The idea of LinkedIn is good, but the execution is absolutely awful. It encourages spam and lies, has a shit app (on iOS) and the “social” aspect of it is completely stupid and useless (they now even support videos - WTF?).

I’d pay good money for a “premium” alternative without the above issues.

Why would you want an iOS app for linkedin? Unless you are a recruiter it's just not a daily use kind of thing.

I don't really understand why most people use apps for things that are essentially websites that don't have unusual latency requirements. I mean, sure, maps and some of the other daily use things, those extra microseconds matter. I want to do more of it locally. But things like linkedin and facebook? the ios browser works fine for that (well, I haven't figured out how to make facebook messages work through the mobile website... but there's no way I'm installing that app)

I use LinkedIn as a less creepy alternative to Facebook Messenger, to keep in touch with people who I don’t have their number or who don’t have iMessage. As a result I’d love to have a decent native app at least for the messaging part of it.

hold refresh button and click on "request desktop site".

then go to facebook.com/messages.

Thanks for the support. Your instructions work, and I can switch back to the mobile site by closing the window and navigating back.

Note; as someone who has done a lot of tech support, I think it's important to tell people "that worked" when they give you tech support and that support leads to the problem being solved. Paid or not.

or you can use mbasic.facebook.com

What do you get when you combine LinkedIn, spam, and videos?

Gary Vaynerchuk!

It took me a few weeks of unfollowing, unsubscribing, or clicking whatever buttons were available for “omfg stop showing me this stuff” to delouse my feed of all things Gary Vee.

This. GV is like a LinkedIn virus, really annoying. Also the guy is like the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, getting rich by selling advise on how they got rich, which is all pretty much useless for others (or at least very disingenuous)

Yeah, if I didn’t know better I would say that he’s a Sasha Baren Cohen charector. Literally a caricature of a bunch of stereotypes.

Did you do zero research on him? He still runs a marketing business with real customers. He also invested early in FB, Snapchat, and Uber.

He had a challenge this year on flipping items from free section of Craigslist, yard sales, thrift stores for profit.

What is this all pretty much useless? He gives away 99% of information for free (I've been watching his videos for 3 years). He comes out with a book once every two or three years that's a synthesis of mostly what he has already given away. Think of Tim Ferris' book Tools of Titans.

Do you think advise like work to make money so you can fund your own businesses if no one else wants to fund you is useless? How about figuring what you want and reverse engineering the path? Or to successful entrepreneur who doesn't find money rewarding anymore, that it's good thing, because most people never get past the phase of chasing money, that he can focus on what he wants and finds meaningful.

> He also invested early in FB, Snapchat, and Uber.

Sources? I suspect origin will be himself. What does it mean to invest early in Facebook? FB completed its last traditional round in 2006. Personally, I’m a fan of GV, but it’s weird when someone says they invested early to mean outside of an angel investment / funding round. I’d be surprised if he was part of a FB round. Instead like other social media entrepreneurs he likely picked up some on secondary market or directly from a shareholder 2007+ as much for the narrative as the financial investment.

I don't discount people that got it in secondary markets. It's not like they're only buying a few shares. I can't find outside sources. The most legit one is from WSJ[0], 200k investment in 2009. Hopefully they verified holdings and date of investment before printing.

Crunchbase does list him as Angel/Seed Round investor in Uber in 2010[1].

[0] https://outline.com/8HHZFF

[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/uber-angel--c76f942...

Even if you don’t discount, do you agree that his FB investment is different from his angel investments?

Yes. It’s much earlier.

Anything pre ipo, they’re going to be the first 1% of shareholders if the company does well. And many times you can’t even buy into those rounds without the right connections. Early is subjective vs if he said he was an angel round investor.

I understand you're probably like most people on hacker news and don't care for people on the "sales end" of the spectrum, but he definitely didn't get rich selling advice.

He runs a really successful marketing company (https://vaynermedia.com/) a sports agency (http://vaynersports.com/), gives most of his content away for free on YouTube, wrote 4 books and is a NYT + Wall Street Journal Bestseller, and is pretty respected in the early stage Silicon Valley investment community (https://www.crunchbase.com/person/gary-vaynerchuk/investment...).

