I personally found messaging to not be very useful or relevant, and I just couldn't keep up with the backlog of messages. If they really want to contact me, they can just email me.

Here are the UBO rules:

  www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
  www.linkedin.com###messaging
  www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header
  www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content
  www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay
  www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item

There’s a similar network effect problem with Facebook, but it’s a lot easier to leave Facebook because you presumably can still message your real life friends in other ways.

With LinkedIn you can’t leave without also seriously hurting your ability to get in touch with recruiters.

That said, you basically don’t have to spend any time on it after you set it up. Maybe update once a year? So doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

...not that I've ever had anything useful come from talking to a recruiter. The useful bits have always come through my existing personal network more directly, or through meatspace networking. I shut down my LinkedIn because I basically started to view recruiter emails as spam.

So in my world, having a CV with the necessary keywords (SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, COBIT, NIST SP 800/XX/yy/zz, NIST CSF, etc.) is a life saver because I always have headhunters calling me. I don't see them as spam. I just tell them to ring me 30 days before my contract/extension ends, and they gladly do so, and I stay working like this.

I don't spend more than 10minutes per month, and only to accept/ignore/reply to messages. I use it. I don't let it use me (apart from the fact that they sell my data to anyone who is willing to pay them).

Sure - if you know people that work at the specific company you're interested in then you can just get a referral through them, but if you don't then having a history of email contact with recruiters at interesting companies via linked in is quite valuable and makes it easy to jump to the interview process.

The job market is strong so we (devs) get a lot of email from recruiters trying to hire, and the recruiter quality can vary (generally employees of the specific company are better than hired firms), but in general I think this is a good problem to have.

I don't categorize the person you're replying to this way, but I've definitely seen devs go on a bit of an ego trip because of the recruiter emails they get and then treat them dismissively. A career is long, there's no reason to be nasty to them or cut them off - at some point you might need their help.

I dislike LinkedIn, but have seen very few people walk the walk professionally when it comes to influencing their own workplace to stop using it in some way. I have advised every company I have worked at against using external recruiters, and rarely has it been accepted (even though we always got a lot of candidates from the external recruiters who weren't a good fit with regards to either skills or eagerness).

Props to the article author for actually doing so, and I hope they will remember this and not use LinkedIn when the company they are cofounding has to recruit their N > 20th employee.

Email might be a neutral tool, but not using a tool like LinkedIn is worse because you're restricting your hiring pool to immediate connections. For all its warts, LinkedIn allows job seekers to connect with a wider range of jobs and job posters to connect to a wider range of potential candidates.

The answer isn't to double down on a "it's not what you know but who you know" world.

Most outside recruiters are terrible, we can agree on that. It's a two-fold problem, they give you poor candidates and harm the reputation of your firm by leaving a poor impression of you to them. I'm looking for work right now and had first hand experience of this recently; I don't know if I should feel sad that I didn't get a job that sounded perfect or happy that I dodged a bullet because if the candidate experience was so bad, what would working there be like?

That's the one that I used, thanks! I find messaging valuable :)

A high percentage of which seem to be recruiters cutting and pasting words of wisdom, inspirational quotes that dozens of people "Like."

I don't know how people can take this stuff seriously.

Before lockdowns, I kept seeing this post, that boiled down to "employee asked for WFH, due to personal life issues. Now they are even more dedicated and can spend the time freed up working 8-6 instead, and we both win! Thoughts?"

On a slight tangent, seeing all the companies come out of the woodwork to praise WFH policies during COVID was truly astounding. I suspected 100% of these companies would go right back to working in an office as soon as COVID left the news. And that seems to be playing out right now. I've been working remote for many years now, so I know these people are totally full of shit. It's the worst sort of virtue signaling and pandering imaginable. Then they all switched to Black Lives Matter. These people sold their soul to the devil.

The only wannabe thought leaders I see are all people I actually know who are taking other people's thoughts and passing them off as their own. Thankfully, I rarely scroll the feed -- I only use linkedin to receive unsolicited messages from people who just want to be my friend so they can sell me their services. I should really delete my linkedin profile.

Any post by a company with no logo is virtually guaranteed to be spam. I'm seeing them side-by-side with the real post. It's highly polluted by these bad actors.

The scraped ones are the bad ones. Bad formatting and categorisation, not kept up to date (the job might be expired on the original site but still displayed on LinkedIn) and you have to register and apply on an external site.

It’s quite ironic that LinkedIn is so against scraping despite doing it themselves.

Last time I was looking I used those sites to fil the quota for job applications per day that receiving JSA (social security) requires in the UK - whilst putting the real effort in to the 2-3 decent possibilities a week I found.

The worst part though, to me, is that it seems too often to completely ignore my search terms in favor of showing me "sponsored" or jobs that match my profile, even if they completely lack anything from my search.

