[HN Gopher] LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
        
       https://ibb.co/fYQVfMWp https://ibb.co/MyTNnrGQ
        
       Author : hrncode
       Score  : 558 points
       Date   : 2026-03-29 08:58 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
       | arun6582 wrote:
       | linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again
        
         | porise wrote:
         | It's not as bad as JIRA, although JIRA is marginally more
         | useful than LinkedIn.
        
           | tom1337 wrote:
           | kinda offtopic but as somehow currently outgrowing trellos
           | capabilities, do you have any good suggestions instead of
           | Jira?
        
             | calderwoodra wrote:
             | Linear
        
             | maccard wrote:
             | The answer is unfortunately jira.
        
             | menno-dot-ai wrote:
             | Gitlab has pretty good Kanban functionality. People tend to
             | hate Jira but there aren't a lot of great alternatives
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | Jira's problem is that it's effectively free-form, and there
           | are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams - one
           | using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs
           | with story points, and a third using waterfall with time
           | estimates - all in the same project, with the same workflows,
           | and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release
           | fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your
           | team are generating reports from.
           | 
           | That and its dog slow, of course.
        
           | rvz wrote:
           | Both of them are equally garbage.
        
           | eddyg wrote:
           | Jira (hasn't been JIRA for a long time) is great when you
           | have proper Jira governance in place, with admins who say
           | "no, you can't have a new custom field, use this one with a
           | new context", configure good workflow transitions with
           | validators and conditions, design appropriate create, view
           | and edit screens (instead of using the same one for three
           | separate operations), etc. The problem is always crappy
           | administration, not Jira. Jira can be _fantastic_ when
           | properly managed.
        
           | hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
           | Ironically if you use jira you probably should be using
           | LinkedIn to escape it.
        
         | lucb1e wrote:
         | > i will get negative karma again
         | 
         | "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never
         | does any good, and it makes boring reading."
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
         | ghywertelling wrote:
         | If I were PM at LinkedIn, I would do some cross social network
         | info pollination to correct the LinkedIn. I would promote power
         | users from bluesky or twitter who are technical or otherwise
         | have lot of good analysis. Experts are prolific users and make
         | use of Zipf's Law to promote good content. Also through graph
         | analysis, the users who get followed by power users will be
         | promoted as well. Whatever you might say about Instagram and
         | Tiktok, their recommendation system is SOTA. I even love ads
         | from Instagram, they know exactly what kind of ads I might
         | engage with.
        
       | noitpmeder wrote:
       | The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll
       | speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through
       | molasses
        
         | lpcvoid wrote:
         | Imagine the MBA that had this idea. This is peak, distilled
         | Microslop engineering right there.
        
           | thunky wrote:
           | It's the user's fault. They vote for this crap with their
           | attention. Junk sites like this shouldn't exist but they do
           | amd aren't going anywhere until people stop using them.
        
             | kalaksi wrote:
             | Some users might enable these kind of features with their
             | attention, but I don't think users actually want these
             | features and any kind of "voting" is likely unintentional.
             | It's manipulation. The fault lies mainly with the company
             | and their carefully planned dark patterns. Ideally, users
             | should punish them by e.g. leaving the platform but there's
             | friction that may be a bigger problem than the dark
             | patterns (depending on user). And I don't think there are
             | any platforms that always guarantee good user experience
             | now and in the future.
             | 
             | Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are
             | and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time,
             | carefully balancing their attention to try to provide
             | markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the
             | misbehaving actors.
        
             | philistine wrote:
             | Users are not perfect agents. How can you expect the
             | average non-technical person to figure out what is
             | happening? For most people, if they don't see visually see
             | something happening on the screen, it doesn't exist. They
             | simply have no frame of reference to figure out that
             | LinkedIN is hijacking their scroll speed.
        
             | shimman wrote:
             | Is it really the users fault when the apps are literally
             | designed by neuroscientists that explicitly design it to be
             | addictive toward humans all of which is being funded by
             | monopolists companies whose leadership tend to have
             | antidemocratic views about humanity?
             | 
             | Maybe we should finally regulate these addict boxes as the
             | dangerous substances they are.
        
           | baal80spam wrote:
           | Nah, it's just bad engineering, period. I "like" aljazeera
           | too - they hijack your freaking PageDn and PageUp keys.
        
         | kjkjadksj wrote:
         | Scroll down through jobs, hit next page. Page reloads at bottom
         | of list on next page. Have to scroll up then scroll down, every
         | page.
         | 
         | Baffles me ui like this exists in 2026.
        
         | hrmtst93837 wrote:
         | Scroll hijacking like that feels like product brain rot. You
         | can see the trade in plain sight they slow the user down so
         | feed metrics look better, and the side effect is that keyboard
         | nav, accessibility tools, and UI automation all get wierd in
         | ways the people shipping it probably never have to touch.
         | 
         | Older laptops already choke on LinkedIn. Adding fake drag on
         | top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a
         | stalled car.
        
         | koinedad wrote:
         | The scroll jacking drives me nuts
        
         | Banditoz wrote:
         | I recently found a bypass for this. Put this in your ublock
         | origin custom rules:
         | www.linkedin.com##main:style(font-size: 16px !important;)
        
       | kace91 wrote:
       | I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I
       | login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor
       | images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what
       | taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
       | 
       | Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels
       | like an episode of Severance?
        
         | eitally wrote:
         | It's legitimately useful for networking, and also for keeping
         | track of professional events.
         | 
         | On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales
         | teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
         | 
         | This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the
         | app, or the memory consumption.
        
         | mft_ wrote:
         | I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading
         | the page within about 10s of doing so.
         | 
         | But it's the default for recruiters, and it's thus unavoidable
         | to support necessary communication with them.
         | 
         | I've been thinking recently it's surprising that they never
         | carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function -
         | ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some
         | product manager's metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the
         | enshittification hole, it's also understandable that they
         | didn't.
        
           | reactordev wrote:
           | You have to look at who owns LinkedIn and why building a
           | meetings and calendar was not "part of the plan"
        
             | mft_ wrote:
             | On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive)
             | enshittification is basically making decisions according to
             | incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.
             | 
             | On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams
             | for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to
             | benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You
             | could also build in limited access to Word for CV
             | creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and
             | then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge
             | recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
        
               | reactordev wrote:
               | Except those two divisions were at others ends of the
               | hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise
               | deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals
               | and meetings about meetings about how to have good
               | meetings... it's an MBA's wet dream.
        
               | mft_ wrote:
               | I think we're basically in violent agreement. MS sucks,
               | big organisations often suck, misaligned incentives
               | everywhere, etc.
        
         | jadbox wrote:
         | I think it depends on who you follow/connected with. I only
         | follow people that are prone to write their own posts, and I
         | feel Linkedin is less filled with AI crap as mass public
         | platforms like X.
        
           | paoliniluis wrote:
           | LinkedIn feed now brings dumb posts from AI bots that
           | contacts follow. All social networks tend to follow the same
           | principles now: bring to everyone's feed what's most
           | engaging, which is normally clickbaits or posts that use
           | exaggerated words
        
         | port3000 wrote:
         | It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse
         | at work. It has all the negative attributes associated with a
         | social network and none of the upsides (apart from the
         | occasional recruiter message).
        
           | monsieurbanana wrote:
           | I work remotely so I had no idea. I'd have thought that
           | unless you're in HR you wouldn't scroll a website whose
           | primary purpose is to look for new jobs.
        
             | edgyquant wrote:
             | That is not the primary purpose of LinkedIn though. It is
             | used extensively by a class of people who are generally
             | decision makers and those selling services to them.
        
             | mwexler wrote:
             | Much like X, it's what you choose to use it for. Papers are
             | posted, approaches are debated, and loose groups form to
             | align. It's easy to scroll past the pandering, but there is
             | useful stuff in the dross.
             | 
             | But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the
             | gems.
        
           | alsetmusic wrote:
           | I've not understood why people wanted it to be a social
           | network. That aspect always seemed bizarre to me until it had
           | been true for long enough to stopped being strange. But this
           | doesn't make sense to me either.
           | 
           | I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to
           | signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I
           | very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my
           | last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work
           | there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if
           | I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping
           | around for a new job, for example.
        
             | user_7832 wrote:
             | > I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly
             | revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a
             | new job, for example.
             | 
             | If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this.
             | You can edit your profile with or without a notification
             | post. You can select "show open to being hired only to
             | people outside your company".
             | 
             | Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but
             | if I understood you right, these things aren't really
             | issues.
        
             | cjbgkagh wrote:
             | Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they
             | couldn't buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.
             | 
             | A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting
             | LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and
             | maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse
             | the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long
             | term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market
             | so they were able to milk that for money.
        
               | Spooky23 wrote:
               | The same reason there's probably some dude pitching
               | adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
               | 
               | In the last 20 years "peer to peer", "Uber for X",
               | "gamification" and now of course "AI" were the must have
               | tech memes. Back in the day O'Reilly had a conference
               | dedicated to the revolution of... XML.
               | 
               | Social was just another one. Now, even the social
               | companies are kinda moving past social. It's more about
               | hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling
               | money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books
               | about how the social enterprise would revolutionize
               | business.
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of
               | M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it
               | needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of
               | course that's an easy target, it's already text based.
               | GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?
        
