Tech Instagram is worse they just like looking at flashing colors on screen with no meaning. I once saw like this dude flexing about how complex his code is by showing like this obsidian ass diagram like dude what am I supposed to appreciate here? how coupled your code is?
LinkedIn used to be a half-decent social network. There weren't too many updates, some were grift of course, but you'd also see former colleagues doing interesting things like startups or academic papers.
Then ChatGPT happened and dear lord did LinkedIn ever fall off a cliff. So, so many low-effort, zero-value updates. Far worse than any other social network I use.
I don't know, it was pretty bad before then too. Famously memed for the near psychosis level of shared performance art, where everyone had to present themselves as hobbyless, status hungry work machines. Maybe it was different if you already had a great network. Everyone I knew job searching hated it.
I feel that LinkedIn has a lot of similarities with late stage Quora. Though linkedin has handled the its descent into Instagramization a lot better than Quora did.
Trolls posting absolute garbage /b/ are at least trying to evoke some feeling in you. Hard to say the same from the ‘I had dinner with my wife on a yacht. Here’s what it taught me about Series A VC relationships’ posting full of Claudisms and emojis.
Reducing it to this assessment misses a lot of nuance. Sci is probably one of the better engineering boards on the internet today. There's probably a lot of overlap between HN users and 4chan users actually.
It used to be the case that if you wanted a new job, you could strategically update your profile and over the next several days you would get bombarded by recruiter messages, some of which would actually be high-quality leads.
I once got a cold LinkedIn message that got me a job that I loved. When I was looking this year though it did NOT have the same results. Lots of bots and just recruiters who see a open to work and just add you out of no where with nothing. I did get help from people I actually know on LinkedIn, but other than that it was definitely not helpful in the job search.
I know there's a lot of hate for LinkedIn here on HN but it really is the only place to see where ex-colleagues are working at and what competitors say they are up to. It's kind of like a boring version of TwitterX, but essential to those of us in normie jobs.
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
That's the reason I use LinkedIn, and I have zero complaints about it in that form. Tho for me is more about keeping the connection rather than see what they work on.
OTOH I do see the performative posting "I bumped my pinky toe on the cupboard and here's what it taught me about leading teams" and I genuinely don't understand who they're writing for. Isn't it obviously bullshit for everyone? Who cares about that?
LinkedIn is where you, if you work in IT, can broadcast that you're looking for work. It depends on you, your skillset and networking abilities, but it's still pretty good at getting you interviews and recommendations.
The entertaining part, for me, is seeing social media or sales people trying to get a job via LinkedIn. For IT, replies are normally: "I'll call you", tagging someone who is actively hiring or "Reach out to so-and-so at company X, tell them I said hi.". For people who should be experts in sales and social media the replys are "To bad we're not hiring right now", "Best of luck" or "Shared".
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.
Yes. I must use it within sandbox and single signon MFA and a password that questions my sanity to login. Even with this it regularly manages to sucks the soul dry occasionally.
I hate LinkedIn so much I made a slop cannon for it. I have Claude research a topic and post an extremely LLM slop post about BuSiNeSs twice a week, and of course everyone comments with slop comments and I reply in kind.
I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
Even connections won't save you anymore. I have an account with over a hundred connections but now they want to see a government ID for whatever reason. Won't let me do anything on the website until I do.
I hate this, because that's probably a fake reason given by them.
Mercado Libre (the "latin american Amazon") did something similar to me: they said I enabled two factor authentication via ID, and blocked me from my account until I give it to them. After a lot of back and forth with support, they finally admitted that they picked random users for "some tests", and told me that there's nothing I could do about it. Maybe LinkedIn is doing something similar?
nitter.cf is a controversial one because (a) it's not real Nitter - it's an AI translation into Rust and (b) - it's run by a person who also runs a child porn site
You can use twiiit.com or xxcancel.com to redirect you to any nitter that's currently working.
I still remember the days when Google saw it as 'cloaking' when you showed different content to users and search engines. And to be honest, I'm annoyed they don't seem to do that anymore.
Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.
But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.
Does this suggest an opportunity (maybe a business opportunity) for a service that, by crawling and scraping paywalled sites, presents to the human user what bots get to see? What if this service could somehow correlate all the socials you mentioned in a single, less horrible user interface?
archive.is, when google served cached pages you could get the actual content from the cache, not sure if other engines still serve the page they crawled as a cache.
This is one of the services the AI companies provide: presenting you a distilled, ad-free, version of the information they've scraped. At no payment to those providing it.
