Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

https://www.elliotcsmith.com/linkedin-toxic-mediocrity/

by smitec • 11 months ago

473 382 11 months ago

cheschire• 11 months ago

I wish LinkedIn wasn’t seen as a valid background check tool.

Now that we have HR going whole hog on AI processing of job applications, up to and including the first round interview, can we please get rid of LinkedIn?

Instead, I would much rather see job applications come in three parts. A cover letter, a human resume overview page, and then the deeper multi page CV that is primarily for AI processing.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 11 months ago

That makes a lot of sense, but the inevitable result is an AI arms race, with AI tools for writing these, feeding AI tools for reading them.

I really feel as if I retired at the best time possible.

reactordev• 11 months ago

This is precisely why I deleted my LinkedIn profile all together.

While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.

mr_toad2• 11 months ago

I don’t think anyone bothers to read cover letters anymore. Recruiters don’t even seem to read resumes very closely, judging by the number of times I’ve been asked questions that are literally in the first paragraph of my resume.

nickfromseattle2• 11 months ago

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

Nothing you post there is going to change your career.

I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

Doing work that matters might.

This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

Go for depth over frequency.

Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.

Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.

zwnow2• 11 months ago

LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.

fnord77• 11 months ago

where are the non-boomers looking for jobs these days?

kkirsche• 11 months ago

This has been my experience. Just a bunch of ego stroking

refactor_master• 11 months ago

There are a lot of boomers out there though, and you won’t reach them on TikTok.

jibal4• 11 months ago

The boomers have retired.

nathanaldensr2• 11 months ago

If you want to see how true this is, visit r/linkedinlunatics[1] on Reddit.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/

roenxi• 11 months ago

Haven't the boomers more or less aged out of jobseeking at this point? Even the youngest of the Baby Boomers are around 60 and most of them are in their 70s.

fragmede5• 11 months ago

its just a gathering of pretentious people.

Tell us more about HN...

baq• 11 months ago

Are you an employer or an employee?

melvinroest2• 11 months ago

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.

I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.

Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.

nickfromseattle2• 11 months ago

I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.

But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]

[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...

makeitdouble3• 11 months ago

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

That's spot on.

And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.

I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.

We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.

StopDisinfo9102• 11 months ago

As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.

Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.

But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.

paulcole3• 11 months ago

Many devs don't like "bullshitting”

In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.

pjmlp2• 11 months ago

Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.

We have to, if we want to stay in business.

saagarjha• 11 months ago

The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.

itronitron• 11 months ago

I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.

oytis4• 11 months ago

The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

notahacker2• 11 months ago

Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT

And written in a very specific way

Not like that. Like this.

The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.

And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.

It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.

And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.

I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn

But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.

That sounds like mediocrity to me.

In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit

motorest3• 11 months ago

You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.

I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?

porridgeraisin2• 11 months ago

if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.

winning on linkedin
push them to

* vomits *

millions of dollars

dirty money.

</rant>

oytis4• 11 months ago

I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good

sklargh• 11 months ago

This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?

cpursley4• 11 months ago

If it leads to someone purchasing a solution that solves a need, how is that zero value?

NeutralCrane• 11 months ago

This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).

They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.

Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.

Spooky232• 11 months ago

The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.

Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.

Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.

anon84873628• 11 months ago

To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.

antonvs• 11 months ago

> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.

ohdeargodno4• 11 months ago

The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.

Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.

your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.

Building in public

Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".

I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.

In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.

fhd26• 11 months ago

What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.

What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.

Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.

At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?

We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.

Imustaskforhelp7• 11 months ago

If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.

I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.

Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.

But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.

sigbottle• 11 months ago

Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.

apwell23• 11 months ago

I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?

throwawaybob420• 11 months ago

Yeah that was my first thought as well.

cootsnuck6• 11 months ago

Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)

So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.

The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.

LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.

sgnelson• 11 months ago

Just going to throw this out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.

fragmede5• 11 months ago

If you're in marketing, "kill yourself"

is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks

1oooqooq• 11 months ago

wow. you weaponized medicrity to save a few bucks on an actual marketing campaign. so unique. good for you.

tomas789• 11 months ago

I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.

gchamonlive• 11 months ago

But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says.

So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.

thomasahle• 11 months ago

> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?

If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".

Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.

botacode• 11 months ago

Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement.

Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.

cootsnuck6• 11 months ago

It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.

If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.

And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.

Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.

You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.

You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.

You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.

And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.

Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.

It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.

That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).

scarface_74• 11 months ago

I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.

All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.

It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.

For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.

woooooo• 11 months ago

Engineering leader | ex-something

...

Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?

AndrewKemendo2• 11 months ago

I’d love to see your “million dollar linkedin” if you’re willing to share it

gedy• 11 months ago

TBH it's probably just lead-gen or sales outreach..

_swfb4• 11 months ago

I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?

Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.

I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.

calmbonsai• 11 months ago

I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.

Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.

Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...

I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.

Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.

godot• 11 months ago

I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.

For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.

And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?

aledalgrande• 11 months ago

Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt

and funnily enough, this is still marketing

"build it and they will come" doesn't work

oytis4• 11 months ago

I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.

