[HN Gopher] LinkedIn's Alternate Universe
___________________________________________________________________
LinkedIn's Alternate Universe
Author : Benlights
Score : 161 points
Date : 2021-02-10 16:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (every.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (every.to)
| hankchinaski wrote:
| i would also want to burn linkedin to the ground, but i found
| pretty much most of my jobs through it so not sure how i would do
| otherwise
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| As a lawyer who depends on network building, especially a during
| no-contact world, LinkedIn is critical to me to stay up to speed,
| increase interaction with clients/colleagues, source new hires,
| etc.
| jlos wrote:
| LinkedIn is like every large internet gathering (Reddit,
| Facebook, Youtube, etc): 80% is a sea of thoughtless garbage, 15%
| is trivial but entertaining, and the remaining 5% is genuinely
| useful information and functionality that didn't exist 15 years
| ago. The stuff the article points out--hilariously--is the
| equivalent of browsing r/politics (or r/wallstreetbets the past 2
| weeks).
|
| For useful 5% LinkedIn my principles are:
|
| - I unfollow all companies and people so the newsfeed is totally
| empty.
|
| - I don't post, like, follow, or any other kind of interaction
|
| - I add everyone I meet professionally (school, work, networking,
| etc) immediately after meeting them.
|
| - I keep my profile updated with essentials only (pictures, work
| history, etc).
|
| This has some nice benefits that are hard to replicate:
|
| - In the event I need to reach out to that one person I used to
| work with, for whatever reason, I have a way to reach them
| without ever having to get personal contact info like an email
| address or phone number.
|
| - If I need to put a name to a face for someone in a professional
| network, I can do a glance through LinkedIn. I think everyone
| appreciates when someone takes the time to remember you, so this
| is really valuable.
|
| - The occasional "what is that one friend doing 5-10 years
| later". Just the other day I was browsing alumni from my school
| and saw a friend I haven't seen in about 10 years. Turns out, we
| both changed careers and went into software engineering!
| offtop5 wrote:
| While I love linkedin, as it makes it very easy to apply to so
| many jobs, the photos seriously need to be removed.
|
| A person's physical attractiveness should play no role in hiring,
| many people who are disabled might not be able to take photogenic
| pics. Those people are heavily disadvantaged, any person of color
| is heavily disadvantaged, I really hate the idea of social media
| creeping into LinkedIn.
|
| For one it doesn't make a lot of sense for your political or
| social views to become a part of your employability. It's a
| resume not a statement on who you are. Then again I generally
| hate social media because it leads to the least informed shouting
| the loudest.
| notahacker wrote:
| LinkedIn used to constantly harass me with popups asking me why
| I hadn't uploaded a photo. Guess I'd have felt a lot worse if
| the answer was "because I'm insecure about my appearance" or
| "because experience tells me some people have issues with my
| ethnicity" or "because I did upload a photo once, and then
| realised that the people who looked at my profile also looked
| at other profiles of people in completely different roles who
| had similar facial features to me and found it really creepy"
| and not simply that I didn't want to.
| edoceo wrote:
| I have a tool I use for hiring that purposely removes name,
| location and photos from applicants data that I review.
|
| It helps perception of the prime facts by removing largely
| irrelevant data.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I'd be interested in a tool like that. I try not to look at
| the names of applicants and drop anyone who supplies a
| headshot but it would be nice to have that information
| filtered out.
|
| Yes, several applicants supplied a headshot for the last
| engineering role I hired for.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| > A person's physical attractiveness should play no role in
| hiring
|
| Are you also against in-person or video interviews?
| offtop5 wrote:
| I would definitely be okay with phone only interviews, but
| this is more of a like when a recruiter's browsing through
| hundreds of candidates he or she shouldn't see pictures
| first.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| That's not all LinkedIn is for though. If it was a submit-
| your-resume-for-recruiter-screening website, your
| suggestion to remove the pictures would make sense. But
| it's used in a very different way which is why I don't
| think the pictures are a problem.
| offtop5 wrote:
| What are you talking about, you can definitely apply for
| jobs on LinkedIn and your photo is front and center. If
| the person receiving that application doesn't have the
| most positive reaction to your photo, maybe you suffer a
| disability which leaves your face disfigured, you're much
| less likely to get a job
| Igelau wrote:
| LinkedIn weirds me out. It's like there's a machine somewhere
| churning out bubbly young blondes and they all wind up as
| recruiters on LinkedIn. There was even one that billed herself as
| part of a combination job-search and matchmaking service: get an
| interview and a date! It's not surprising that some guys are
| getting confused, because there are users who are intentionally
| recreating an "enterprise" version of the thirst/influence
| dynamic of other social networks.
| ffhhj wrote:
| That's disgusting. Where?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Baser dynamics are definitely not absent from LI. I've heard of
| salesmen creating catfishing accounts and boosting their
| response rates from executives. But that's also the seedy
| underbelly that's always existed in enterprise- tales of HR
| violations at trade shows and industry conferences abound. It's
| just more surreal or perhaps hypernormalized to see it in the
| clean, sterile, ostensibly professional world of a business
| social network.
