As for posts shared on LI, I mainly feel awkward reading them. You know that when someone suddenly got active on LI they either got fired or are looking for prospects. It's just a kind of weird game, more so that people basically have to use their real names and reveal their employment history in order to benefit from the site, so they're particularly vulnerable. Everybody knows this, so they refrain from poking fun at them.
It’s amazing how antithetical this is to requiring real identity.
Proponents say anonymity is the cause of spam and all sorts of unwanted content online. Yet using one’s real identity can end up just being terribly inauthentic.
I never say anything I really think or feel under my real name which isn't utterly benign and uncontroversial. There is a profound sense of unsafeness when you're in full public view like that. It seems almost unavoidable that the end result is almost entirely watered down blathering.
I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.
I use LinkedIn as a professional identity placeholder and online resume for HR groups. I ignore pretty much all the posts because much of what I've sampled has been trash.
I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.
Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.
It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.
It's interesting to see some people feel this way. I don't really filter my views in posts on the web compared to conversations with (not very close) friends. It does feel like that could very well come back and bite me, maybe I'll lose jobs over "supporting hacktivism" or whatever. I guess it's a risk I'm willing to take to share my ideals.
Yes, this depends on many factors, like how strongly you feel about the case, how controversial it is, if you have kids, mortgage and so on.
I'll never forget when many years ago my boss, by that time a CEO of some major publicly traded companies, called me to his office and kindly asked I moderate my Usenet activity on some niche group. It turned out he was a lurker there and foresaw certain things I said might cause problems - it turned out he was right. And that was a long time before the Twitter era.
It's useful to know what the ranges are in your location.
I never got a job through it though, real life networking and personal connections generally yield higher salary opportunities than recruiter-sourced ones (if you're planning to stay outside of FAANG)
Well, one of the main recruiting tools we use when trying to find qualified candidates is LN. so we’ll search for “design” or “engineering” and specific companies and then largely source from LN. So if you want to get in touch with people hiring I suspect LN is a good way. Their tooling for recruiters is pretty robust and sometimes works as you expect it to as well.
Never really occurred to me to read the feed on LinkedIn. I've liked about 3 things ever from people I actually know.
I get a fair number of interview requests through it though so it would have some value as a recruiting tool. Let's face it, CVs are a badly structured way of listing and distributing your employment history...
Late 2000s, I got a date thru LinkedIn. My romantic interest quipped "I'm glad LinkedIn's good for something." That was LinkedIn's high water mark for me.
I eventually cleared my profile (along with my other social accounts). I'll delete it outright once I'm confident my abandoned nym can't be repurposed into a sockpuppet.
at $job (inside a NOC), we used to joke that linkedin was the worst professional network,and the local network operator group IRC channel was the best channel.
It makes a ton of sense if you think about it, the people you want to connect with professionaly are people in the same workfield and their bosses. These people have A) far more intresting tidbits to share then recruitment and HR folk, and B) getting a job at their company is far easier if you they have some kind of clue of what you actually do during your previous job on a very fundemental level.
LinkedIn is missing a major feature, different classes of connections. Your network is meaningless when it’s full of recruiters as well as people you actually worked with.
linked in doesn’t solve the networking problem. maybe i’m different but i’ve never reached out to anyone over linked in to “network”. if i needed to do that i would call, text, email. linked ins real purpose is a search engine for recruiters to contact you. your whole contact list could be recruiters and no colleagues and it would be the same website
I infrequently exchange messages with old colleagues on there, people I have worked with but wouldn’t have on Facebook, and I may not have a personal email address for them.
I have rigorously only accepted connections from people I’ve actually worked with in some capacity.
Makes for a nicer feed, but maybe that means I’m missing out on some recruiting opportunities? I thought recruiters could reach out to folks on LinkedIn without establishing a connection first.
I’ve never taken much interest in the ‘feed’ part, and view the site mostly as a tool for finding work, though I’ve not had to look for the last few years due to non-LinkedIn networking...
