HN

Comments (138)

• s1mon
  I love when people complain about X being in their feed on social media, and I see none of X. Do they not understand the basics of the algorithms? The more you engage with X, the more they show it to you.That said, there's an insane amount of garbage self promotion on LinkedIn for individuals and companies which amount to your mom putting up your messy crayon drawing of you pet cat on the refrigerator as a kid. It's only impressive to you and your family, and it's not a remotely accurate picture of your cat.
• Menu

  rietta
  Slightly off topic. I've had exactly one consulting engagement come from LinkedIn, back in 2013. Someone met with a VC, was told they needed a Ruby on Rails developer, found me, and it was off to the races. That was it. No lead since, in any format. I paid for Premium for a while and eventually stopped.I have connections, and friends occasionally like a comment when I share something. I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform, even in the comments. That makes it really hard to share a good blog post.Honestly, I get more engagement on Facebook. My mom and in-person friends find what I do slightly interesting, at least when the algorithm decides to show it. Same story there, though. Links to a blog get buried compared to native content.
• Menu

  kleiba2
  I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
• Menu

  MisterMunchkin
  You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
• Menu

  d2kx
  My wife got into a car accident.On a sunday.I didn't go to the hospital.I had a client, and a project.Ready to go.On a sunday.You don't give up when life challenges you, you move faster.Keep building [ROCKET EMOJI]
• mawadev
  I joined a call once to meet a guy and he was all energetic and speaking in tongues of an LLM hitting epic one liners and I thought he was just a coke addict. Turns out his reality is basically linkedin. Like how the hell can you be like this unironically?
• Menu

  jmathai
  LinkedIn is truly an odd place. I think it’s more performative than Instagram.
• Menu

  upupupandaway
  I am finding a niche on LinkedIn by calling out the larping, clichés, fake projects, AI experts, and the general stupidity of the whole thing. Kind of eliminates me from being considered for some positions, as commented by a recruiter.
• sitzkrieg
  i deleted LinkedIn in 2017. nothing of value lost
• mococa
  I only had a LinkedIn because... recruiters
• Menu

  meerita
  Who really goes to Linkedin to get useful info? That's why I am in Hacker News.
• qmr
  Linkedin is a fucking cesspool. I refuse to participate.Apparently my background is impressive enough that someone stole it and made a profile of me. To what end I do not know.
• Menu

  tobadzistsini
  Can someone post the full thing instead of making a reader scroll up-and-down 'til the next block of text realizes it should load, please?
• tombert
  I'm glad that LinkedIn's bullshit "inspiration porn" has finally gotten the hatred I always felt it deserved [1].It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905664
• Menu

  cyral
  Finance LinkedIn is filled with slop posts about "Look at the trading terminal I built. Real math. Here's why it matters." and it's some clearly vibecoded pointless app. Comments are all "Insane project <name>!"It is funny that they actually added a "Looks like AI Slop" button on the menu for each post.
• Menu

  nicebyte
  I am not joking when I say that 4chan is a more rejuvenating and life affirming place than Linkedin
• Menu

  TrackerFF
  As far as larping goes, quantitative finance is currently the hottest field for that. I'm sure that close to 100% of the people on social media that market themselves as quants are in fact not professional quantitative analysts / researchers / developers.They all post vids of their vibe-coded dashboards where agents are doing market research and executing trades, while they kick back as collect to profits.I've even seen these people promote some ASICs for home use, you know, to get those extra milliseconds shaved off.After tech layoffs started, the get-rich-quick folks looked on what other fields pay well, and the decided that the absolutely most selective, the most credentialed and gatekept niche role in finance, that's the one to impersonate.
• spprashant
  I don't mind the projects. Its the grandiose self-important posting that is insufferable. Not everything you experienced today is an epiphany on productivity or team-building.
• okokwhatever
  Nothing like the good old trolling sites... Uh, I love internet...
• bwnkl
  LinkedIn is such a shit fest. First they push AI generated posts, now you can mark posts as slop but guess what: you're not flagging that content, you're labeling it.
• Menu

  shrubby
  Yes. I must use it within sandbox and single signon MFA and a password that questions my sanity to login. Even with this it regularly manages to sucks the soul dry occasionally.
• Menu

  imagetic
  People look at me weird when I tell them I don’t have a LinkedIn account.
• pmkary
  Best thing I read in a long long time.
• shantanujoshi
  Wonderful read thank you!
• sailfast
  What the heck? Author just did the same thing they absolutely hate about LinkedIn, but posted it to their blog and hacker news. GTF outta here man.
• Ekaros
  I am thankful that I am not yet important enough to have to spend time spamming there. Which most of my feed seems to be. Just another marketing channel. Just corporate spam. I suppose it generates some leads for some people...
• steve_j_choi
  Linkedin got saturated like a benchmark
• gadders
  Don't hate the player, hate the game. If it gets them a better job and more money, good luck to them.
• tamimio
  Every time I convince myself to use LinkedIn because I keep getting told it’s where business opportunities are (not jobs, business connections), no matter how I try to be cringy, something deep inside keep preventing me and I feel like a fraud just by posting anything there. Don’t use it now and happy to lose these opportunities, until we get a better platform to replace it.
• Menu

  f311a
  Never seen such posts, my feed contains different kind of larping.
• stronglikedan
  hey now, that pothole detection could come in handy for self driving cars, so let's not poo poo it right out of the gate!
• Menu

  logdahl
  I often get notifications to play LinkedIn games, Zip or whatever. The games are very trivial and on a timer, where you end up on some kind of network leaderboard. I never play them party because they're boring, but also, I'm utterly scared that they use them as a intelligence signal in recruiting or selling it to 3rd party ATSs. There are so many companies hungry for arbitrary "smartness" indicators, this wouldn't even chock me.
• Menu

  flarg
  I know there's a lot of hate for LinkedIn here on HN but it really is the only place to see where ex-colleagues are working at and what competitors say they are up to. It's kind of like a boring version of TwitterX, but essential to those of us in normie jobs.I wish there was an alternative but at least there's not much right wing propaganda and it does just work.
• Menu

  stavros
  I hate LinkedIn so much I made a slop cannon for it. I have Claude research a topic and post an extremely LLM slop post about BuSiNeSs twice a week, and of course everyone comments with slop comments and I reply in kind.I immortalised the posts here:https://thinkpieces.stavros.io/
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  nalekberov
  Why would you visit LinkedIn nowadays to begin with? Like besides corporate clowns who is genuinely active there?
• ml_eng_perspect
  Fun project, but the blog trivializes ML.I suspect any positive results here are due to training on the test set. (Their training data collection script uses their feed, which is then also used for the slop detector demo vid.)Expect performance to deteriorate if this is corrected, or simply over the coming weeks if not.
• kelseyfrog
  All I want to know is, is it effective? If so, how much?
• jpm_sd
  I'm an EE so The Algorithm tailors my feed differently. Instead of a million computer vision Hello World slop posts, I get a million "I designed a PCB with three components on it using ChatGPT" slop posts.Also I'm constantly getting friend requests from randos all over the world. I thought you had to have some kind of 2nd or 3rd tier actual connection first?
• upupupandaway
  The author did all this to identify the slop posts and yet hasn't learned a thing about B2B sales. What a larper./s
• Menu

  vachina
  [flagged]