It's a shame, because it has a few features I really like that I dont see in other job boards. The ability to filter by both the company industry and the job function is pretty nice.

Also, I can't stand the interface for looking for a job. I really wish it had a "Jobs since you last looked", because otherwise I just kept seeing the same jobs I wasn't interested in.

The behavior you are describing reminds me of the behavior that happens after deactivating your account, not deleting it.

I deleted my facebook last year so maybe things have changed.

My main goal was to harm Facebook's ad business, so I still accomplished that. As far as privacy, I've mostly given up on escaping from Facebook's databases.

It has happened multiple times. I explicitly unfollow someone, never interact with them in any way, and then they again pop up in my feed after two weeks. Somehow if you follow too few people, Facebook just picks some more people for you to follow without ever asking you or telling you.

My feed went back to being social rather than emotional manipulation or clickbait news. It was amazing.

Eventually the site lost its value for me because 75% of my real friends deleted their profiles, so it was an awkward/depressing ghosttown. I eventually deleted mine because of ethical qualms.

open "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=__OBJ_...

Apologies to non-Mac users. OnMyCommand is at http://www.abracode.com/free/cmworkshop/on_my_command.html, though for beginners I will immodestly suggest my fork of the ReadMe: https://github.com/abra-code/OMC/pull/9/files

That brings up another issue, that employment background checks are increasingly checking social media posts for "questionable" activity. It's already daunting enough to see that I can't express my true self on places like FB for various reasons but now it's a factor when I'm applying for work?

I think if it was voluntary, and for like a PR position or other very public-facing, it would be different but when I found out this was going on I was relieved that I basically checked out of social media long ago voluntarily where I was already very guarded about how I expressed myself.

Honestly, can you blame them in the current climate? If they can find something that is seriously questionable (I leave the definition of that to the reader), anyone else can too. And no company wants either internal dissent or an external PR hit because someone they hired ranted online about something that's outside the scope of "civilized" discourse as determined by the standards of the arbiters of appropriate public discussion.

She's gotten incoming freshman kicked out of the colleges they were accepted to. Fired from their jobs. Businesses closed. Dozens and possibly hundreds of them. She's literally dedicated herself to destroying lives.

This is precisely why that although the 1st Amendment only specifically mentions government limits on laws regarding free speech, that free speech MUST ALSO be a cultural value that is protected and defended FIRST and the content of the speech judged SECOND.

People love to say "you are free to speak but we never said there's no consequences!!" as though that's some sort of ace in the hole. Well, sorry folks, but it isn't free speech if you are able to ensure I can never make a living for the rest of my life. The law generously limits what is illegal speech, and certain kinds of hate speech are included.

"I may disagree with every word you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" MUST be a social value for "free speech" and especially the 1st Amendment to have any meaning at all.

I do have good professional reasons to be on twitter and I honestly don't have much inclination to have political arguments there. If I did, I'd probably get another pseudonymous handle but even that carries some risk that it could be connected to you in some way.

And the degree to which this social-media-background-check crap goes - just see a recent entry from jwz's blog about this[1]. I had little idea things had gone that far already.

Sure, play stupid games/get stupid prizes but we are all human and go through phases of self-discovery. Turning social media into a saccharine, superficial cat pics trading ground where everyone is fearful of losing friendships over, say, well-intentioned analysis and opinions seems like a pathetic outcome for humanity overall. Not to mention how easy it is to miss sarcasm or other thought subtleties that can't be easily conveyed on international multimedia social networks.

I agree with others who say HN is a refreshing exception to the toxic mess that is social media, though.

1:https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/02/enjoy-your-dystopia/

But you are right, seeing witch hunts on social media makes me think you shouldn't use them. I don't express a lot of my political opinions online anymore for this reason alone and am cutting on how much personal information I give up.

The advice also warns that, “The employer should – prior to the inspection of a social media profile – take into account whether the social media profile of the applicant is related to business or private purposes, as this can be an important indication for the legal admissibility of the data inspection.”

This means that while business networking sites such as LinkedIn may be considered fair game, platforms used for more personal purposes, such as Facebook and Instagram, are possibly not relevant."

I don't live in the EU, though, so I'm oblivious of the details.

1: https://checkpoint.cvcheck.com/the-gdpr-and-its-effect-on-so...

For a professional community it is hopelessly clumsy. Also overpriced.

I am always wondering who reads that? It turns out that a lot of people do read (or at least see) the feed.

I'd really love to see others job updates there, or job openings. But mostly its just drivel.

Not trolling but I'm willing to bet that the majority here in HN, including me, do not know who you are talking about.

It seems like I would have to unfollow everyone, which is not a big deal for me (I don't look at the newsfeed to begin with) but could be problematic if you find some content useful.

