It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers.
And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and landed my dream job. You can too".
I think the reason is alluded to in the article: it's not polite to call out BS, and if you do the work involved is OOM larger than creating it.
A friend and I have a mini-hobby of sharing these with each other under the title of “Today in Thanking Myself”. The highest level are the ones where people pimp out their own families for LinkedIn karma
This is so nauseatingly entertaining, and a distillation of similar bullshit I've encountered freelancing for various agencies and startups.
It feels like this field is ripe for trolling - people making fake accounts and making similar inspirational posts that are a bit too outlandish but could almost be real.
Or maybe these troll accounts exist, but the posts are indistinguishable from the real thing...
That’s by far the worst. Something bad happens to their family and they make a post about it! I have seen examples too terrible to post as a comment (assume something very bad happened and the next day theres a post on jt)
You can use the same sort of polite etiquette in well crafted form to undermine these polite attacks. It takes quick thinking and usually works best in the form of an open ended question that sets the BS in its place. No one says anything explicitly but everyone internally acknowledges it. It may be a bit passive aggressive but such is most modern business culture and meetings.
The problem with this is well-stated in Brandolini's Law [0]: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
So, effectively, this means that given equivalent amounts of effort, you've got 10 people producing bullshit for every 1 refuting it effectively. Thus the bullshit continues to spread.
The trick to that problem is to pass the burden of proof on the one producing the BS (as it should be), which is similar to what Bertrand Russell does in Russell's Teapot:
From why I’ve seen on LinkedIn, subtly doesn’t work. Folks that pick up on it probably spotted the BS already. You really have to hit them over the head with a hammer to drive the point in.
Someone passive aggressively gives you with a backhanded compliment to set you up for failure. They stroke your ego, build you up in front if people, then offer a trove of BS that needs to be accomplished that only you are capable of accomplishing and makes it difficult for you to refute.
Instead of being pressured into saying yes, you quickly think about the information and ask a general question like, "well that might be possible, I'm personally not sure how, perhaps you had some ideas on how we can accomplish that in the proposed timeline?" and so forth.
If someone is marketing you a BS solution, you can usually dip down to a kernel of truth and quickly form a well crafted open ended question to ask how they address some problem their solution clearly couldn't. "With our application, you can easily interface with any platform" -- "that's awesome, how much effort is typically required to do that? Do you have example cases?" And so on.
You could also use an even more general/vague question similar to the one you just posed: asking someone to elaborate on something that's clearly BS usually catches them off guard if they were just making up nonsense and had no thought behind their statement. If they had some thought, it's going to be pretty clear. All that's needed is to pepper on some politeness to make it: "that sounds intriguing and thought provoking, could you elaborate on that idea more?"
These are benign on the surface but can be used offensively and without any clarity of the genuine intent to pass the BS baton around.
If I call out BS there’s a risk of the influencer incensing their followers enough for them to go after my employer and colleagues and tell them that I’m bully.
Assuming* that scenario were to play out, it would be such a painful irony for an influencer to encourage their followers to harass an ordinary stranger under the accusation of the stranger being a "bully", of all things.
* "Assuming" because you won't risk it, not because it couldn't happen
It happens all the time and takes that exact form every time. Pretty much every internet dispute involves the drama triangle[0]. This rule gets more and more true as more people are involved in the dispute. (The viewer is invited to fill the third role)
LinkedIn is now just Facebook which opens at Work and China.
It's sad because I did find some quality talent from LinkedIn during my recruitment drives for previous startup couple of years back, Also since someone looking for a job is de-facto expected to have a LinkedIn profile helped that.
But now when I recently logged in, I saw something akin to sharing video status like in other social-media chat apps and my profile page is asking me to upload a '30 second video intro'; I feel this is going increase inequality as someone who was able to project their qualifications and experience first without distractions is now made to compete with someone who's good with TikToking.
Microsoft has suspended new Chinese accounts on LinkedIn. I expect that they'll eventually be forced to completely separate the Chinese LinkedIn from the rest of the world. Can't have anyone mentioning Tiananmen Square on June 4.
I have solved this problem by unfollowing people who post or like low quality content. My LinkedIn feed is now mostly filled with useful corporate news.
The awkward thing is that these people are projecting their insecurities.
When they say "I really care about all the employees, here I am giving the janitor a $500 giftcard" I hear " I feel bad about letting several employees think they were getting big bonuses, so here I am looking for feedback on how great of a person I am"
You forgot the nauseatingly formulaic "I wouldn't be where I am today without the :insert unsung low status figure here:" posts from high status people who you know couldn't give two s** about said low status people.