               | Spooky23 wrote:
               | I actually didn't know that was a thing. I was trying to
               | cook up something quick and absurd. Truth is stranger
               | than fiction!
        
               | siva7 wrote:
               | Yammer was probably one of the most bizarre m&a stories
               | ever.
        
             | mancerayder wrote:
             | Is it terrible if your employer finds that you're looking
             | for another job? If they like you, maybe they'll intervene
             | to make your life better?
             | 
             | If they hate you, they're less likely to go through a
             | termination process including severance.
             | 
             | I used to always worry about them finding out. Now, I'm
             | having trouble not blurting it out from the rooftops.
        
           | andrewl-hn wrote:
           | > It's a social network that became socially acceptable to
           | browse at work.
           | 
           | YMMV. I've heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work
           | was treated as a massive red flag: "this person looks
           | elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore".
        
             | freeAgent wrote:
             | It depends on your role. People in sales have it open all
             | the time since it's a legitimate research tool for them.
        
               | matwood wrote:
               | Yep. Sales and biz dev people use LI constantly not
               | necessarily for connecting, but learning about contacts.
        
             | whatevaa wrote:
             | No more such thing as commit to the company in western
             | world anymore. Companies are definitely not commited to
             | you.
        
             | torginus wrote:
             | This. I would rather post on any other social media site at
             | work than Linkedin. It's a major signal that the person is
             | looking for work.
        
               | siva7 wrote:
               | Especially the "Let me show you i have a open linkedin
               | tab while screen sharing so you guys know i hate this
               | place" move as if anyone cares.
        
               | kube-system wrote:
               | I can't imagine working in a place toxic enough where:
               | 
               | 1. That's the default presumption (rather than someone
               | doing networking for their current role)
               | 
               | 2. Where "looking for another job" is a point of
               | contention
               | 
               | Any good senior engineer should be keeping in touch with
               | others in the industry. And good teams are made up of
               | people with good communication skills who want to be
               | there.
        
             | layer8 wrote:
             | If you're considered valuable at your current company,
             | instead of being a red flag it can help you get a raise or
             | other benefits.
        
         | projektfu wrote:
         | Over time, when I see a login gate on a website, I've gone from
         | "I should join this exclusive site" ca. 2005 to "I guess they
         | don't want me here" currently. If there are others like me,
         | Linked in is a net negative for hiring. I literally have no
         | idea what's on it anymore.
        
           | kleiba wrote:
           | +1 I haven't made an account on a new website in years, and
           | god forbid I will ever link my gmail with anything other than
           | g-suite.
        
         | jmye wrote:
         | I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if
         | that's where my network is and that's where everyone posts
         | jobs. But I don't think that's what you're asking.
         | 
         | I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the
         | site. Some of the "career coaching" groups suggest posting
         | constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but
         | thats only the content generation part. I'd guess some
         | recruiters follow it?
         | 
         | But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who's
         | spending more than 30 seconds seeing "oh, John/Jane got a new
         | job, cool" and then logging off.
         | 
         | Maybe it's people stuck trying to find work who think there
         | might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
        
           | psalaun wrote:
           | I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react
           | to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I
           | only follow people posting these opinions). It's the closest
           | we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won't ever
           | meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree)
           | politely with them because I'm CTO of a company and I can't
           | publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or
           | ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts
           | with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of
           | ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.
           | 
           | The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just
           | a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform:
           | you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB,
           | therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to
           | note that trolls are often retired people or professionals
           | high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for
           | looking stupid on internet.
           | 
           | This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
        
             | hatmanstack wrote:
             | The feed actually surfaced people working on open source
             | projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real
             | collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't
             | have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's
             | a useful signal source for things outside your usual field
             | of view.
        
           | cosmodisk wrote:
           | I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics
           | who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts,
           | but there's more than that. I've met some people who
           | tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later
           | became friends and our kids play together. I did meet a lot
           | of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met
           | otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in
           | those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often
           | involved in interesting and challenging discussions on
           | various technical and other topics.
           | 
           | The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want
           | to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's
           | what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with
           | people who are really good in what they do and perhaps
           | exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's
           | inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in
           | any other large forum without very strong moderation.
        
         | quinndupont wrote:
         | Desperate job seekers. Nobody wants LinkedIn.
        
           | DaSHacka wrote:
           | "No one goes there, it's too crowded" type energy
        
         | itsthecourier wrote:
         | to investigate people of interest
        
         | wombat-man wrote:
         | I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what
         | they're up to these days.
        
         | subscribed wrote:
         | Recruiters keep reaching out. I didn't have to seek a new job
         | in perhaps last 15 years, all I had to do was to flip "looking
         | for opportunities" on and start sorting out the messages and
         | emails.
         | 
         | This works.
        
         | catcowcostume wrote:
         | It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look
         | for candidates. That's why.
        
           | SV_BubbleTime wrote:
           | Do they not also make posts on Indeed or other non-social
           | sites?
        
             | dinkleberg wrote:
             | The difference is that the recruiters come to you on
             | LinkedIn. This is quite handy when you're currently
             | employed since opportunities come to you that you wouldn't
             | have otherwise looked for.
        
               | SV_BubbleTime wrote:
               | Cool, even more reason to dislike it. I want my people
               | doing their work, not wondering if the grass is greener
               | somewhere else.
        
         | beAbU wrote:
         | I got my last job there, and I have a steady queue of
         | recruiters reaching out the whole time. So I will probably
         | continue to use it as long as I need to eat. I don't engage
         | with the feed at all though.
         | 
         | I believe the same applies to many others as well
        
           | saadn92 wrote:
           | This. That's the only reason I'm on there too. I completely
           | avoid the news feed, but it does help when you having people
           | reaching out and you need jobs.
        
           | bluedino wrote:
           | I've also gotten my last few jobs there. It's great for that.
           | Even if it's 90% low effort recruiter spam.
           | 
           | It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza
           | parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of
           | great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy
           | reels. Blah.
        
             | torginus wrote:
             | I think one of the most objectively pathetic things in the
             | world is trying to ride the counterculture wave against a
             | thing, while shilling the exact same thing.
             | 
             | Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? _proceeds to
             | write influencerslop_
        
             | sameerds wrote:
             | You forgot "I am honoured and humbled to announce <insert
             | mundane recognition>."
        
               | le-mark wrote:
               | The comedy/tragedy of this is; whenever I talk to people
               | outside of engineering at social gatherings, this is what
               | they do. Tell me their resume and accomplishments. I'm
               | like, can we just a have a conversation please?
        
               | raw_anon_1111 wrote:
               | I always asks the question "what keeps you busy"? People
               | think my wife and I are retired because of how often we
               | travel. I say I'm not, I work remotely and try to keep
               | the conversation away from work.
        
           | matsemann wrote:
           | It's a difference between "using it" and just having a
           | dormant profile you wake to live when interested, though.
        
           | pimeys wrote:
           | Beeper has LinkedIn integration, so you can chat with
           | recruiters with any Matrix app without ever opening the
           | website.
           | 
           | https://www.beeper.com/
        
             | wolvoleo wrote:
             | Still need a LinkedIn account for beeper to connect to
             | though.
        
         | Spooky23 wrote:
         | It's a great way to spot phonies if you don't have a lot of
         | time. If you encounter someone who seems to know things but
         | you're not sure what or how well, check LinkedIn.
         | 
         | If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit
         | artists and readily ignored.
        
           | jrm4 wrote:
           | And the converse is true: If you read something with
           | substance, you can know it is VERY important to them; they're
           | likely literally risking their livelihood to do so.
        
         | DeathArrow wrote:
         | Yes, it's low quality but you can find employment, you can
         | establish some industry connections and you can find the right
         | people to hire if you need to.
         | 
         | Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they
         | visit when they need to.
        
         | MegaDeKay wrote:
         | A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job
         | searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the
         | coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain
         | visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to
         | sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how
         | to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc)
         | and stuff like that.
         | 
         | The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
        
           | justin66 wrote:
           | From the online job searcher's point of view, it's one of the
           | least awful circle jerks in a Dante's Inferno-esque series of
           | circle jerks. It is only the first or second circle jerk, at
           | worst.
        
         | inaros wrote:
         | I always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating
         | site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.
        
           | tartoran wrote:
           | Wait, are you dating on LinkedIn?
        
         | richardstahl wrote:
         | This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which
         | helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.
         | 
         | https://www.cringebot3000.com/
        
         | xantronix wrote:
         | The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the
         | best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional
         | C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining
         | hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to
         | change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at
         | least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist
         | some of their most inane excesses.
        
           | mancerayder wrote:
           | That's the first I've heard of LinkedIn-driven revolutionary
           | endeavors towards social change. I think that's the point
           | we've all reached given all else has failed.
        
         | dainank wrote:
         | In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked
         | with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as
         | 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring
         | enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the
         | odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely
         | ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I
         | think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are,
         | thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to
         | what I find here on HackerNews.
        
         | riffraff wrote:
         | I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling
         | to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't
         | have their email or phone number anymore.
         | 
         | I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring
         | X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to
         | pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of
         | agentic development. Let me explain.").
         | 
         | I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and
         | who is their target audience.
        
         | Henchman21 wrote:
         | It feels important to remember that _all_ the Severed employees
         | were there by choice. Perhaps not the choice of the innie, but
         | hey someone made that choice for their reasons.
        