Back when expertsexchange was consistently in the top search results, google had instituted a rule that said that the page must show content without requiring being logged in otherwise the site would be deranked. Guess they quietly dropped that rule
Years ago I worked with people who does "remarketing", tracking, online ads and sales funnels. Some of them ended up as LinkedIn connection. Their understanding of the internet, IT and the world in general is something to behold. They post the weirdest shit and would have zero moral issues jamming a radioactive AI tracking chip up your butt if it increased "conversion" by 0.5%.
Finance LinkedIn is filled with slop posts about "Look at the trading terminal I built. Real math. Here's why it matters." and it's some clearly vibecoded pointless app. Comments are all "Insane project <name>!"
It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
I often get notifications to play LinkedIn games, Zip or whatever. The games are very trivial and on a timer, where you end up on some kind of network leaderboard. I never play them party because they're boring, but also, I'm utterly scared that they use them as a intelligence signal in recruiting or selling it to 3rd party ATSs. There are so many companies hungry for arbitrary "smartness" indicators, this wouldn't even chock me.
You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
Good on you for doing this and I hope you get promoted. But I can imagine a lot of people are like me and just don’t want to engage in office politics on or offline. Not that I don’t sometimes, but I’d much rather just work and be paid to do a job and live my life.
What? It's how the job market works. It's like 90% connections and bullshit. I use GP somewhat similar to GP. Not as directly, but still targeted at helping my career. I've got a few people who write a lot of buzz that are also actually good for a couple of interesting comments back and forth. Once in a while they'll share someone new and I'll link up with them. This keeps you in the algorithm and it doesn't require you to be fake.
Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.
Some times I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.
Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill.
I don't think it's quite as black and white. LinkedIn is just one channel, but I imagine you're going to have a hard time finding a workplace where social credit isn't a big part of internal politics. Whether that's being charming, great at your job or using SoMe, it's all about people.
I doubt any company primarily uses LinkedIn for promotions, but it does help your career if you are known for something positive by the people who run the company you work for.
Of course social credit is a big part of internal politics, but if you have to resort to an external social network for your internal signaling, something is very broken. This whole subthread is about someone claiming they have to be active on LinkedIn to prove their worth to someone inside their organization.
They're saying it's not the only way, it's just one way. Some people post on LinkedIn, other people have shared hobbies w/ their management chain, it's just looking for any edge you can find.
I use LinkedIn as another place to post my photos. My goal is to post 5 a day though sometimes I do more and sometimes I do less. I wouldn't really be doing it just to post to LinkedIn but since I am to posting 6 other social sites I am already doing all the work. The average visibility I get is atrocious but once in a while I get a hit and get 500+ views.
You're lucky, since it probably means you never got hit with serious, high-level LinkedIn-speak. People speaking like this exist: I only had one or two interactions, but I honestly ran for my life and sanity as soon as I could. It's eerie, and both possible interpretations ("this guy speak like this for a reason (I'm not going to like that reason)" and "this guy honestly believes what he's saying (is he mad?)") are frightening. I feel really fortunate to only really encounter them IRL this rarely.
Every time I convince myself to use LinkedIn because I keep getting told it’s where business opportunities are (not jobs, business connections), no matter how I try to be cringy, something deep inside keep preventing me and I feel like a fraud just by posting anything there. Don’t use it now and happy to lose these opportunities, until we get a better platform to replace it.
As far as larping goes, quantitative finance is currently the hottest field for that. I'm sure that close to 100% of the people on social media that market themselves as quants are in fact not professional quantitative analysts / researchers / developers.
They all post vids of their vibe-coded dashboards where agents are doing market research and executing trades, while they kick back as collect to profits.
I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.
After tech layoffs started, the get-rich-quick folks looked on what other fields pay well, and the decided that the absolutely most selective, the most credentialed and gatekept niche role in finance, that's the one to impersonate.
What sucks abut these types of people and the latest get rich quick scheme of the day is that they are generally rewarded mightily by society and investment. Part of it is greater fool theory playing out lucratively, part of it is also these crypto bros finding themselves with an ear to actual government power directly shaping the trajectory of nation states into their favor.
I suspect any positive results here are due to training on the test set. (Their training data collection script uses their feed, which is then also used for the slop detector demo vid.)
Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
I'm glad that LinkedIn's bullshit "inspiration porn" has finally gotten the hatred I always felt it deserved [1].
It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.
I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.
I'm an EE so The Algorithm tailors my feed differently. Instead of a million computer vision Hello World slop posts, I get a million "I designed a PCB with three components on it using ChatGPT" slop posts.