Medium seems more aggressive with their paywall lately, but clearing the cookies works fine.
It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.
The majority of random sites I visit have no need for cookies ultimately..
> It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.
That's fairly easy to accomplish. I keep my ~/.mozilla in git and essentially git reset it on startup. Everything I didn't explicitly commit into it - gone!
Well, that has the ring of truth, when applied to the newsfeed. And the final conclusion that you should just get on linkedin when job searching and then get off again is fine. I find it incredibly useful for job searching, to the point that I don't even bother with other sites.
However, the job search experience is badly spoiled by secondary recruitment postings. These are especially annoying when the posting is cut off so that you have to follow an external link to get the full info. And having to apply from external sites is also a pain. Linkedin seems big enough to be able to enforce some rules on those sorts of things.
I think the newsfeed stuff that this article focusses on really only affects people who buy into it. Personally, after reading a few posts of the type '5 reasons your boss should stop doing that thing you hate', I stopped paying attention to the newsfeed unless there was a robot video from boston dynamics at the top. And the secondary features don't really seem like they have enough meat to stick.
For me seeing pictures of what friends far away are up to, a la facebook, is actually pretty nice. And twitter is best when a quick thought is linked to a more in-depth article or post. Plus news links to some objective source. And no promoted content. I'm not holding my breath.
For me the ideal social media feed would look a lot like Hacker News. Literally every day I find something interesting here. Something technical I didn't know, something new I never heard of, something that makes me think. Rather than social media sites that keep trying to spiral me into their bubbles of things I looked at before. When in fact I come here to see stuff that I didn't know. I don't want more of the same but yet that seems to be considered the holy grail of engagement algorithms.
It's amazing how free sharing works when it's not constantly fiddled with by algorithms. There is user voting of course but I read the 'new' page a lot too.
I pretty much use LinkedIn as a self-updating Rolodex. I basically don't use it for recruiter-related stuff at all but then I haven't really been on the market for a very long time.
Also what's super annoying when doing job searches is that they add this 'promoted' stuff that blatantly ignores your search query. I have some searches set up for jobs in my local Spanish city but every day it adds 'promoted' jobs in the US to it.
I often wonder if LI is trying to do too many things at once. At this point it hard not to come to the conclusion that it promotes certain types of behaviors. The problem is that if left laissez-faire, the feed will not attract folks who abhor work influencers. So, perhaps they need to ask who they are really targeting?
For generic work-banter, an app like Blind seems to cut it better. Given the anonymity, it is able to (anecdotally) elicit truer depictions of one's workplace, and this helps folks get real value through what are in essence (unaggregated) reviews of companies and job roles.
By using real profiles and establishing a set up of "professionalism", LI absolutely cuts/reduces the possibility of deriving real value for the layman (read non work influencer and non CXO). Apart from connecting with old colleagues and looking for a new job, why should the layman even bother logging into the platform on a fairly regular basis?
Having said that, LI is great for some things even for the layman. It has been great for looking for new jobs as the article states. But it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it needs to figure out their core audience or differentiate product offerings before it deteriorates into a job board for the laymen like me, in which case it will be possible for a new and trendy job board to come along and replace it.
Blind would be great if it didn't attract and retain the most toxic and reactive folks (in my brief experience). That attribute makes it an undesirable place to be for someone who's well adjusted at their job, which I would say undercuts your assertion that it provides a more accurate view of the workplace. A counterbalance to the polished view you'd get through LinkedIn? Sure. But it's where people go to talk shit.
Makes perfect sense. In one of my previous roles, we used to keep track of SSI (Social Selling Index), and we would be gently nudged into posting about a few things (events, launches, etc.)
I decided to game the system and shot up to the top of the rankings by simply posting actual useful stuff (pretty much the same commentary I would post on my personal link blog, but with some bearing on work topics).
I quit doing it after a while because I thought I had made my point, but not before I had reached the top three in our cohort.
