[HN Gopher] Why is it so hard to share links on LinkedIn?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is it so hard to share links on LinkedIn?
Author : shortformblog
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-07-23 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Cancer on top of cancer. Please someone better this platform and
| end it.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| I think you'd either need a better job market or a platform
| appealing to an audience that isn't on LinkedIn to better it
| and end it. Right now, you aren't moving the white collar
| recruiters because LinkedIn caters to them so people who want
| jobs aren't going to your alternative.
|
| Maybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and
| minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new
| jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket
| onto LinkedIn's turf.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket
| onto LinkedIn's turf.
|
| Probably won't work because of classism
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Now that this is the second comment is added to your comment,
| wait for another 5-7 minutes, then edit your initial comment
| adding something short and witty about life, the universe, and
| everything, and see the comments and karma exploding!!! :)
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Speaking as someone who worked on doing exactly that for a
| while [1]: as long as all the jobs are there and all the job
| seekers are there, it's very hard to dislodge. Empirically,
| users want "all the jobs" more than they want UI improvements
| or lack of engagement-bait posts.
|
| One of the very first things I wrote down for my current
| company was "build a service, not a product", where "product"
| here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for
| that.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
| mock-possum wrote:
| With the current hiring landscape in web dev I'm not even
| sure all the jobs are there. :/
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Some users want 'all the jobs'. Many other users would prefer
| access to job listings/postings with a bit more integrity
| behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment,
| perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers,
| etc. Many job posters don't like dealing with it either, but
| "that's where all the job seekers are!". No, they're really
| not. It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement
| rather than good outcomes for either party.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| ...is all very easy to say, but empirically didn't work. Or
| at least, our specific attempt at it didn't.
|
| One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my
| previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of
| why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in
| all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of
| words long, and it doesn't even cover all the _big_ points
| of how complicated actually trying to build something
| better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking
| about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked
| on the problem for years, in the interest of being _only_ a
| twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of
| the complexity of working on a problem in its full
| complexity.
|
| ----
|
| > job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind
| the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment
|
| What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for?
|
| The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some
| platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the
| worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like
| to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is.
| Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or
| direct apps on your company website (which tend to be
| higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And
| thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry
| bye now".
|
| If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of
| places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if
| not actioned on in a short period of time and send a
| message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you
| really going to use an entirely different platform because
| they _say_ "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if
| that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of
| energy to sign up?
|
| ----
|
| > perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable
| numbers
|
| We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually
| (limiting the number of messages they could send
| candidates).
|
| In practice, this didn't make the average message
| significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it
| created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed
| at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't
| just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of
| their precious message credits. They stopped being willing
| to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-
| traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even
| though in the vast majority of cases they weren't
| exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior
| is frequently irrational or uninformed!).
|
| Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the
| apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully
| value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless
| you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between
| applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very
| noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect.
| That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed
| (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the
| first place).
|
| That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational,
| which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-
| information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-
| size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the
| worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of
| all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from
| "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only
| on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a
| result.
|
| And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects
| that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by
| (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since
| those are the ones that don't get matched through default
| channels).
|
| And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things -
| when you know they're problems. But those solutions create
| problems of their own, often in unexpected ways.
|
| ----
|
| > It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement
| rather than good outcomes for either party.
|
| This is true, but what's implicit in your argument here is
| the claim that "being a marketplace optimized for good
| outcomes" is in fact the primary criterion for being a
| successful platform.
|
| I'm not saying LinkedIn is good for job searching. It
| isn't. I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is
| not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself,
| and that building a better solution is harder than it
| seems.
|
| I don't mean to say it can't be done, or even that people
| shouldn't try. _I 'm_ trying again (just not with a
| platform), so obviously I think there is some degree of
| solution to be had here. I just think that this kind of
| comment betrays a kind of "one simple trick" attitude that
| just is not engaging with the complexity of the problem or
| with the fact that incentive structures often do not point
| to "make a thing that doesn't suck".