| cryptica wrote:
| I like LinkedIn. It's one of the few places on the internet which
| still has this 'wild west' vibe. I enjoy the random connection
| requests and scam attempts. It's the only social network which
| actually allows me to meet smart interesting people outside of my
| immediate network.
|
| Maybe LinkedIn doesn't work so well if you're a rich person, but
| as a regular person I really like it. I've established many
| successful personal and business connections through LinkedIn.
| rchaud wrote:
| This could just be re-titled as "Sometimes people turn their
| brain off when interacting online". Is it shocking anymore that
| people openly say bigoted stuff "with their real name, alma mater
| and workplace all listed"? They do this on Facebook as well.
|
| > In this story, straight from the weird world of LinkedIn,
| people use Skype in 2020, hiring managers give unsolicited
| feedback on performance at the end of an interview, and contracts
| are flourished and signed immediately.
|
| This phrasing really left a sour taste. Perish forbid people use
| Skype for a job interview. What, they couldn't FaceTime? This man
| living in a one-room apartment with his family couldn't have the
| decency to have an iPhone or join the rest of the 21st century in
| installing Zoom?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > people use Skype for a job interview
|
| The implication there is not that they use unfashionable
| communication methods, it's that the stories are fake reposts
| of fake stories that someone invented years ago, when using
| Skype was a regular thing.
| vorhemus wrote:
| I also have one:
| https://allagora.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/technology-makes-i...
|
| I still don't understand what the benefit of those standard text
| blocks is.
| [deleted]
| frereubu wrote:
| Previous discussion from 2 months ago with 277 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320536
| neals wrote:
| I treat everything on LinkedIn as a press release. Not just
| content from organizations, but especially that from individuals
| representing themselves or their (small) businesses.
|
| It's all just a dishonest representation of their 'best self'.
|
| The LinkedIn Crowd is just as bad as the Instagram influencer
| crowd and I hate what the internet is becoming.
| notahacker wrote:
| > The LinkedIn Crowd is just as bad as the Instagram influencer
| crowd
|
| No, it's _more_ fake and forced.
|
| I once sat through an hour meeting about "representing the
| company" better on LinkedIn which was triggered by a post by a
| sales guy which had been dutifully reshared by colleagues until
| a board member saw it and decided it was sexist. The post in
| question was one of those awful only-on-LinkedIn stories
| involving our hero, the sales guy, bumping into a distraught
| stranger recently laid off by the industry vertical he was
| selling into and comforting her with words of sage wisdom. It
| wasn't sexist _per se_ , but it was pretty nauseating and
| probably bullshit.
|
| After this, I think my colleague responsible for drumming up
| social media engagement better understood why I was
| uninterested in helping the company hit performance metrics by
| posting on a biweekly basis with random people in my network
| @mentioned to beg for likes.
|
| Give me a feed full of poses in improbably expensive clothing
| in front of a Santorini sunset, 31st takes of overly technical
| "improvised" guitar solos and artfully posed kids any day.
| indymike wrote:
| "No, it's more fake and forced."
|
| No more or no less than how most coworkers act at work.
| gowld wrote:
| Is this why men in business have learned to avoid talking to
| women in business? A man delivering a sales pitch to a man
| isn't offensive, but a man delivering a sales pitch to a
| woman is sexist. And then women notice that men avoid talking
| to them, frezing them out.
| notahacker wrote:
| I believe the assumption of sexism was based on the
| assumption the hysterical person requiring comfort from a
| kindly man didn't actually exist, but was inevitably cast
| as female.
|
| Personally I'm not particularly bothered by the gender of
| distressed people I might be able to calm down with a quiet
| word, but if I try to turn it into a teachable moment on
| LinkedIn then shoot me...
| josefresco wrote:
| I'm more self-conscious about posting to LinkedIn than any
| other network. I know will cross post content from Twitter, but
| even that needs to be re-written to be more "professional".
| It's strange.
| philihp wrote:
| When it comes to what school you went to, you can tell LinkedIn
| whatever you want. Just make sure you silently set it back to
| something true once you get that job offer and look confused when
| your recruiter thinks you went to school in Boston.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| LinkedIn is for recruiters. It is networking is a myth
| josefresco wrote:
| I enjoyed this article because I feel the same way about
| LinkedIn, and also really like the term "performative
| professionalism".
| [deleted]
| 333c wrote:
| It doesn't seem like the guidelines or FAQs mention this (so
| maybe the rule changed), but shouldn't this have (2020) in the
| title?
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| The vast majority of people have no reason to "network"
| professionally. They have nothing to give and nothing to take.
| jaaron wrote:
| I don't like LinkedIn as a _social network_ but as a hiring
| manager, there 's nothing else close to it. Sometimes we wish
| there were, but it definitely fills a niche.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what niche does Linkedin fill for your day-
| to-day work? Personally I only have a profile so people can see
| I physically actually exist, outside of that I don't think I've
| ever used the site for anything.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I thought LinkedIn was only for looking for jobs and getting
| business contacts, for business to business work. I see
| people posting personal "stories" and, to be honest, I'm a
| bit confused.
| teekert wrote:
| So often here on HN, things like: Object Orient Programming is
| absolute garbage! LinkedIn is the Devils social network! Python
| has all these WTFs, why aren't we killing it in favor of Julia?
| Here I am, I found my job through LinkedIn, applied to places
| where my classmates ended up. That was nice. And I use classes in
| Python when it suits me and I even build stuff that people
| appreciate (how!?). Oh yeah, I also enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, take
| my Karma!