Going past #10 took some doing, though. By that time I had a JavaScript scraper and a Jupyter notebook to predict the best hashtags, and if the LinkedIn API was actually usable I’d probably have fully automated the whole thing.
I trained it by tokenizing my post history with nltk and using the number of likes (scraped via JS) as the target metric. Then I built a simple recommender that would take my draft and list the most interesting tags for it.
It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers.
And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and landed my dream job. You can too".
I think the reason is alluded to in the article: it's not polite to call out BS, and if you do the work involved is OOM larger than creating it.
You can use the same sort of polite etiquette in well crafted form to undermine these polite attacks. It takes quick thinking and usually works best in the form of an open ended question that sets the BS in its place. No one says anything explicitly but everyone internally acknowledges it. It may be a bit passive aggressive but such is most modern business culture and meetings.
From why I’ve seen on LinkedIn, subtly doesn’t work. Folks that pick up on it probably spotted the BS already. You really have to hit them over the head with a hammer to drive the point in.
Someone passive aggressively gives you with a backhanded compliment to set you up for failure. They stroke your ego, build you up in front if people, then offer a trove of BS that needs to be accomplished that only you are capable of accomplishing and makes it difficult for you to refute.
Instead of being pressured into saying yes, you quickly think about the information and ask a general question like, "well that might be possible, I'm personally not sure how, perhaps you had some ideas on how we can accomplish that in the proposed timeline?" and so forth.
If someone is marketing you a BS solution, you can usually dip down to a kernel of truth and quickly form a well crafted open ended question to ask how they address some problem their solution clearly couldn't. "With our application, you can easily interface with any platform" -- "that's awesome, how much effort is typically required to do that? Do you have example cases?" And so on.
You could also use an even more general/vague question similar to the one you just posed: asking someone to elaborate on something that's clearly BS usually catches them off guard if they were just making up nonsense and had no thought behind their statement. If they had some thought, it's going to be pretty clear. All that's needed is to pepper on some politeness to make it: "that sounds intriguing and thought provoking, could you elaborate on that idea more?"
These are benign on the surface but can be used offensively and without any clarity of the genuine intent to pass the BS baton around.
The problem with this is well-stated in Brandolini's Law [0]: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
So, effectively, this means that given equivalent amounts of effort, you've got 10 people producing bullshit for every 1 refuting it effectively. Thus the bullshit continues to spread.
The trick to that problem is to pass the burden of proof on the one producing the BS (as it should be), which is similar to what Bertrand Russell does in Russell's Teapot:
If I call out BS there’s a risk of the influencer incensing their followers enough for them to go after my employer and colleagues and tell them that I’m bully.
Assuming* that scenario were to play out, it would be such a painful irony for an influencer to encourage their followers to harass an ordinary stranger under the accusation of the stranger being a "bully", of all things.
* "Assuming" because you won't risk it, not because it couldn't happen
It happens all the time and takes that exact form every time. Pretty much every internet dispute involves the drama triangle[0]. This rule gets more and more true as more people are involved in the dispute. (The viewer is invited to fill the third role)
A friend and I have a mini-hobby of sharing these with each other under the title of “Today in Thanking Myself”. The highest level are the ones where people pimp out their own families for LinkedIn karma
That’s by far the worst. Something bad happens to their family and they make a post about it! I have seen examples too terrible to post as a comment (assume something very bad happened and the next day theres a post on jt)
I do something similar by locating everyone’s ‘origin’ story. It seems just because you are a mediocre person with income, suddenly you must have this comic book origin story that needs to be out in theaters.
‘Eg, I was retarded in school and no one believed in me, and then one day blah blah blah, and look at me now’ - Coming soon to streaming services and theaters, the story of just a normal person overcoming basic odds to get income like a normal person, but with a dramatic twist.
And they are all shamelessly vain because they are more than willing to reboot their origin story at their next accomplishment.
Particularly bad are women who absolutely cannot stop patting themselves on the back on LinkedIn.