My uBlock Origin filters for linkedin which completely cut feeds and all sort of distracting things out (some filters might be outdated, but things work):
All this leaves out is the leftmost side (where your number of connections are seen), and the top blue row. The feed is entirely gone. You can still read and message people, see your connections, etc. But no more viewing the feed. It's made my linkedin visits so much easier to bear.
Edit:
Some HN searching shows a single filter which blocks out most of the home page, and is probably cleaner:
The worst thing is that these kinds of posts have a really negative effect on many people around them. So I think it's ultimately self-defeating for LinkedIn in the long run to foster this kind of environment. For me they just instigate a gag reflex, but for others it can just make them feel low and awful. And so they leave the site.
My wife has been out of the job market for 10 years (had kids, mother got sick and passed away, we moved for my job, she went back to school, but used to be successful in design/marketing @ a FAANG, studying now for UX research.) Anyways, very tough to get back into the job market. And now she goes on linkedin to try to connect with old job aquaintances and look at jobs and the like and it's all these people puffing themselves up like peacocks and it's just confidence destroying. Amps up the inner critic and self-judging in many people, comparing yourself to these people, and for what? Half of what is posted isn't even fully... real?
Work is work. It's great some people really love their jobs. But what I see on linkedin these days doesn't reflect a normal person's career focus.
The same exists on nearly every social media site, sadly. Natural progression I would assume. On Twitter, in dev circles, we have "Junior Dev Porn" where the same poll/questions are asked, the same anecdotes are recycled, and the same code snippets posted, all in the name of empowering junior developers. But at a high altitude it's glaringly obvious the majority are for engagement and follower gain. Especially so when those internet points are leveraged for favor.
I agree - it seems that all social media platforms suffer from this. Original/useful content seems to lose out in the battle for user engagement. I wonder if you could create a new type of social media platform that overcomes this problem?
How are you going to overcome a problem that we are structurally ingraining into our youth? If the kids are on TikTok by 10 years old, you know, this is a losing fight. The next 3-4 generations will not even recognize that there is a severe vanity and narcissism problem.
Personally I don’t have a problem with repetitive content that is overtly aimed at beginners and junior devs, since there is a constant flow of new beginners and junior devs joining social media.
Seems like it could be a constructive exchange: newbies get useful basic content; posters get likes and followers. But, only if the content is actually good.
Couldn't it be more useful to distill that repetitive content into a durable medium, instead of relying on the online equivalent of handing down an oral history of development practices?
Counterpoint: as it is with Facebook, the quality of your feed depends entirely on your connections and who among those connections you have chosen to mute/unfollow. I have over a 1000 connections and I've assiduously unfollowed/muted anyone in my network or adjacent to my network who posts anything that I feel is not substantial.
Reminiscing over (paper) mechanical drawings from university days and reconnecting with a few colleagues I've lost touch with in the intervening 20 years.
Interior designs of some of the newer office spaces in the city that are aimed at tech startups.
Comparing notes on the "Messy Middle" of startups with another founder.
That isn’t really a counterpoint. If you have to assiduously pick through a thousand connections to prevent a tide of spam from taking over your feed, it’s not a very useful tool.
You could technically dig a trench with a spoon, but why would you?
At least LinkedIn (the company) got over their initial love affair with video. There was a time when my LinkedIn feed was 80% videos of people sitting in their cars over-sharing directly to the camera… because that is what “the algorithm” wanted most to promote. I basically avoided LinkedIn for months (maybe years? can’t remember) as that was going on.
But yeah. Even without the videos, the LinkedIn timeline is a pretty soulless place.
I think these algorithms should just die. Facebook was actually good when the feed was just all the things my friends had posted, nothing more nothing less. But then they started tinkering with algorithms and trying to find stuff I liked. Well they don't know me yhat's for sure. I had to weed through pages of crap to find one interesting bit. Glad to be off it now but LinkedIn is harder to let go.
LinkedIn is missing a major feature, different classes of connections. Your network is meaningless when it’s full of recruiters as well as people you actually worked with.
I have rigorously only accepted connections from people I’ve actually worked with in some capacity.
Makes for a nicer feed, but maybe that means I’m missing out on some recruiting opportunities? I thought recruiters could reach out to folks on LinkedIn without establishing a connection first.
I’ve never taken much interest in the ‘feed’ part, and view the site mostly as a tool for finding work, though I’ve not had to look for the last few years due to non-LinkedIn networking...
linked in doesn’t solve the networking problem. maybe i’m different but i’ve never reached out to anyone over linked in to “network”. if i needed to do that i would call, text, email. linked ins real purpose is a search engine for recruiters to contact you. your whole contact list could be recruiters and no colleagues and it would be the same website
I infrequently exchange messages with old colleagues on there, people I have worked with but wouldn’t have on Facebook, and I may not have a personal email address for them.