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Okay.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I enjoy using LinkedIn
|
| Why? My timeline is exclusively about professional interests.
| Blog posts, interesting papers, etc. Sure there's marketing crap
| in there, but that's also nice as I get to see what my contacts
| are building / hustling. I find it inspiring. After all, most of
| them I know as actual people doing cool stuff.
|
| Meanwhile Twitter/Facebook are negativity cesspools, it's hard to
| spend much time there.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| It would be kind of cool to see a more reddit-y or hackernews-y
| professional networking site.
|
| Like, I'm glad I have a professional connection to my friends
| who've went into healthcare, but honestly I have no
| intellectual curiosity about medicine and I ignore it if it
| comes on my feed. I'd rather see the stuff you're talking about
| - interesting papers, blog posts, etc - in a professional
| context with possibly the opportunity to network. The culture
| is somewhat here on hackernews, although more geared towards
| startups and computer science, but I'd like to see it available
| for other professional fields.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That's because people's careers are tied to their Linkedin
| profiles, so naturally you're only going to get the most
| positive, shiny things being propped up on it.
|
| This feature also inhibits sharing though, which is why
| Linkedin has such an artificial feel about it.
| he11ow wrote:
| Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad
| is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online
| networking.
|
| - If you see it as a place to mostly transact with recruiters,
| Yes, your feed is absolutely going to be crap. If you see it as a
| place to have conversations with your professional community,
| your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with
| the best content.
|
| - If you see online networking as shouting-from-rooftops self
| promotion, of course you'll notice the worst of the worst
| shouters. If you realize anyone you'll ever need to engage with
| professionally is basically a click away, you start looking at
| what on these people's mind. You don't care about Mark Cuban or
| whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your
| real target audience talk about their pain points.
|
| - "Performing professionalism" is the best. Of all the social
| networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism:
| its users' fear for their own reputation. Being an ass might end
| up costing real dollars, so maybe best avoided, the logic goes.
| You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give
| you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in
| that.
|
| Plus, LinkedIn is nerdy. Text posts actually perform better than
| links. Attention is fairly aligned with follower count. (I've
| collected data for a year, and some pretty clear trends emerge)
|
| So yeah, it's good that we have this variant of a social network,
| if anything I wish there were more like it.
| kube-system wrote:
| > You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will
| give you points for being shitty to others.
|
| Pick any of the news stories in the sidebar which are related
| to social issues, and expand the comments.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| > Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or
| bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online
| networking.
|
| No, it's largely about me, as a reasonably tech-literate
| person, understanding abusive design and dishonest behavior.
| Sodman wrote:
| > If you see it as a place to have conversations with your
| professional community, your feed is going to look like a
| constant streamed event with the best content.
|
| Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? LinkedIn largely
| markets itself as an employee <-> recruiter <-> employer
| connection platform, and almost all of the posts I see reflect
| that. Let's say I mute the posts advertising job openings or
| blatantly pushing company PR. Most of what's remaining is just
| buzzword regurgitation by self-proclaimed "thought leaders"
| trying to make a name for themselves before they jump ship for
| a better title. There's a reason we don't see many LinkedIn
| links getting to the front page of HN - there's very little
| good original content there.
|
| If I want to get an honest opinion from professionals in my
| community, I'll follow them on twitter, read their blogs on
| their own platforms (or the likes of substack), or even reach
| out directly. Everything posted on LinkedIn is implicitly
| poisoned by the filter of "This post exists mostly to make me
| look good to future employers/employees", which rarely makes
| for good content.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| > Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this?
|
| Definitely not. No one I know uses LinkedIn except when they
| are looking for a new job.
|
| The ones I've found who are using it a lot are either: paid
| to, or desperate for work and try to fluff up and BS their
| way into a job.
| idolaspecus wrote:
| I think the obvious objection is that LinkedIn sees itself in
| the way you say reflects not "getting" it.
| Bakary wrote:
| For me the experience is bad not because I don't understand how
| the platform works but because it represents some of the
| soullessness of modern culture and online media. Most of the
| content that it posted there, even by real people doing real
| things, often sounds like self-parody or a TEDx talk. The
| platform itself warps the way people relate to the world. The
| point you raised about reputation is a good one: it's not just
| reputation in itself but also a certain culture and way of
| thinking that is unofficially enforced.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the usefulness of it but I can
| feel something dying inside of me each time I use it as well. I
| cannot for the life of me relate to someone who enjoys LinkedIn
| for its own sake.
| leokennis wrote:
| This exactly.
|
| Instagram has people posting "accidental" selfies that took 3
| hours of make up, 156 tries under a full lighting rig and
| then an hour of post processing.