| mgkimsal wrote:
| By no means was I trying to say these will solve
| everything at all, and thanks for detailing a bit more of
| what you did.
|
| Was _just_ having a conversation with someone today about
| this topic too. Some companies get 80 applications, and
| someone will indeed actually at least put eyes on all 80.
| Other companies get 80, and they 'll just look at the
| first 3-5 then stop and move on to other stuff.
|
| >
|
| > I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not
| sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and
| that building a better solution is harder than it seems.
|
| Without a doubt. I've been asked a couple of times to
| join 'job board' startups, and there's never been a
| compelling hook as to how to differentiate or compete
| with indeed/linkedin/etc. There were ways to
| differentiate, but to me, they weren't compelling enough
| to throw my lot in with them. And... not surprisingly,
| years later, neither got very far. In one case, the
| 'hook' was to provide as detailed a profile as you could,
| asking users to input things like various NAICS codes to
| classify their work in various industries, so that people
| who know NAICS codes could search for your skills faster.
| That's certainly differentiating your platform, just not
| in a good way.
|
| > What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? ...
| But are you really going to use an entirely different
| platform because they say "no" rather than letting you
| infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or
| takes a bunch of energy to sign up?
|
| Not on its own, no. There likely are platforms that
| automatically close stuff out and _send an
| acknowledgement that the hiring company has passed on
| you_.... but I don 't think I've ever engaged with one in
| 20+ years. And the 'takes a bunch of energy to sign up' -
| ideally that's already something that is taken care of.
|
| The one place I see some growing value in 'job
| boards/markets' is in niche/focus - industry/skill niche
| and/or geographic niche. Job boards focusing on .net, or
| matlab, etc run by orgs who have some ability to bridge
| the gap between the hiring industry folks and the workers
| seem to be where it's at, but I seem to only know of a
| few (but expect that trend to grow).
|
| Thanks for the input and insights.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Is LinkedIn a good place to find jobs? I deleted my account a
| decade back over some privacy slight and I thought it was
| just some weird blogging platform for posturing now. Is it
| worthwhile as a jobs platform?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| LinkedIn grew because of massive spam. They bought spammers
| from India.
|
| That phase of the internet has gone so I do not think this is
| possible anymore.
| volkk wrote:
| actually doing some contract work for a competitor that is
| tackling job searching/candidate searching from a
| referral/recruiting perspective and i am very optimistic. i
| think if the execution goes well, it's going to be huge.
| they've raised a fairly sizeable seed round. somebody needs to
| kill linkedin--it's awful.
| EGreg wrote:
| You know, there is this maddening trend on HN to bemoan how
| networks owned by large centralized corporations with profit
| motives enshittify everything (Skype, Reddit, LinkedIn)
|
| But then as soon as an open, decentralized alternative not driven
| by the profit motive is introduced, it's knee-jerk criticized and
| downvoted. How do you expect anything to change if you won't
| support any solutions? (Other than, let's use the government
| regulations / antitrust / whatever).
|
| Here is a free and open alternative that I have been working on
| for 12 years:
|
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
|
| Here is exactly how it would reinvent the profit-driven ecosystem
| behind the current centralized social networks:
|
| https://qbix.com/ecosystem
|
| It does to LinkedIn, Twitter et al what the Web did to AOL, MSN
| etc. Putting the control in the hands of the community. Here is
| what that looks like:
|
| https://qbix.com/communities
|
| And here is an application of the technology in one vertical,
| that I'm building using it. You can build your own:
|
| https://rational.app
|
| There are other solutions too, like Mastodon and Matrix. I just
| think they are much further behind and people expect features
| comparable to Facebook and Twitter, much like they expect the
| Impossible Burger to be as good as a meat burger as possible
| before they can switch. It's not easy, but we need to support
| open source projects that get that done, rather than tear them
| apart. Just my 2c.
|
| _PS: If anyone with any sort of skills wants to contribute to
| this, more than happy to talk. My email is greg at the domain
| qbix.com_
| skrebbel wrote:
| HN doesn't have a single opinion. These are different people.
| Archelaos wrote:
| The OP speaks of a "trend". No matter whether he is right or
| wrong with his observation, his wording leaves room for
| diverse opinions.