         | nacozarina wrote:
         | it's deteriorated to the point where shit-posting is becoming
         | normalized, so it has that going for it
        
         | markus_zhang wrote:
         | The articles are mostly BS, but I got all of my previous jobs
         | from LinkedIn, except for the first one. Which else should I
         | use? I guess networking is better, but I'm not really a
         | networking type of person. LinkedIn at least shows me which
         | companies have openings so I can network with the hiring
         | managers. Those openings could be fake, but hey at least there
         | is some data.
        
         | andyjohnson0 wrote:
         | I used it 18 months ago when I was looking for a job, and I
         | found a paid subscription genuinely useful. Before and since:
         | almost never. If I change jobs again then I'll use it again.
         | 
         | At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting
         | garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand
         | how dismal the platform is.
        
         | anonu wrote:
         | Many people use it.
         | 
         | But let's be honest...
         | 
         | it's not just a social media platform.
         | 
         | It's a mindset. A daily ritual. A lifestyle. A place where
         | every thought becomes a "lesson"
         | 
         | ...
         | 
         | Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange
         | staccato posts.
         | 
         | Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things
         | happening in your industry you can learn about.
         | 
         | But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work
         | family dribble.
        
           | jhickok wrote:
           | "My father died from cancer, and this is what it taught me
           | about B2B SaaS sales..."
        
         | aenis wrote:
         | Easy. That is the only social media site that is so comically
         | bad, that it does not trigger me in any way with the feed. I am
         | using it as a way to reach out to colleagues from the past - a
         | bit like facebook circa 10 years ago.
         | 
         | I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have
         | deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a
         | small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the
         | easiest solution.
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | As a hiring manager, it's still the best place to try and find
         | people for a given role.
         | 
         | Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like
         | graphics development.
        
           | timokoesters wrote:
           | Do you have advice for building up this network for graphics
           | development? I'm a Master's student building a custom
           | rendering stack with wgpu and it's difficult to meet people
           | interested in specific skills like rendering.
        
             | dagmx wrote:
             | If you're in a big city, there are likely meetups locally
             | for game devs (usually amateurs but a few professionals
             | show up)
             | 
             | If you aren't in a location with meetups , the best bet is
             | finding online game dev communities.
        
         | franktankbank wrote:
         | Yea, I quit recently, got absolutely nothing positive out.
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Because after Stackoverflow Jobs went bust, LinkedIn and Xing
         | (in DACH space), are the best ways to reach out to head
         | hunters.
         | 
         | All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
        
           | le-mark wrote:
           | I will never understand why SO did not lean into its jobs
           | feature. I got two jobs from it, I thought it was great.
        
         | mancerayder wrote:
         | You had me almost spit out my coffee. That's hilariously on
         | point.
         | 
         | My favorite is this:
         | 
         | The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary,
         | Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author.
         | Father."
         | 
         | That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
         | 
         | Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and
         | various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income
         | and achievements to shame.
        
         | rirze wrote:
         | It's great for niche fields or small credentialed network
         | groups. The social media side is complete nonsense, don't use
         | it.
         | 
         | I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
        
         | nottorp wrote:
         | > Out of all places to doomscroll
         | 
         | Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs
         | parts?
        
         | tyleo wrote:
         | I use LinkedIn. I've posted some blog posts on both Hacker News
         | and LinkedIn and determined that LinkedIn is a bit more
         | evergreen. A post on the HN front page gets thousands or tens
         | of thousands of views in a day but a LinkedIn post has
         | thousands in the long tail.
         | 
         | I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI
         | generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my
         | posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
         | 
         | Truthfully, I think it's easy to rise above the slop since so
         | much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed.
         | Even fewer post things to it.
         | 
         | The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping
         | contacts.
         | 
         | I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of
         | LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few
         | times we've interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn
         | posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through
         | their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been
         | spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people
         | everyday during the work day, which looks like a big
         | distraction when they're doing it constantly.
        
           | estimator7292 wrote:
           | > I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of
           | LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing.
           | 
           | About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their
           | management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO
           | overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have
           | enough on my LinkedIn profile.
           | 
           | As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares
           | so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring
           | process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working
           | there.
        
             | MrDarcy wrote:
             | I have consulted for CEO's and other executives who think
             | like this. You certainly dodged a bullet.
        
             | a4isms wrote:
             | _Hiring can remain irrational longer than you can remain
             | unemployed._
             | 
             | One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough.
             | Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post
             | too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more
             | attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth
             | loves your hot takes.
             | 
             | So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One
             | person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and
             | didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how
             | to code by hand, but although your solution is fast,
             | compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in
             | mind.
             | 
             | At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly
             | irrational process dominated by social factors rather than
             | objective feature detection.
        
               | drfloyd51 wrote:
               | Agreed.
               | 
               | Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix,
               | every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
               | 
               | Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff... the first
               | answer to an HR "off limits" question will be given soon
               | enough if I get the job.
               | 
               | Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
               | 
               | Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
        
               | zugi wrote:
               | > Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
               | Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
               | 
               | Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious
               | hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it
               | underground. Over the years it's done more good than
               | harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those
               | who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
        
           | josteink wrote:
           | > Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social
           | feed.
           | 
           | I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know)
           | LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than
           | X/Twitter.
           | 
           | You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free
           | speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
           | 
           | All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite
           | surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to
           | dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure
           | this sort of popularity.
           | 
           | Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-
           | SPAM.
        
             | sunaookami wrote:
             | Same with Pinterest in Germany which seems bizarre to me.
             | It's supposedly more popular than Twitter, Twitch,
             | Snapchat, LinkedIn and Reddit (but below TikTok, Instagram
             | and Facebook).
             | 
             | EDIT: Data from 2023: https://medias.smart-home-
             | fox.de/SDE/Social%20Media%20Statis...
        
           | phillipcarter wrote:
           | > Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social
           | feed. Even fewer post things to it.
           | 
           | Yes, but many of the people who _matter_ in professional
           | domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who
           | do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can
           | often be to your benefit.
        
             | bertylicious wrote:
             | Could you please name a couple persons who matter in their
             | professional domain, who post on LinkedIn, and who you
             | benefited from by engaging with them on LinkedIn?
        
             | toolazytologin wrote:
             | > engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
             | 
             | How? Legitimate question.
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | I dunno if that is really true. I've started posting
           | technical things on LinkedIn because it gets pretty good
           | engagement from real people that I know. I've also seen some
           | great technical posts there.
           | 
           | Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think
           | it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
           | 
           | Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've
           | got several through recruiter spam.
        
           | loglog wrote:
           | I recommend to block the Linkedin feed with uBlock.
        
           | keeda wrote:
           | Anecdotally, I've noticed a correlation between spikes in
           | LinkedIn social activity and subsequent job changes, after
           | which the activity (typically) subsides again. The activity
           | doesn't even have to be actively posting, just reacting to
           | posts on their feed.
           | 
           | I think the dynamic you're observing is partly people just
           | reacting to stuff (or if posting actively, fluffing up their
           | "professional presence") as they do a job hunt.
        
         | xioxox wrote:
         | A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely
         | because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on
         | Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.
        
           | MengerSponge wrote:
           | Bluesky doesn't push an algorithmic feed, so it looks empty
           | if you aren't following people who are posting.
           | 
           | FWIW starter kits and topical feeds are a great way to
           | jumpstart your algorithm.
        
         | yread wrote:
         | I work in research and people post their papers there. Signal
         | to noise ratio is getting worse and worse though.. My
         | "favorite" was probably an AI generated post (3 em dashes in
         | one sentence, its not this.its that. And so son) about how bad
         | AI is and how it hallucinates.
        
           | jonhohle wrote:
           | "This wasn't just AI generated -- it was a paragon of
           | hallucinated AI slop."
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | I doubt many people go to LinkedIn for the cringey and
         | obnoxious feed. It's more write-only than anything.
         | 
         | Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the
         | feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually
         | use.
         | 
         | One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same
         | problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the
         | awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever
         | there is incentive to gain advantage.
         | 
         | (My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our
         | secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was
         | killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would
         | just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick,
         | that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
         | 
         | Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to
         | hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake
         | with the right employers.
         | 
         | A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the
         | sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just
         | more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful:
         | sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and
         | spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on,
         | the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of
         | the recruiter's recommendations...
        
           | neilv wrote:
           | And be careful with AI _elsewhere_ in the hiring process.
           | 
           | Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI
           | startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an
           | AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed
           | to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
           | 
           | Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call
           | with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email
           | from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I
           | no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I
           | replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call,
           | referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and
           | would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No
           | response...
           | 
           | I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to
           | broken AI managing his inbox, _or_ if he had just blown me
           | off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn 't
           | want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure
           | employer knew what happened with the AI, and that
           | rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
           | 
           | No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
           | 
           | Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the
           | situation when it messes up.
        
         | surgical_fire wrote:
         | I keep an up-to-date profile so recruiters reach out.
         | 
         | It's useless otherwise.
        
         | xeromal wrote:
         | I've gotten two very good jobs from linkedin.
        
         | legitster wrote:
         | LinkedIn has the most clear para-social relationship. Post and
         | interact to look good for recruiters and future employers.
         | 
         | Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist
         | "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
        
         | trash_cat wrote:
         | Sales people using it a lot to scout prospects and understand a
         | person's seniority in an organisation, to target better and
         | prepare a strategy to pitch higher up the chain.
        