|
| LinkedIn is full of that same brand of fake, just applied to
| work. Acting like some boring-ass conference was awesome,
| pretending that celebrating some minor work achievement with
| cake was the ultimate team building exercise etc.
| he11ow wrote:
| What I meant by "understand how online networking works" is
| not that you - or anyone else - has struggled to grasp which
| button to click to connect with someone. Hundreds of millions
| of people use LinkedIn, and yet that's not quite the use case
| I'm talking about, so let me be clearer:
|
| Most of the value lies in the messaging. You connect with
| someone. You read their stuff, or they read yours. You strike
| a conversation. You continue that conversation here and
| there. You hop on a call to get to know each other a little
| more. You continue chatting here and there. It could be a
| week, it could be two months, but do you see how easily now
| you're not "a vendor" or "a jobseeker", but, YOU?
|
| So your CV doesn't need to compete with a gazillion other
| CVs, before people start asking you if this opportunity is of
| interest. And clients come to you because they trust you.
| That's the kind of networking I'm talking about.
|
| Yeah, I like it. It gets me business. I get to engage with
| really nice people in my industry, who self-select because
| they find the stuff I write interesting. It's not dependent
| on my physical location or whether I got entry into some
| event.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Thanks for this. I always had the impression that it was
| just for recruiting and transactional networking. I'm gonna
| give it a try.
| tobmlt wrote:
| This is pretty much my experience with linked, to the
| extent that I use it at least.
|
| I see my friends from my old job posting about wind turbine
| projects using our software. See my last big project get
| released into the wild. Give them a thumbs up; keep in
| touch, keeps doors open. Find new doors. Not a time sink,
| more high quality data than googling jobs. Seems mostly
| helpful. I get spammed invites from many kids coming into
| industry/almost graduating, but I mostly like it - if they
| seem honest I accept and get to watch them take their first
| steps in the job world too. I've had seniors asking for
| advice on how to break into computational mechanics and try
| to help with project advice / sending resumes along.
| ...Make friends and influence folk. Not bad.
| Bakary wrote:
| To clarify, I was indeed talking about understanding the
| culture, and it is the culture itself that invokes a
| reaction of nausea. Engagement metrics, Medium-style
| "lessons learned" posts, growth hacking, hustle porn, the
| word "influencer" taken at face value, "storytelling",
| hashtag optimization, "adding value" etc. I live in the
| real world and I accept and understand that this stuff
| makes money and that it's not gonna change any time soon
| but the economic reality of it does not lessen the feeling
| of postmodern horror. I know there are plenty of genuine
| conversations about real, non-marketing projects
| interspersed around this but the general culture is
| disturbing on a profound level.
| airstrike wrote:
| This is so on point you should write a whole goddamn
| article and publish it
| serial_dev wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| Personally, I don't even mind shameless self promotion.
| Got a new cool job? Good for you. Are you giving talks at
| conferences? Amazing. You raised money, you screenshot
| positive reviews of your app, you post your open source
| package or article, that's all great, I might even share
| it or like it if I know you and want you to reach a part
| of my audience.
|
| What I can't stand is the "growth hacking". Claiming
| quotes as your own to look wise and insightful. Badly
| describing a step in Elon's career to sound like someone
| who never gives up. Bad Work memes by people who can't
| meme! "software devs vs designer" or "how DHL, UPS,
| Amazon delivers packages" tiktoks. Obviously
| dysfunctional bogus prototype from "now this" from the
| nineties disguised as something novel. Talking about how
| working for $tech company is special / not special at
| all. Posing in suit at home describing how difficult it
| is to work from home... For some reason, these posts
| annoy me, especially if they are obviously a copy of a
| post that went viral last week
|
| Just writing this list made me frustrated.
| [deleted]
| a_shane wrote:
| I totally agree with your take.
|
| I didn't like LinkedIn for a long time (I much preferred
| Twitter) but since becoming a business owner I've appreciated
| having a place where I can go and "talk shop" and connect with
| other business owners going through the same things I am.
|
| Maybe it's just that I've cultivated the right community, but
| at least 90% of the content I see on LinkedIn is interesting,
| personal, and thoughtful. I much prefer it to every other
| social network I use.
| folkrav wrote:
| > Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-
| in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own
| reputation.
|
| I've seen so much blatant bigotry and thinly veiled sexism on
| LinkedIn that I'm having a lot of trouble relating to this one.
|
| > You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will
| give you points for being shitty to others.
|
| Same here, I've seen plenty of shitty self-serving or downright
| condescending comments get rewarded with "claps" or whatever
| emoji they use on there.
| gowld wrote:
| Bigotry and Sexism aren't reputation-threatening for large
| swaths of the business world.
| jcims wrote:
| Unfortunately it's slowly turning into another Facebook
| content-wise.
|
| That and the Business Insider links. Does everyone else pay
| for a subscription or something?
| rmason wrote:
| Personally I would rather build things of value in my spare
| time. Personally LinkedIn world reminds me too much of a big
| corporate HR department. If you work in HR fine, but for the
| rest of us?