Also I'm constantly getting friend requests from randos all over the world. I thought you had to have some kind of 2nd or 3rd tier actual connection first?
I don't mind the projects. Its the grandiose self-important posting that is insufferable. Not everything you experienced today is an epiphany on productivity or team-building.
I am thankful that I am not yet important enough to have to spend time spamming there. Which most of my feed seems to be. Just another marketing channel. Just corporate spam. I suppose it generates some leads for some people...
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 67.3 ms ] threadInterestingly, unlike instagram the LinkedIn business model has nothing to do with it. It’s built around b2b sales and professional recruitment.
The mighty second brain of course. https://youtu.be/6NukGtwJb7Y?si=yg09jegXRM4C-hFE
You can absolutely find non-performative posts on Instagram. There is value in a sincere post - ex. sharing pictures of your cat to your friends.
Whereas in LinkedIn no such value exists in my experience - I can't imagine myself posting there for any other reason than to be performative.
So in terms of % of posts being performative I don't think anything tops LinkedIn.
Then ChatGPT happened and dear lord did LinkedIn ever fall off a cliff. So, so many low-effort, zero-value updates. Far worse than any other social network I use.
A waste of time. Every. Single. Time.
It wasn’t quite as needlessly performative. But it’s never been good.
Who’s the target audience for that?
It's pure Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[0] in action.
[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
OTOH I do see the performative posting "I bumped my pinky toe on the cupboard and here's what it taught me about leading teams" and I genuinely don't understand who they're writing for. Isn't it obviously bullshit for everyone? Who cares about that?
I actually see posts from maybe 5-10% of my connections on LI, one strike for being boring or bland or performative and they're out of my feed.
The entertaining part, for me, is seeing social media or sales people trying to get a job via LinkedIn. For IT, replies are normally: "I'll call you", tagging someone who is actively hiring or "Reach out to so-and-so at company X, tell them I said hi.". For people who should be experts in sales and social media the replys are "To bad we're not hiring right now", "Best of luck" or "Shared".
Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.
I immortalised the posts here:
https://thinkpieces.stavros.io/
HN, do better: you flag legit political discussion, but somehow this racist drivel is still here 8 hours later?
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
It is, they’re darkpatternmaxxing.
There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..
----
Access to your account has been temporarily restricted
Why did this happen?
We take proactive actions to protect you when we detect potential unauthorized access or other activity that doesn’t comply with our policies.
What can I do next?
We first need to verify your identity to ensure your account safety. To regain access to your account, please submit a government-issued ID.
Learn more about verifying your identity.
----
Mercado Libre (the "latin american Amazon") did something similar to me: they said I enabled two factor authentication via ID, and blocked me from my account until I give it to them. After a lot of back and forth with support, they finally admitted that they picked random users for "some tests", and told me that there's nothing I could do about it. Maybe LinkedIn is doing something similar?
Google is itself deep in the darkpatternmaxxing game now as well.
The answer is not to sign up to X, but to learn to suppress your FOMO. Chances are it was drivel anyway. Especially true for LinkedIn.
You can use twiiit.com or xxcancel.com to redirect you to any nitter that's currently working.
Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.
But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.
Select your connections carefully.
It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.
Some times I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.
Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill.
I doubt any company primarily uses LinkedIn for promotions, but it does help your career if you are known for something positive by the people who run the company you work for.
Nobody would accuse me of performative normality
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-houle-a18809320/
Students at my Uni are still LIONs and will mostly accept my follow requests but other people in my town don't, I am gradually building up my network.
LinkedIn wants to reconnect me to my old friends in the knowledge graph industry but I could care less.
No one is real, they are all missing their soul. Thanks capitalism.
Some highlights:
> Avoid discussing performance, pay, or grievances during the party. Alcohol-fuelled “career chats” usually end badly.
> Unwanted advances, inappropriate jokes, or physical contact are still misconduct, even at the Christmas party.
> With thoughtful planning, good judgement, and a dash of HR magic, you can throw an event that’s festive and risk-free.
They all post vids of their vibe-coded dashboards where agents are doing market research and executing trades, while they kick back as collect to profits.
I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.
After tech layoffs started, the get-rich-quick folks looked on what other fields pay well, and the decided that the absolutely most selective, the most credentialed and gatekept niche role in finance, that's the one to impersonate.
I suspect any positive results here are due to training on the test set. (Their training data collection script uses their feed, which is then also used for the slop detector demo vid.)
Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.
I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905664
Also I'm constantly getting friend requests from randos all over the world. I thought you had to have some kind of 2nd or 3rd tier actual connection first?