         | phendrenad2 wrote:
         | There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The
         | last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn
         | doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the
         | "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being
         | atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.
         | 
         | So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon
         | Buying it?
        
         | phendrenad2 wrote:
         | > what taking my kids to school taught me about business
         | scaling
         | 
         | The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts
         | was glorious:
         | 
         | https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...
        
         | com2kid wrote:
         | There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or
         | who are retired and just don't care. They publish some
         | hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth
         | visiting!
        
         | faramarz wrote:
         | its a professional contact list is all it is, for me anyway.
         | its where I go to gather intel on a person/company or where I
         | go to lookup a contact for an outreac
        
         | pndy wrote:
         | That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on
         | "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap
         | everything in this weird language.
         | 
         | https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s...
         | & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion
         | 
         | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
         | 
         | It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking
         | countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate
         | jargon is irritating
        
         | stainablesteel wrote:
         | completed deleted my linkedin, it's not even the least bit
         | useful. it's full of fake stories and communication that sounds
         | more robotic than human
        
         | 0xbadcafebee wrote:
         | It's a social network for employment. If you want to employ, or
         | be employed, that's the social network for that.
        
       | dave333 wrote:
       | Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a
       | little brain tai chi. Queens
       | https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although
       | my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.
        
         | mckirk wrote:
         | I have to admit that this is also what keeps me coming back to
         | LinkedIn. My brain is dangerously easy to motivate by dangling
         | a virtual leaderboard in front of it.
        
           | gessha wrote:
           | But there's so many good games out there. Check out
           | Zachtronics/Coincidence.games for some cool examples. Walk to
           | a bookstore and get one of their many sudoku/puzzle books.
           | Check out the App Store for some puzzle games. Write your own
           | puzzle game!
        
       | kristopolous wrote:
       | Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions
       | and planning strikes on the platform.
       | 
       | Why not?
        
         | kjkjadksj wrote:
         | Most of the heavies in my industry don't even bother with
         | linkedin. They get plenty of applications on their career pages
         | already I guess. Only really startups (which aren't really
         | hiring at all) and the occasional blast from a middle weight
         | company. There are more jobs for ai trainer than real jobs on
         | linkedin right now.
        
       | dzonga wrote:
       | for jobs - indeed is better or other small avenues in their
       | heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through
       | hn)
       | 
       | other avenues - local slack channels.
       | 
       | linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't
       | know and might find valuable
       | 
       | linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
        
         | catcowcostume wrote:
         | ??? Who outside of startups (in a professional environment)
         | even use Slack?
        
         | sp1982 wrote:
         | try https://corvi.careers I been building it purely as job
         | search platform, has good coverage of startups and public
         | companies but I'd still recommend to use LI for network tho
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | It probably depend on where you live and who you are. LinkedIn
         | is my backup in case of a layoff. It's the site where I can
         | reach everyone who worked with me or have made offers in the
         | past.
         | 
         | If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right
         | people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or
         | three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on
         | Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
        
           | kjkjadksj wrote:
           | I think before linkedin people were doing this with email and
           | phone. Literally cold calling your old coworkers. Not sure
           | linkedin really created anything that didn't exist previously
           | especially if you live in some major hub of industry as you
           | indicate.
        
             | mrweasel wrote:
             | It did make it easier though. I don't have to keep a list
             | of potentially outdated phone numbers and email adresses.
             | LinkedIn makes it much simpler to broadcast your
             | availability.
             | 
             | Most of LinkedIn is just garbage though, especially if you
             | somehow connected with social-media people or marketing
             | people. Marketing people on LinkedIn are weird, they can't
             | form coherent sentences and they can't even sell
             | themselves.
             | 
             | You could strip down LinkedIn down to your resume,
             | availability status and your email address and it would be
             | fine.
        
       | __natty__ wrote:
       | And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some
       | managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this
       | amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really
       | needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like
       | always trackers and ads.
        
       | lucb1e wrote:
       | AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it
       | doesn't crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open
       | more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after
       | you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB
       | (edit: found it in message history, yes it was "20% of 7GB" =
       | 1.4GB precisely)
       | 
       | Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of
       | thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that
       | take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your
       | browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps?
       | (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page
       | runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the
       | foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
       | 
       | Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new
       | feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-
       | wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and
       | also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
        
         | r_lee wrote:
         | I think a big problem is the fact that many web frameworks
         | allow you to write these kind of complex apps that just "work"
         | but performance is often not included in the equation
         | 
         | so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
         | 
         | like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would
         | literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating
         | mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation
         | history every time the new response text was updated
         | 
         | and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening
         | is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per
         | team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff
         | multiple times etc...
        
           | taminka wrote:
           | it's unironically just react lmao, virtually every popular
           | react app has an insane number of accidental rerenders
           | triggered by virtually everything, causing it to lag a lot
        
             | r_lee wrote:
             | well that's any framework with vdom, the GC of web
             | frameworks, so I'd imagine it's also a problem with vue
             | etc..
             | 
             | I don't understand though why performance (I.e. using it
             | properly) is not a consideration with these companies that
             | are valued above $100 billion
             | 
             | like, do these poor pitiful big tech companies only have
             | the resources to do so when they hit the 2 trillion mark or
             | something?
        
               | vscode-rest wrote:
               | Nobody gets promoted for improving web app performance.
        
               | r_lee wrote:
               | yep. I think this is the root problem, not the frameworks
               | themselves
        
               | cess11 wrote:
               | If it's slow people also stick around for longer if they
               | have something they must accomplish before leaving.
        
               | array_key_first wrote:
               | It's not a problem with vue or svelte because they are,
               | ironically, reactive. React greedily rerenders.
               | 
               | It's also not a problem with the react compiler.
        
               | yurishimo wrote:
               | Vue uses signals for reactivity now and has for years.
               | Alien signals was discovered by a Vue contributor. Vue
               | 3.6 (now in alpha/beta?) will ship a version that is
               | essentially a Vue flavored Svelte with extreme fine
               | grained reactivity based on a custom compiler step.
               | 
               | One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is
               | because the framework continues to improve performance
               | without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months
               | because the framework authors got bored.
        
             | rustystump wrote:
             | I think linkedin is built with emberjs not react last i
             | checked...
             | 
             | The problem with performance in wep apps is often not the
             | omg too much render. But is actually processing and memory
             | use. Chromium loves to eat as much ram as possible and the
             | state management world of web apps loves immutability. What
             | happens when you create new state anytime something changes
             | and v8 then needs to recompile an optimized structure for
             | that state coupled with thrashing the gc? You already know.
             | 
             | I hate the immutable trend in wep apps. I get it but the
             | performance is dogshite. Most web apps i have worked on
             | spend about 10% of their cpu time...garbage collecting and
             | the rest doing complicated deep state comparisons every
             | time you hover on a button.
             | 
             | Rant over.
        
           | machomaster wrote:
           | The Grok android app is terrible in that sense. Just writing
           | a question with a normal speed will make half of the
           | characters not appear due to whatever unoptimized shit the
           | app does after each keystroke.
        
             | throwuxiytayq wrote:
             | Sounds quite overengineered. CEOs have basically no idea
             | what they're doing these days. If this were my company, I'd
             | start by cutting 80% of staff and 80% of the code bloat.
        
               | userbinator wrote:
               | Don't know if this is satire, but I do wonder if Musk
               | uses the Grok app himself.
        
         | IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
         | Yes, its sometimes extreme. I often wondered if it was my FF
         | browser, but then i'd switch to Opera or Brave, and i would see
         | the same pattern.
         | 
         | Its quite insane
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | My company started using slack in 2015 and at that time I put
         | in a bug report to slack that their desktop app was using more
         | memory than my IDE on a 1M+LOC C++ project. I used to stop
         | slack to compile...
        
           | hobobaggins wrote:
           | It's always good to not slack when compiling.
        
             | antod wrote:
             | Just to clarify for other readers, sword fighting while
             | riding office chairs is not slacking.
        
           | raw_anon_1111 wrote:
           | The bug in Slack is that it uses Electron
        
             | reddalo wrote:
             | Electron has been a blessing and a horrible thing at the
             | same time.
        
         | inaros wrote:
         | What us this AWS you talk about? :-)
        
           | lucb1e wrote:
           | my employer's choice of premium hosting provider
        
             | inaros wrote:
             | I know what AWS is...that is why your statement
             | 
             | >> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.
             | 
             | Makes no sense to me...
        
               | tandr wrote:
               | I think they are talking about AWS dashboard, but I might
               | be wrong.
        
               | QuadmasterXLII wrote:
               | the web interface
        
               | mr_toad wrote:
               | The official name is the AWS management console. Or just
               | the console.
               | 
               | The 'dashboard', the 'interface'? Reminds me of coworkers
               | who used to refer to desktop PC cases as the hard drive,
               | or people who refer to the web as 'Google'.
        
