Yet another Hacker News

41 points BurnerBurner 1 hour ago 41 comments

jmathai 1 hour ago | parent

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

designerarvid 1 hour ago | parent

It talks to that vain and insecure feeling that many of us have deep down.

Interestingly, unlike instagram the LinkedIn business model has nothing to do with it. It’s built around b2b sales and professional recruitment.

BurnerBurner 1 hour ago | parent

Tech Instagram is worse they just like looking at flashing colors on screen with no meaning. I once saw like this dude flexing about how complex his code is by showing like this obsidian ass diagram like dude what am I supposed to appreciate here? how coupled your code is?

yesitcan 24 minutes ago | parent

Like bro totally

aeve890 13 minutes ago | parent

>showing like this obsidian ass diagram like dude what am I supposed to appreciate here?

The mighty second brain of course. https://youtu.be/6NukGtwJb7Y?si=yg09jegXRM4C-hFE

necklesspen 58 minutes ago | parent

Depends on your definition of more.

You can absolutely find non-performative posts on Instagram. There is value in a sincere post - ex. sharing pictures of your cat to your friends.

Whereas in LinkedIn no such value exists in my experience - I can't imagine myself posting there for any other reason than to be performative.

So in terms of % of posts being performative I don't think anything tops LinkedIn.

latentsea 37 minutes ago | parent

The only reason I have LinkedIn is because I think I'm supposed to.

QuantumNomad_ 29 minutes ago | parent

People told me I was supposed to be on LinkedIn but I found it too silly a place to make an account. Then again, I was laid off from my job a while ago and I don’t really have a “network” irl nor online through which to find a new job, so maybe I am the sucker after all.

steve_j_choi 58 minutes ago | parent

Linkedin got saturated like a benchmark

nicebyte 57 minutes ago | parent

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

plausibility 47 minutes ago | parent

Trolls posting absolute garbage /b/ are at least trying to evoke some feeling in you. Hard to say the same from the ‘I had dinner with my wife on a yacht. Here’s what it taught me about Series A VC relationships’ posting full of Claudisms and emojis.

Who’s the target audience for that?

nalekberov 57 minutes ago | parent

Why would you visit LinkedIn nowadays to begin with? Like besides corporate clowns who is genuinely active there?

hyperhello 52 minutes ago | parent

It’s part of the Microsoft network of properties that make everything harder to get up in the morning.

gwerbin 42 minutes ago | parent

It used to be the case that if you wanted a new job, you could strategically update your profile and over the next several days you would get bombarded by recruiter messages, some of which would actually be high-quality leads.

flarg 55 minutes ago | parent

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.

riffraff 33 minutes ago | parent

That's the reason I use LinkedIn, and I have zero complaints about it in that form. Tho for me is more about keeping the connection rather than see what they work on.

OTOH I do see the performative posting "I bumped my pinky toe on the cupboard and here's what it taught me about leading teams" and I genuinely don't understand who they're writing for. Isn't it obviously bullshit for everyone? Who cares about that?

duttish 15 minutes ago | parent

Those people are what "Unfollow <name>" under the 3 dots on the posts are for.

I actually see posts from maybe 5-10% of my connections on LI, one strike for being boring or bland or performative and they're out of my feed.

stavros 29 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn't mind LinkedIn at all if I could turn off the feed.

tweetle_beetle 22 minutes ago | parent

Stalking ex-colleagues hasn't even been an essential part of what I would describe as a normie job.

shrubby 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

shrubby 50 minutes ago | parent

I remind you of the better version ShlinkedIN! Unfortunately it seems to be dead these days.

stavros 48 minutes ago | parent

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/

gwerbin 38 minutes ago | parent

Ironically I think these are insightful. If you want to produce true slop, you need to dumb down your topic selection, or have Claude pick the topics. The stuff about the incompatible goals of "data strategy" I think is genuinely useful perspective, for example.

stavros 35 minutes ago | parent

Claude does pick the topics! I worry I did too good a job steering it. I found a few of them insightful too, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that they're same old "They were doing a thing. It failed." Claude writing you see everywhere, intensifying the feeling that nobody on LinkedIn has a pulse.

Tade0 31 minutes ago | parent

I second that other comment - this is still above average in terms of LinkedIn content.

stavros 30 minutes ago | parent

Damnit. I need to try harder to reach the level of the average poster. Sadly, downwards.

vachina 44 minutes ago | parent

You need to prune your Indian connections.

kleiba2 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

Modified3019 15 minutes ago | parent

If you like, you can block it from coming up with an extension: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

kleiba2 9 minutes ago | parent

The problem is really the unpredictability: some LinkedIn pages can apparently be accessed publicly without a login, others cannot. But perhaps that fact alone would be reason enough to block it entirely in Google searches?

f311a 32 minutes ago | parent

Never seen such posts, my feed contains different kind of larping.

ex-aws-dude 28 minutes ago | parent

Working games mine is all layoff posts recently

Just scrolled now and saw like 5

f311a 13 minutes ago | parent

Mine sometimes contains funny takes.

Something like: "I have been looking for a QA middle role with 2 years of experience for six months. Here is the stuff I won't be doing: relocating to a different city, commuting more than 30 minutes, ...". Most of the comments say, "Good luck. You will definitely find a job". Only a few mention that it's time to update your worldview.

cyral 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

logdahl 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

MisterMunchkin 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

johnnypangs 16 minutes ago | parent

Good on you for doing this and I hope you get promoted. But I can imagine a lot of people are like me and just don’t want to engage in office politics on or offline. Not that I don’t sometimes, but I’d much rather just work and be paid to do a job and live my life.

kelseyfrog 24 minutes ago | parent

All I want to know is, is it effective? If so, how much?

tamimio 14 minutes ago | parent

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.