I just treat it as a fancy resume and Rolodex for people I very rarely talk to but sometimes might need to professionally. There’s no reason you ever need to interact with the news feed
Is anyone who isn‘t doing it for work (recruiting, PR, …) or looking for jobs/work/employers/employees even unironically using this pathetic shitshow mix of early facebook culture and corporate-lies-fake-feelgood-culture bullshit?
Many use it to just peek into other people's lives and get background info - where they work at, where they're from and where they had studied, etc. Worst case, even stalk.
The post is absolutely correct, but this is one of those "let 'em whirl" things for me (inside joke -it just means that if it's none of my business, I am under no obligation to make it my business).
I have a LinkedIn profile. It's minimally active. I post links to some of my GitHub repos, and dust off the mantlepiece, every now and then. I make sure it's up to date and accurate.
I can't even imagine using it like Facebook. The main reason I keep it, is so that I can direct people to a fairly bland place to find out about me, professionally. I'm not really looking for work, but it helps people to take me seriously.
If I want them to find out more about me personally, I'll give 'em my phone number, and we'll do lunch.
I seem to be in the minority, there. I have seen honest-to-God disinformation and rancor trolls on LinkedIn; just like on Facebook and Twitter. They are quite transparent, but they also generate thousands of "likes," and comments.
Um...no thanks. I don't think I want to go on record liking something like that.
The rather disturbing things, are people sharing about personal emotional traumas, and 12-step recovery anniversaries. Unless they work in the therapeutic/rehabilitation field, that's irrelevant (and probably quite harmful -not everyone is forgiving or understanding).
Those stories can be deeply motivating and helpful, but not on LinkedIn.
The past year has been interesting. The way we interact with each other IRL seems to have been affected.
I've noticed a huge uptick in people minding other peoples' business. Things like chiming into overheard conversations between strangers, offering advice or criticism; despite never being asked for it, etc.
This has always been an issue, but it has become exponentially worse, over this last year. I'm really noticing it, recently, with people emerging from their caves, like the final scene of Surrogates.
I suspect that one reason might be that the principal medium for personal interaction for many of us has been online communities, this last year, and the rules are quite different online, than IRL.
For example, I would not say what I am writing right now, in most IRL interactions.
I think we may have some adjusting to do over the next few months.
One thing I have noticed from influencers is shameless copy and pasting of what other influencers have said, or even more shamelessly, some influencers going around after seeing some trite bit of wisdom and claiming they were the original source and demanding credit.
A shamelessly copied and posted post was circulating LinkedIn a few days ago, and someone shared screengrabs how these bottom-feeders are copying and posting content. The content of the post makes matter worse.
A bunch of recruiters posted like this- "generic name was a recent college grad he/she was really talented. they asked for X amount of money. But I gave them Y (Y quite > X). This is the time for human solidarity and being honest and rewarding people for their talent, blah blah blah."
In some screenshots, the name, tech stack, and amount of money were all same.
> The Medium is the message, and the message is "it's time we make this official".
I’m not sure I understand. To me medium is just an easy way to get a blog started. Nothing more to it. People often complain about their business model, but then people here always complain about any business model, or lack of a business model.
Makes perfect sense. In one of my previous roles, we used to keep track of SSI (Social Selling Index), and we would be gently nudged into posting about a few things (events, launches, etc.)
I decided to game the system and shot up to the top of the rankings by simply posting actual useful stuff (pretty much the same commentary I would post on my personal link blog, but with some bearing on work topics).
I quit doing it after a while because I thought I had made my point, but not before I had reached the top three in our cohort.
Going past #10 took some doing, though. By that time I had a JavaScript scraper and a Jupyter notebook to predict the best hashtags, and if the LinkedIn API was actually usable I’d probably have fully automated the whole thing.
I trained it by tokenizing my post history with nltk and using the number of likes (scraped via JS) as the target metric. Then I built a simple recommender that would take my draft and list the most interesting tags for it.
Nice article. Those "I passed some 2 min XYZ certificate" posts really get to my nerve. I usually use the news feed eradicator [0] on such websites. It is like jumping across the valley of the newsfeed attention river.
There is this cool podcast [0] i heard on authenticity and bragging and how to not be shameless. Especially useful when you are an introvert (like me).
I know what you mean but at least those certs are work related and fairly factual. I rather see that than people bragging about how amazing they are in contrived scenarios.
Well, that has the ring of truth, when applied to the newsfeed. And the final conclusion that you should just get on linkedin when job searching and then get off again is fine. I find it incredibly useful for job searching, to the point that I don't even bother with other sites.
However, the job search experience is badly spoiled by secondary recruitment postings. These are especially annoying when the posting is cut off so that you have to follow an external link to get the full info. And having to apply from external sites is also a pain. Linkedin seems big enough to be able to enforce some rules on those sorts of things.