|
| Guess if your ambition is to climb the corporate ladder
| contributing a lot to open source and building a GitHub resume
| would more likely attract the companies you might want to work
| for in real life.
| notahacker wrote:
| > You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a
| whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience
| talk about their pain points.
|
| They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s)
| mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or
| posted memes about work ethic. Knowing what your client's PR
| line is _can_ be useful, but there 's a world of difference
| between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing
| actual pain points.
|
| Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this
| variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more
| user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model
| which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it
| unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met,
| forums which seem designed to _not_ result in interesting
| conversation.
| he11ow wrote:
| > They do that? I was under the impression my target
| audience(s) mostly shared corporate content.
|
| They really do. Mind, not ALL of them.
|
| If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly
| because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people
| are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they
| are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share
| corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you
| perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to
| be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually
| there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit
| on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the
| silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS.
|
| I'll share my own data: Professionally, I live at the
| intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty
| small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP
| practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But
| marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the
| question was how to even have that conversation, and around
| which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year,
| and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm
| amazed at the results.
|
| https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-
| on-...
|
| > dark patterns everywhere.
|
| Not disputing that, unfortunately.
| slibhb wrote:
| > Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP
| and financial marketing (pretty small niche!)
|
| The people who hate linkedin with a burning passion (or at
| least see it as a bizarre, soulless hellscape of
| inauthenticity) are people who see sentences like this and
| think "the horror, the horror".
|
| Maybe you really do "live at the intersection between NLP
| and financial marketing" but to me that just sounds like
| bullshit.
| notahacker wrote:
| Your example seems to be more about _you_ talking about
| potential client pain points and relating it to your
| solution. I don 't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for
| that (including some of the content put out by companies
| I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated
| leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some
| corporate PR is actually interesting.
|
| But all the times clients have told _me_ about pain points
| have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I
| 'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients
| or competitors!
| he11ow wrote:
| > That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is
| actually interesting.
|
| I am going to put a question mark next to this dichotomy,
| and here's why.
|
| This idea that you have "authenticity" vs. "corporate PR"
| is no longer true. For sure, there's still what we think
| of as "corporate PR" (Look at our employees volunteering!
| Look at the award we won!). But fundamentally, this idea
| that there are "corporates" and there are "workers" is
| fast becoming dated. You don't have to be a freelancer or
| an indie hacker with a SaaS side project to be a company
| of 1. You, and everyone else in the knowledge-work
| economy is a company of 1.
|
| The lines between who's "in" (an employee) and who's
| "out" (unemployed) are really blurred - and will only
| become more so. Contractors; freelancers; side-projects;
| these are all manifestations of the same thing. So when I
| say "my content" and you say "it's your corporate PR" I
| think is the wrong way to look at it: Trust IS personal.
| Views ARE personal. Heck, employment IS personal.
|
| > Your example seems to be more about you talking about
| potential client pain points.
|
| No, it really isn't. Anyone who builds stuff, side-
| projects or otherwise, knows you CAN build all sorts of
| stuff, but the question is whether you SHOULD. To
| understand what's worth building, I was - and still am -
| having a lot of conversations with clients. LinkedIn made
| it a whole lot easier, of course. the pain points are not
| "potential", they're real. And because the building is
| done is tandem with the market, it's hardly a wonder I
| position the services as a solution to those pain points.
|
| Maybe I got it all wrong but it seems to me this is what
| Steve Blank was talking about in the "The 4 steps to the
| epiphany."
| DC1350 wrote:
| I think you have a poor understanding of why the average
| LinkedIn user cares about their job. Most people would
| quit immediately if money wasn't a concern, so the idea
| of spending time posting about their career for fun comes
| off as extremely fake and inauthentic. Your motivation is
| different from normal which is why you don't get it. Are
| you self employed?
| drewcoo wrote:
| Or maybe the burden on appealing to customers* is on the
| business providing the service.
|
| * Or product, depending on point of view.
| Silhouette wrote:
| I rejoined LinkedIn a while back after quitting years ago. I've
| since had numerous connection requests from people I didn't
| know who didn't even reply to a short, friendly message back. I
| joined some popular groups related to my professional
| interests, and their content turned out to be close to 100%
| bad-subreddit-quality self-promotion. The valuable connections
| I do have on LinkedIn invariably originated with some encounter
| elsewhere and then one of us looking the other up, not through
| LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn has produced, to my knowledge, 0
| useful opportunities either for me or for someone in my network
| through me. Not a single one, ever.
|
| Meanwhile, I've been an active participant in many other online
| forums for decades, from old-school Usenet to HN. The opposite
| of everything I wrote above about LinkedIn applies with many of
| these other forums: I have enjoyed countless worthwhile
| discussions with interesting and/or professionally relevant
| people, replies or private messages I've received have been
| genuine and relevant, from time to time useful opportunities
| have been found for me or someone I was talking to, I've often
| found external material via those forums that was interesting
| or informative, etc.
|
| So am I bad at online networking, or is LinkedIn just a bad
| forum for useful online networking? IME, it's very obviously
| the latter, and that doesn't appear to have changed much during
| the extended period when I wasn't using it. The more I write
| here, the more I think it's time I got around to deleting that
| account (again).