This is so nauseatingly entertaining, and a distillation of similar bullshit I've encountered freelancing for various agencies and startups.
It feels like this field is ripe for trolling - people making fake accounts and making similar inspirational posts that are a bit too outlandish but could almost be real.
Or maybe these troll accounts exist, but the posts are indistinguishable from the real thing...
I have solved this problem by unfollowing people who post or like low quality content. My LinkedIn feed is now mostly filled with useful corporate news.
The awkward thing is that these people are projecting their insecurities.
When they say "I really care about all the employees, here I am giving the janitor a $500 giftcard" I hear " I feel bad about letting several employees think they were getting big bonuses, so here I am looking for feedback on how great of a person I am"
LinkedIn is now just Facebook which opens at Work and China.
It's sad because I did find some quality talent from LinkedIn during my recruitment drives for previous startup couple of years back, Also since someone looking for a job is de-facto expected to have a LinkedIn profile helped that.
But now when I recently logged in, I saw something akin to sharing video status like in other social-media chat apps and my profile page is asking me to upload a '30 second video intro'; I feel this is going increase inequality as someone who was able to project their qualifications and experience first without distractions is now made to compete with someone who's good with TikToking.
Microsoft has suspended new Chinese accounts on LinkedIn. I expect that they'll eventually be forced to completely separate the Chinese LinkedIn from the rest of the world. Can't have anyone mentioning Tiananmen Square on June 4.
You forgot the nauseatingly formulaic "I wouldn't be where I am today without the :insert unsung low status figure here:" posts from high status people who you know couldn't give two s** about said low status people.
I'm starting to flag medium content now as I cannot read things anymore. They're paywalling me and I can't be asked to login or pay or whatever they want from me.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadSo they turn into sharks fighting over scraps.
A bunch of recruiters posted like this- "generic name was a recent college grad he/she was really talented. they asked for X amount of money. But I gave them Y (Y quite > X). This is the time for human solidarity and being honest and rewarding people for their talent, blah blah blah."
In some screenshots, the name, tech stack, and amount of money were all same.
How low can these people stoop?
For 15 minutes of fame and potential fortune? Planck Length.
If you feel something's horrible there it's likely by design and within that context.
(edit: you're to you are)
Isn't this true for all major social media platforms?
I'm unsure how other platforms being identical in that regard moderates the statement. I still feel a reminder is helpful.
Your communication metadata, your choices, you age, gender, location, and many other things are indeed products of companies like Facebook. But in a way, you are, too. Because the mere presence of yours draws some other people to that platform.
And celebrities who are famous outside of social media, are definitely more products themselves rather than the data associated with them.
On the other hand, on dating apps like Tinder, you yourself are the product in addition to any other information they might monetize in numerous ways.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/hbr-ideacast/id1520221...
LinkedIn is the same as any social media. It can be gamed and if that's to the advantage of certain people then they will game it.
The problem starts when people are trying to game each other. This is bad, because it turns what should be a PvE game into a PvP one. With the shitty cards nature/evolution gave us, we have plenty of external challenges left to overcome; it's really sad to see and deal with people who instead want to abuse others to get ahead.
Seems like it could be a constructive exchange: newbies get useful basic content; posters get likes and followers. But, only if the content is actually good.
There's plenty going for LinkedIn here, given how unhip it is. Including some reasonably popular threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27042151
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=linkedin.com
> The Medium is the message, and the message is "it's time we make this official".
I’m not sure I understand. To me medium is just an easy way to get a blog started. Nothing more to it. People often complain about their business model, but then people here always complain about any business model, or lack of a business model.
I say this as someone who had accidental success, and ran that successful business for over a decade, completely aware that luck and timing played a far larger part than quality.
For Facebook that means e.g using the events functionality. For LinkedIn that’s private messages and network graphs (“do I know someone at X company”).
