LinkedIn rewards mediocrity
316 comments
·August 17, 2025bluedino
glitchcrab
A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.
weinzierl
Cool idea. I used to have
"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"
in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.
stalfosknight
Good idea! Thank you
HPMOR
LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.
glitchcrab
Yeah, it was never going to be a forever solution, but it's served me well for the last few years.
bartread
That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.
lo_zamoyski
> Typical motivational/marketing stuff
Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.
nickfromseattle
This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
Shacklz
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
fhd2
I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.
It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.
hliyan
The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.
If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.
There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.
motorest
> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.
This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.
I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.
inopinatus
It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.
terminalshort
If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.
alansammarone
Same reply as I wrote above:
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
lisbbb
I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.
Aurornis
> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.
Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.
But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.
wohoef
In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.
spicyusername
To play devil's advocate here, can any value be created if no one knows about your product?
alansammarone
No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.
simianwords
Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.
ndriscoll
Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.
Imustaskforhelp
Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.
Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..
I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.
But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?
ohdeargodno
Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!
Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!
Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!
Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_
nathanaldensr
It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.
Imustaskforhelp
To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.
Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.
There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.
The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.
null
godot
I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
RugnirViking
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
oytis
I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
aledalgrande
> Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt
and funnily enough, this is still marketing
"build it and they will come" doesn't work
makeitdouble
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
StopDisinfo910
As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
Henchman21
Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.
paulcole
> Many devs don't like "bullshitting”
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
tombert
I have noticed that, at least in the Java world, people lie a lot about stuff going "faster", and I think it's just justification to not fix their terrible code.
I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.
For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.
phyzome
"winning on LinkedIn"
Sorry, I'm just laughing at this phrase. It sounds like the setup to a joke.
motorest
Some of the actual posts on wikipedia are more outlandish than the parody ones. It's entertaining.
AndrewKemendo
I was not expecting that to be the top response but here we are
I’m more interested in what their content actually looks like if it’s that “successful”
calmbonsai
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
thomasahle
> > Doing work that matters might.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
cootsnuck
It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
botacode
Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement.
Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
oytis
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
motorest
> You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
notahacker
Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
torginus
My impression was all 'content' that does well on LinkedIn (including the stuff I like), is because people want to engage with the creator in hopes they get in their good graces which will somehow help them land a job, or they're in a pact with others and like each others' content.
Recommending others and getting recommended by folks whose word means something might be meaningful, but that's about it.
Regular (and often painfully below average) rubes with a dozen self-appointed titles (SaaS platform evnagelist, Innovator, Tinkerer, Father), who post articles like 'Here's what murdering a homeless man taught me about b2b sales' are the definition of cringe.
oytis
Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area.
Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain experience as engineers, but I wouldn't expect them to be particularly good ones.
On the other hand, I know a couple of outstandingly good engineers I have worked with, who also have some mindshare on private blogs and conferences, but nowhere near the thought leaders, and definitely not on LinkedIn
null
NeutralCrane
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
Spooky23
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
ndriscoll
Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing.
The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
anon84873628
To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.
boje
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
gwbas1c
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
Tade0
A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
1vuio0pswjnm7
This thread is headed by defensive comments alleging that they have benefitted financially from LinkedIn.
These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.
It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.
Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.
The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.
It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".
This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.
Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866666
That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)
It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad
HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.
zelphirkalt
Unfortunately, however, people at many companies, who are responsible for hiring people, are running around on LinkedIn and believe things of value being communicated there, living this strange parallel world or bubble of self-marketers and make believe that is LinkedIn, becoming part of it themselves with their mediocrity. The signal of excellence entirely drowns in a stream of mediocrity on LinkedIn.
etra0
LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol).
I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.
What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.
Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.
_fat_santa
LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
filoleg
Yup, agreed heavily with your take.
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
LeftHandPath
The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
deepsquirrelnet
I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
grues-dinner
Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.
daxfohl
Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
appease7727
LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
jackdawed
To combat LinkedIn spam, I exclusively write wizard-themed LinkedIn posts: https://dungeonengineering.com/i-could-have-cursed-him-inste...
toddmorey
I did laugh at loud at "They lift others up. Literally, in my case."
lloydjones
This is fantastic!
Sorry, ahem:
#Inspiring #CastTogether
commenter8
The nice thing about LinkedIn posts is that it’s clear that everything is an ad. Reddit, Facebook, etc started with people just posting to communicate and socialize, then were (mostly) taken over by ads / influencers pretending. With LinkedIn there’s no pretense and no wheat to sift from the chaff.
It’s just marketers marketing to each other. If that’s useful you can join a mutual promotion group and auto-comment on each others’ posts without damaging anything of value. If not you can stay away and completely ignore any posts when you come back for an occasional job search.
joshdavham
If you find reading posts on LinkedIn as annoying as I do, there’s actually a nice solution that will literally wipe your feed blank:
1) Change your preferred feed view to “Most Recent Posts” : https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/preferred-...
2) Unfollow all of your connections. You’ll stay connected but won’t see their annoying posts anymore.
…and there you have it! Focused peace and zen on an otherwise excruciating website.
modeless
Or just don't visit your feed?
tombert
To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.
LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.
I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.
And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.
randcraw
LinkedIn seems like the natural home (origin?) of those oh-so-inane "Motivator" management posters that were so popular in the 1990s. Now if only there were also an outlet there for the "Demotivator" posters that followed. THOSE I liked.
adidoit
Because LinkedIn makes your employment front and center it encourages status games .
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
lloydjones
Yes — I (as somebody who posts to promote my startup) wonder what the true goal is sometimes, as it’s ambiguous.
Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.
My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:
It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.
Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.
It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
adidoit
You nailed it. And of course the platform solving for engagement then enshittifies but we have no alternative...
back to posting on LinkedIn I guess..
toddmorey
The content that feels so vapid (and unfortunately makes a high percentage of what's on there) are the ones where the post itself is the entire body of work. The Photoshop a quote on the wall types.
But there actually IS good content on LinkedIn. It's professionals doing interesting work and posting about it. One user that springs to mind for me does UX for the automotive industry and posts concepts, designs, and experimentations. Its fun and fascinating to watch. And I think it has much more traction to the folks that matter than any post he could do about what his weekly grocery trip taught him about the creative process.
Maybe put another way, build a content brand and not a personality brand. You can still get meaningful, career changing traction. Or do what this author does and just set up your own small tent miles outside the fairground because that's what makes your soul happy. I love the indie web.
mostlystatic
I love LinkedIn as a founder/developer. It's become my main social network after the Twitter acquisition.
Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.
Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).
I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_client-side-rende... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_resource-download...
LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.