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| This 100%. Don't waste time on linkedin. Online networking?
| Sounds like BS, sounds like another self help book, or some
| dumb TedX talk that says you aren't successful because you
| cross your legs when you sit. It's all nonsense and BS.
|
| There's a sector of society that is conned into believing the
| white collar koolaid and LinkedIn is the social network for
| that. Anyone who's really doing anything doesn't spend time
| there, ime.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| I get so many invites of recruiters; not to offer me a job, but
| to sell me their data science services and products.
|
| And what about the 'your expertise is required' messages that
| turn out to be questionnaires.
|
| It's getting a bit like FB.
| kodah wrote:
| Social networks are just vacuums of interest and I think they'll
| continue on that trajectory until an inevitable societal
| disinterest in centralized information sharing platforms.
|
| The internet _will never_ reflect reality.
|
| - If you walk around venting to everyone all the time, you will
| have no friends.
|
| - If you walk around virtue signaling and one-upping people all
| the time, you will have no friends.
|
| - If you walk around telling people all the prestigious companies
| and schools you've attended, you will have no friends.
|
| Except on the internet all of the above is totally acceptable and
| even encouraged. People love to share information about
| themselves, there's a psychological component to this. It feels
| good.
|
| - It feels good to let people know exactly how frustrated and
| slightly nihilistic with the world you are.
|
| - It feels good to unload on the political opposition and get
| likes and shares in return.
|
| - It feels good to have reductionist arguments that get cited on
| mainstream news.
|
| You can delve into plenty of reasons why people do this stuff.
| Personally, I don't think it matters and I say that as someone
| who detests social media so much that I stay off of it. People
| come to the internet for different reasons and those reasons find
| an intersection on social media. I love IRC primarily for this
| but also because it couples anonymity with the service. We get
| some abusers and manipulators but even the stalking and
| harassment attempts that people have tried on me are worth the
| stay. I can speak freely and relate to people in a way that would
| not be possible otherwise, and largely I thank the culture of
| Freenode and it's channels for that. Yet, Freenode is also a
| vacuum of interest, just one designed for nerds that communicate
| over ASCII anonymously.
|
| Join the network that's right for you, just like you would in
| real life.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Imagine you have a friend. A good friend.
|
| One day, when you're not paying attention, your friend says to
| you, in a tonguetwister, "ifyoudontmindmelookingthroughyouraddres
| sbookandcallingeveryonesaywhat?"
|
| "What?" you reply.
|
| "Nothing.", says friend.
|
| Later that day, when you're not looking, your friend copies all
| the numbers out of your address book and starts calling everyone.
| If they pick up the phone, friend says:
|
| "Good afternoon, Friend's Name, Your Name said you'd be
| interested in my new social network, would you like to sign up?"
|
| If you found out that this had happened, would you still be
| friends with this person? Would you still talk to them? Would you
| still want to know what they have to say?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| In fairness - a lot of social networks "growth hacked" with
| similarly seedy techniques, right?
| rurp wrote:
| If the only way to win in a particular market is through
| dishonest and scummy behavior, the rules should be changed
| via regulation.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| In fairness, I don't like any social network.
| vram22 wrote:
| Are you pro or con them? Seedy techniques are never fair,
| just seedy.
| KDJohnBrown wrote:
| LinkedIn is a ghetto with no redeeming value.
|
| It has close to 0 value for job seekers. In the past year I've
| received 5 real contacts from hiring managers (sadly all of whom
| wanted SRE, not DevOps. I find sre dull and I would rather be on
| the dole than waste my life in performance analysis).
|
| I also received over 1,500 connection requests and 5,000 InMails
| from parasitic headhunters. None of those had jobs amenable to my
| location or skillset. 75% of them were from spam houses in India.
| The other 25% were from generally incompetent headhunting
| sweatshops in the usa.
|
| I don't give a crap about inspirational stories frok the head of
| DailyMail (I Hired a FELON), or other social media garbage. I
| just wanted a job.
|
| I gave up on my search and deleted my linkedin protile for good
| this week. It was the most freeing feeling since deleting
| pagerduty and facebook.
|
| I worked for Reid Hoffman about 20 years ago. If I could get him
| on the phone I would ask him if he had any idea what a piece of
| trash linkedin has become.
| wikibob wrote:
| Could you elaborate on your understanding of the difference
| between SRE and DevOps?
| emrekzd wrote:
| Perhaps the author is in an alternate universe.
|
| Unlike what the author thinks linkedin revenue isn't largely
| fueled by recruiter business. It is driven by where he thinks
| they are weak: linkedin marketing solutions, or in friendlier
| words "feed interactions". See the most recent microsoft earnings
| report:
|
| https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....
|
| And unlike what the author thinks linkedin navigated the current
| climate around social networks pretty well. Not only they've
| succeeded in keeping the network out of the political
| environment, and showed strong growth in user base and engagement
| (see above report), they also ranked as the most trusted social
| network consistently according to Business Insider Digital Trust
| study:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/us-digital-trust-study-from-...