I think the newsfeed stuff that this article focusses on really only affects people who buy into it. Personally, after reading a few posts of the type '5 reasons your boss should stop doing that thing you hate', I stopped paying attention to the newsfeed unless there was a robot video from boston dynamics at the top. And the secondary features don't really seem like they have enough meat to stick.
I pretty much use LinkedIn as a self-updating Rolodex. I basically don't use it for recruiter-related stuff at all but then I haven't really been on the market for a very long time.
For me the ideal social media feed would look a lot like Hacker News. Literally every day I find something interesting here. Something technical I didn't know, something new I never heard of, something that makes me think. Rather than social media sites that keep trying to spiral me into their bubbles of things I looked at before. When in fact I come here to see stuff that I didn't know. I don't want more of the same but yet that seems to be considered the holy grail of engagement algorithms.
It's amazing how free sharing works when it's not constantly fiddled with by algorithms. There is user voting of course but I read the 'new' page a lot too.
For me seeing pictures of what friends far away are up to, a la facebook, is actually pretty nice. And twitter is best when a quick thought is linked to a more in-depth article or post. Plus news links to some objective source. And no promoted content. I'm not holding my breath.
Also what's super annoying when doing job searches is that they add this 'promoted' stuff that blatantly ignores your search query. I have some searches set up for jobs in my local Spanish city but every day it adds 'promoted' jobs in the US to it.
Just like Facebook: ignore the ”newsfeed” part, and the rest of the service is pretty decent.
For Facebook that means e.g using the events functionality. For LinkedIn that’s private messages and network graphs (“do I know someone at X company”).
The “feeds” that are front and center on both sites is the worst feature and in no way necessary for using the service. It’s their easiest method of ad delivery though, which is why they want you to view it.
For Facebook the newsfeed is full of viral crap, ads, and if you are unlucky, toxicity. On LinkedIn it’s recruiters and workfluencers pushing posts that seem like parody but isn’t.
Every time I try to use Twitter to follow interesting companies I get annoyed and quit because of the same garbage. I've been thinking it's an age thing, where people with better eyesight than me or who grew up looking at low SNR information like that can filter through it more easily. They need to put ads and suggestions and such nonsense off to the side and attract your eye by being worth looking at, not inline pretending to be part of your desired info feed.
That much is true, but the tragic comedy is in what people seem to think will actually be taken seriously / make others see them in a good light -- see https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn for evidence.
This propensity for gaming everything is a very good and useful capability, when applied to the environment - to nature, to physics, to our own bodies. Roads and cars and boats exist because we've gamed our stamina. Planes and rockets exist because we've gamed gravity. Farming and drugs and vaccines exist because we've gamed microbiology.
The problem starts when people are trying to game each other. This is bad, because it turns what should be a PvE game into a PvP one. With the shitty cards nature/evolution gave us, we have plenty of external challenges left to overcome; it's really sad to see and deal with people who instead want to abuse others to get ahead.
My favourites are the posts by those who have had accidental success, who feel qualified to hold court as though they have some magic technique.
I say this as someone who had accidental success, and ran that successful business for over a decade, completely aware that luck and timing played a far larger part than quality.
LinkedIn has too much "advice" from "experts". Shut up and make me laugh instead. Everything they post is either self-congratulatory "advice" or just sycophantic worship.
I often wonder if LI is trying to do too many things at once. At this point it hard not to come to the conclusion that it promotes certain types of behaviors. The problem is that if left laissez-faire, the feed will not attract folks who abhor work influencers. So, perhaps they need to ask who they are really targeting?
For generic work-banter, an app like Blind seems to cut it better. Given the anonymity, it is able to (anecdotally) elicit truer depictions of one's workplace, and this helps folks get real value through what are in essence (unaggregated) reviews of companies and job roles.
By using real profiles and establishing a set up of "professionalism", LI absolutely cuts/reduces the possibility of deriving real value for the layman (read non work influencer and non CXO). Apart from connecting with old colleagues and looking for a new job, why should the layman even bother logging into the platform on a fairly regular basis?
Having said that, LI is great for some things even for the layman. It has been great for looking for new jobs as the article states. But it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it needs to figure out their core audience or differentiate product offerings before it deteriorates into a job board for the laymen like me, in which case it will be possible for a new and trendy job board to come along and replace it.
Blind would be great if it didn't attract and retain the most toxic and reactive folks (in my brief experience). That attribute makes it an undesirable place to be for someone who's well adjusted at their job, which I would say undercuts your assertion that it provides a more accurate view of the workplace. A counterbalance to the polished view you'd get through LinkedIn? Sure. But it's where people go to talk shit.
