Many post on HN added value to my life, and it happens on a regular basis. As for posts shared on LI, I mainly feel awkward reading them. You know that when someone suddenly got active on LI they either got fired or are looking for prospects. It's just a kind of weird game, more so that people basically have to use their real names and reveal their employment history in order to benefit from the site, so they're particularly vulnerable. Everybody knows this, so they refrain from poking fun at them.

It’s amazing how antithetical this is to requiring real identity. Proponents say anonymity is the cause of spam and all sorts of unwanted content online. Yet using one’s real identity can end up just being terribly inauthentic.

I never say anything I really think or feel under my real name which isn't utterly benign and uncontroversial. There is a profound sense of unsafeness when you're in full public view like that. It seems almost unavoidable that the end result is almost entirely watered down blathering.

I don't really see any antidote to this in our current environment other than operating as much as possible on platforms allowing pseudonymous accounts. If some unbalanced rando decides they really hate something I said, I'd prefer if they had to jump through at least a hoop or two before being able to tie it to my location or my family.

I use LinkedIn as a professional identity placeholder and online resume for HR groups. I ignore pretty much all the posts because much of what I've sampled has been trash.

I think anonymity is the real key here. It gives power back to those in leveraged positions to be critical when they otherwise wouldn't. Once you connect back to your real identify, you become as leveraged as you really are and act accordingly. You're not going to be as critical of information you really are because socially speaking, you may close off a bridge of opportunity. It becomes this ridiculous networking and social climbing game instead of focusing on content.

Anonymity is a double edged sword because it can certainly be abused and give garbage but I feel like you get better information through anonymity than actual identity. Both require sorting and filtering, one just seems to have more insightful information.

It's not unique to LinkedIn of course. LinkedIn posts often remind me of cringe worthy corporate meetings where you have disjoint groups in the same meeting or disconnected higher level people. It's often in your interest to say nothing at all than be critical, so you get all these sort of ridiculous discussions about nothing where everyone prices each other or some effort. LinkedIn posts embody this worthless grandstanding nothingness--that and just general advertising/marketing. We have a business culture problem, IMO.

It's interesting to see some people feel this way. I don't really filter my views in posts on the web compared to conversations with (not very close) friends. It does feel like that could very well come back and bite me, maybe I'll lose jobs over "supporting hacktivism" or whatever. I guess it's a risk I'm willing to take to share my ideals.

Yes, this depends on many factors, like how strongly you feel about the case, how controversial it is, if you have kids, mortgage and so on.

I'll never forget when many years ago my boss, by that time a CEO of some major publicly traded companies, called me to his office and kindly asked I moderate my Usenet activity on some niche group. It turned out he was a lurker there and foresaw certain things I said might cause problems - it turned out he was right. And that was a long time before the Twitter era.

My bar for adding value to life might be lower than GP's but I do get value-adding posts in my feed. It's basically boring updates from people but made less boring because I know these people.

A friend from a previous job now leads a project for company X. Someone else switched their tech stack to Y. Another person migrates from cloud back to on-prem.

It might have to do with my policy of not adding random people as connections.

I get a reasonable amount of value from LinkedIn from when people post innovation challenges or want to set up talks with people interested in X.

But you are wading through a swamp to find those gold nuggets.