| pmdr wrote:
| Yeah... about that...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > happy to talk
|
| Well done for just walking the walk.
| rjurney wrote:
| I have no trouble sharing links. Even multiple links in one post,
| although the first one will define the preview. Nor do I have a
| problem sharing images and including urls in the post body. Nor
| do I understand why people only share the link in the top
| comment.
|
| What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to
| include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other
| than that, how is sharing links painful?
|
| I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn
| resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my
| own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an
| expert is how I get work.
|
| The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group...
| one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to
| drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at
| navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.
| ianbicking wrote:
| Reading the article, I guess he's just saying that sharing a
| link will make the algorithm rank your post lower. This has
| been happening everywhere, I suppose, recently on Twitter,
| quite a while ago on Facebook... a combination of social
| networks wanting to keep readers captive on the platform,
| preferring content that's been adapted for the platform, and
| some (probably justified) suspicion that links are more
| promotional than informative.
|
| So what's "hard" is using SEO-style tricks to share a link
| without your post being pushed into obscurity. And for people
| without the time or desire to hack the algorithm, it means
| sharing links on LinkedIn isn't very effective.
| redrove wrote:
| It's not the trouble of sharing links, it's the fact that the
| post is downranked, did you even read the article?
| rjurney wrote:
| Yes, and I don't get it. Why would people read a post without
| a link? My link posts do fine.
| recursive wrote:
| > Why would people read a post without a link?
|
| Huh? People would read a post to understand its content.
| People read novels. Those don't have links.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to
| include some quotation or a summary of the link's content.
| Other than that, how is sharing links painful?
|
| It's explained in multiple parts but often sharing a link will
| "downrank" your post simply because it contains a link.
|
| This is also very common on social media sites, not just LI.
| ghusto wrote:
| My only guess as to why people put so much effort in trying to
| use platforms that are so obviously user-hostile, is the fear of
| missing out -- not being where everyone else is.
|
| If the company you're applying for cares whether you're on
| LinkedIn, consider withdrawing your application.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's where the audiences are. There's not really a way around
| it.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "When Network Effects Attack", the new zombie thriller.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| My previous employer's evil HR director weaponized employee
| Linked In profiles. The hr department would actively monitor
| employee linked in pages. You were expected to regularly post
| positive stuff about the company (it would come up in reviews),
| BUT if it looked like the employee was buffing their resume
| they would have the employee's manager bring the employee in to
| try and figure out if they were getting ready to quit, and in
| certain cases use those updates as the impetus for us to "find
| a reason" to PiP/fire the employee.
|
| Or, if you were a manager on HR's shitlist as someone they
| wanted gone, they would use employees updating their profile it
| as cause for the manager's manager to investigate if the
| manager should be fired for low staff morale, since the
| employees were seen as getting ready to quit, and so it must be
| the managers fault.
|
| The company's position was, you should only use your linked in
| profile to talk about how good the employer was, and anything
| else to promote the employee or look for a job was a trigger
| for "finding a reason to fire".
|
| It was horrible. Glad I'm not there anymore.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Absolutely ridiculous behavior. What if an employee didn't
| have a LinkedIn account or never logs into it?
|
| This is apparently what happens when your HR org is large and
| bored.
| redrove wrote:
| I hate LinkedIn from the bottom of my heart. It's absolute crap,
| just utter crap.
|
| It's exactly where all the LLM, SEO, "LeadGen" spam goes to and
| comes from.
|
| Social networks are awful but I think I despise this one the
| most.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't really like LinkedIn either, but I think this is one of
| the things they get right.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I do think Cory Doctorow has done an unwitting disservice with
| the word "enshitification". It's great to name a phenomenon, but
| after that it serves to hide more than it reveals. Far less often
| discussed is the emotional dynamics around 'social media'.
|
| Way I see it, most all BigTech social media is bitterness and
| resentment. The platform owners have as much contempt for the
| users as the users have for the platform.