LinkedIn desperately tries to get me to “follow” the people you mentioned which I always ignore however not following them still doesn’t isolate you from the noise.

It seems like everyone on LinkedIn is trying to be an “influencer” or wannabe thought leader posting bullshit motivational content or presenting obvious facts as something groundbreaking.

All the content in my feed is from my connections or interactions by my connections. Of course there is plenty of vapid "thought-leader" content from them too.

Actually I've gotten some amusement from watching a few former colleagues overtly try the "LinkedIn thought leader" thing. Kind of funny to observe the (sometimes very large) gap between what they post and what I know they used to do in their day jobs.

And hence the saying "Nobody is a prophet in their own land".

Maybe one or two of them. But I don't even know who Guy Kawasaki is.

This is the trick to turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate who you follow. Facebook in particular has many tools to do this, from preventing their content posting to your news feed to unfriending them altogether.

Too many people just follow everyone they know, then complain when they start seeing content that gives them negative outcomes.

There's also this weird social stigma where people think that if you unfollow them on a social website, you can't be friends in real life. That's not true either! They're just really bad at posting content I'm interested in viewing.

The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.

You just need to curate your timeline. You have the tools. If you timeline looks bad, you probably haven't curated it properly. If it still looks bad after curation, then perhaps it's time to take a long hard look at your friends and acquaintances!

Something amazing happened in the middle. I started seeing engagement photos and wedding announcements and baby shower invites, from the three months prior. All things that I would have loved to know about at the time, but that were systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”. For a brief moment I thought I had saved my Facebook.

But then, I refreshed my page and the tide of low quality humor, cat pictures, and political memes came back in. I remember I kept trying to tell Facebook not to show me anything from LadBible, but no matter how many times I clicked “never show me content from this page”, literally the same videos came back. A week later I came back, and the feed was again overgrown with the stuff, like poison ivy.

These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention and they cannot be redeemed. At least, I couldn’t redeem mine.

Another thing I noticed was that basically the same video would be posted by a dozen (and growing) increasingly obscure pages, and my friends (and fb) would share from all the different pages indiscriminately.

If you block one obscure page, another one arrives to take its place within a few days. It almost feels engineered by design, to get around the "never show stuff from this person/page again" mechanism.

I couldn't be bothered... I shut it down.

Selection bias. You may very well have found the same exact, or even better, jobs outside of LI.

Other than that it only left me with jobsdb and jobsteet, both need for me to actively looking for a job.

If you want to use LinkedIn and keep your sanity, I suggest disabling all notifications except the email notifications for new messages and then don't log back in unless you get an e-mail and you need to respond to that person.

Recently I tried to get Twitter for the first time and my gosh what a mess that platform is. I only wanted it to follow some researcher to get up-to-date research topic but the damn app just have to fill the feed with "retweet" and other tweet I didn't even ask for (and I can't turn this off!)

If you submit a resume to a recruiter they can submit on your behalf to a company. If you submit to many in the same firm some will use the date received in order to assign any money earned.

Without this rule you would have people sending in resumes without the person's knowledge.

But LinkedIn is basically fine as a way of keeping track of people and potentially contacting those you're not directly connected to elsewhere. I go through my connect requests once a month or so and ignore about half of them. I ignore any messages trying to sell me something or recruiters that are pitching something that's not remotely my thing. (In all fairness, my profile isn't really filled out so it would be hard to know what I actually do or have done.)

I do similarly with respect to notifications which is a good rule of thumb in general.

Maybe ban it in hosts and unban when needed?

I never scroll through the news feed.

I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume.

It looks as if the site is beneficial when used strictly for professional contact(s), it's working as expected most of the time. The marketing side, which is part of its business model, is annoying. Groups used to provide valuable and interesting information in some professional fields. Now, not so much. When everyone tries to push their agenda all of the time, it is just noise. Despite this, some people are still surprisingly listening and engaging, so it still works from a marketing standpoint.

> I never scroll through the news feed.

That's the way to use it.

i'm curious what others see as value from the platform.

in my narrow view:

- i have a list of connections id most likely be able to contact off platform

- a feed full of virtue signaling and mostly useless content

- messages from random recruiters. usually the full extent of the interaction is: phonecall, redo resume and send over, ghost (40+ interactions like this last year with 2 interviews resulting)

i spoke with someone in career services and their #1 suggestion was to start messaging people i don't know on linkedin looking for "connections" to expand my network.

perhaps i don't get "it" but it seems like for some its incredibly valuable and for the rest its actually a net negative all things considered.

1. My linkedin contact list is >300 people that I worked closely with over the years and all have seen me kick ass. I have actual email addresses for <10% of them.