Like most things on hacker news, don't speak on something unless you know what you're talking about.

Hes totally fueling his company by being famous. Wouldnt exist otherwise. Elon Musk of digital advertising

considering how his company came before he was really famous, I highly doubt that. It's ok if you don't care for Gary V, he's not for everyone, but saying his success is contingent on the fact the he's "famous" is simply not true. Again, if you don't know what you're talking about, you probably shouldn't be speaking on it.

I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm working in the same field, own a digital agency. He's a snake-oil salesman.

totally not how he got rich but OK.

not understanding the downvotes, he got rich via his dad's liquor/wine shop

Unfortunately no one is on those 'premium' alternatives cos most people know this is a possible route to an opportunity- not the only one or the best one.

It is very easy to understand. LinkedIn started as a service to help with business networking but ended up just being a recruiter place and scamming (yes, scamming) people making them think the service has many other uses.

For example, you go to a LinkedIn group about marketing with million of subscribers, post an average interesting non spammy article and nobody comments or click on the links. Nobody! And it has million users. Compare this to posting in an interesting subreddit like /r/sysadmin or /r/networking or /r/python where almost anonymous people give you an answer to a complex issue.

Then you decide to go premium, or pay for ads where you will find that the conversion is practically zero. Finally you apply to their API. Yes, you apply because they manually review your use case and will not approve your request even if you just want to retrieve all your connections with a simple HTTP GET.

Alternatively, it also works great for mapping out companies as part of OSINT. Save for intelligence services, you can find exactly whose credentials you need for keys to some company's kingdom. All of that with the free trial of a recruiter account. The search could be better, but isn't bad once you figured out how it works.

How? Linkedin doesnt let you connect with ppl outside of your network. How do you start getting in?

I don't want to connect with anyone, just see at which company/ies they work and their function(s). Paying recruiters have a nice search function for that on LinkedIn.

Isn’t that only true for free accounts? I think if you pay them like $15 (or use the free trial as grandparent comment suggests) they’ll let you message anyone.

You'd be awfully surprised by how far you can get with only a free account and Google: LinkedIn will limit search results and suchlike if you use the site itself but you can generally fall back to Google to get what you need.

Eg—

    firstname.lastname@company_firstname_works_for.com

Proceed to try common passwords?

Don't need to guess the email format anymore: https://hunter.io/

I agree. I’ve gotten my last four jobs via recruiters who contacted me on LinkedIn. I ignore any messages from recruiters who don’t work for local agencies.

LinkedIn represents every approach I abhor in a tidy package. 1. Idolisation of social norms 2. Inability to admit weakness or failure 3. Artificial elevation of meaningless interaction

I get that it's a reflection of current corporate/professional culture, but I'd like to minimize the amount of time I spend using that set of social norms.

"if you can avoid the bad parts like spam"

An engineer I once worked with used to joke that the best way to fix flash was to uninstall flash.

I wonder if this precedent holds for avoiding LinkedIn spam by just avoiding LinkedIn.

(Spoiler alert: it works marvels, YMMV)

What I've noticed is that the top developers that I know, the real elites, do not have LinkedIn accounts.

Is it weird I like the ego stroking linkedIn provides?

It definitely works. After deleting my LinkedIn account 5 or 6 years ago, my recruiter spam dropped to nearly zero. It was a great decision.

As a former recruiter, I found the LinkedIn user experience to be completely abysmal for any non-trivial search.

Yes, same here. The problem though it got more spammy lately, with all the videos and recruiters so LinkedIn may burnout as a useful tool. Although not clear what could replace it...

Getting job through LinkedIn, does that ever happen? For the past many many months, LinkedIn has been consistently sending me one job posting - "Data Center Operations Intern at Amazon, Boardman, OR".

My last job was through LinkedIn, though not through a recruiter. The hiring manager reached out to me in a DM and I ended up being exactly what they were looking for. Switched jobs, but still working with that same person. Ended up breaking into a whole new career because of it.

Got my job through a recruiter on linkedIn seemingly cold messaging me. I initially only interview because I thought it would be good practice, but the more I learned about the company and eventually got an offer, was blown away by the opportunity. YMMV

I just landed a job as a Golang developer via LinkedIn, so it does happen occasionally.