The “feeds” that are front and center on both sites is the worst feature and in no way necessary for using the service. It’s their easiest method of ad delivery though, which is why they want you to view it.
For Facebook the newsfeed is full of viral crap, ads, and if you are unlucky, toxicity. On LinkedIn it’s recruiters and workfluencers pushing posts that seem like parody but isn’t.
www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.feed-shared-navigation-module.overflow-hidden.Elevation-2dp.left-rail-container
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.pv3.feed-shared-news-module
www.linkedin.com###launchpad-wormhole
www.linkedin.com##.right-rail
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper
www.linkedin.com##div[class^="feed-shared-update"]
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.community-panel.mb2.artdeco-card
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.mn-abi-form
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.app-aware-link.text-align-left.link-without-hover-state.t-bold.t-black.t-12.feed-identity-module__anchored-widget--premium-upsell.feed-identity-module__anchored-widget.link-without-visited-state
www.linkedin.com##.Elevation-2dp.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.artdeco-dropdown--justification-right.artdeco-dropdown--placement-bottom.artdeco-dropdown.mb2
www.linkedin.com##.scaffold-layout__aside
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.feed-usher-header
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__closed-share-box
All this leaves out is the leftmost side (where your number of connections are seen), and the top blue row. The feed is entirely gone. You can still read and message people, see your connections, etc. But no more viewing the feed. It's made my linkedin visits so much easier to bear.
Edit:
Some HN searching shows a single filter which blocks out most of the home page, and is probably cleaner:
www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
Sources:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24528438
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23489785
Drop this one. Breaks linkedin for me
Parent mentionned:
> All this leaves out is the leftmost side (where your number of connections are seen), and the top blue row. The feed is entirely gone.
Not sure why anyone would even access linkedin at all then? Connections count is essentially meaningless
This filter is absolutely perfect! I NEED LinkedIn as I actually get job offers via it, but all the other crap on there can go to hell.
It worked so well that I did the same with Facebook and Twitter. I don't even like those websites. Visiting them is more like a reflex.
https://www.hidefeed.com/
It simply hides the feed. Then I could apply for jobs/network in peace.
It is also toxic as hell.
But I know people who got employment offers from LinkedIn. So it adds value in that sense.
I just mute and block those influencers. And check LinkedIn maybe twice a week.
One of the things I cannot find any excuse for is how fake people are. They are behaving in a fake manner even when they don't have to.
Like, someone makes an IoT project (usually copied from GitHub), and markets it like this- "I was having X problem. I though why not solve it with modern technology? So I made this innovative blah blah copy of something".
Yuck. So cringy!
The only thing bothering me on LinkedIn are the recruiters and that got much better in the last years.
Most of the time I use it to stay in touch with old co-workers and to syndicate my articles, which sometimes (2-5 times a year) leads to new clients.
That’s “what it should look like”. To get there, I expect it’s “establish the right norms from the start and incentivize the right content and behaviors along the way”. To monetize, I don’t know and I don’t especially care.
But for simplicity, moderation and downvote buttons would do a world of good.
I attribute lack of evident destructive mobbing on hn to adequate moderation workforce.
Oh, the power of small inconveniences.
* Users would explicitly agree that their profile posts are subject to moderation.
* Profiles would be private and users would be heavily discouraged from using a real name. Friending someone else would require an out of band secret key exchange. A new key would be required to add each person to a group and the entire group would be informed when a new user was added. The only people with real visibility would be the mods.
* There would be no advertising or tracking.
* The service would be located in a country that doesn't immediately bend over for Five Eyes, China, or Russia.
* There would be no org pages or corp accounts.
* Anyone holding public office, running for public office, or affiliated with a political campaign would be explicitly banned from using it at the EULA level. Group pages with more than X members would automatically be flagged for periodic review, and obvious attempts at political organizing for a campaign or movement such as BLM or the Proud Boys (chosen purely as examples of political movements) would result in a ban for all affiliated accounts.