RugnirViking2• 11 months ago

It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.

brcmthrowaway• 11 months ago

I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post

Xymist• 11 months ago

This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.

I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!

lambdasquirrel• 11 months ago

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.

Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.

meow_mix• 11 months ago

This was going to be my comment, but I was going to be a lot more rude

scirob• 11 months ago

Great take, would love to see your Ln profile for the context in case this HN account is not Anon

user568439• 11 months ago

Full of people sucking each other BS. And then recruiters unable to understand the most basics of a profile.

Nevertheless I update my own from time to time, it can still be useful if you navigate through the garbage. Also it helps me to cross-check a bit some people if they have a contact that you both know and you trust.

More than once I encountered people with 100% fake profile and fake work history. Maybe LinkedIn should only allow to add that you worked somewhere doing something with some kind of verification process.

seattle_spring• 11 months ago

I've lost count how many first-line engineering managers I've actively worked alongside change their LinkedIn title to "Engineering Leader" or something like that. They'll be a manager of 6 ICs in Org X, which itself is comprised of 400 people, but on their profile they'll put "leading Org X". It's some of the clearest evidence I've seen that LinkedIn is toxic sludge.

lloydjones5• 11 months ago

Exactly — depth is the new authenticity . #Reflecting #ThoughtLeader

lloydjones5• 11 months ago

Damn — HN strips emojis, putting my pastiche in danger of looking sincere

bootsmann• 11 months ago

I think the hashtags save you from looking pretentious

HPsquared• 11 months ago

Mediocrity can be measured.

antihipocrat• 11 months ago

There is no benefit to be gained from disagreement or debate. Any such discourse looks problematic to a potential employer.

RA_Fisher• 11 months ago

True, aside from the exceptional employers that’ll actually provide a good career.

chiefalchemist2• 11 months ago

Agreed. The level of mediocrity and group-think on LI is freighting. It’s no wonder so many companies / brands struggle.

Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.

trinix912• 11 months ago

It probably gets that way because nobody wants to be the one to argue back, as it puts them in a bad light. So what's left are cheap platitudes and confirmations.

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

Unless its a safe enough disagreement. Lynching on an overconfident but incorrect post for example. As long as correcting it makes you look smart, hard working, a leader.

WhereIsTheTruth• 11 months ago

It reflects society, everything rewards mediocrity and deception

TrackerFF• 11 months ago

r/LinkedInLunatics for the best of hits.

Shacklz• 11 months ago

if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.

inopinatus• 11 months ago

It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.

nathanaldensr2• 11 months ago

It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.

Imustaskforhelp7• 11 months ago

To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.

Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.

There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.

The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.

simianwords14• 11 months ago

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

Imustaskforhelp7• 11 months ago

Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.

Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..

I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.

But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?

ohdeargodno4• 11 months ago

Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!

Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!

Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!

Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_

ndriscoll4• 11 months ago

Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.

spicyusername• 11 months ago

To play devil's advocate here, can any value be created if no one knows about your product?

alansammarone13• 11 months ago

No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.

fhd26• 11 months ago

I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.

It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.

hliyan2• 11 months ago

The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.

If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.

There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.

motorest3• 11 months ago

I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.

This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.

I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.

terminalshort2• 11 months ago

If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.

alansammarone13• 11 months ago

Same reply as I wrote above:

lisbbb2• 11 months ago

I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.

Aurornis2• 11 months ago

The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.

Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.

But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.

wohoef2• 11 months ago

In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.

lurk2• 11 months ago

Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

Are you mind-hacking your friends when you text them “Good morning”?

tomhow2• 11 months ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930602.

Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
I find it deeply depressing

Please don't fulminate on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

democracy• 11 months ago

LinkedIn is a vanity fair, and I'm not sure why it even matters in 2025 — it's just a job board when you need it.

__loam• 11 months ago

LinkedIn is a great place to talk to recruiters still. If you're not picky about where you work, you can find a job pretty fast by working with recruiters directly and skipping the cold apply.

giantg23• 11 months ago

It's not even a good job board anymore because it's filled with junk and evergreen postings.

hn8726• 11 months ago

Can't agree. While there are some evergreen postings, LinkedIn job applications still landed me a couple of interviews (and much more compared to cold applying on the company website). And then there's recruiters reaching out which landed me even more interviews + my current - genuinely great - job.

bgribble• 11 months ago

How else are you going to liquidity-stalk that company you left with some options or even shares?

I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.

hubraumhugo• 11 months ago

[deleted]

Disposal8433• 11 months ago

My feed is mostly AI-generated slop

I see zero slop on my feed. Maybe because I only follow friends and former coworkers that I liked. How many people are you following?

nicksbg• 11 months ago

The posts section always basically goes like: We did X but then what surprised us with X is something we did not see coming.

tropicalfruit• 11 months ago

linkedin is training data for tuning the corpo-speak, sycophancy and sociopathy tokens on microsofts AI models

varispeed• 11 months ago

LinkedIn isn’t a professional network, it’s a slave auction with a newsfeed. Workers line up to show their teeth - “failure is just learning in disguise”, “kindness is leadership”, all that drivel - while hoping to be picked by a master who won’t beat them too hard.

