I think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space and especially a professional space that is going to be your first impression for a new job prospect. Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects. Even if you'd like to run a live blog on some project you're working on as a sort of portfolio - do it on a platform you have full control of in case you want to rescind it or modify it later.

There are a lot of valid business interactions which are basically people in certain niche asking questions or talking about things which are going on which are super relevant to other companies in that niche. These can be informative (most industry insiders who might be interested in your live blog aren't subscribed to it, but most of them have LinkedIn accounts) and even lead to actual collaboration, purchases or funding.

ChatGPT takes on $globalevent are not examples of that. But they seem to be more favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm because of rather than despite how generic they are and how artificial their engagement boosting is.

I agree. If you follow people that are really interesting to you and if you don’t just connect with anyone who tries to connect with you, your feed can be pretty good. Sometimes LinkedIn reminds me of the good old days when everyone had a Twitter account and people could discuss there their work and other related stuff without too much politics involved

You are looking through the eyes of an individual contributor, but it is not a social network for individuals and job search is a side effect. The main audience is marketing and sales services and executives, to advertise and network in their niche. The generic posts are equivalent to billboard ads, made by people literally paid to spend their day doing marketing (and so post generic things on LinkedIn). What might be confusing is there is also a huge wannabe/aspirational individual entrepreneurs and marketers crowd that are LARPing being successful on it, and as an individual you might only see this surface.

> Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects.

At one of my past companies, I recall a recruiter disqualifying a candidate for a SWE role solely for having a "weird" headline banner image on their LinkedIn profile.

The "weird" image was a benign screenshot of a landscape backdrop of some Miyazaki film. No characters, no action sequences -- literally just trees, mountains, shit like that.

This is the kind of lunacy you're up against.

I’d imagine that there are not too many situations where someone having anime on their LinkedIn profile is not a huge red flag.

Nothing necessarily wrong with watching anime, but choosing to broadcast that on LinkedIn would generally demonstrate severely lacking judgement.

I think GP assumes that Myazaki's films have transcended the "anime" label. They certainly have with me, and with most mainstream film critics. But based on the LinkedIn reaction, and your comment, maybe not? That's interesting.

I think Miyazaki films are cool, but I seriously doubt most people who aren’t film buffs will really recognise them.

I think many if not most people will have negative associations when they think of adult anime enthusiasts, therefore most people with good social skills would not put anime on their LinkedIn.

I also probably wouldn’t want to hire someone who’s holding a gun in their LinkedIn photos (unless it was related to their work), even though I’m a hobbyist shooter myself. I think shooting is a cool hobby, but I understand that for many people it’s a weird enough hobby that it would be downright stupid to advertise it in an unrelated professional context.

The problem isn’t anime (or guns), it’s the poor judgement demonstrated by adding pointless question marks on what might otherwise be a good profile.

I think we agree with each other, but also that you missed my point: the "mistake", as it were, wasn't to do with social skills as much as assuming Miyazaki / Studio Ghibli had crossed into the mainstream, which... It seems isn't accurate.

Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"? (I don't know; I've never used LinkedIn in any capacity.)

> Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"?

I think it really depends on the film. I doubt the expected value of putting a special background on your LinkedIn profile is very high.

> gawk at

Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?

It's really just people being terminally online, but with a thin veneer of professional growth.

English speakers don't experience this, but in my language LinkedIn-speak has so many calques from English that, in order to understand it, I often have to translate words one by one to English and then the result back to my language.

> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space

people want to socialise in all sorts of contexts. think of it as hanging out at the bar after hours at a conference.

> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space

As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.

Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.

Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.

Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.

LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.

probably because businesses can now use it as a digital resume and bypass all those pesky *-descrimination laws.

I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles. It works to enhance their technical reputation and give them publicity, and it can be very informative for me.

But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting. My block list is vast, and my threshold for blocking is incredibly low.

Ultimately, it's probably only a community of about 100 experts that post informatively on the energy industry.

So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from (although admittedly I should probably be using Bluesky instead).

I've also had tens of people tell me they really enjoy my posts on LinkedIn - I tend to post slightly against the mainstream opinions in my industry, and with humour, so I may not have developed a particularly professional reputation, but I've gained more publicity than anyone else in my company outside of the Exec level.

I’ve learned this is the way to get the value from any social network, great suggestion.

Small business it actually can be a meaningful way to refer people digitally and make business connections.