|
| That is no basis for a 'community'.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I honesstly don't understand why _anyone_ posts on LinkedIn. It
| seems like such a pick me move from anyone who can 't build an
| audience on Twitter. The only people who I see post on LInkedIn
| are wanna-be "thought leaders" and people who are looking for a
| job.
|
| LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value
| proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a
| LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social
| proof and never think about it otherwise.
|
| As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform
| with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting
| Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to
| subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you
| do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.
| daedrdev wrote:
| They hope it will make them money
| rjurney wrote:
| Twitter is how I built my entire network in the Bay Area... it
| was amazing at flattening hierarchies, I could talk to anyone.
| Then at some point the recommender system changed and people in
| my network never saw tweets from one another. At that point it
| became useless for my career.
|
| Concurrently, LinkedIn sharing grew from nothing to awesome. I
| get most of my news about the latest developments in my field
| from LinkedIn. I get jobs by posting blog posts on LinkedIn, or
| summaries of interesting recent papers.
| simonw wrote:
| Which field? I'm still trying to get a feel for what kind of
| fields are active on LinkedIn these days.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The problem is that Twitter has also been enshittified and the
| audience is dwindling.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's cancerous how important "building an audience" and
| "engagement" has become to chronically-online people, and how
| it's seeping into meatspace, even into job applications.
|
| I hereby swear to never set out to "build a personal brand" in
| my life. Total toxic waste. I wish humanity could get over
| itself.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Because LinkedIn is where people bring their "professional"
| persona and can actually write in-depth on a subject. Which
| means those who know what they're talking about can actually
| write something worth reading.
|
| Twitter is a flaming toxic dumpster fire whose only purpose
| seems to be to post hot takes, or to gang up on and bully
| people who disagree with you 280 characters at a time.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I've never been a big user of LinkedIn but started writing the
| occasional blog post a few months back after my employer said I
| needed to increase my "external eminence". I was pleasantly
| surprised at the number of reactions and comments I got. More
| recently I have shared a few external links along with some
| commentary on them and hardly gotten any reactions or comments. I
| guess that explains it.
| lainga wrote:
| Can I ask why the employer wanted this of you? Were you
| compensated for your eminence embiggenment?
| cut3 wrote:
| It typically helps with recruitment in my experience.
| mihaaly wrote:
| LinkedIn is a safe place for raising eminence. Praising each
| other could safely be mandatory by the T&C with the retaliation
| of locking you out for life while keeping your profile public
| but clearing all your achievements and contacts except the very
| first one, very very few people would trigger that clause.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Not only that. LinkedIn is now plagued by these little diagrams
| posted and re-re-posted that tell absolutely nothing about a
| topic, useful just to some people that only want to get
| traction/attention on the platform. Then you have all these
| annoying suggestions of topics that at least for me 99% of the
| time I'm absolutely not interested in wasting my time on.
| Suggestions and posts that are from someone on the other side of
| the planet that I have absolutely no relation to. When I
| negatively posted about these diagrams, after few days my critic
| "magically" dissapeared from the platform. Gone. Then you are
| also invited to answer random questions I have zero interest on.
| I lost the count how many times I clicked "Not interested in
| topic" only to see it coming back over and over again. The list
| goes on and on. It is an absolutely rotten platform. Many many
| years ago LinkedIn was something completely different, and was
| quite enjoyable to use. Big companies really know how to ruin
| products.
| throwaway8481 wrote:
| LinkedIn was never perfect. It worked for some who had
| extensive people networks to bring to the platform, but the
| platform itself was always hot garbage. I still tell younger
| folk about the days when they would spam your entire address
| book. I'm still seen as the loony in my peer circle for having
| no LinkedIn presence. It's an industry standard of hot garbage.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I deleted my linkedin account around the beginning of covid and
| haven't thought about it since. That place was a disaster zone.
| burnte wrote:
| I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who
| think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it
| didn't exist, but have a profile because you have to play the
| game. I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable
| part of your LI profile is what you did (a short resume) and your
| connections number. If you connections number is over 500, that's
| a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. The quality of those
| connections does not matter to the people who look at that
| number.
|
| So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with
| 19 out of 20 users there against their will.