               | lucb1e wrote:
               | Ah, now I understand your question (and see others
               | already answered). Yeah, I realized that possible
               | confusion after writing it, but hoped it was clear enough
               | after editing in the bit about this AWS problem being in
               | a browser tab. You may have seen the initial version, or
               | it may still have been too confusing. Whoops
        
         | susupro1 wrote:
         | Hit this exact wall with desktop wrappers. I was shipping an
         | 800MB Electron binary just to orchestrate a local video
         | processing pipeline.
         | 
         | Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies
         | (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS
         | payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.
         | 
         | Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of
         | overhead.
        
         | m132 wrote:
         | I noticed that there's a developing trend of "who manages to
         | use the most CSS filters" among web developers, and it was
         | there even before LLMs. Now that most of the web is slop in one
         | form or another, and LLMs seem to have been trained on the
         | worst of the worst, every other website uses an obscene amount
         | of CSS backdrop-filter blur, which slows down software
         | renderers and systems with older GPUs to a crawl.
         | 
         | When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main
         | page and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it
         | being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom
         | of the page (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) that got stuck in a
         | SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React
         | crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event
         | and thus itself to be triggered again.
         | 
         | I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals
         | and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this
         | isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating
         | back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are
         | far from new and yet web developers have only been getting
         | increasingly disconnected from reality.
        
         | RunSet wrote:
         | > Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of
         | thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it
         | that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it
         | takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks
         | like 22 fps?
         | 
         | It is to do with websites essentially baking in their own
         | browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as
         | possible.
        
           | lstodd wrote:
           | Spot on. It's why I quit adtech in 2015. Running realtime
           | auctions server-side is one thing, but building what
           | basically amounts to live-feed screen capture ..
        
         | christophilus wrote:
         | I was researching laptops at BestBuy and every page took ages
         | to load, was choppy when scrolling, caused my iPhone 13 mini to
         | get uncomfortably hot in my hand and drained my battery _fast_.
         | It wouldn't be noticeably different if they were crypto-mining
         | on my iPhone as I browsed their inventory.
         | 
         | It's astonishing how bad the experience was.
        
           | hobobaggins wrote:
           | Best Buy is actually one of the worst and slowest websites
           | from any large retailer. I cannot believe how bad it is. It's
           | like they set out to make it pretty and accidentally stepped
           | in molasses.
        
             | jimbobimbo wrote:
             | The irony! My router died literally an hour ago, and I was
             | on bestbuy to buy a new one. Over 5g connection. That was
             | probably the worst shopping experience I had in a while...
        
         | ssss11 wrote:
         | So many sites.. they're all built as web apps these days when
         | they don't need to be. And they're all full of tracking and
         | "telemetry"........
        
         | userbinator wrote:
         | If you're talking about the AWS management UI, I haven't used
         | it recently but can tell you that the Azure one is no better.
         | One of the stupidest things I remember is that it somehow
         | managed to reimplement a file upload form for one of their
         | storage services such that it will attempt to _read the whole
         | file into memory_ before sending it to the server. For a
         | storage service meant for very large files (dozens of gigabytes
         | or more).
        
       | barbegal wrote:
       | I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so
       | much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get
       | dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount
       | of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how
       | much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of
       | memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of
       | available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and
       | video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over
       | the internet.
        
         | progval wrote:
         | It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other
         | applications' files.
        
           | surajrmal wrote:
           | This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is
           | informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize
           | discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux
           | doesn't have something similar.
        
             | progval wrote:
             | Linux supports it too through madvise():
             | MADV_FREE (since Linux 4.5)                   The
             | application no longer requires the pages in the range
             | specified by addr and size.  The kernel can thus free these
             | pages, but the freeing could be delayed until memory
             | pressure occurs.
             | 
             | and                      MADV_DONTNEED                   Do
             | not expect access in the near future.  (For the time
             | being, the application is finished with the given range, so
             | the kernel can free resources associated with it.)
             | After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics
             | of memory access in the specified region are changed:
             | subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but
             | will result in either repopulating the memory contents from
             | the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for
             | shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem-
             | based techniques such as System V shared memory segments)
             | or zero-fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private
             | mappings.
             | 
             | Does Chrome use it, though?
        
         | general_reveal wrote:
         | Um.
         | 
         | The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly
         | concerned about Chrome's memory usage because it's passively
         | allowing this all to occur.
         | 
         | How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much
         | memory automatically, all that means is that those website
         | owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
         | 
         | Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
        
           | lucasfin000 wrote:
           | uBlock origin on Firefox or Brave, which will block most of
           | the tracker bloat, causing the RAM spike. It's not a perfect
           | fix, but it will cut out a significant chunk of it. Tab
           | Wrangler also helps by suspending inactive tabs
           | automatically. You should try out both.
        
           | temp0826 wrote:
           | Step 0- don't use a browser created by an ad company
        
         | lucb1e wrote:
         | Or another process will die at random instead, which might be
         | your desktop environment, the main browser process, Signal (10%
         | chance at corrupting message history each time), a large image
         | you were working on in Gimp...
         | 
         | Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation
         | failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at
         | 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the
         | kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot
         | allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the
         | OOM killer
         | 
         | but also
         | 
         | it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to
         | multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in
         | open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you _not_
         | get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
        
           | surajrmal wrote:
           | That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last
           | ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back
           | well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how
           | ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your
           | tabs will be discarded.
        
             | lucb1e wrote:
             | I've already described above what the browser's behavior
             | is. That your browser works differently is good for you;
             | I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There
             | are also other downsides that this other behavior does not
             | fix, mentioned in sibling comments
        
               | surajrmal wrote:
               | This is not a chrome problem but an OS problem. Android
               | does a much better job here by comparison. Desktop Linux
               | is simply not well optimized for low RAM users.
        
           | Pannoniae wrote:
           | I dunno I have 96GB of RAM and I still get the whole "system
           | dies due to resource exhaustion" thing. Yesterday I managed
           | to somehow crash DWM from handle exhaustion. Man, people
           | really waste resources....
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | I want my compiler, language server IDE, to do that not
         | LinkedIn
        
         | itopaloglu83 wrote:
         | Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you're talking
         | about real RAM issues.
         | 
         | The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs
         | open.
         | 
         | Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies
         | particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or
         | needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from
         | users.
        
         | kalleboo wrote:
         | I use a Mac which has really good memory management but still
         | seeing that 10 GB of my SSD is clogged up with useless crap
         | just because modern development systems are complete and utter
         | crap feels bad.
         | 
         | March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for
         | fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature
         | comfort features like loading in chat history from the server,
         | mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple
         | session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
         | 
         | Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake.
         | The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was
         | nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people
         | don't even consider what memory is.
        
         | g947o wrote:
         | Reclaiming memory is not free.
         | 
         | It's better not to use 2.4G RAM in the first place. Imagine
         | LinkedIn isn't so hostile to users and instead actually cares
         | about user experience.
        
       | steveharing1 wrote:
       | For sure there is more to what they just show
        
       | user070223 wrote:
       | Github hogging cpu when js is turned off
        
       | fredgrott wrote:
       | LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to
       | use it....
       | 
       | No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost
       | like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for
       | state....rookie mistake
        
         | itopaloglu83 wrote:
         | And also keeps showing a red dot on the feeds tab every time
         | you navigate to another screen, so that they can trick you with
         | interacting with one more ad.
         | 
         | Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of
         | shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It's a way
         | of forced interaction.
         | 
         | We're slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
        
       | throwatdem12311 wrote:
       | Don't go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet
       | website. Problem solved.
        
       | delduca wrote:
       | LinkedIn is full of crap. Unfortunately is the only way to get
       | recruiters visibility.
        
       | bvan wrote:
       | As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in
       | mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main
       | professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their
       | capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
        
         | xantronix wrote:
         | Actually I think I'll play mean, specifically _because_ I want
         | to be radioactive to investors and private equity. I sincerely
         | believe there is a better way to exist and work without being
         | beholden to a system that incentivises quarterly thinking at
         | the cost of everything else.
        
         | debesyla wrote:
         | For sure higher quality social network than Facebook. I
         | personally like it. (Note that I follow only lithuanian posts.
         | It may be our local language specifics.)
        
         | jnovek wrote:
         | I think I've legitimately taken career hits because I cannot
         | stomach it. The culture of LinkedIn is absolutely repulsive to
         | me.
        
         | isatty wrote:
         | I give 0 fucks about it.
        
         | graysonk wrote:
         | "What trying to protect the feelings of a group of people who
         | will never care about me taught me about b2b sales"
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | The VCs I know think the LinkedIn feed is a joke, too.
         | 
         | Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed
         | and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.
        
         | phyzome wrote:
         | I sell my labor. I don't sell my respect.
        
         | throwuxiytayq wrote:
         | I know a lot of people who use LinkedIn, and I don't think any
         | of them are happy with their job. Play stupid games, win stupid
         | prizes.
        
         | mwkaufma wrote:
         | What does that have to do with RAM?
        
           | bvan wrote:
           | Absolutely nothing, as 99% of comments to the post. But it is
           | the norm on HN it seems.
        
             | mwkaufma wrote:
             | bootlicker commentariat
        
         | sgustard wrote:
         | Yep, I've co-founded several companies and sold them for near
         | $1B in aggregate. My investors and customers are on there,
         | sometimes posting nice things about us. So I give it a thumbs-
         | up and move on. Nothing worth rage-bating about. Mostly I go
         | there to play linkedin.com/games.
        
