For the most part, mine is fairly "professional": business-related posts, often promotional in nature, but not necessarily out of the place. The posts that are low-quality seem to come from recruiters, colleagues-of-colleagues that I haven't really met, etc. I suspect if I pruned a bit I'd not out the 10% or so of low quality.
Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#32It's not so much the war and politics - I don't see so much of that luckily - but all the "thought leaders", influencers and other grifters filling up the feed with their drivel.
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#33My favorite has to be the motivational gurus and hucksters, that just spout absolute nonsense. I saw one example, it was something like this:
"You don't understand scale.
Use $50 to buy 10 tomato plants.
In 6 months you have 250 tomatoes.
Plant those into 250 plants.
6 months you have 6250 plants.
Plant them.
6 months you have 156k tomatoes.
Plant them.
6 months you have 3.9MM tomatoes.
Sell them for $1 each."
Another genius went on with this motivational piece:
"If you double $1 every day, you will be a millionaire in 20 days. What's your excuse?"
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#34It feels like people want to be "though leaders" and boost their personal brand. Heck people are using to pick up dates. People are pushing a lot of political stuff too. It is kind of turning into facebook.
LinkedIn Lunatics https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
Thank you for sharing this. It's the sub I didn't know I needed.
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#35About a decade ago, we’d refer to LinkedIn as “the network everyone has, but nobody is on.” Meaning, everyone has an account but there’s no reason to log in unless you’re seeking an employment change. Looks like they tripled-down on features to change it. Always seeking DAU.
> Looks like they tripled-down on features to change it. Always seeking DAU. The irony is that all the extra nonsense keeps a lot of us away even more. I think even the next time I want to change jobs, there are platforms I'll use before I go back to LinkedIn. I guess it's like any social media platform. Once you invite too many people, you dilute the original purpose and community, and just end up with memes and cat…
LinkedIn is like certifications now:
There's an entire industry around claiming it's important, using it, optimizing it, etc.
But all of that is orthogonal to getting actual work done and the skills to do so.
... or in other words, LinkedIn is what would have happened to Craigslist, if CL had decided they wanted people to spend more time on the site, instead of concluding their business as quickly as possible.
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#36So I started social accounts for the Carolina Code Conference that I took over this past March. LinkedIn has outpaced them all and they were all started at the same time.
Content is delivered equally to all platforms, aside from a couple of experiments here and there.
Here are the numbers from a couple of weeks ago…
LinkedIn is by far the leader in the house, with 538 followers outpacing our 440 Substack subscribers followed by Instagram with 103, Twitter/X with 85, YouTube with 55, Threads with 30, Facebook with 18 and Mastodon with 16 followers. YouTube didn’t have any content until September, so that’s encouraging. Facebook has been a real disappointment so far.
Probably going to be shuttering the Threads and Facebook accounts soon to focus our efforts where it makes sense.
Despite the low follower counts, Mastodon has seen pretty good engagement from the followers that are there at least.
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#37You need to tune the algorithm. Are you following people who are pushing politics on their LinkedIns? I've found following relevant VCs, PMs, Academics, and corporate leadership has drastically improved my LinkedIn with almost zero noise. Mute and unfollow people who post too much politics on LinkedIn, and engage with content that is more relevant to you. The algorithm will tune itself for you accordingly
I didn’t think there was a way to mute people, only to unfollow or disconnect entirely.
I find it annoying that I can’t tell LinkedIn to show me less of this, like I can with other social networks.
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#38About a decade ago, we’d refer to LinkedIn as “the network everyone has, but nobody is on.” Meaning, everyone has an account but there’s no reason to log in unless you’re seeking an employment change. Looks like they tripled-down on features to change it. Always seeking DAU.
> Looks like they tripled-down on features to change it. Always seeking DAU. The irony is that all the extra nonsense keeps a lot of us away even more. I think even the next time I want to change jobs, there are platforms I'll use before I go back to LinkedIn. I guess it's like any social media platform. Once you invite too many people, you dilute the original purpose and community, and just end up with memes and cat…
> there are platforms I'll use
Citation needed.
Seriously though, what alternatives should we consider?
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#39Linkedin is the example of the clickbait engagement society we live in. Everything turns arround self promotion full of bullshit titles and descriptions of mostly thin air. Everybody is an uber executive leader responsible for mind blowing changes impacting the entire world.
Re: Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
#40LinkedIn started by hiring massive spam farms out of India. I don't know when it was ever respectable.