| lockedinspace wrote:
| That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's
| utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a
| person who has more connections than other even tho they have
| the same resume?
|
| Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a
| dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing.
|
| Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses
| themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people
| has accepted into their "network".
| bbarnett wrote:
| _so it 's a dumb metric_
|
| I have to ask, have you interacted with many recruiters?
| lockedinspace wrote:
| Fortunately quite many, maybe cause my sector is highly
| demanded, but having 1k,2k or whatever number of
| connections is not a metric for a lookable candidate. Years
| of experience, your github projects, open-source contribs
| are valuable metrics IMHO.
|
| Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection
| number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is
| better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.
| arjvik wrote:
| I think you're reading in too much to the above
| comment... from what I can tell they're just trying to
| say "it's a dumb metric because recruiters are dumb"
| lockedinspace wrote:
| Maybe I am overlapping my personal experience with
| others, but since I have a small number of connections,
| my job requests from recruiters in LI are normally
| optimal, quite elaborate and high-quality.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| All those recruiters have 1000's of connections! </s>
| burnte wrote:
| > That correlation between connections and being good/bad
| it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration
| a person who has more connections than other even tho they
| have the same resume?
|
| Would _I_? No, but I also have never once looked at someone
| 's LinkedIn when in the hiring process. I used to carefully
| curate who I connected with so that when looking at my
| connections, you could see it was a list of respected people
| in their fields, but I had barely over 100. Several
| recruiters told me point blank that doesn't matter at all. So
| I stopped bothering to care about my LI profile and
| connections, and suddenly had a LOT more activity with
| recruiters when I added more connections. Seemed quantity is
| truly valued over quality there.
|
| > Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so
| it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing.
|
| Yes, that was my point.
|
| > Would think it's more useful seeing how that person
| expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how
| many people has accepted into their "network".
|
| You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the
| end.
| lockedinspace wrote:
| >You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in
| the end.
|
| Maybe a high number of connections causes a better first-
| impression, but if the candidate does not know how to write
| or articulate a word makes things much harder. Overall,
| seeing how a person expresses their ideas in their natural
| language gives you a better impression of how a person
| thinks/operates.
|
| Which in the end matters, cause you are dealing with
| persons, not statistics.
|
| For first instance recruiters, having a large number of
| people in your LI can get you into the first recruitment
| stage, but you won't pass if you don't know how to
| communicate, express and confront ideas, that's how it
| works.
| Quothling wrote:
| I never really understood the negativity towards LinkedIn and
| I'm probably not one of those 4% considering I basically never
| use it. To me LI is the perfect sort of social network, where
| it's actually useful when you need it, and the rest of the time
| you can simply ignore it. In years where I'm not considering
| changing jobs I'll usually only open LI to add new colleagues,
| or click an e-mail to accept someone wanting to link up with
| me, and that's it. Well, I'll admit that I kind of use it as an
| online resume for myself because I dislike updating my old doc
| (I really need to get that written in something that isn't
| doc). If I get some big brain-think which is related to my
| professional life I'll write it down in a note app and keep it
| for when I actually want to "activate" the LI algorithm.
|
| To do that I'll post a few comments over a week, which seems to
| make LI think you're an active user, and then I'll post the
| most relevant / well written brain-think from my collection. If
| I'm feeling frisky I'll post two. A few days later my inbox
| will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless
| stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't
| worked with Java in 15 years), but usually there is something
| interesting in the ocean of shit. Some of my colleagues use it
| actively and dislike it, but use it because they think they
| have to. In my experience that's not the case at all. The 500+
| may be true, I crossed that long ago even though I've generally
| worked in non-tech enterprise so 80% of my connections have
| nothing to do with SWE.
|
| Maybe this means that I do fall under the 4%, but even if you
| hate LI, you should know that you can play it extremely casual.
| burnte wrote:
| I don't hate it, I just don't care about it. I'm in a field
| where I get jobs by what I've done, not how many work-friends
| I have on a website. I wish I didn't have to play the LI game
| but for some reason business execs think that connections
| number means something, so I have to play the game a little.
