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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

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231–240 of 466 posts

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#231
post #63

I really consider getting rid of my car. I bought it a year ago, but it's only ever sat in the driveway, I never use it. The funny meta-thing about his post, is that the content he feels adds 0 value, is in fact his own post. He is literally making a post about a tool he doesn't use. It's the equivalent of a person making a blog post about a tv series they don't watch but have seen the trailer for; no actual value to…

The "I deleted my [Facebook, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok] account and this is why" is a genre in itself. They rarely say anything new.

Social media is a waste of time, the news feed is enraging, people put on a fake perfect persona, FOMO, insecurity, inauthentic connection, signaling, controversy, drama, dopamine, addiction. Unplug yourself, use analog tools, read books, have real life fun and deep bonding with your partner, friends and family etc.

It's all true, but we've heard it countless times and read it in the lifestyle columns of magazines all the time.

Indeed I think this is the next generation of self promotion and branding. You are above the plebs and the uniform little boxes that people package themselves into. You cannot be represented as a row in a database table, you are unique and special, you think outside the box, you go your own way, know what you want, think critically and independently and can refuse lowly temptations. You are not under the powers of the corporate machine. You delete your social media.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#232

I also closed my account recently because they wouldn't let me update my profile without providing a location. I've been a nomad most of the last 5 years and everything I do professionally is over the internet.

I noticed this as well and consider such practice a dark pattern. Unable to update exsisting information without providing new information.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#234
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is valueless content. I disagree. It poses several questions about the value of LinkedIn. And it spurred a discussion. If anything your comment really adds nothing here.. (Maybe some discussion, but a useful one?)

I read that because hn showed it on spot 1. I think it was a waste of time. I also started to think in this direction more the last few years: If we as a socity would be better of creating less but better, we would not have facebook or linkedin feets full of waste. We would have perhaps 10 hn articles per day, 10 world news, 1-2 local news and thats it. I would have the rest of my time 'free' of the burden of trying…

I'd say entertainment and it wasn't even very good at that right?

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#235
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I unfollow a lot of people This is the trick to turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate who you follow. Facebook in particular has many tools to do this, from preventing their content posting to your news feed to unfriending them altogether. Too many people just follow everyone they know, then complain when they start seeing content that gives them negative outcomes.…

My problem with Facebook is they actively try to make your feed controversial. You can unfriend 95% of the haters and some how that remaining 5% will fill up 50% of your feed, and it's not because they are posting more frequently.

This is ultimately why I stopped using Facebook. One day, I sat down for two hours to systematically unfriend, unfollow, and click “I don’t want to see stuff like this” on all of the memes, politics, and other crap. I’d unfollow friends who exclusively shared this stuff, and tried to train the algorithm to avoid cat videos and memes.

Something amazing happened in the middle. I started seeing engagement photos and wedding announcements and baby shower invites, from the three months prior. All things that I would have loved to know about at the time, but that were systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”. For a brief moment I thought I had saved my Facebook.

But then, I refreshed my page and the tide of low quality humor, cat pictures, and political memes came back in. I remember I kept trying to tell Facebook not to show me anything from LadBible, but no matter how many times I clicked “never show me content from this page”, literally the same videos came back. A week later I came back, and the feed was again overgrown with the stuff, like poison ivy.

These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention and they cannot be redeemed. At least, I couldn’t redeem mine.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#236
post #97

From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free so I'm mostly feeling positive about it, but I agree that like any social network it has downsides and can lead to psychological stress. Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as…

Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed". Its full of mostly useless content by wannabe thought leaders drowning out a few posts which may have been insightful/relevant. Job search and add/message connections are the only features I have found useful.

Some companies require engagement with social media as a requirement for advancement. So you are not wrong about the wannabe thought leaders. This is where they go. Nobody will make negative comments on these posts- it's like making a negative comment about your boss in public.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#237
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed". Its full of mostly useless content by wannabe thought leaders drowning out a few posts which may have been insightful/relevant. Job search and add/message connections are the only features I have found useful.

Of late (this year) in my experience the job section is mostly reposts of other jobs or positions already filled or fake roles. Any post by a company with no logo is virtually guaranteed to be spam. I'm seeing them side-by-side with the real post. It's highly polluted by these bad actors.

LinkedIn has their own job platform with the “Easy apply” feature, but also seems to scrape job ads from a lot of third-party sites.

The scraped ones are the bad ones. Bad formatting and categorisation, not kept up to date (the job might be expired on the original site but still displayed on LinkedIn) and you have to register and apply on an external site.

It’s quite ironic that LinkedIn is so against scraping despite doing it themselves.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Not to mention any names but you know who I'm talking about. Not trolling but I'm willing to bet that the majority here in HN, including me, do not know who you are talking about.

To me it seems like (in no particular order): Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Richard Branson, Guy Kawasaki.

The "verified" badge on there is a good heuristic for who not to follow (if not outright block them) because those are not people anymore, but marketing/PR operations.

LinkedIn desperately tries to get me to “follow” the people you mentioned which I always ignore however not following them still doesn’t isolate you from the noise.

It seems like everyone on LinkedIn is trying to be an “influencer” or wannabe thought leader posting bullshit motivational content or presenting obvious facts as something groundbreaking.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying the filter was useless, or you couldn’t find a single candidate out of hundreds?

Sorry. What I meant by "resume filter" was us manually scanning through the candidates. We put some criteria for C programmers into LinkedIn and got a bunch of web and .NET devs who had also mentioned C someplace. Perhaps skilled C devs just aren't looking for jobs on LinkedIn (totally possible! I wouldn't if I were looking), but I was kind of surprised that we got literally zero viable candidates. I expected at leas…

Many universities (at least in Europe) still teach some C in introductory level courses to build basic terminal apps with file I/O, string manipulation and pointers. One of my exams was to build a basic address book with fseek or draw a tic-tac-toe board form a struct.

When I see C on a resume with 0 industry experience I'm 99% sure it's that knowledge level of C which is nearly useless in real world.

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