I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care 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.<p>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.
> Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault<p>It is, they’re darkpatternmaxxing.<p>There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..
LinkedIn was more open earlier I think they closed down much more. It seems that Google didn’t delist the profile pages.
Linkedin, reddit, instagram, pinterest, x, bluesky, threads, facebook... they provide a better experience to web crawlers than logged-out humans.
If you like, you can block it from coming up with an extension: <a href="https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist</a>
Try Kagi. It's definitely worth it. And you can block sites in search very easily. None of the closed content farms show up in my search results.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
X is the same. "Check out what [politician/celeb] said on X!!" And it's the login page.<p>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.
Who really goes to Linkedin to get useful info? That's why I am in Hacker News.
You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.<p>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.
I didn't expect there would be a Christmas party in hell.
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.
You do you. When I see someone posting on LinkedIn, my only thought is "Can I get away with unfollowing?"<p>I guess a few posts a year are ok if they don't sound angry or delusional. But zero is really best.
Is this for real? If so, that's a major institutional and managerial failing.
LinkedIn is truly an odd place. I think it’s more performative than Instagram.
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.
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?
The only reason I have LinkedIn is because I think I'm supposed to.
People told me I was supposed to be on LinkedIn but I found it too silly a place to make an account. Then again, I was laid off from my job a while ago and I don’t really have a “network” irl nor online through which to find a new job, so maybe I am the sucker after all.
You are a good servant. But you are a bad slave because you are not currently licking the soles of my feet.
Depends on your definition of more.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So in terms of % of posts being performative I don't think anything tops LinkedIn.
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.<p>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.
It definitely fell off before ChatGPT by at least a few years.
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.
It talks to that vain and insecure feeling that many of us have deep down.<p>Interestingly, unlike instagram the LinkedIn business model has nothing to do with it. It’s built around b2b sales and professional recruitment.
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.
People look at me weird when I tell them I don’t have a LinkedIn account.
When searching for a job, it almost feels irresponsible not to use the site, but boy is it one poor execution. Why are jobs like the fourth tab? Why is there a feed populated entirely by people I don’t know and have never connected with in any way? Are people really just sitting there hiring strangers based off of cool comments? I literally hate like 10,000 things about this site. I rank it similarly to Discord in terms of quality:popularity ratio.
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 <i>quants</i> are in fact not professional quantitative analysts / researchers / developers.<p>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.<p>I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.<p>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'm glad that LinkedIn's bullshit "inspiration porn" has finally gotten the hatred I always felt it deserved [1].<p>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.<p>I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually <i>require</i> 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.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905664">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905664</a>
I only had a LinkedIn because... recruiters
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>!"<p>It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
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 am not joking when I say that 4chan is a more rejuvenating and life affirming place than Linkedin
Apropos, some of the most wholesome community spirit I've seen in recent years has been amongst the degenerate gamblers of wallstreetbets.
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.<p>Who’s the target audience for that?
Linkedin got saturated like a benchmark
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".
Those people are what "Unfollow <name>" under the 3 dots on the posts are for.<p>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.
Stalking ex-colleagues hasn't even been an essential part of what I would describe as a normie job.
I wouldn't mind LinkedIn at all if I could turn off the feed.
<i>I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.</i><p>Go on corposlop site centered around betraying your humanity by method acting as lobotomized drone slaves of global transnational capitalism. <i>I lie and sign myself to lies! At least no "right wing propaganda" though.</i>
Never seen such posts, my feed contains different kind of larping.
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%.<p>Select your connections carefully.
Working games mine is all layoff posts recently<p>Just scrolled now and saw like 5
I thought maybe that was just mine because I had been laid off in January so my algo got messed up.
Mine sometimes contains funny takes.<p>Something like: "I have been looking for a QA middle role with 2 years of experience for six months. Here is the stuff I won't be doing: relocating to a different city, commuting more than 30 minutes, ...". Most of the comments say, "Good luck. You will definitely find a job". Only a few mention that it's time to update your worldview.
Fun project, but the blog trivializes ML.<p>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.)<p>Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
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.<p>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 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.
Why would you visit LinkedIn nowadays to begin with? Like besides corporate clowns who is genuinely active there?
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.
It’s part of the Microsoft network of properties that make everything harder to get up in the morning.
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.<p>I immortalised the posts here:<p><a href="https://thinkpieces.stavros.io/" rel="nofollow">https://thinkpieces.stavros.io/</a>
I second that other comment - this is still above average in terms of LinkedIn content.
My edification is complete and through a process of thought leadership osmosis I have now ascended to B2B sales enlightenment
Ironically I think these are insightful. If you want to produce true slop, you need to dumb down your topic selection, or have Claude pick the topics. The stuff about the incompatible goals of "data strategy" I think is genuinely useful perspective, for example.
Claude <i>does</i> pick the topics! I worry I did too good a job steering it. I found a few of them insightful too, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that they're same old "They were doing a thing. It failed." Claude writing you see everywhere, intensifying the feeling that nobody on LinkedIn has a pulse.
On the bright side, if everyone is burning credits mining generic but helpful knowledge out of the LLM training data in bite-size packages, I don't need a subscription of my own!<p>It will be really fascinating to see what happens with the potential for LLM-generated output to become a dominant component of new training data.
All I want to know is, is it effective? If so, how much?
You need to prune your Indian connections.
>You need to prune your Indian connections.<p>HN, do better: you flag legit political discussion, but somehow this racist drivel is still here 8 hours later?
I'm indian myself T_T