|
| > A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters
| spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that
| great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15
| years)
|
| Ditto, except I'm not even a programmer and never have been
| but I still get a flood of Java programming offers. I
| actually get so many I have "java developer" as a filtered
| phrase in my email. I get 50+ a month, every month, for a
| decade now.
|
| And really that's what most people get on LI, oodles of
| connection or sales spam, and irrelevant communications from
| people casting nets rather than actually being good
| recruiters and finding good people. That's why most people
| "hate" it, it's junk mail we actually _have_ to interact with
| sometimes. I spend maybe 2 minutes a month there, and wish I
| didn 't have to at all.
| tfsh wrote:
| I had about 1000 connections and found my linkedin homepage
| completely useless as it wasn't showing me anything about the
| people I care about (mostly uni friends, colleagues).
|
| I went through and whittled the list down to about 150 people I
| would either consider a friend or.close colleague.
|
| My homepage is still useless as linkedin shows me random
| trending posts, so that effort was a complete waste of time.
|
| It hadn't occured to me that recruiters would see less than n
| connections as a negative trait. I'd expect the opposite,
| someone with 1k connections (e.g) seems like someone who
| connects regardless.
| arjvik wrote:
| I'm at the point where I'd rather recruiters who care about
| useless metrics like that skip over me. The true signal makes
| itself known amongst the noise of spam-all recruiters.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under
| 500 and it's a bad thing.
|
| How is this supposed to be correlated with employee quality? I
| doubt there's a positive correlation
| DowagerDave wrote:
| the correlation (if any) is negative IME, as the lowest count
| people are long-term employees who haven't need to build a
| pseudo-employment network to get their next job; they've been
| busy heads down doing work. The content served up by LI is
| either low effort/low value listicles with vague, click-baity
| headlines, or grand, ego-puffing requests to generate said
| content (you've been selected to answer this question about
| database design!)
| notzane wrote:
| > I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable
| part of your LI profile is ... your connections number.
|
| How long ago was this? I've been talking to lots of recruiters
| and the most common points I hear are
|
| - add every skill
|
| - keywords in your descriptions so you show up in searches
|
| - gaps and job tenure
|
| Remote jobs apparently get a ton of fake candidates so some
| recruiters have started checking for verification and profile
| age as additional signals.
| rty32 wrote:
| This is some sort of the third type of users but really non-
| users -- real people you know that actually exist (like
| colleagues) but never have had a LinkedIn profile, yet they
| have a successful career.
| simonw wrote:
| > "Back in the day, people used to sort of get around LinkedIn
| stuff by just dropping a link in the comments and saying, 'Hey,
| check out the comments,'" Jung explains. "Problem is, LinkedIn
| actually parses if you're the first person to comment in your
| post, if you're the first person to add a link, even if you
| actually write, like, the website, but remove the .com and say
| 'dot com,' this algorithm is on to you. It's immediately going to
| take your post and downrank it."
|
| Is that really true? It sounds like the kind of superstition that
| shows up in opaque systems like LinkedIn and TikTok all the time.
| But maybe it IS true?
|
| I'd love to see experimental confirmation of this, but it's hard
| to design transparent experiments like that without the risk of
| burning a valuable LinkedIn account.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| Sounds spam detection
| scarface_74 wrote:
| As if most of the people who post prolifically on LinkedIn
| trying to be seen as "thought leaders" aren't spamming the
| site regardless of whether it has a link.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Hillel Wayne asked this on LinkedIn, and people came out of the
| woodwork to suggest they'd personally measured it. It does
| sound like something that could be a superstition, but it seems
| to be real.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _an organic audience on LinkedIn_
|
| Is there such a thing? Are there people actually interested in
| reading Thought Leader Posts?
|
| > _the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success_
|
| I have no idea how one defines such a thing, but is... is it at
| all correlated with anything? Or is it just warm fuzzy feelings,
| equivalent to Reddit points?
|
| Anyway, this reinforces me view that LinkedIn is a bad company
| that has not fundamentally changed its dark patterns in any
| significant way, and I'll be staying off of it until I'm on the
| brink of homelessness.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I'm bemused by the fact that there are people who actually engage
| with LinkedIn.