The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.

Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.

enemyz0r• 11 months ago

You manage to see through the bs

adidoit3• 11 months ago

Because LinkedIn makes your employment front and center it encourages status games .

The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)

Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing

Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.

I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.

lloydjones5• 11 months ago

Yes — I (as somebody who posts to promote my startup) wonder what the true goal is sometimes, as it’s ambiguous.

Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.

My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:

It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.

Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.

It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.

adidoit3• 11 months ago

You nailed it. And of course the platform solving for engagement then enshittifies but we have no alternative...

back to posting on LinkedIn I guess..

fred_is_fred• 11 months ago

"it encourages status games". I think most social media does this. Read a Facebook feed and everyone is either on a beach, had a baby, or got promoted. Nobody is home sick or doing laundry or dealing with a terrible boss.

YetAnotherNick• 11 months ago

Ironically, this post and comments here feels like it could be on Linkedin. Catchy title with low effort content. Nowhere in the blog he answers this question and the comments here just go with the title and common hate against Linkedin and "owned by Microsoft" as author calls it.

merksittich• 11 months ago

What annoys me the most in my LinkedIn feed is low-effort visual AI slop, in particular based on fads such as the bland 4o comic style with text bubbles.

As a "visual animal", I find it very hard to tune out this kind of noise. I consequently try to hide such content from my feed, but the LinkedIn algorithm will not budge.

I did an Ask HN a while ago trying to find browser add-ons which will hide (or blur) such images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43833961), which turned out fruitless.

tornikeo• 11 months ago

Use the best tool for the job.

I look at LinkedIn as a purpose-built tool for marketing my brand (my dev experience). It works well. Just like any tool LinkedIn has some problems. But it is the best in that niche.

lbyaus• 11 months ago

Couldn't agree more

adidoit3• 11 months ago

1. Self-Aggrandizement-as-a-Service 2. Tied to corporate status games 3. Delivered as an algorithmic feed

I'm obviously being provocative but those are the dynamics

lazarus01• 11 months ago

I'm a data scientist and ml engineer, used to be in tech sales before transitioning to a technical role.

I've spent most of my adult life using using linkedin for business development and job search. What people don't realize, it's the worlds most accurate business database. Highly effective for networking, where you can see peoples interests and interaction and match up with like minded peers and contemporaries.

I agree that the user generated content is indeed mediocre.

When it comes to posting content, I subscribe to Cal Newport's theory, if you produce something that is valuable and rare, people will find you. People spending their time posting large amounts of content are not creating anything valuable or rare.

y42• 11 months ago

He as point. And it's probably annyoing because: One wants to post "substantial content" and being acknowledge, but one cannot rise against this "flood" of nonsense.

Question is: What can you do? We can't stop this trend. People are looking for "reach". And you can achieve that using differet approaches. What we experience at LinkedIn is the simplest approach: Spam the system with your AI generated "nonsense" posts, add a selfie and people will follow. It's not even bad content, it's positive content, emotional content, touching content. But first it's way easier to create than writing long technical articles or analysis. And seconds it's easiere to consume - people want short messages.

And it's not only LinkedIN, it's everywhere. Medium, Facebook, you name it.

Sad for everyone trying to communicatae more than just "calendar mottos". But true.

sometimes_all• 11 months ago

I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity. A seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing.

It took me approximately 5 minutes to install uBlock Origin and create a filter that removes the feed. No more toxic mediocrity to see because there are no posts to see. It makes Linkedin a lot more bearable for me.

redeyedtreefrog• 11 months ago

ah cool great idea, I've now done the same

www.linkedin.com##[aria-label="Main Feed"]

mglvsky• 11 months ago

Another small annoying thing in LinkedIn are posts with different fonts. They look so lame, that I have "banner blindness" for such posts

Edit: grammar

wchandler• 11 months ago

I found it best to stay Linked-Out.

Havoc• 11 months ago

People read linkedin?

Everyone I know just use it as a glorified Rolodex

senko• 11 months ago

The mediocrity (and "hacks" like LinkedIn broetry[0]) make it super-easy to stand out just by talking plainly about interesting stuff!

I have a (subjectively) high (self-imposed) bar for posting on my blog, but my bar is much lower for LinkedIn. I also have a much larger audience there.

I sometimes turn the LI posts I'm really happy with into blog articles, so they also serve as a kind of preprint for me.

Basically, I use it like I'd use Twitter if it still existed and allowed for somewhat longer posts, and BlueSky if it had any users.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...

nis0s• 11 months ago

The only reason to have a LI is to have an online resume, but if that’s the only reason then make a website. You’re better off interacting socially or blogging on your own site, which may have a commenting feature. You can use agents to post your blogs to various places for exposure.

etra0• 11 months ago

LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol).

I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.

What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.

Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.

deepsquirrelnet• 11 months ago

I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.

The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.

I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.

grues-dinner• 11 months ago

Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.

_fat_santa• 11 months ago

LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.

1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.

2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.