|
| I'm not going to argue the author does not have valid points, but
| the main argument doesn't connect with actual results.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Interestingly Quora has also adopted the LinkedIn self-promoting
| hustling style crossed with positivity/profundity porn.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| > Quora
|
| One online cesspool at a time please.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Certainly, I just think the two are in the same category,
| along with Medium, as opposed to the Facebook/Twitter or
| TikTok/Instagram/SnapChat categories. Different vibes and
| demographics.
| FlownScepter wrote:
| The description at the end about how it's basically a hostage
| situation but with the hostage takers trying to be fun is the
| most excellent metaphor for anything I've ever heard.
|
| It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content
| trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I
| personally find nauseating.
| xtracto wrote:
| >It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content
| trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I
| personally find nauseating.
|
| Haha, all LinkedIn posts do look like if Silicon Valley's Jared
| Dunn had written them.
| ed312 wrote:
| I think we're almost at the point where the predictive text bots
| could all chat with each other in the LinkedIn echo chamber. I
| look forward to the day where I get a notification from "me" on
| LinkedIn saying we just had a great interview and start at the
| new company next Monday.
| indymike wrote:
| You can use the built in suggestions in LinkedIn's chat to do
| exactly this.
| rchaud wrote:
| We are absolutely at that point. People are optimizing their
| content for the algorithm, and using keywords and hashtags so
| the machine recognizes patterns batter.
|
| Even on a mostly non-algorithmic feed like Reddit, the highest
| upvoted comments on popular subs always feature an extremely
| predictable response, like a dad joke, followed by similarly
| predictable sub-comments written solely to garner upvotes.
| adamnew123456 wrote:
| > Even on a mostly non-algorithmic feed like Reddit, the
| highest upvoted comments on popular subs always feature an
| extremely predictable response, like a dad joke, followed by
| similarly predictable sub-comments written solely to garner
| upvotes.
|
| The subreddit simulator is a good proof of this, especially
| once it was rebased on top of GPT-2. Generally, the closer a
| subreddit is to the top of the list the more it's content
| will look like the output of the language model.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| Someone needs to make a LinkedIn profile who's content is all
| GPT-2 generated from other posts and see how many job offers it
| gets.
| stewx wrote:
| > The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars
| speaks for itself.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| LinkedIn has provided a treasure trove of comedy material. I
| especially enjoy Joshua Fluke's youtube channel [1] where he
| shows cringeworthy team building videos he culled from LinkedIn.
|
| [1]. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-91UA-Xy2Cvb98deRXuggA
| slow_donkey wrote:
| Wish he didn't make fun of bad English from non-native speaking
| posts - of course they'll seem cringey to us. There's plenty of
| legitimate examples he could have used instead.
| kirykl wrote:
| I was turned down for a job I was fully qualified for due to not
| having enough contacts on linked in.
|
| The hiring manager said he wanted a candidate with greater linked
| presence.
|
| Actual scope of the job was fully orthogonal to linked in
| srswtf123 wrote:
| Here's a fun thing that happened to me on LinkedIn:
|
| A few years back, I was job hunting, using LinkedIn at bit to
| find leads. During this ongoing process, my father, who'd been
| receiving chemotherapy treatments passed away.
|
| Being the "technical one" it fell to me to manage his various
| accounts. I logged into his gmail from the same browser I'd used
| LinkedIn, and started to contact people he knew but was out of
| touch with.
|
| The next day, I started receiving email, from my dead father,
| from LinkedIn. Claiming he'd just joined the service and wanted
| to connect to me.
|
| I still don't have the words for this, years later.
|
| What exactly is wrong with these folks at LinkedIn? They seem
| like caricatures of actual humans to me now, and I no longer even
| bother to visit the site.
|
| If anything positive comes from cancel-culture, canceling
| LinkedIn would be my preference.
| leephillips wrote:
| Cancelling LinkedIn is super easy. I have a procmail entry that
| cans any mail from LinkedIn; I don't have an account with them;
| and I have an entry in my hosts file that removes them from the
| internet for me.
|
| But your story is disturbing. How might it have happened,
| technically speaking?
| srswtf123 wrote:
| I don't know the technical details; I simply walked away in
| disgust.
|
| But: I imagine since I had valid login credentials, and they
| were likely cached in a cookie, well, seems like they
| harvested cookies and went hog wild?
|
| Tbh, its things like this that Have prompted me to leave the
| industry entirely. My personal take is that there are _very
| few_ ethical people in C-level positions, and hence most
| companies are entirely unethical. YMMV
| ljm wrote:
| LinkedIn did some really dodgy shit before MS took over and
| started cleaning it up. Slowly.
|
| They tricked you into giving them access to your email. They
| used endorsements to trick you into logging back in (and
| hitting the previous trick login...). The marketing bods who
| came up with that shit will occupy a special place in hell
| along with every other growth hacker.
|
| The content is about as low value as on any other social
| network but compared to the toxic waste Twitter and FB spew
| out, the worst you'll see on LinkedIn is an annoying writing
| style where everyone seems to be drafting a motivational
| seminar or self help book.
| nthnclrk wrote:
| Those changes started happening years before Microsoft and
| have nothing to do with the acquisition.