       | rixed wrote:
       | Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some
       | elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking
       | half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's
       | full of errors.
       | 
       | I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met
       | two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it
       | made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs
       | LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
       | 
       | This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a
       | timely fashion.
       | 
       | (For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already
       | editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page
       | translations, and the next one was wrong people count when
       | associating personnal profiles to business ones).
        
       | eclipticplane wrote:
       | I wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser
       | extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent
       | screen scraping?
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | That code is minimal. It's definitely not the source.
         | 
         | Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it's a
         | good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people
         | using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their
         | servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
        
           | SilasX wrote:
           | Really? Then why else do adblockers seem to take up so much
           | memory, other than an arms race with countermeasures that
           | sites take?
        
       | b8 wrote:
       | So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for
       | faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different
       | service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win
       | situation.
        
       | davisr wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
       | cmiles8 wrote:
       | Beyond being useful for a quick check on someone's career
       | history, LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters pretending to be
       | experts in things while the actual experts never post about the
       | subject on LinkedIn.
        
       | inetknght wrote:
       | It also constantly uses about 50% of my CPU.
       | 
       | I only open LinkedIn... very rarely. When done, I just close it.
       | 
       | Don't scroll. Don't read stories. Don't do anything except
       | message recruiters. Get them into email or a phone call. That's
       | it. Fuck LinkedIn.
        
       | neeeeeeal wrote:
       | Is it not possible to collar the amount of RAM a browser tab is
       | able to use? If not, would love for someone to develop this!
        
       | enesozt wrote:
       | I rarely use Linkedin but for my new app that I'm building the
       | Linkedin is good platform to find out & engage possible customers
       | so last few weeks I'm using it more. But man.. so sorry for
       | people using it daily. Such a bad experience. I didn't surprise
       | it takes that amount of RAM because every component in the page
       | is laggy, you feel very unsafe. You're getting some error but you
       | have no idea what it is. Don't wanna mention about the content at
       | all. But like many people mentioned in the comments it's still
       | the number one place for their work
        
       | aquir wrote:
       | Web developers of HN: how is this possible? What can use 1.2GB
       | RAM for a website? Preloaded all videos?
        
         | xantronix wrote:
         | That's the sort of question a reasonable person would ask. To
         | answer this correctly, you need to occupy the mind of a madman.
         | Now, we've got a boatload of KPIs to optimise or our necks are
         | on the chopping block!
        
         | lkbm wrote:
         | Keep in mind this is memory used by a browser tab, not "how bug
         | the website is". Probably a memory leak as the feed is scrolled
         | or something, but it _is_ a massive download when you first
         | load the page.
         | 
         | I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due
         | to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred),
         | a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS
         | (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB
         | transferred).
         | 
         | A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__`
         | -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were
         | fully client-side rendered.
         | 
         | The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have
         | 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195
         | _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b
         | f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb
         | e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
        
         | jackkinsella wrote:
         | Probably a memory leak
         | 
         | But other ideas: - all pages of FE site loaded at once instead
         | as as needed - FE indexed search engine - bug rendering too
         | many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)
        
           | SilasX wrote:
           | Then why does pretty much every site seem to have a "memory
           | leak" of this type (besides unicorns like HN that try to be
           | minimal)?
        
         | socalgal2 wrote:
         | Honestly, while I'm sure Linked is bloated, HN in Chrome is
         | taking 204meg for the front page on my MBP. That's with no
         | images, no videos, a minimal amount of css.
         | `document.body.textContent.length` says 4278
         | 
         | Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over
         | 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for
         | Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on
         | machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78
         | 
         | I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-
         | layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit
         | because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture.
         | If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg.
         | Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.
         | 
         | Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use
         | textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the
         | screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software
         | rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.
         | 
         | I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if
         | you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the
         | reason these things take lots of memory is because these things
         | take lots of memory.
        
       | z3ratul163071 wrote:
       | well it is a microslop product, what do you expect?
        
       | raffael_de wrote:
       | uBlock Origin -> My Filters:
       | www.linkedin.com##div[data-testid="mainFeed"]:matches-path(/feed)
        
       | rollulus wrote:
       | They do other unholy things. I don't know what, but consistently
       | while playing music on my HomePod opening that site makes it
       | stutter within a few minutes, fully stop working shortly
       | afterwards and it needs a reboot to work again.
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | Not for me even if I completetly turn off uBlock
       | https://files.catbox.moe/5a3bcq.png
        
       | astrospective wrote:
       | I keep my profile updated as a consultant because it lets clients
       | and others in my company get a fuller gauge than my one pager.
       | I've also got my most recent and prior job from having a price
       | and responding to the right recruiter, I've also had a handful of
       | interviews as well, which is honestly more than I've gotten from
       | trying to apply to random job board postings.
        
       | jrm4 wrote:
       | I know I'm old, but I now find LinkedIn to be my favorite social
       | media site, and I'll explain why.
       | 
       | Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but
       | with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely
       | valuable and here's why:
       | 
       | Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything
       | there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or
       | more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the
       | opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
       | 
       | Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you
       | could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of
       | them all.
        
         | adi_pradhan wrote:
         | LOL you've nailed LinkedinSpeak here
        
           | jrm4 wrote:
           | Let me try again, then
           | 
           | If you fuck up badly on here, no one cares at all
           | 
           | If you fuck up badly on Twitter, maybe someone cares
           | 
           | If you fuck up badly on Facebook, people you know find out,
           | maybe no one else.
           | 
           | If you fuck up badly on LinkedIn, you have to find a new job
           | and you've stained yourself in this market.
           | 
           | Thus, anyone posting to LinkedIn is subconsciously saying --
           | I'm aware that this might STRONGLY hinder my ability to eat
           | but I'm posting it anyway because I think it is that
           | important for some reason. (now that REASON may be fluffy,
           | but still.)
        
             | ramon156 wrote:
             | Oh, you were not joking.
             | 
             | No, people do not care. You're not a celeb. This is
             | textbook spotlight effect.
             | 
             | Your life becomes a lot more enjoyable if you don't take
             | yourself so serious, try it sometime
        
               | jrm4 wrote:
               | I generally agree with what you're saying here -- I don't
               | mean that "other people ACTUALLY care."
               | 
               | I suppose -- I'm trying to explain why I believe the
               | choice, and thus the material itself, to post LinkedIn
               | might be special in a way that the rest might not?
               | 
               | Like I'm guessing a lot of people do fall into the
               | "spotlight effect" and that affects what is posted.
        
               | booleandilemma wrote:
               | I disagree completely. If you post something racist on
               | LinkedIn you're probably going to lose your job. Try it,
               | if you don't believe me. If you post something racist
               | here you're going to get downvoted.
        
             | mancerayder wrote:
             | This can be read as why to avoid LinkedIn. Job searching is
             | already hard, if you manage to land an interview you still
             | have to spend time, as an old dude, studying Leetcode like
             | you're a kid with five years experience instead of twenty.
             | Then it's competitive. Etc.
             | 
             | So to this you wish to add the increased risk of negative
             | exposure by saying a bad thing? Or that someone, someones,
             | or people five years from today consider a bad thing?
             | 
             | I love writing and posting and engaging (you can tell from
             | my history here alone), but I'm not crazy enough to risk
             | spilling my feelings on a site full of people in suits and
             | ties, with Leader next to their names.
        
               | jrm4 wrote:
               | I agree with you generally; what I am saying here right
               | now is that how people behave on LinkedIn creates an
               | interesting filter for content in this way in the
               | present, without saying necessarily SHOULD people behave
               | this way.
        
         | podgorniy wrote:
         | > destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD
         | 
         | Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post
         | was actually the cause?
        
           | phyzome wrote:
           | There was a bit of a scandal at my employer some years back
           | and IIRC it was kicked off by someone posting/boosting some
           | really questionable stuff on LinkedIn.
           | 
           | Amusingly, this was someone high up in HR.
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | My postings on LinkedIn have definitely had direct
           | consequences in my professional life.
           | 
           | I consider them _all_ good because ultimately if you get
           | upset by the way I behave then that 's probably going to be
           | true if we work together also.
           | 
           | Sometimes people like to tell me that I'm very authentic and
           | it's clear that I'm not trying to suck up to anyone, which
           | they respect. Some people quietly retreat from me and I find
           | out later that it's because I hurt their feelings
           | inadvertently by shitting on AI or calling out web
           | development as largely being inefficient in resources or
           | something.
        
             | jrm4 wrote:
             | Love this response, and as some one who does perhaps a bit
             | too much spending/wasting time on other types of social
             | media, including here, I've made a conscious decision to
             | post on LinkedIn more.
             | 
             | And it's _such_ a difference. It forces me to slow down and
             | think about a lot of things. The most important being: Is
             | this even worth posting AT ALL?
             | 
             | And then, okay -- how can I say this in a future-proof way
             | that both appeals to normies and tech folk like myself. I
             | feel like I'll be doing better the more I post to places
             | like that, and maybe less here?
        
           | jrm4 wrote:
           | No, but as I've said below, this isn't about what will
           | actually strongly happen, but what I think people think. I
           | could be wrong here.
        
         | kmijyiyxfbklao wrote:
         | Well if that gets us LinkedIn, we should move as far away from
         | that as possible, and not listen to the people who want real
         | names everywhere.
        
       | p_ing wrote:
       | This isn't all that accurate. Unless Chrome only presents the
       | private working set, this will include shared or sharable memory.
        