My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"

parpfish2• 11 months ago

I like it as a “place that hosts resumes in a standardized format that can be imported to other applications correctly”

filoleg• 11 months ago

Yup, agreed heavily with your take.

I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).

For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.

As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.

appease7727• 11 months ago

LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.

The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.

Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.

LeftHandPath• 11 months ago

The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.

Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.

Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

rekenaut• 11 months ago

Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.

Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.

daxfohl• 11 months ago

Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.

The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.

senfiaj• 11 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9aDtJWW2qs

Ozzie_osman• 11 months ago

LinkedIn borrowed all the growth and engagement tactics from modern social media, becoming more of an engagement product and less of a professional network.

jongjong• 11 months ago

In a corporation-dominated economy, LinkedIn can't produce anything different... People are limited in what they can say. On LI, you are representing your employer to some extent. You can't just post all your juicy gossip or crazy takes.

At best, you can nerd-out in your subject area, but even that's limited as you risk being seen as either a show-off or you may make a mistake one day and be shuned for it. It's kind of high-stakes. It's like social networking but with your employer potentially scrutinizing your posts.

On LI, people are always one bad post away from losing their income. You're never going to get fully honest takes in such environment.

The only people who can share everything honestly on LI are people who are very predictable and basically don't have any opinion about anything... Not the most exciting kinds of people.

Though at least this self-censorship boringness ceiling does make it easier to get eyeballs for your content if you're willing to get risky. It's easier for content to stand out.

fredgrott• 11 months ago

This reads like a developer trying to make a GUI be less effective....kind of like some maligned GIT client and other dev production tools...

SMAAART• 11 months ago

It has been like that for quite a while, people talk a lot and say nothing; and get rewarded for it.

jackdawed• 11 months ago

To combat LinkedIn spam, I exclusively write wizard-themed LinkedIn posts: https://dungeonengineering.com/i-could-have-cursed-him-inste...

lloydjones5• 11 months ago

This is fantastic!

Sorry, ahem:

#Inspiring #CastTogether

toddmorey2• 11 months ago

I did laugh at loud at "They lift others up. Literally, in my case."

0cf8612b2e1e• 11 months ago

Well that made my day. Fantastic satire.

To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”

I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.

wltr• 11 months ago

Well done, sir!

PaulHoule• 11 months ago

Why Mastodon is so much better: https://mas.to/@skeletor

cpursley4• 11 months ago

My customers and market are not in these obscure channels, they are on LinkedIn (and Facebook). None are on reddit or x.

phyzome• 11 months ago

[flagged]

motorest3• 11 months ago

Some of the actual posts on wikipedia are more outlandish than the parody ones. It's entertaining.

AndrewKemendo2• 11 months ago

I was not expecting that to be the top response but here we are

I’m more interested in what their content actually looks like if it’s that “successful”

tomhow2• 11 months ago

Please don't post shallow dismissals like this on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mehulashah• 11 months ago

LinkedIn is a long-form billboard not a blogging site. It’s meant for getting attention, not for thought provoking discussion. Or at least, I’ve not really seen honest discourse on any recent social platform. There are plenty of reasons to be on a billboard, but most billboards are boring.

felineflock• 11 months ago

He simply doesn't know how to use social networks.

I get a lot of useful information from LinkedIn because I choose who to follow and block.

yusege• 11 months ago

Mediocrity is everywhere—on every platform. Even on blogs. Even in scientific publications. But if you’re creating something worth reading, why hesitate to post it on LinkedIn or anywhere else? Valuable content doesn’t lose its quality just because of where it’s published. Dumb comments don’t change that either.

I actually think creators who produce valuable work should be just as visible as the mediocre ones, so that over time, the difference becomes clear and mediocrity slowly fades. Sure, the marketing and self-promotion side of things might feel uncomfortable, especially for developers. But in a society where the ignorant are bold, if the thoughtful and knowledgeable don’t show the same courage, that society is doomed.

No matter what kind of nonsense you come across, let science and reason be your guide—and keep creating and sharing.

paulcole3• 11 months ago

I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying

Oh wow, I’m sure this isn’t going to be an evenhanded look at the situation.

apwheele• 11 months ago

I don't disagree with the fundamentals of the post (most stuff is vapid, not just on LinkedIn but other platforms as well). But I still personally have benefitted the most from LinkedIn for grass roots for my business most recently, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/02/20/linkedin-is-the-best-s.... It is higher quality referrals than I ever got from X for example.

toddmorey2• 11 months ago

The content that feels so vapid (and unfortunately makes a high percentage of what's on there) are the ones where the post itself is the entire body of work. The Photoshop a quote on the wall types.

But there actually IS good content on LinkedIn. It's professionals doing interesting work and posting about it. One user that springs to mind for me does UX for the automotive industry and posts concepts, designs, and experimentations. Its fun and fascinating to watch. And I think it has much more traction to the folks that matter than any post he could do about what his weekly grocery trip taught him about the creative process.

Maybe put another way, build a content brand and not a personality brand. You can still get meaningful, career changing traction. Or do what this author does and just set up your own small tent miles outside the fairground because that's what makes your soul happy. I love the indie web.