Through LinkedIn I’ve been recruited to three public companies and have done one successful IPO. I don’t read the articles or interact with anyone really. If you ignore the social drama which I don’t personally see a lot of, I think it’s a decent tool given the price.
I don't really see any of this emotional divorce stuff mentioned in the article in my timeline on LinkedIn. Just the usual people reposting all the corporate PR bullshit about how the company loves the planet and blowing their own trumpets about how amazingly committed they are to making a difference on orphan secretary poodle day. It's a sickening mess of people stumbling over each other to be the most politically correct obedient corporate drone. People are even more fake than on Facebook.
Of course the people who are actually good at their jobs are never seen there. They don't need to profile themselves because they're well-known to be good. And they don't have thousands of contacts because they only accept requests from people they actually work with. It's almost like an inverse proof of capability.
The only reason I'm still on there is because it's handy when you need another job. The social part is a complete failure IMO.
I unfollow everyone on LinkedIn and only see updates from the companies I follow. It would be great if they supported "Unfollow All" natively instead of having to mess with JS.
I did the same. The offshore recruiters were very fond of the "fake positivity" posts i.e man doesn't hold elevator for someone or steals a parking space from a person while going to an interview just to find out that it was the CEO. Once I started following them, my feed cleaned up immensely taking on a more technical bent.
I think the news feed on LinkedIn is an absolute cesspool, but it's not hard to see why. It has the same "look at me!" dynamics of any social network, and in addition it has the "any present or potential future employer, look at how great I am", too.
So you end up with a combination of sappy "look at this insightful business anecdote I have!" combined with then lots of over-congratulatory posts because nobody wants to offend a potential job contact. Never have so many words been said that say so little.
Still, I feel that for its core purpose, connecting with known business contacts and job hunting, LinkedIn does a fine job. They just have to layer on all this other useless functionality to give legions of product people, designers and engineers something to do.
My experience has been that LinkedIn and other social media necessitates promoting influencers who are almost certainly between mediocre and above average at their fields, never the best. There are a few exceptions, but in general if some so-called expert's "job" involves them constantly tweeting, poasting on LinkedIn, writing daily blogs, instagramming and otherwise releasing a non-stop supply of YouTube videos, then they probably have little expertise. Usually, you can find what they're trying to sell without too much effort. Those who can't do, influence.
There are of course meaningful people on social media who do have useful things to say. Some brilliant people in the tech world I know will post on their blogs every few weeks or post a few tweets each week. But they're spending the majority of their time actually creating things, not crafting tweets optimized to feed an algorithm.
YouTube is an interesting one, since it's an immersive medium. Some of the people with the best tech tutorials or "content" there will rarely or never show their faces. I think this is probably a consequence of not wanting to waste time editing, since again, they have real things to do outside social media. If a tech person is just talking to the camera for 10 minutes, I can do without it, and, again, usually they're trying to sell something (often of dubious value).
yeah i know ive been avoiding it on principle... like, if i see the post is on medium, well then, you've saved me reading any further because you're the type of person that cares so little about reader experience that you write on medium. just trying to do my part for a slightly more open web.
All social media platforms without a "dislike" button are trash, precisely because I am the product.
Today I use my RSS feed to find interesting, novel content.
The ideal LinkedIn would have some kind of metamoderated, highly curated (and filtered!) "most interesting professional content for you" and the weight of "a friend of a friend shared this really popular thing" would be super small because that's a crappy signal.
Linkedin has a button to “make my feed better”, but it only allow me to add stuff. One of the Danish political parties is VERY active on LinkedIn, but it’s just populist garbage aimed at small business owner. They refuse to answer critical question, of cause.
My feed would much better could I tell LinkedIn to only show my post made directly by people in my network, and not shared posts.
In my case I need to build a network to find jobs as it is more niche and I refuse to work for fin-tech or ad sellers (for now, this may clearly change if I need money).
I’m not really a social or business media guy but even I know it could be so much better. I’ve been waiting for somebody to improve things and wrote this in frustration.
https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
In all seriousness, people actually look at the newsfeed or whatever they call it on LinkedIn? The only thing I do with LinkedIn is keep my profile up to date in case I'm changing jobs. I've never posted anything other than my profile and I get a steady stream of recruiter emails (that I ignore if I'm not looking for work).
We built a fairly large consulting company 6 years ago, 50% of the business secured through working LinkedIn hard and doing the whole thought leader/influencer thing.
Nowadays though it’s a complete parody of itself and spammed to death. I closed my account with 40k followers as it had become a complete waste of time over the years.
> getting hired via LinkedIn has, inevitably, become more about getting attention than being qualified for a given job.
Does anyone actually get hired via LinkedIn?
I have always assumed that the majority, and most extreme, of the performative LinkedIn “actors” are really simply wasting their time.
