Go in there and disable all that before changing anything. I’m bothered in a similar way about that stuff.

That being said, I don’t post or participate in the social media aspect. It’s a virtual resume and an index of recruiters and companies who are interested in you, and it’s good to know where your colleagues you want to work with again are at.

Don’t install the app for minimal invasiveness. And also consider that anyone who actively uses LinkedIn has probably disabled or filtered out all the notification noise themselves as well, so don’t get too caught up thinking about it.

What do you mean by "It just bothers me that people get notified whenever I'd do anything on it"?

You don't have to notify anyone when you update anything, it's just a setting. Most people don't.

The "fake" ones are the people trying to become linkedin-fluencers, I agree I'd never want to do that. But setting up your profile is basically a copy paste of your resume, and leads to an in-flow of recruiters you can always go back to when it's the right time.

I can't really believe I'm preaching for linkedin because I barely spend any time on it, but it's a tool, and when I've decided to move companies, it's made life far easier than it would've been manually applying to companies. That's without making public posts or sharing public updates to my role

Maybe it's because I never go on it, but every time a contact posts or visits my empty profile, I get notified. I can only imagine the notifications they would get if I started actually putting my info online. I might want to share it with a recruiter on a one-off basis, but I dislike having my cv available to everyone. I like to live a private life and not be publicly tracked, is that too much to expect nowadays? Just asking because I haven't job searched in a long time

Yep makes sense, I hate all that too, and they probably should do a better job providing sensible defaults for people like us. But it definitely can all be turned off.

If you're looking for work (at least in programming, in the US), respectfully you need to get over it. This mindset is well in the minority and will actively hurt you while job searching.

Not saying you won't find stuff without it, but why make it harder than it needs to be?