| personalityson wrote:
| Like Facebook, you use it to check on people's background
| holoduke wrote:
| Why is so fking hard to use the web version of the site on my
| mobile. Constant popups to force installing the app. I dont want
| apps. I only want websites. I hate you linkedin product owners.
| staticshock wrote:
| In defense of linkedin: there are different strains of toxicity
| and malevolence running rampant on every other major social media
| platform (body shaming, bullying, harassment, predation, scams,
| various kinds of radicalization, etc.), and _many_ of those
| strains are rather subdued on linkedin.
|
| Linkedin, of course, has some strains of its own (e.g. workism),
| but, surprisingly, I find it to be by far the healthiest social
| network out there.
|
| That's probably owing more to self censorship than to moderation
| or algorithmic curation: your "professional" persona is more on
| display here than anywhere else.
|
| So, yeah, sure, seems reasonable to suggest that linkedin has an
| anti-link bias, and the incentives for that bias are fairly
| intuitive. That being said, is it actually a bad thing, or does
| it also function as another tenet of their quiet but, in my mind,
| reasonably effective moderation approach?
| elashri wrote:
| To me, LinkedIn is another social media website where I find
| people posting achievements every month and get the feeling that
| I'm leftover with me doing PhD and wasting my time doing some
| less cool research. I find people getting titles, posting about
| their new certificated, moving to another job. Some are
| participating in some events in their company that I don't know
| about because the only events we have is seminars with some free
| food. I also find people from the same field of research posting
| about a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm that is going
| to change the world. All of that while I sat down and debug some
| weird CUDA bugs and do fits for a data that will measure some
| elementary particle and improve our physics understanding of the
| world (which actually seems much less cool that my writing made
| it sound). I don't know if that is just me or that people on
| LinkedIn are really those super cool people who have all these
| achievements and cool stuff to share. I updated my LinkedIn twice
| in a decade. One of them after I got my Masters, and the other
| one was reposting a post by mistake.
|
| Yes, I hate LinkedIn and I hate that many people in industry and
| academia expects you to have presence there. And I hate that
| networking is the first thing you should focus on to have a job.
|
| I don't want to be famous or influencer or grow an audience. I'm
| not interested about all marketing yourself aspect and keeping
| track of how do algorithms changes affect that. I really wish
| that I didn't have to create an account. I don't like visiting
| the algorithmic timeline with this all probably fake/not-very
| realistic posts.
| mihaaly wrote:
| People want to sell themselves. But in the stiff competition
| the way to remain in the race is by lowering their price
| (value), and so they easily get far from this (where thoughts
| could be exchanged with value produced):
| https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3bdb31644d5f165aa6342...
|
| Concerning LinkedIn I lower the ammount I believe the way and
| extent it is told.
| matrix87 wrote:
| Is it just me, or is LinkedIn giving priority to job postings
| from M$ and their subsidiaries?
|
| I get the impression that they are, and I'm a little skeptical of
| the legality of it
| osrec wrote:
| I only go to LinkedIn when I feel the urge to cringe. Everything
| about it is utterly cringeworthy.
|
| Even the marketing tools (which I was forced to use by a
| marketing company we hired) were so bad they made my skin crawl.
|
| The link related functionality only adds to the hell of this
| vile, spammy platform.
| mihaaly wrote:
| The UX of LinkedIn is terrible. Once I went into a futile debate
| with a support person (yes, it was that ancient time couple of
| years ago), so I had to conclude the 'support' is even worse. I
| do not use it that much like when I thought it would be good for
| finding a job (I did eventually, but not there) and memories
| fade, but I recall that searching for keywords is like triggering
| a random number generator, search profile gives notifications
| about dozens of new positions but when I trigger manually the
| very same search then it is 0 results, and whenever I did
| something then I got a notification that I just did that, very
| useful thanks, and it stayed there until you manually close it,
| also you have more and more otherwise, very annoying. Feels like
| genuine Microsoft quality.
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