2. I can browse my list and see where they are currently working. "oh gee, Mary works at coolCo, I should reach out to her because I' like to work for/with coolCo."

3. When I want to let them know that I started a new business venture, I can send them a message that is less obtrusive than an email.

4. If I give a prospective client my linkedin, they can see a) a brief summary of my resume, b) that I have a lot of contacts in x space, and c) that they may know some of the people I have worked with over the years. These all give me some measure of credibility.

LinkedIn has been extremely valuable to me. The recruiters who contact me are usually from professional executive search firms and highly relevant, though I only get a few a year.

I think the level of relevance depends on the industry though. I'm in finance/banking and fairly senior.

Or is attracting these sorts of offers the only/main reason you're on LinkedIn?

I use LinkedIn to contact professional colleagues when I don't have their email addresses. I've met 95%+ of the people on my contact list at some point in my career, and it's easy to send them a message to catch up. That's especially useful if they've switched jobs and they lose their work emails.

I also sometimes search people I meet at events or job applicants to find out a bit more about their backgrounds and see if we're connected with anyone.

Sometimes when I'm researching a company or hedge fund for work I'll search LinkedIn to get some information about the firm below the senior-most executives.

It also lets me know when some of my colleagues are mentioned in the media or have TV/print interviews. I like following up with people about those.

I never post or like anything. My employer actually forbids it due to securities regulations. I had to give our Compliance Department access to my account through a special program so they can monitor & log everything.

LinkedIn is pretty useless for the former--except as a Rolodex--but anecdotally can be very useful for the latter.

1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested

2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with "that's all fine and well, but I make <absurdly_high_total_comp> now; do you want to continue the discussion?". (note: I'm not lying).

I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today's junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?

Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said "yes" at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).

But, TBH, I'm far enough along in my career in this point and have a sufficiently specialized role (my current job had the description written for me after I started talking to the company) that random recruiting is unlikely to be a fit.

By contrast, StackOverflow and Twitter have given me some really great work opportunities.

The discussion is generally informed, balanced and insightful . I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.

It's very simple once you stop chasing growth and engagement metrics. The main reasons the other social media platforms are cesspools is because outrage generates engagement so the platform is designed to encourage it as well as encouraging users to join and stay regardless of the quality of their contributions, where as here the design itself acts as a small barrier to entry, in addition to a karma system and competent, human moderation that discourages (and eventually bans) bad behavior.

It doesn't show you ads because it is not trying to sell you anything. You could make a point that the hiring posts for ycombinator grads are ads.

Of course this could be reproduced in other similar communities as well.

The fake kind of positive. I don't understand why people do that. They're trying to fool other human beings by pretending that everything is awesome, positive, etc.

LinkedIn is useful as an online resume. But the feed is mostly garbage. Fake positivity is the worst.

on hackernews, the first one comes as a side effect of the general topic and the relatively high level of discussion and entries, and maybe also of the fact that it's text-only.

the second one comes via the threat of downvotes, or, more generally speaking, the possibility of negative feedback.

I...guess I knew there was a newsfeed, I just didn't know anyone actually looked at it.

It gave me nothing much.

Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.

One thing I found both awkward and fascinating was a job rejection from somewhere I never applied to or had any prior contact with! That was a strange feeling.

Someone internally recommended me for a robotics position. I didn't ask them to, but it was a glowing recommendation I was told. HR looked at my LinkedIn profile and concluded that since it mentions web (I do different things at different times), I received a surprise mail telling me I was unsuitable for the role and I should watch their company site in case webdev positions come up. But I'm not often a webdev, it's just up there for those times when I am!

From that strange incident as well as the types of approaches I get from recruiters (we think you are a perfect match for... our client asked me to write to you... oh, having now looked at your profile I see you are not... etc),

I'm inclined to think LinkedIn profiles for those with a variety of experience just confuse people looking to hire.

I haven't figured out a way to solve this dilemma and from talking with others at a conference, it's a common problem. The way it's done outside LinkedIn is tailored CVs, which focus on relevant items to each role and leave out the less relevant. But you can't do this on a big shared profile.

I feel like some internal miscommunication had to have happened but maybe not.

When I see C on a resume with 0 industry experience I'm 99% sure it's that knowledge level of C which is nearly useless in real world.

Extract the utility (eg. Facebook’s events and groups) without getting sucked into the cycle of shallow dopamine hits that is the news feed.

Could you please explain like what value you derive out of it. LinkedIn primary purpose is to build your professional network so that you can find your next job easily. It does not work out because programmers does not vouch for someone unless they have worked directly in my experience.

I like that way of looking at it.

I have to agree. I no longer even load the FB timeline. I have to have an FB account in order to interact with the community for one of my open-source projects, but I check it maybe once a day.