I think big business it's also a way of keeping in contact with former colleagues so that when you're interested in jumping to another company you can do it easily in one place.

Otherwise it's a place for sales people to pump out garbage posts.

Yeah but who the heck even reads those? Whole 'social feed' is just bunch of pathetic 'look at me how I am engaging!' farts that is disgusting. Do recruiters participate? If yes who cares. Do engineers actually participate? I would expect some grifters and bullshitters but nobody serious.

If feels cringy and disgusting, apologies to engineers here who worked hard on that but that has no place in anything related to professionals and careers. I go there once every few years, do accept meaninglessly on all new connections and log off, ignoring all other parts. If I lose the job I'll update profile but otherwise the same.

I've seen people cross-post technical content on LI, but never use it as their main platform.

In any case, the best advice I got on LinkedIn was from a mentor helping me find my first SE job who told me: You don't have to like it, but you would be stupid not to use it.

Haha, you're absolutely right. But the kind of thing he's complaining about is on HN too. "Why the Cloudflare outage should never have happened" and so on and so forth. Everyone has wisdom to share but somehow they're never equivalently successful.

"As a third-year student in Computer Science at the University of Tzatziki, I would never use unwrap, I'd use expect, so then the error log that I skipped over would be accurate..." blahblahblah

Very fittingly in German one can describe messing something up as vergurken. Which basically means to cucumber something, which I assume the good people at the university of tsatziki are very qualified to teach about.

Highly entertaining.

Because your coworkers and management are there. The ones who advance, or decide who does. They’re creating one of the fields on which the working game is played. Also, they pollute the water.. the water the rest of us have to drink. It’s a culture.

Ugh, yes. I work in somewhat of small island of a subsidiary business unit within a very large organization, so I'm a bit out of the loop. Just going to work and doing my job. We had an interim employee from another site for a few months, and the amount of LinkedIn trading reminded me that I'm not playing the game that everyone else is.

> Because your coworkers and management are there

And investors.

You want to get a pulse in the market, or need to clean up the backlog of recruiters invitations because you're a bit OCD and feel bad about not answering people who probably used AI to send you this apparently so personal message, and you also were born poor, so even all those years living a comfortable life your first instinct towards people who could maybe want to hire you is being a nice agreeable folk, as old survival instincts never really die.

Then, it is like, things that are not good for you, but you do anyway like drinking sugary beverages, staying awake too late in the night, drinking that last couple beers that you didn't need to drink and didn't enjoy but then give you this morning headache.

Because it's being assumed that if you don't have LinkedIn then you are not a suitable candidate to hire, sometimes in pre-screening they explicitly ask to provide it, or get screened out. So when you make something like that a de facto requirement to get a job, or at least to be considered, then people will complain about it. Per your analogy, it's like I have to have a mandatory strip club membership to be considered for xyz.

My issue with LinkedIn goes beyond the cringeworthy content. It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT. Unlike other platforms where you can have some nicknames etc., you are most likely to have legit info in there. I wouldn't be surprised later if digital ID in smartphones will be required to update/sign up there, "to make sure we fight fake accounts!!"

> It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT.

It's the main platform of interest if you ever talk to data brokers just because of the richness of personal information, employment history, and social network (connections) information present there. Microsoft is sitting on a goldmine of personally-identifiable information, and the platform is aggressively scraped every millisecond for new data.

Never had this happen.

I've never been murdered either, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

the purpose of linkedin is to do online sleuthing when you get curious about what happened to somebody you half remember from high school.

then you find their profile and you're left with the question "Have they really been a manager at Arby's for twenty years, or were they a manager twenty years ago and then forgot they had a linkedin?"

I only use LinkedIn when im looking for a job or information from people I know. Or asking good people if they're looking.

Unfortunately I tend to miss people reaching out to me because I dont check it otherwise.

Right. During times I'm looking for a job, I use uBlock Origin to completely hide the feed. Otherwise, I see no reason to use LinkedIn at all anymore.

It‘s not so easy. LinkedIn is not solely about searching job. It provides a window into the world of coworkers, friends and managers alike. These are the fellow humans we like to watch and listen to. As a species we are well versed doing so which results in most of us watching and some of us providing content trying to get attention and (most of the time) making a fool of ourselves. We just cant help ourselves.

I been hacking on jobswithgpt.com, you don’t need to sign up either.

I do exactly that. Have a profile. Search for jobs. Apply.