I find LinkedIn really useful for two things: looking someone up before meeting with them to see why we have in commmon, and using it as a candidate’s resume). I only really see the “feed” when some friend posts something and those tend to be things they have posted elsewhere.
Now my gf used to work there and she is an enormous fan yet…despite that she doesn’t post in the feed either.
So the rest of the piece is great, but is there actually hiring going on as a result of the feed?
I once got hired via LinkedIn but have never posted a single thing there. I basically use it as an up to date and more extensive resume, and I assume I get attention from recruiters because of tech keywords in my work history and positively regarded companies and schools.
If you're trying to get hired in marketing or communications, then the performance probably matters, but recruiters will reach out without your having to loudly pat yourself on the back in a thousand strangers' feeds.
I thought it was the virtue signalling humble brags that were the bane of linkedin. Am I the only one who thinks linkedin is like the looking glass version of Twitter?
Twitter: "So and so is so awful, gnash, boycott shame! Have you read my blog?"
LinkedIn: "That sooo resonates with me! You're such a insightful thought leader, have you read my blog?"
Totally agree. The virtue signaling in my feed is so insufferable that I stopped reading it years ago. It has basically become twitter with the vitriol replaced by fake positivity.
Can your connections find out if you unfollow them? This is the only thing preventing me from unfollowing.
I've muted a ton of people I don't know at all because their rabid self-promotion or clickbait would keep showing up in my feed. But it is usually the same list of friends liking or sharing that content.
Do LinkedIn influencers get hired more than the rest of us? The article seems to make that assumption. But if recruiters and hiring managers don’t like this influencer content either, maybe none of this matters and we can all just relax and ignore the LinkedIn newsfeed.
Yeah. LinkedIn tries to encourage this sort of behavior for engagement but I haven’t found my lack of engagement with it to staunch the recruiter outreach.
If anything, when on the recruiting side as I review applications I use engagement with that pabulum as an indicator that this person is a BS-artist and probably wouldn’t be a good culture fit for my team. These really attention-seeking personality types tend to stir up a lot of inter-team drama in my experience. Maybe bigger companies have enough slack in the system and outlets for people to blow off steam to absorb it, but in small teams they can wreak havoc with morale.
LinkedIn is a matchmaking service for recruiters and resumes to find each other. As such it works pretty well, just ignore the feed which is mostly inspirational and self-serving crap.
I wonder if it would be possible to devise a different/better version of LinkedIn?
Could you create a social media platform that takes the positive aspects of LinkedIn (large network of users that are, at least ostensibly, targeting ambition, hard work, and self-improvement) but that leaves behind the accompanying parade of inauthenticity, brand names, buzzwords, tropes, and recycled posts?
I wonder what this would look like? Would it be possible?
One idea… a social media platform where people promote, share, and encourage meaningful projects :)
I'd hoped it might get better when Microsoft bought it; there'd really not be any need to actually turn a profit by resorting to scummy tactics and dark patterns. But it seems to be following more of the Yammer route, where it is still left to muddle along in benign neglect on the same path as pre-acquisition.
Medium seems more aggressive with their paywall lately, but clearing the cookies works fine.
It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.
The majority of random sites I visit have no need for cookies ultimately..
> It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.
That's fairly easy to accomplish. I keep my ~/.mozilla in git and essentially git reset it on startup. Everything I didn't explicitly commit into it - gone!
Several years ago, there was a burst of people telling stories that were recognizably copied from Somerset Maugham's story "The Verger". What had been lost was Maugham's irony, what was left was a pull-your-self-up-by-your-bootstraps story that could have been inspiring if true but instead was just dumb.
Ironically I can't even read this due to the login wall.
I hate the social media aspect of LinkedIn so much. I don't want to validate you , I don't think physical appearance was any role in the hiring process, but LinkedIn keeps telling me to upload a picture.
It's still the best way to find a job, but I try to avoid the social aspects.
Why would you do that? I've posted my resume there, LinkedIn tricked me ("do you know these peoples") into "connecting" with former colleagues and recruiters can find me. That works well; the rest is rubbish and I don't know why they bother.
I removed all recruiters and similar, leaving only people I know and (mostly) other engineers... And even then I basically only check the notifications anyhow.
So I consider myself fortunate; by not taking LinkedIn that seriously, I've avoided a lot of... awkwardness, to put it nicely.
Yes and no. On other media platforms your behaviour and activities(both posts and add clicks) are the product. On other hand on LinkedIn you yourself is the product. And not in the influencer way.
Your communication metadata, your choices, you age, gender, location, and many other things are indeed products of companies like Facebook. But in a way, you are, too. Because the mere presence of yours draws some other people to that platform.
And celebrities who are famous outside of social media, are definitely more products themselves rather than the data associated with them.