Oras• 11 months ago

There’s some decent stuff on there in amongst all the noise. But, for whatever reason, that good stuff gets lost amongst a million posts of washed out nonsense.

That's the problem with all social networks anyway. The algorithm would encourage content that reaches a wider audience, not target niches.

Also add the LinkedIn pods (which is a group of people that will like and comment nonsense on posts to boost), same concept of bots in other social networks.

That said, LinkedIn is still the only social network where I have real people that I know and have done business with.

JCM9• 11 months ago

LinkedIn is useful to check someone’s career history.

Beyond that it’s mostly a bunch of folks spending time on LinkedIn trying to impress people that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. Which ironically drives away the people folks seem to be trying to impress. Spend time there if you wish, but you’re “marketing” to people that mostly aren’t there.

The whole “influencer” thing on LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters claiming to be experts at things they’re not really experts at. When someone starts off by saying they’re a “top influencer” on LinkedIn I run the other way, quickly. If you have to market yourself as an influencer then newsflash you’re probably not. If you are, you just are.

mostlystatic• 11 months ago

I love LinkedIn as a founder/developer. It's become my main social network after the Twitter acquisition.

Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.

Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).

I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_client-side-rende... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_resource-download...

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

If you say this it means you probably have tuned who you connect to and your settings well to avoid spammy content. I'm amazed it is possible.

akk0• 11 months ago

I wouldn't know what LinkedIn rewards, because they banned me the day after making my account for no stated reason and then rejected my appeal. I just complied with their request to see my passport for the third time earlier today. I suspect I triggered a flag originally verifying my identity because it took me two phones to realize their verification bullshit will never load without Play Services and a third, stock android phone to get through it.

nojs• 11 months ago

This is how you win on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcollison

Dynamically communicate prospective opportunities and proactive technologies. Efficiently aggregate interactive materials before state of the art collaboration and idea-sharing. Credibly supply cross-media metrics via leading-edge solutions.

fragmede5• 11 months ago

is this the right Elliott Smith?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliott-smith-29707136

Avicebron• 11 months ago

This post made me open linkedin..

The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager"..

They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror, pulls a strip down and sticks her phone back to the tape.

Seems like she's a bad manager. Obviously tape doesn't go over the mirror, well she's leveled up her skills in the next few seconds. She installs the brilliantly designed mirror-mount-phone-holder-multi-axis.png (TM).

No she's a good manager, she's meeting her employees in the middle, both passenger and driver can pull the phone right next to their face in case they need to see the map. Good managing! Fractional leadership!

I do wonder when the next car digs itself into a ditch, whether putting the phone in front of the drivers face was ideal. But hey, I'm just a lay-engineer struggling to form a sentence with an aw shucks look, far from the hallowed halls of what an MBA or fractional CTO could know.

This seems emblematic of something...

Aurornis2• 11 months ago

This post made me open linkedin..
The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know

The two common failure points for developers using social media are getting triggered at the first instance of content they dislike in the feed and not following sources of content they want to read.

Nobody should feel compelled to use any social media if they don’t want or have to. If you actually want to understand what other people see in the platform, though, you have to understand how they use it.

Any social media with a feed requires an ability to skim and filter. If you stop and read the obviously low quality content to either hate-read or to get triggered then you won’t make it far on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Hacker News comments.

Second, you have to curate your sources. If you strongly dislike a post then use mechanisms to see less of it. If you want to see more of something then like it. Follow people who produce good content. Once you’ve given the algorithms some signal the content improves to your liking, even though it’s not perfect.

raghava• 11 months ago

Disaster stemming from the deadly combo of Dunning Kruger effect + network effect + recommendation algorithms floating similar BS up top.

Most who post absolute BS on such "professional" forums as a way to gain a larger "network" easily attract similar ones with relatable mediocrity index. The network effect kicks in and mediocrity gets amplified.

Everyone thus gets forced to either to act insanely ridiculous or just GTFO to retain whatever little sanity they have left in them.

Most corporate jobs are just mediocrity-maxxing absolutely BS jobs. It is only natural that the most popular corporate SM amplifies and promotes BS and mediocrity at scale.

sssilver2• 11 months ago

Semi-related — why don’t we create a service in which people make employment “claims” and other people (their managers/customers) sign these claims with their own keys, so these claims can be cryptographically verified by a third party in a distributed fashion?

This way, Linkedins basic premise of being a centralized “CV as a service” would become obsolete, leaving just the social network, which I personally would gladly abandon.

hahn-kev• 11 months ago

If it works you'll have a bunch of people faking it for each other, and if it doesn't then it's no different than anything else.

sssilver2• 11 months ago

How would they fake it? Their own identity claims would need to be cryptographically signed.

snowwrestler• 11 months ago

This is indeed in development although I’m not sure LinkedIn is involved yet. Look up:

Learning and Employment Records (LERs)

wohoef2• 11 months ago

Final sentence of this piece is missing a word.

pbreit• 11 months ago

It doesn’t seem that bad to me. Certainly not “toxic”. A lot of it is quite relevant to my industry. Perhaps because I am selective with who I link (only people I have worked with and could vouch for)).

toolslive• 11 months ago

What bothers me most is how "fake" it all is. I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices. Companies with fake job posts that keep on getting recycled (clicking "report this job" does not help at all) aso aso. It's sort of a parallel universe where everything is nice and dandy... sort of a Barbie universe.

danparsonson2• 11 months ago

I've seen companies upholding an image of success while they are scraping by and leave a wake of unpaid invoices.