| kube-system wrote:
| They were hit with a class action lawsuit for that
| MaanuAir wrote:
| That probably explains why there is a process to declare
| someone has passed away.
|
| I used it in a similar circumstance, years ago.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > If anything positive comes from cancel-culture
|
| This is just a strange word to describe customer's choice.
| diggernet wrote:
| My recent "LinkedIn is annoying" story:
|
| I rarely ever log in to LinkedIn, but do have their app on my
| phone (which I also rarely use). And I always ignore whatever
| stupid notifications it triggers (it seems they are almost as
| needy as Facebook). About a month ago, this LinkedIn notification
| pops up on my phone:
|
| "Ding! You're distracted (again). Here are tips for staying
| focused."
|
| I'm not distracted. I'm using my phone. And interrupting what I'm
| doing to tell me I'm distracted is...impressively oblivious.
| mcenedella wrote:
| The best way to get out of the LinkedIn treadmill is to take
| control of your own presentation. At Leet Resumes, we write
| engineering resumes for free (premium hosting services coming
| this fall): www.leetresumes.com
|
| Use us, or use someone else, or write your own resume and host it
| on your own personal site. It's better to own your own
| presentation on the web than rely on a distant, and perhaps not
| friendly, corporation.
| site-packages1 wrote:
| I don't think I would use a service called "leetresumes" but
| having your own site is good advice as a place with high SEO
| value when people DDG your name. However, this doesn't replace
| LinkedIn, unfortunately. Also to echo someone else, hiring
| managers love LI for good reason, it's easy to source a bunch
| of candidates with potentially niche experience.
| mattkevan wrote:
| At internet scale, Sturgeon's Law is six-sigma.
|
| For LinkedIn, add a couple of zeroes.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I fear people who enjoy using LinkedIn.
| k__ wrote:
| Got a bunch of jobs via LinkedIn.
|
| The recruiters only wasted my time, but I got a bunch of messages
| from CXOs and VPs that got me good gigs.
| prepend wrote:
| LinkedIn taught me, back in 2005, to never link my address book
| to anything. This has been so helpful because any time an app
| wants to do anything with my address book, I assume that they
| will do the dumbest, most embarrassing thing possible.
|
| Also, I used to have the "I don't care if people see what I do
| setting" turned on, because why not. Then LinkedIn started
| emailing people because I moused over their post and stuff. Some
| contact emailed me to ask what I needed from her and it was so
| weird. And the email it sent her was super incorrect and stupid
| and said something like "Prepend wants to get back in touch with
| you."
| gsmo wrote:
| I've muted most people in my network. The amount of self and
| mutual-mas2batory posting is nauseating.
| xtracto wrote:
| If you think about it, it is very similar to Facebook, where
| the majority of things people post are how happy they are and
| how successful they are; or the odd ranter. However LinkedIn
| does not have ranters.
| kazen44 wrote:
| which is weird when you think about it. Only showing
| succesfull and how happy you are is not a realistic view of
| life, and hiring candicates who are engaged in this behaviour
| should be a major red flag?
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| "what happens when you have a literally captive audience and the
| company can do whatever they want in terms of data abuse and
| features"
|
| If you are employed, you cannot fathom how dependent on linkedin
| some people are. It is when you are most vulnerable that they get
| that $5 to see who viewed your profile (I didn't even know they
| had that feature until some out-of-work friends were talking
| about it)
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I use it to keep in some level of contact with a wide group of
| work contacts as they move around the industry. But it's not an
| enjoyable experience. I wrote about how it could be improved in
| the hope someone would do it... so far still waiting.
| https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
| edoreld wrote:
| I exclusively use LinkedIn to find new jobs.
|
| I set it to "Open to Finding New Jobs", and then get 1 to 2
| applications per week. I found my last two jobs by recruiters
| contacting me.
|
| It works great for that. I never had any use for all the social
| networking.
| folkrav wrote:
| Same. Last two jobs were through LinkedIn recruiters.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Originally I had linkedin in 2009 to keep track of my contacts
| (as that was what they were for at the time, afaicr).
|
| Unfortunately I can't easily export contacts anymore, so I'm kind
| of stuck. The number of dark patterns linkedin uses is ... rather
| large. And every few months I come back, it seems like there's
| some new option to share my Personal data. Defaulted to "on" of
| course.
|
| I keep meaning to hand-copy all the contact information I still
| need and delete my account, but it's a lot of work so I keep
| putting it off.
| pge wrote:
| Here's how to get them out -
| https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/66844/exportin...
| forrestbrazeal wrote:
| A fairly unique and interesting feature of LinkedIn that I've
| noticed: posts seem to have a much longer tail than, say, Twitter
| or Facebook. If I share a text-based post with useful info, it's
| often still getting engagement 15 or even 30 days later.
|
| And because the median quality of LinkedIn posts is _so bad_ ,
| good, non self-aggrandizing posts really stand out. The algorithm
| is GREAT at elevating them.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is, posting on LinkedIn in good faith is
| the new attention economy market inefficiency.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-11 23:00 UTC)