On the other hand, on dating apps like Tinder, you yourself are the product in addition to any other information they might monetize in numerous ways.
Linkedin became cancer. Facebook-level. Why does a "professional networking" need posts with reactions? Why does the algo recommend me things of other people which I don't follow at at??
LinkedIn influences are an upgrade over LinkedIn Groups, such that groups are overrun with spam from recruiters. Which is to say LinkedIn Influences are not as bad as some alternatives.
Why would you even want to use it? Seriously, the only time people are using it is when they are looking for a new job, and this is usually a relatively a short time. After that you just turn off all notifications and basically mute the site for the next few years. I have to admit I created an inbox rule for automatically archiving all LI mails without reading as they were using all dirty tricks to send mails even after telling them not to (I hope this changed after the GDPR, but I'm not removing my rule just in case).
I'm starting to flag medium content now as I cannot read things anymore. They're paywalling me and I can't be asked to login or pay or whatever they want from me.
I find LinkedIn really cringy. And I haven't seen ONE post there that actually added value to my life.
It is also toxic as hell.
But I know people who got employment offers from LinkedIn. So it adds value in that sense.
I just mute and block those influencers. And check LinkedIn maybe twice a week.
One of the things I cannot find any excuse for is how fake people are. They are behaving in a fake manner even when they don't have to.
Like, someone makes an IoT project (usually copied from GitHub), and markets it like this- "I was having X problem. I though why not solve it with modern technology? So I made this innovative blah blah copy of something".
You can indeed curate, but I definitely get the vibe that cringe is the default mode on LinkedIn (which is still strictly better than Twitter’s default mode, toxicity).
In two words: “thoughtful” and “good-faith”. Content should be interesting and thoughtful rather than optimizing for clicks (obviously this isn’t compatible with an ad-based model). Dialog should be civil, charitable, kind, etc and strong norms for objectivity and neutrality. Low tolerance for overt ideological advocacy, authoritarian rhetoric, flame baiting, etc.
That’s “what it should look like”. To get there, I expect it’s “establish the right norms from the start and incentivize the right content and behaviors along the way”. To monetize, I don’t know and I don’t especially care.
Off the top of my head, it would have the tone of Facebook before they allowed public accounts outside of schools and right after they introduced news feed, it would be aggressively moderated, and it would cost enough money per month that people would think twice before engaging in a behavior that led to an account getting banned or using bots. There would be an initial setup fee of at least $100 along with a monthly subscription fee, and getting an account banned would result in a total loss of your payments and deletion of your profile.
* Users would explicitly agree that their profile posts are subject to moderation.
* Profiles would be private and users would be heavily discouraged from using a real name. Friending someone else would require an out of band secret key exchange. A new key would be required to add each person to a group and the entire group would be informed when a new user was added. The only people with real visibility would be the mods.
* There would be no advertising or tracking.
* The service would be located in a country that doesn't immediately bend over for Five Eyes, China, or Russia.
* There would be no org pages or corp accounts.
* Anyone holding public office, running for public office, or affiliated with a political campaign would be explicitly banned from using it at the EULA level. Group pages with more than X members would automatically be flagged for periodic review, and obvious attempts at political organizing for a campaign or movement such as BLM or the Proud Boys (chosen purely as examples of political movements) would result in a ban for all affiliated accounts.
* Egregious (as in obviously intentionally hostile rather than ignorant or inadvertent) racism, sexism, bigotry, etc would result in a ban.
* Any attempt at bullying would result in an immediate ban.
* Any attempt at bulk data collection would result in your account being suspended and flagged for review.
You get the idea. Social networks should be about sharing fun content with your real life social network. They should not be about self promotion, BS drama, politics, disinformation campaigns, advertising, influencing, branding, etc.
I don't think it would work on a platform on which people can organize to bully. That's an advantage of HN, it is hard to build such a community because of the lack of communication between users out of topics.
I pretty much don’t use unmoderated forums. (he said, on an unmoderated forum) But on any forum, the rotting stench of money draws many flies. That’s a lot of the problem.
BYW, how much do I get for posting this valuable wisdom?
Maybe curating LinkedIn is a skill that not many people desire to possess. I have an account because it's expected when you're looking for a job. I'm not interested in articles about business or whatever the good content on LinkedIn is supposed to be.
I find it pretty easy to skip past the recruiters and connection requests when I pop in from time to time. I just generally ignore all the random recruiter request that are way off target. (Though, in all fairness, my LinkedIn profile is very scanty.) And I'll rarely respond--usually with a polite no--to on-target ones given that I'm not really on the market. (And have never gotten a job since grad school decades ago that wasn't a personal contact.)
Even if you’re only connected with your acquaintances, the algorithm ensures that many of the posts your connections like or comment on will show up in your newsfeed.
