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Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

trungphan.substack.com

141–150 of 290 posts

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#141

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We used to troll each other with my friends by endorsing with Drupal skills :)

My favorite trio of endorsements is Lubrication, Flexibility and Potatoes.

I have an endorsement in bacon. It is my proudest endorsement.

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#142
post #37

I never understood why I always got so depressed reading LinkedIn, until I read The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao. And then I saw that LinkedIn consists almost entirely of clueless people talking to other clueless people, and exclusively in posturetalk (these are Rao’s terms - “clueless” means something specific). And if you haven’t read The Gervais Principle, I highly recommend it, although it may bum you out.

Posturetalk. Like the term.

It's my new portmanteau of the week. Last week I saw "grimfutures" and adopted that.

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#143

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This is true whenever your real identity is at stake tho? Almost everyone sanitizes their views in the public so much so there's no opinion in there anymore.

There's sanitizing, and then there's writing a parody of your life that's borderline low fantasy. If the joke is that everyone involved knows it's creative fiction, and I'm just the odd one out, then so be it. But if people reading those posts think it's anything more, I'm.... worried about people.

I really feel like I’m missing out. I never really check the feeds on LinkedIn.

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#144

I feel like TeamBlind is the exact opposite of LinkedIn -- no positivity, no one cares about mission or whatever, the #1 thing is TC and WLB, and everyone is anonymous. And yet its posts are much more honest, candid and just overall useful than those of LinkedIn.

Indeed, they are total opposite. I wonder if these are the same people who show different faces. I wonder about these people on LinkedIn, either they are total hypocrites on LinkedIn, or they totally buy on the corporate BS. I'm not sure which is worse!

I've had a career change recently and I joined a big American corp. I wasn't familiar with this type of environment. The level of bullshit and hypocrisy there is amazing. Fortunately, nobody in my team is into that.

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#145
Virtue signaling, culture that celebrates positivity-at-all-cost, and worshipping of executive leadership through emulation.

That's why that "i got pip'ed at Amazon" was such a breath of fresh air.

By far the best thing I've seen on Linkedin.

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#147
post #68

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My favorite riff on these is when the poster is headed to an interview but saves a dog along the way, and the dog turns out to be the interviewer.

On LinkedIn nobody knows you're a homeless dog.

Hey Newsbinator - I'm here live, I'm not a dog. On a side note to this thread, I saw your company MVP For SaaS and it's very much aligned with what I've wanted to do for a long time. How have you found client acquisition? I really like your idea of targeting marketing and design companies - that's super smart. Overall, excellent looking site :)

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#148
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the Gervais Principle, but only as a cynical joke that can sometimes be applied to real life. There's really no need to read the book. If you're interested in a laugh, just see the blog post [1]. The gist of it is that there are only three types of people who work in organizations: 1. At the top of the food chain are the sociopaths. Executives. 2. Below it are the clueless, the mid-manager who works nights and…

I know the book is a bit silly, but I only partially agree with your assessment, because I haven’t ever read anything that better describes existence within most large corporations. Would you be willing to elaborate on what you think it gets wrong?

The first blog post about the principle was amusing and offered some basic structure to the disorganized quality of work life, but it was the application of the principle that started to lose me. The machinations of striving to move from one position to the next started to feel rather nihilistic and cynical, even for me.

Re: Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

#150
post #89

There is a huge irony to Twitter using LinkedIn as a punching bag. Twitter is full of people pretending to be cool and popular and witty by doing things like making fun of LinkedIn posts for being fake.

And the irony goes one level deeper... (Or two if you're reading this)

I'm playing the role of the the smart one who thinks they have it figured it all out, and you're playing the pedantic one, right?

I definitely adopt a Hacker News voice when commenting here. But in my experience both HN and Reddit are different from most social products because I engage in lots of disparate conversations rather than having to to present a consistent personality and be building a brand and set of followers.

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