       | CrzyLngPwd wrote:
       | Closed mine ages ago, along with most of my social media. No need
       | for it, never was a need for it.
        
       | alyandon wrote:
       | Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set
       | resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from
       | hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.
       | 
       | It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided
       | that you as a user should have almost no control over how much
       | ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
        
         | dijit wrote:
         | Goes with the territory of allowing remote code execution
         | arbitrarily and all the time otherwise you won't be able to..
         | 
         | * checks notes *
         | 
         | read text on the internet.
        
       | eximius wrote:
       | Let's be real, LinkedIn is full of LinkedIn Lunatics but pretty
       | much all mainstream social media is pretty shit. They're just
       | different flavors of shit. LinkedIn: bad. Facebook: bad. Twitter:
       | I literally think it contributed to the collapse of discourse and
       | rise of shallow thought / rejection of expertise. I'm not going
       | to list more because the theme is, you guessed it, they're bad.
       | 
       | Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other
       | platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social
       | experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
        
         | estebank wrote:
         | Social media being bad is partly because of shady business
         | practices, and partly because a lot of people suck (in
         | different ways, at different times, including us).
         | 
         | Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?
        
           | eximius wrote:
           | Mastodon, Bluesky, etc are neat - both in what they're trying
           | to be and their technology. But ultimately these days I
           | reject them in favor of more local socialization (again, not
           | geographically). What this looks like is a constellation of
           | private (or pseudo private) discord communities. If I make
           | friends in one, I often get invited to another. I recognize
           | the merit in broader social forums like Mastodon, but it is
           | not worth the drawbacks to me.
           | 
           | As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm
           | working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but
           | with community servers run independently. That is, there are
           | some "federated" identity providers so community servers can
           | agree on identity across servers, then each community server
           | runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community
           | server - private channels in a community server are not E2E
           | encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups
           | are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays
           | (with a special class of relay server for people who want to
           | DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun
           | with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such
           | high latency (even locally!).
        
           | deanishe wrote:
           | A large part of the problem, imo, is that people haven't used
           | the ability to talk to the entire planet as an opportunity to
           | broaden their horizons, but to build themselves a
           | transnational bubble of like-minded individuals.
           | 
           | Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the
           | void was kinda understandable, but these days you can
           | literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to
           | go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.
           | 
           | That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many
           | people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match
           | their preconceptions.
        
             | rglover wrote:
             | > That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days,
             | many people assume you're lying if your stated motives
             | don't match their preconceptions.
             | 
             | A brutal reality to navigate if you're not acting in bad
             | faith.
        
         | mahirsaid wrote:
         | Im pretty sure that is the current sentiment amongst the
         | judicial body at the moment, Meta and Google have been taking
         | blows left and right. They are also not allowing else to take
         | shape that might make their business model obsolete. With all
         | that we have more and more laws that are redistricting the use
         | of social media by their own bad doing. So if another company
         | wants to offer something innovative, now they have an unfair
         | playing ground due to the enormous amount of regulation that
         | are NOW being implemented. Another words the longer these large
         | tech companies are able to keep their business the harder it is
         | for innovation in this sector from other players. The spill
         | over to polotics is dangerous and counter-productive to
         | innovating technology.
        
           | salawat wrote:
           | When your definition of innovation includes "move fast, break
           | things, ignore regulations until you can scale big enough for
           | the lawyers hopefully to outpace the legal system" it is
           | arguable that any of that should be allowed at all. There's
           | room for leniency for innovation sake, then there's building
           | the wrong damn thing and not taking no for an answer when you
           | should. Tech is beyond that point by leaps and bounds.
        
         | fritzo wrote:
         | Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction
         | between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that
         | distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on
         | graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking
         | algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph
         | neighborhoods?
        
           | serf wrote:
           | well moderation is ubiquitous , but yeah --
           | personalization/targeting/social graph are essentially the
           | things that people expect out of a social media platform.
           | 
           | I do personally think the karma thing _is_ an aspect ,
           | because it 's gamed _everywhere_ to huge advantage -- but the
           | altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort
           | to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while
           | still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.
           | 
           | I also know that's a naive view.
        
           | kingstnap wrote:
           | A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public
           | experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated
           | one.
        
           | pndy wrote:
           | That'd be the thing indeed.
           | 
           | hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with
           | discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a
           | forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among
           | fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple
           | profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience
           | unlike anything large social network services offer.
           | 
           | A typical social media platform mainly exists around main
           | stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups
           | dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's
           | of course the perfect unstained image because everything
           | falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as
           | algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so
           | on.
        
           | zero-st4rs wrote:
           | I think the distinction is pretty easy imo. HN is topic
           | centered, Social Media is person-centered. Before MySpace
           | there was a pretty big proliferation of forums and other
           | topic centered discourse. The profile was such a minor part
           | of those tools.
           | 
           | When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a
           | lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled
           | with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online
           | as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for
           | surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a
           | trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real
           | photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs
           | you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar"
           | must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this,
           | but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.
        
           | kelnos wrote:
           | I would say yes, that's a good way to make the distinction.
           | It's even more than that: the feed is different for every
           | single user.
           | 
           | With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a
           | given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily
           | determined by all users voting up articles or moderating
           | them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that
           | weights votes and flags differently based on some other
           | criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags.
           | And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if
           | they load the page at the same time.
           | 
           | HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is
           | centered around individuals and what they personally choose
           | to post and promote.
        
         | spike021 wrote:
         | social media is only bad if you don't curate what you're
         | looking at. most the platforms these days have features to
         | block posts containing certain words or hashtags.
         | 
         | i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the
         | years both where i live and in other countries.
        
           | LtWorf wrote:
           | It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there
           | is no way to disable reels.
        
             | spike021 wrote:
             | I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.
        
           | blharr wrote:
           | Most social media is actively against that, _feeding_ you
           | recommendations to keep you on the platform.
        
             | spike021 wrote:
             | The only site that actively funnels me with recommendations
             | is Youtube at this point. In most cases that's fine for my
             | taste because I use youtube as more of a learning platform
             | for things like car mechanics, photography, etc. So it
             | doesn't serve me anything toxic.
             | 
             | For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me
             | from that pretty well.
        
           | pndy wrote:
           | Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use
           | to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow
           | on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom
           | decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience
           | supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either
           | to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags.
           | They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new
           | content there.
           | 
           | Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried
           | to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in
           | the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated
           | drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not
           | - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same
           | things.
           | 
           | Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my
           | friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm,
           | and instead filled main activity stream with generated
           | graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by
           | facebook - after that interacting with any content would
           | poison your stream with stuff for months.
           | 
           | Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once
           | they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't
           | create there account ever again due to how they started
           | treating their users.
           | 
           | So there's this "curation" for me.
        
         | pks016 wrote:
         | I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media
         | and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.
        
           | raphar wrote:
           | Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.
        
             | nelsonic wrote:
             | Nope. Google+ was a ghost town. They made the right call to
             | shut it down and focus their efforts on YouTube.
             | 
             | The videos and comments on YT are superb training data,
             | every bit as good as Google+ was.
             | 
             | In 2025, YouTube's total revenue (advertising +
             | subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60
             | billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap
             | $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies. Google+
             | would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular
             | social network.
        
               | shwaj wrote:
               | The videos are good training data, but the comments? The
               | comment UX is so non-conducive to discussion, and the
               | general quality is very low compared to what used to be
               | on Google+ (to be fair, the self-selected users of
               | Google+ were not representative of the general
               | population).
        
               | freehorse wrote:
               | > comments on YT are superb training data
               | 
               | This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just
               | noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just
               | terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you
               | are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical
               | issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure
               | if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a
               | bit more effort into that side of their platform.
        
               | pks016 wrote:
               | Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't
               | want another fb or insta. The circles and community were
               | great.
        
           | pndy wrote:
           | Oh they tried to - in a simple "please fill out the form"
           | way. I'll link to my prev comment:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425198#46429370
           | 
           | IIRC they tried at some point incorporating G+ on youtube but
           | that didn't work either
        
         | tombert wrote:
         | I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a
         | superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a
         | bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably
         | mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a
         | bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.
         | 
         | I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit,
         | and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job
         | applications _require_ that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I 've
         | debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one"
         | or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the
         | reject pile.
         | 
         | So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is
         | strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it
         | just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to
         | be fair.
        
           | userbinator wrote:
           | _now a lot of job applications require that you give them a
           | LinkedIn URL._
           | 
           | What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.
        
             | tombert wrote:
             | I got an email from Indeed for this today: https://job-
             | boards.greenhouse.io/doordashusa/jobs/7727512
             | 
             | About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and
             | it's a mandatory field.
             | 
             | There are tons though.
        
           | kelnos wrote:
           | Agreed. There are lots of people posting shitty things on
           | Facebook, Twitter, etc., but on LinkedIn, everyone is so
           | _fake_. They 're putting their best professional face on,
           | heavily self-censoring themselves, and their content plays to
           | the whole "employment culture". It's not even a little bit
           | genuine.
        
             | tombert wrote:
             | I don't even know why they do it. Everyone knows it's fake
             | and performative, this couldn't possibly actually help
             | their careers could it?
             | 
             | AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.
        