That's the bane of social media platforms where engagement is low (Twitter suffers from this too). There are very few content creators, and especial on a professional network, there isn't enough content generated to share daily, so to generate content, the platform needs to dig deeper into the bottom of the barrel and show you second-level engagement (ie friend of yours commented or liked some rando's content).
Well, one of the main recruiting tools we use when trying to find qualified candidates is LN. so we’ll search for “design” or “engineering” and specific companies and then largely source from LN. So if you want to get in touch with people hiring I suspect LN is a good way. Their tooling for recruiters is pretty robust and sometimes works as you expect it to as well.
It's useful to know what the ranges are in your location.
I never got a job through it though, real life networking and personal connections generally yield higher salary opportunities than recruiter-sourced ones (if you're planning to stay outside of FAANG)
Never really occurred to me to read the feed on LinkedIn. I've liked about 3 things ever from people I actually know.
I get a fair number of interview requests through it though so it would have some value as a recruiting tool. Let's face it, CVs are a badly structured way of listing and distributing your employment history...
You say you haven't seen a single post there that added value to your life. Hypothetically, if you saw a post that DID add value to your life, what would that post(s) look like?
Many post on HN added value to my life, and it happens on a regular basis. As for posts shared on LI, I mainly feel awkward reading them. You know that when someone suddenly got active on LI they either got fired or are looking for prospects. It's just a kind of weird game, more so that people basically have to use their real names and reveal their employment history in order to benefit from the site, so they're particularly vulnerable. Everybody knows this, so they refrain from poking fun at them.
It’s amazing how antithetical this is to requiring real identity.
Proponents say anonymity is the cause of spam and all sorts of unwanted content online. Yet using one’s real identity can end up just being terribly inauthentic.
I never say anything I really think or feel under my real name which isn't utterly benign and uncontroversial. There is a profound sense of unsafeness when you're in full public view like that. It seems almost unavoidable that the end result is almost entirely watered down blathering.
I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.
I use LinkedIn as a professional identity placeholder and online resume for HR groups. I ignore pretty much all the posts because much of what I've sampled has been trash.
I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.
Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.
It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.
It's interesting to see some people feel this way. I don't really filter my views in posts on the web compared to conversations with (not very close) friends. It does feel like that could very well come back and bite me, maybe I'll lose jobs over "supporting hacktivism" or whatever. I guess it's a risk I'm willing to take to share my ideals.
Yes, this depends on many factors, like how strongly you feel about the case, how controversial it is, if you have kids, mortgage and so on.
I'll never forget when many years ago my boss, by that time a CEO of some major publicly traded companies, called me to his office and kindly asked I moderate my Usenet activity on some niche group. It turned out he was a lurker there and foresaw certain things I said might cause problems - it turned out he was right. And that was a long time before the Twitter era.
My bar for adding value to life might be lower than GP's but I do get value-adding posts in my feed. It's basically boring updates from people but made less boring because I know these people.
A friend from a previous job now leads a project for company X. Someone else switched their tech stack to Y. Another person migrates from cloud back to on-prem.
It might have to do with my policy of not adding random people as connections.
Late 2000s, I got a date thru LinkedIn. My romantic interest quipped "I'm glad LinkedIn's good for something." That was LinkedIn's high water mark for me.
I eventually cleared my profile (along with my other social accounts). I'll delete it outright once I'm confident my abandoned nym can't be repurposed into a sockpuppet.
at $job (inside a NOC), we used to joke that linkedin was the worst professional network,and the local network operator group IRC channel was the best channel.
It makes a ton of sense if you think about it, the people you want to connect with professionaly are people in the same workfield and their bosses. These people have A) far more intresting tidbits to share then recruitment and HR folk, and B) getting a job at their company is far easier if you they have some kind of clue of what you actually do during your previous job on a very fundemental level.
If Google's executives didn't perennially have their heads up their asses they would have turned Google+ into a LinkedIn competitor, integrated with their search platform.
They did have their heads up their asses, they didn't do anything because the company never innovates on new ways to make money that are actually simple and achievable. It's more interesting to go for things like self-driving cars and then fail at them.
And now we are stuck with this awful awful platform that is LinkedIn.
The influencers make me want to gouge my eyes out. It's just plain nauseating to read this empty drivel, and you can't escape it.
The worst is the obvious performative social justice messaging. Seeing my former CEO, who makes 111 times what his average coder makes, prattling on about equity is just plain awful.
Ditto for the regurgitated dozens of times stories of inspiration that are almost certainly fabricated or exaggerated. You see the same story over and over but it mutates and changes over time with little pictures added here and there......
And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and landed my dream job. You can too".
I think the reason is alluded to in the article: it's not polite to call out BS, and if you do the work involved is OOM larger than creating it.