Devil's advocate: what else are they going to say? They're trying to land new business so they can pay those invoices. "We're really struggling and desperately need your money now!" is unlikely to help...

1vuio0pswjnm7• 11 months ago

This thread is headed by defensive comments alleging that they have benefitted financially from LinkedIn.

These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.

It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.

Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.

The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.

It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".

This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.

Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866666

That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)

It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad

HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.

zelphirkalt• 11 months ago

Unfortunately, however, people at many companies, who are responsible for hiring people, are running around on LinkedIn and believe things of value being communicated there, living this strange parallel world or bubble of self-marketers and make believe that is LinkedIn, becoming part of it themselves with their mediocrity. The signal of excellence entirely drowns in a stream of mediocrity on LinkedIn.

btbytes• 11 months ago

For many years I went without looking at LinkedIn at all. I even deleted my LinkedIn account for couple of years in mid '10s.

I have found a lot of value in LinkedIn recently after I started interacting with news, posts, and people that have something interesting to say. It is as if you tell the algorithm what you like, it will show more things like that.

I also proactively flag things I don't like to see. That also helps a lot in improving my feed, I assume.

Th "updates" feed with all the opentowork, hiring, promotions doesn't bother me much. it has it's uses, and its easy to just eyeball and move on.

What I don't understand is the grandstanding about how LinkedIn and its users are all dumb. You can always timebox your interactions with LinkedIn and ignore it rest of the time if you cannot afford to NOT have a LinkedIn account.

Oh! and learn to use the notification settings. Turn off email alerts etc.,

boje• 11 months ago

Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.

To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.

I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.

My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.

gwbas1c• 11 months ago

I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.

I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.

Tade0• 11 months ago

A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).

My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.

jvorick• 11 months ago

Totally agree that LinkedIn rewards toxic mediocrity, but do believe there are ways to avoid those parts of the platforms.

For example, stop following toxically mediocre connections.

LinkedIn will show you things based on what you follow/like/engage with. In my experience, there's troves of real operators posting genuine and helpful advice.

rglover• 11 months ago

One of the most obnoxious things about LinkedIn are the games that people play. Fake engagement over a series of my posts only to drop their pitch in my messages.

That, and it's so rare to find real content on the site that isn't just some mimetic rehash of the same thing other people are saying.

Frankly, it's a very ominous network to interact with—it's very unsettling to see how quickly and deeply people have adopted a performative mask that's uniquely a "LinkedIn character."

Endless droves of "think pieces" from people you can tell have never really been challenged in their field, have limited experience, and insist that they are the expert missing from your sheathe.

The saddest part is that the mediocrity will only ever increase, not decrease, in a world that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence.

rand17• 11 months ago

I don't need a reward from a beggar.

ChiMan• 11 months ago

Seems like a market has emerged for a LinkedIn-like service that does everything LinkedIn does, minus the public posts. Resumes and direct messages only.

joshdavham2• 11 months ago

If you find reading posts on LinkedIn as annoying as I do, there’s actually a nice solution that will literally wipe your feed blank:

1) Change your preferred feed view to “Most Recent Posts” : https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/preferred-...

2) Unfollow all of your connections. You’ll stay connected but won’t see their annoying posts anymore.

…and there you have it! Focused peace and zen on an otherwise excruciating website.

modeless• 11 months ago

Or just don't visit your feed?

joshdavham2• 11 months ago

I was using LinkedIn a couple months ago to look for jobs and the problem was that the feed was really hard to avoid and kept sucking me into wasting my time.

When I did the above two things, it completely nerfed my feed so that I could just focus on jobs.

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

Use an ad blocker!

0x0000000• 11 months ago

Unfollow all of your connections

I hate that this is the only option available. I want to follow my connections, for their own posts, if any. What I don't want is to see everything they like, share, and comment on -- but LinkedIn won't let you turn that part off.

WiggleGuy• 11 months ago

I have a user script that just hides the LinkedIn feed. It's quite blissful.

slowhadoken• 11 months ago

Social media rewards mediocrity, LinkedIn is just the most button down.

0898• 11 months ago

Unlikely as it sounds, being normal is a strategy that works on LinkedIn.

The quality bar is very low. People post so much fluff and AI thought leadership that the algorithm has recently started rejecting it, and LinkedIn essentially ran out of content.

For the past couple of months it's been showing people posts from two or three weeks ago due to the lack of suitable material.

What I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to stand out and build an audience if you just post honestly and thoughtfully about the interesting little puzzles or dilemmas you face during your workday.

Some posts of mine that have hit it off:

Why is it hard to find clothes for men? Why do people think it's weird when I drink milk on Zoom? Should I post on X, or do people still frown on it?

