In my experience, there's plenty of sales people and middle managers posting stuff and commenting. Usually platitudes and mangled quotes from rich people, plus submissions of their company's marketing blogs.

Those things are just the neurotransmitters spewed by people who are becoming analogues to neurons. (Not aware of why they are filtering and passing on signals, but somehow performing some kind of decision making in aggregate.)

Recruitment spam or not it works and mediates a lot of jobs and connections. I don't think you should diminish LinkedIn's role on the job market.

And yes, a lot of my colleagues are very frequent users of LinkedIn for sharing and discussing business related stuff. With that said these tend to be non-techy people. Techy people tend to use sites like HN instead.

Absolutely. Various technical forums are active despite the horrible, horrible UX.

Couldn't have been said better - I mean, even a small, less than half-way competent team could easily build something providing a (much) better UX as compared to the LinkedIn forums.

I get most of my gigs through contacts on linked-in.

If MS can disconnect LinkedIn from having to monetise its social graph directly, they might actually be able to turn it into something likeable.

Imagine this: A recruiter messages you and then follows up with a skype interview through LinkedIn.

So you can tell them in person that you don't live in the same country or work in even vaguely the same area rather than ignoring them as you do now?

As opposed to using the superior Hangouts product? That's gonna suck.

To make that happen they'll have to put up even more barriers to messaging people out-of-band. Much like Upwork/etc.

You can do this... today! Without spending $26bn.

Yes, I got a guy in trouble for selling me a password-protected system board and not replying when I asked him whats going on (he took it from his boss' laptop, wrote it off as defective or something). Heh