* Egregious (as in obviously intentionally hostile rather than ignorant or inadvertent) racism, sexism, bigotry, etc would result in a ban.
* Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
* Any attempt at bulk data collection would result in your account being suspended and flagged for review.
You get the idea. Social networks should be about sharing fun content with your real life social network. They should not be about self promotion, BS drama, politics, disinformation campaigns, advertising, influencing, branding, etc.
> Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
Alas, that turns accusations of bullying into pretty effective bullying.
BYW, how much do I get for posting this valuable wisdom?
That's the bane of social media platforms where engagement is low (Twitter suffers from this too). There are very few content creators, and especial on a professional network, there isn't enough content generated to share daily, so to generate content, the platform needs to dig deeper into the bottom of the barrel and show you second-level engagement (ie friend of yours commented or liked some rando's content).
But you are wading through a swamp to find those gold nuggets.
A friend from a previous job now leads a project for company X. Someone else switched their tech stack to Y. Another person migrates from cloud back to on-prem.
It might have to do with my policy of not adding random people as connections.
I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.
I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.
Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.
It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.
I'll never forget when many years ago my boss, by that time a CEO of some major publicly traded companies, called me to his office and kindly asked I moderate my Usenet activity on some niche group. It turned out he was a lurker there and foresaw certain things I said might cause problems - it turned out he was right. And that was a long time before the Twitter era.
Which mostly underscores your point.
I never got a job through it though, real life networking and personal connections generally yield higher salary opportunities than recruiter-sourced ones (if you're planning to stay outside of FAANG)
I get a fair number of interview requests through it though so it would have some value as a recruiting tool. Let's face it, CVs are a badly structured way of listing and distributing your employment history...
I eventually cleared my profile (along with my other social accounts). I'll delete it outright once I'm confident my abandoned nym can't be repurposed into a sockpuppet.
It makes a ton of sense if you think about it, the people you want to connect with professionaly are people in the same workfield and their bosses. These people have A) far more intresting tidbits to share then recruitment and HR folk, and B) getting a job at their company is far easier if you they have some kind of clue of what you actually do during your previous job on a very fundemental level.
Makes for a nicer feed, but maybe that means I’m missing out on some recruiting opportunities? I thought recruiters could reach out to folks on LinkedIn without establishing a connection first.
I’ve never taken much interest in the ‘feed’ part, and view the site mostly as a tool for finding work, though I’ve not had to look for the last few years due to non-LinkedIn networking...
It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.
The majority of random sites I visit have no need for cookies ultimately..
That's fairly easy to accomplish. I keep my ~/.mozilla in git and essentially git reset it on startup. Everything I didn't explicitly commit into it - gone!
Well, that has the ring of truth, when applied to the newsfeed. And the final conclusion that you should just get on linkedin when job searching and then get off again is fine. I find it incredibly useful for job searching, to the point that I don't even bother with other sites.
However, the job search experience is badly spoiled by secondary recruitment postings. These are especially annoying when the posting is cut off so that you have to follow an external link to get the full info. And having to apply from external sites is also a pain. Linkedin seems big enough to be able to enforce some rules on those sorts of things.
I think the newsfeed stuff that this article focusses on really only affects people who buy into it. Personally, after reading a few posts of the type '5 reasons your boss should stop doing that thing you hate', I stopped paying attention to the newsfeed unless there was a robot video from boston dynamics at the top. And the secondary features don't really seem like they have enough meat to stick.
What do you think the ideal social media feed would look like?
It's amazing how free sharing works when it's not constantly fiddled with by algorithms. There is user voting of course but I read the 'new' page a lot too.
For generic work-banter, an app like Blind seems to cut it better. Given the anonymity, it is able to (anecdotally) elicit truer depictions of one's workplace, and this helps folks get real value through what are in essence (unaggregated) reviews of companies and job roles.
By using real profiles and establishing a set up of "professionalism", LI absolutely cuts/reduces the possibility of deriving real value for the layman (read non work influencer and non CXO). Apart from connecting with old colleagues and looking for a new job, why should the layman even bother logging into the platform on a fairly regular basis?