Try posting about what you don't know, rather than what you do. People like that more.

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

That's too normal for me it makes LinkedIn sound like Facebook. If it were "why I didnt choose Kubernetes for my current project" then maybe.

ambicapter• 11 months ago

Hah, I would actually like to know why finding clothes for men is so hard.

_swfb4• 11 months ago

To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.

LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.

I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.

And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.

randcraw• 11 months ago

LinkedIn seems like the natural home (origin?) of those oh-so-inane "Motivator" management posters that were so popular in the 1990s. Now if only there were also an outlet there for the "Demotivator" posters that followed. THOSE I liked.

_swfb4• 11 months ago

Yeah, it's horrible; I deleted my Facebook a decade ago because I hated what social media interaction was becoming and it was doing a number on my mental health. I deleted my old Twitter a few days ago, and I haven't done anything on Bluesky in months and I never used it much. The only social media I use regularly now is HN and SomethingAwful.

I would so love to just delete my LinkedIn, but you can't do that now. A lot of job applications require you give your LinkedIn. So I am stuck logging in occasionally. It's dystopian.

zem• 11 months ago

I think the key point is this one

8<------- What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor. 8<-------

in other words, linked in the resume hosting and career networking site doesn't reward the behaviour, linked in the random social network that happens to be hosted on the same site does. just ignore the latter.

bluedino• 11 months ago

LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.

Things I don't find it useful for:

Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot

Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."

Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired

Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.

"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.

Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.

Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.

glitchcrab2• 11 months ago

A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.

stalfosknight• 11 months ago

Good idea! Thank you

HPMOR• 11 months ago

LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.

weinzierl2• 11 months ago

Cool idea. I used to have

"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"

in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.

monkeyelite2• 11 months ago

Is it bad to use automation?

lo_zamoyski2• 11 months ago

Typical motivational/marketing stuff

Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.

bartread• 11 months ago

That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.

phendrenad2• 11 months ago

The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.

ethbr12• 11 months ago

I think I heard about something similar happening in the web search market too...

ivape• 11 months ago

The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.

Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.

Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.

darth_avocado• 11 months ago

As a general rule, if you’re an engineering candidate that made a profile years ago and is missing updates and haven’t put in much description about your work experience beyond “I worked here from this date to that date”, you’re probably a good engineer.

That’s how I find LinkedIn useful.

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

That is in danger of being a typical "weird heuristic" that linked in loves to post about (with high p values).

I have seen people say for recruiting advise.

* They recommend you hustle. E.g. deliver your resume pretending to be a food delivery

* Don't follow up if explicitly not told to by your recruiters instructions.

* You must have an up to date linked in.

Usually in hot take format that if you dont do that you got no chance.

So everyone stick to measuring for the role!

spauldo2• 11 months ago

That doesn't jive with my experience.

When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.

Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.

fHr• 11 months ago

trys way to hard to be a social platform

Tier2Capital• 11 months ago

that sounds a bit rough on graduates. we all start from the bottom and some people are not born with well connected parents or schools with wide networks. I actually think linkedin is a good way to pay it forward (although NOT for low effort graduates who send the same template spam message to everybody)

flkiwi• 11 months ago

I'm sure someone else has said this, but Corporate America (I cannot speak to Corporate $AnywhereElse with any depth) and large parts of the entrepreneur ecosystem reward mediocrity. In this sense, LinkedIn is just a symptom of a larger disease.

bravesoul27• 11 months ago

They also hustle theatre. For every startup job mentioning role impact there is one that doesn't but tries hard to get across how much of Saturday and Sunday you should be working to be consider moral enough to work for them. Then on LI pictures of staff on 24h+ working stints that might kill them.

ozim• 11 months ago

Oh so it is OK to post mediocre stuff on your own blog where no one reads.

But trying to show it to people is not.

I like „content guardians” everywhere saying „oh this does not belong to HN”, „oh this doesn’t belong to linked in.

Fuck that - let people do what they want and express themselves even if it is mediocre shoveling of ideas

spauldo2• 11 months ago

I hate when people tell me I can't piss in the street. "Go to a bathroom," they say. "That's not appropriate here." Screw that, my junk is rated E for Everybody.

wkat4242• 11 months ago

LinkedIn also rewards absolutely sickening PR spamming. All the corporate feelgood PR bullshit that people willingly repost, it makes me sick to my stomach.

People must have no spine or self-worth to be reposting all their employer's hot air like that.

But yeah Microsoft is all about mediocrity. Their game is becoming the biggest common denominator, not the best.

bryanrasmussen• 11 months ago

toxic mediocrity is clever, on the other not sure if it is clever enough that he has to describe coming up with the phrase twice.

I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity

four paragraphs later

The vast majority of it falls into a category I would describe as Toxic Mediocrity.

0xbadcafebee• 11 months ago

Nothing you post there is going to change your career.

I've gotten two good jobs from posting on LinkedIn. Mutual connections see your posts, and recruiters can find and contact you. When you list it on your resume, people do look at it. So yes it "changes" your career, by helping you get jobs.