         | johanneskanybal wrote:
         | I kind of love Linkedin tbh. It's where you get jobs. They
         | created Kafka. Definitly don't spend a lot of time there though
         | just more if you need a new job.
        
           | the_af wrote:
           | How often do people get jobs via LinkedIn? I have never.
           | 
           | Their "social media" aspect sucks. LinkedIn is 99% bullshit
           | posts about people hyping up they have "learned lessons" or
           | sucking up to whoever just hired them.
           | 
           | Kafka is a neat piece of engineering though, I'll grant you
           | that.
        
         | wolvoleo wrote:
         | Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans
         | for thousands of plugins.
        
           | kube-system wrote:
           | LinkedIn has aggressive anti-bot features. I wouldn't be
           | surprised if most of that 2.4G is that
        
             | wolvoleo wrote:
             | I know but I think it's more of a 'feature' to prevent
             | recruiters and advertisers from avoiding their overpriced
             | subscriptions and scrape data.
             | 
             | Knowing that doesn't make LinkedIn a better platform in my
             | eyes, on the contrary. It's more an 'if you pay you can do
             | whatever you want' kinda thing.
        
         | KellyCriterion wrote:
         | To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for
         | adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)
        
           | hatsix wrote:
           | nah, their feed became algo driven just like FB... im
           | constantly seeing things that I have no relation to
        
         | snackerblues wrote:
         | >Twitter
         | 
         | X*
        
         | ojr wrote:
         | hackernews has a good signal to noise ratio, noise is bad
        
           | AussieWog93 wrote:
           | Honestly, HN has a lot of people getting infuriated by storms
           | in teacups and spouting shit. Definitely an order of
           | magnitude better than Reddit or Facebook but still not the
           | same as IRL.
        
       | SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
       | I was searching for jobs using it a while ago and it consumed 80
       | percent of my iphone's battery in under 40 minutes. It's quite
       | impressive. Not even highest end mobile games can do that.
        
       | thebeardredis wrote:
       | And? Who uses (is used by) Linkedin?
        
       | dijit wrote:
       | Nearly all the top level comments are about the value of Linkedin
       | _at all_ rather than the technical reasons that 2.4G of RAM for a
       | website is atrocious.
       | 
       | Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of
       | video editing can require so much RAM?
       | 
       | In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM
       | back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution
       | which was en vogue at the time)..
       | 
       | Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it
       | requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years
       | ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler
       | _today_?
        
       | cuevaio wrote:
       | whatttt
        
       | denysvitali wrote:
       | The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of
       | memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one
       | I've seen in a long time
        
         | nshelia wrote:
         | We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything
         | LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
        
           | denysvitali wrote:
           | A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I
           | fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
        
             | mattmanser wrote:
             | As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about
             | memory usage, a lot is fonts and images.
             | 
             | EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out
             | voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
        
               | littlestymaar wrote:
               | Aka poor resources management.
               | 
               | If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than
               | what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on.
               | (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works
               | in a best effort way).
        
               | cosmicgadget wrote:
               | How much? You typically don't want more than a few
               | different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts
               | nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of
               | kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?
        
               | troupo wrote:
               | Well, and then you have Claude Code which at one point
               | needed 68GB of RAM to run
               | https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
               | 
               | :)
        
             | ozim wrote:
             | Space is mostly empty there is not much interesting stuff
             | to collect and who's going to buy that data
             | 
             | LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer
             | details etc. that's a lot of interesting data.
        
           | thephyber wrote:
           | I'm guessing you mean "does" in the sense of a user-facing
           | feature.
           | 
           | I've heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known
           | browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the
           | "simple chat apps" aren't doing that, then it's apples-to-
           | oranges.
        
         | charcircuit wrote:
         | Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product
         | so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less
         | memory.
        
         | bluedino wrote:
         | That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And
         | it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much
         | radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?
        
         | thomasgeelens wrote:
         | This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's
         | like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my
         | fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out
         | there on 69kb.
        
       | gitmwnkdkc wrote:
       | That's nothing. I've seen the Azure portal using >5gb in a single
       | chrome tab.
        
       | gamblor956 wrote:
       | As someone pointed out below, the problem is not entirely (or
       | even mostly) LinkedIn. HN, a text-only website, consumes several
       | hundred MB of RAM on his Mac. On Firefox on my Windows computer,
       | each HN tab I have open consumes at least 30 MB of RAM...for pure
       | text...
       | 
       | The bigger problem is that browsers these days are not very
       | resource efficient because the programmers behind them have
       | powerful top-of-the-line computers that hide all the
       | inefficiencies (or at the very least, computers significantly
       | more powerful than what their users use). This is compounded by
       | the web developers of most websites also using similarly powerful
       | computers for their development, which hides all of the
       | inefficiencies in the website code. This leads to the clusterfuck
       | of LinkedIn using up 2.4GB of RAM across two tabs (though on my
       | computer 2 tabs only uses up about 600 MB even after a few
       | minutes of scrolling).
       | 
       | It turns out that focusing on developer productivity to the
       | exclusion of the user experience has huge negative externalities.
       | Who would have known? (Answer: Literally everybody who was a
       | programmer before the developer-first mentality took over tech.)
       | 
       | The solution: make browser and website developers use _slower and
       | less powerful computers_ than their average user /visitor will
       | use. The performance issues would be identified and addressed
       | immediately.
        
       | namegulf wrote:
       | We're back in the IE era (now with chrome and other browsers)
       | where websites are bloated with ton of js, css, websockets,
       | background services hogging memory.
       | 
       | May be its time for browser vendors to show the consumption
       | (right now they show memory usage) by features i.e background
       | service, websockets, etc.,
       | 
       | With option to disable background service workers.
        
       | torginus wrote:
       | While awful I would like for someone to explain what's in that
       | 1.3GB.
       | 
       | In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is
       | for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to
       | see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
       | 
       | I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram,
       | because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's
       | not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need
       | it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
        
       | system2 wrote:
       | I think it is an accomplishment to bloat a website to a point
       | where the user needs to download 40-100mb per page. Even if I
       | try, I can't find the right JS files to make it that large. How
       | do they even make JS files this big?
        
       | ianberdin wrote:
       | Are they affiliated with RAM sellers?
        
       | tim333 wrote:
       | The behaviour is a bit weird - I just opened mine and in Chrome
       | task manager it showed the ram use climbing to 2.8GB, but in the
       | network console it only shows a few 10s of mb download. I wonder
       | what the discrepancy is? The site seemed to notice the console
       | was open and behaved differently also.
        
         | throwaway_19sz wrote:
         | I think that's normal, I would expect RAM use to dwarf network
         | transfer on most modern JS-heavy sites.
         | 
         | If a page downloads 1MB JSON, that could easily take 10MB
         | (maybe much more?) RAM when parsed into an object. And JS code
         | itself probably has a similar increase in size just by getting
         | parsed into an AST. And all that is before really executing
         | anything - once the dozens of shitty third party scripts start
         | whirring, they will generate tons of uncollectible garbage
         | because they are written by miserable people who don't give a
         | shit, understandably. And I bet LinkedIn has a hell of a lot of
         | junk third party scripts injected by random spies I working in
         | various corporate departments who need to spy on users to
         | collect data to persuade their boss to let them do some dumb
         | project to prove they deserve their job.
         | 
         | Tabs also render a bunch of compositor layers as bitmaps stored
         | in VRAM, or just RAM, for smooth scrolling. Oh and there's the
         | DOM, I bet that adds up. I'm probably only scratching the
         | surface. There's so much going on in a browser tab. The front
         | end is a marvel of engineering. Sites like LinkedIn of course
         | exploit this for banal evil, sadly.
        
       | examachine wrote:
       | what a useless junk indeed.... terrible code
        
       | gnarlouse wrote:
       | You can actually permanently reclaim that memory and prevent this
       | bug in the future!
       | 
       | Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
        
         | NelsonMinar wrote:
         | I've got one weird trick to lessen your email load, too.
        
       | Bender wrote:
       | It's not just memory. I've never been able to scroll back more
       | than about 6 days in the LinkedIn feed. I slows to a crawl and
       | this was on a gaming machine with 64GB of ram. I tried raising
       | all the limits in the browser with only marginal gains. If they
       | had an option to instead use pagination with say 100 items per
       | page I think it might get a little better.
        
       | nickdothutton wrote:
       | I wish someone would build a LinkedIn that was actually good.
       | That you could actually do business over, and no I don't mean
       | spam people with you BS cold emails which must have a 10000:1
       | success rate. I wrote a bit about this almost a decade ago and
       | there is nothing.[1]
       | 
       | [1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
        
       | reboot81 wrote:
       | Its owned by Microsoft. They sell RAM.
        
       | 01jonny01 wrote:
       | Notably mentions should be given to Stripe (dashboard) at ~900 MB
       | and Youtube.com at ~1 GB on watch pages.
        
       | galleywest200 wrote:
       | I remember touring a chemistry lab in college and one student
       | asked the panel of chemists how much LinkedIn mattered in their
       | industry and they paused until one chemist asks "what is
       | LinkedIn?"
        
       | zffr wrote:
       | The performance of both the website and the iOS app is also not
       | great. On the iOS app, I frequently see frames dropped and
       | scrolling is sometimes blocked for up to a second or more at a
       | time.
       | 
       | LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones
       | should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
        
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