Having said that, LI is great for some things even for the layman. It has been great for looking for new jobs as the article states. But it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it needs to figure out their core audience or differentiate product offerings before it deteriorates into a job board for the laymen like me, in which case it will be possible for a new and trendy job board to come along and replace it.
I decided to game the system and shot up to the top of the rankings by simply posting actual useful stuff (pretty much the same commentary I would post on my personal link blog, but with some bearing on work topics).
I quit doing it after a while because I thought I had made my point, but not before I had reached the top three in our cohort.
Going past #10 took some doing, though. By that time I had a JavaScript scraper and a Jupyter notebook to predict the best hashtags, and if the LinkedIn API was actually usable I’d probably have fully automated the whole thing.
And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and landed my dream job. You can too".
I think the reason is alluded to in the article: it's not polite to call out BS, and if you do the work involved is OOM larger than creating it.
But it's perfectly fine to spew BS if you do it politely. The "politeness" weapon has been used on me many times
Instead of being pressured into saying yes, you quickly think about the information and ask a general question like, "well that might be possible, I'm personally not sure how, perhaps you had some ideas on how we can accomplish that in the proposed timeline?" and so forth.
If someone is marketing you a BS solution, you can usually dip down to a kernel of truth and quickly form a well crafted open ended question to ask how they address some problem their solution clearly couldn't. "With our application, you can easily interface with any platform" -- "that's awesome, how much effort is typically required to do that? Do you have example cases?" And so on.
You could also use an even more general/vague question similar to the one you just posed: asking someone to elaborate on something that's clearly BS usually catches them off guard if they were just making up nonsense and had no thought behind their statement. If they had some thought, it's going to be pretty clear. All that's needed is to pepper on some politeness to make it: "that sounds intriguing and thought provoking, could you elaborate on that idea more?"
These are benign on the surface but can be used offensively and without any clarity of the genuine intent to pass the BS baton around.
So, effectively, this means that given equivalent amounts of effort, you've got 10 people producing bullshit for every 1 refuting it effectively. Thus the bullshit continues to spread.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
Best not to poke the bear.
* "Assuming" because you won't risk it, not because it couldn't happen
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle
‘Eg, I was retarded in school and no one believed in me, and then one day blah blah blah, and look at me now’ - Coming soon to streaming services and theaters, the story of just a normal person overcoming basic odds to get income like a normal person, but with a dramatic twist.
And they are all shamelessly vain because they are more than willing to reboot their origin story at their next accomplishment.
Particularly bad are women who absolutely cannot stop patting themselves on the back on LinkedIn.
https://twitter.com/BestofLinkedin
https://twitter.com/BestofLinkedin/status/139178233788132966...
And this:
https://twitter.com/BestofLinkedin/status/138491328852230963...
It feels like this field is ripe for trolling - people making fake accounts and making similar inspirational posts that are a bit too outlandish but could almost be real.
Or maybe these troll accounts exist, but the posts are indistinguishable from the real thing...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ohtis_is-your-linkedin-feed-f...
When they say "I really care about all the employees, here I am giving the janitor a $500 giftcard" I hear " I feel bad about letting several employees think they were getting big bonuses, so here I am looking for feedback on how great of a person I am"
It's sad because I did find some quality talent from LinkedIn during my recruitment drives for previous startup couple of years back, Also since someone looking for a job is de-facto expected to have a LinkedIn profile helped that.
But now when I recently logged in, I saw something akin to sharing video status like in other social-media chat apps and my profile page is asking me to upload a '30 second video intro'; I feel this is going increase inequality as someone who was able to project their qualifications and experience first without distractions is now made to compete with someone who's good with TikToking.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/tech/linkedin-china-microsoft...
Not like Out of Memory, like in a Linux process.
But at least due to companies wanting free exposure on Google, paywall bypass tools are now a thing.