Yeah it's full of drivel. All social media is full of drivel. Stop paging through the drivel and use it as a tool. Collect good connections, keep up with old colleagues, network. That's what it's for.

btbuildem• 11 months ago

I think it's a perfect mirror of the corporate world, which in itself rewards and thrives on mediocrity. Mediocrity is safe and predictable.

Sure, let's hear the counter-example of the noble startup, taking massive risks to build The Coolest Thing. Like the enthusiastic wiggly sperms, one in a million succeeds -- and the consequences of initial success are to grow mediocre over time.

LinkedIn is marketing slop, aimed at the lowest common denominator, because that's the most numerous denomination of the walking wallet. Of course it is saturated with family friendly, inoffensive, endless streams of softcore corporate propaganda.

ramijames• 11 months ago

LinkedIn rewards mediocrity in the same way that the rest of the world does. It does so for the exact same reason: good networking is more often than not more important than being exceptional.

ngcazz• 11 months ago

I lurk LinkedIn for this guy's posts only https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-cheng-991849b6

commenter8• 11 months ago

The nice thing about LinkedIn posts is that it’s clear that everything is an ad. Reddit, Facebook, etc started with people just posting to communicate and socialize, then were (mostly) taken over by ads / influencers pretending. With LinkedIn there’s no pretense and no wheat to sift from the chaff.

It’s just marketers marketing to each other. If that’s useful you can join a mutual promotion group and auto-comment on each others’ posts without damaging anything of value. If not you can stay away and completely ignore any posts when you come back for an occasional job search.

janalsncm• 11 months ago

I see zero value in the LinkedIn feed. That’s ok, just ignore it. In the groups I’ve joined (naively thinking I’d learn something useful) it’s mostly infographics explaining things I already know or engagement bait “polls”.

I update my job when necessary, and from time to time a recruiter sends me a decent job posting.

bilater• 11 months ago

I try not to fall into posting generic content. Instead, I focus on sharing real things I’ve built or done, hoping they’re actually useful for someone. For example, my last post was about a weekend app I put together, and I always try to include a link to the app or a github repo so people can try it out for themselves.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/biltahir_sometimes-i-get-into...

DebtDeflation• 11 months ago

As a recently laid off tech worker, I was excited to have a recruiter contact me regarding what seemed like a dream job. After passing an initial phone screen, a face to face interview was scheduled. I spent several days preparing. On the day of the interview, I took the train into the city and had a 4 or 5 block walk to the new company's office. While walking, I noticed a scraggly dog laying in the alley. I was pressed for time, but stopped to get some food and water to give to the dog. He was very appreciative, barked playfully, and licked my face. I continued on my way. When I got to the office, I signed in, took the elevator to the 7th floor, and opened the door. Imagine my shock, the dog was the interviewer. <-- This is the kind of nonsense I generally see posted on LinkedIn, perhaps only slightly exaggerated.

Ms-J• 11 months ago

Linkedin is a dumpster fire of spam and aggressive, low intelligence/high effort marketing tactics.

I would never use their site for anything, though I've seen coworkers apply for jobs using it. Personally I've found the other nonsocial platforms and email to be the best for getting a high paying position.

denkmoon• 11 months ago

If you don't like linkedin just don't use it. It's that easy. Hasn't hurt me so far.

alexchantavy• 11 months ago

If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. You’ll get less views and less engagement but there’s less temptation to post nonsense just for likes. You’re going to have a harder time getting people to stick around and read what you’re writing but that additional pressure raises the bar.

Telling people to “raise the bar”, and then suggesting they should aim for less engagement just sounds strange. Who decides where the bar is, and why should hitting it require fewer people to see what you made?

I agree that a lot of LinkedIn content is cookie-cutter garbage, but advising others to invest serious effort into thoughtful writing with the expectation of no reach feels deeply unhelpful.

Instead, you could encourage others to write content on LinkedIn that sounds less "what X taught me about B2B sales" and improve the culture of "toxic mediocrity".

nottorp• 11 months ago

Random bit of info:

I cannot log in to Linkedin any more on my default browser, which is Firefox with the built in privacy protections on and uBlock Origin (that one on the default settings). The front page redirects me to the cookie dialog which goes to the front page which goes to the cookie dialog again ad infinitum.

I suppose it would work if i accepted, but they shouldn't even ask me for the cookies absolutely required for the site to function so I'm viewing the rest as something optional that I should deny.

shark1• 11 months ago

My Linkedin feed is very bad. I am ok in reading about interesting companies milestones or my contacts sharing opportunities or work related opinions. What I get is endless self-promotion and corporate bullshit. A place where everybody is the opposite of authentic, acting weirdly and cringe as they were being watched by co-workers and possible recruiters (and actually they are).

joshcanhelp• 11 months ago

I don’t love spending time on LinkedIn but I do love that you know what you’re going to get when you go there. There’s not some fake underlaying goal like “keeping people connected.” You’re there to promote yourself and your company, find a job, or hire a person. If you’re not doing any of those things you can just not go there and you won’t miss a thing. If you need a job after 2 years, get back in there, play the game, then log off when you’re done. IMHO it’s about as honest as a large online social network can get.

Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity

Related Stories