LI has to be among the worst social media. The amount of constant self aggrandizing and obviously fabricated stories is insane(cue 'that homeless man was my boss!' memes).

That said, it's not completely valueless. I keep it around to see what old coworkers are up to these days(career wise). I've also gotten a job from a recruiter who found me there. I'm guessing one or both of those are the only reasons anyone keeps it around. The content is pretty bad.

Allowing you to sign up and then immediately locking or shadow banning your account is a dark pattern to force you to provide a mobile phone number or other identification (for extra advertising targeting of course).

Recently I came to the conclusion that I needed to change jobs, but I held off because I didn't want to deal with the psychotic ramblings of LinkedIn posters. I'm sure in real life they are all perfectly normal indiviuals but something about LinkedIn insists that every poorly worded fable is gateway to wisdom, that methaphorical socratic dialog is to mechanism to describe human behaviour, and starting every second post with 'I'm sure this is a contraversional opinion but hear me out...'

In the end I got fired, so I'm actually forced back into the LinkedIn maelstrom of mediocrity but against my will, and without even the grace of my own grim resignation to spur me in to action.

LinkedIn is full of worthless posts full of users wanking each other off. Its the only place full of "get out of bed early, quite drinking soy lattes, inherit wealth" type of posts where it doesn't get challenged (maybe X is another one).

I genuinely might prefer reading AI-generated crap, because then I feel better about humanity.

This week, I posted about a women in engineering conference happening in my hometown and got zero engagement. 1000+ connections on my profile, used hashtags, and tagged the organization and received zero engagement on the post?

I hate to assume the worst but something stinks. When I open my feed, 9 out of 10 posts are from others that I don't follow or have never engaged with. Reading about your experience has confirmed my suspicions that something nefarious is going on under the hood.

It's funny since if it were any other platform, it would have collapsed by now. But because we all use it to find work, well, what other choice do we have? Sure, most of us don't post, but we're still clicking on the website, and we're still seeing the feed -- apparently that's enough for advertisers, for now.

I don't use it much and I haven't had your issues but I'm sick of the political and stupid, irrelevant content. It was supposed to be about professional networking and finding work. It's turning into Facebook and not the original Facebook,the horrible bloated mess it's become.

And here I am thinking about deactivating my Linkedin profile for good. That platform has never been useful, most people use it to spy on others.

Oh the irony: The submission was default hidden but I hang out on the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest page and vouched for it. So another example of automated blocking rules for a new user account.

Most people are only there because they are finding a job. When I have a job I just can’t be bothered with LinkedIn

LinkedIn has sunk lower than Facebook. Like Facebook, every once in a while I use it to look up somebody I used to know or to remind myself of a name I've forgotten. If I look somebody up and see that they're actually posting and engaging on the platform, I feel bad for them.

I say it's lower than Facebook because I know people who rely on Facebook for legitimately useful things — niche communities and local groups that just happened to coalesce on Facebook and were vital enough to survive the decline of the platform. I've never heard of anything similar on LinkedIn.

There's no legitimate use of LinkedIn that will keep people on it if they stop seeing it as a necessity.

Post-Twitter, in my corner of the world, scholarly publishing technology, people have moved to BlueSky, Mastodon and LinkedIn.

I agree, LinkedIn is full of people performing their career as social media and posting selfies. But there is also useful information from orgs and people who moved off Twitter and shifted their weight to LinkedIn.

Twitter was a unifying platform (maybe that was just accumulated through time) and the shakeup has benefited LinkedIn.

Meta has legions of people working tirelessly to give it's users mental disorders, be it on Facebook turning your elderly relatives into racists and transphobes or Instagram giving young women body image disorders, and yet somehow everyone on those sites is a paragon of logic and reason compared to the average linkedin poster.

It's insane how it got this bad with no competitor trying to take its place.

It’s quite hilarious. I clicked on a linkedin link in one of the comments and it opened the app (which I haven’t opened for a while)

The app then proceeded to show me a cookie banner.

The ‘refuse’ button in the cookie banner responds to my click (it changes color while pressed) but does not remove the banner.

I guess I can only remove the banner by clicking “accept”?

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The content of LI is absolute horseshit. I keep my profile for job seeking purposes but I do not use it.

It is by far the worst platform I’ve seen…ever. I use it only as a resume fallback and to find job positions. That’s it. If someone has an extension that blocks all social media aspect of it, please let me know.

Link to close your account: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1379064/closi...

What I wrote about closing mine: https://pcmaffey.com/finally-i-closed-my-linkedin

5 years later no regrets.

I can relate to your frustration with LinkedIn. I’ve been actively writing on the platform for the past two years, building my visibility and engagement, even earning a recognition badge from LinkedIn. However, despite putting in the effort, I haven’t gained much beyond that. The community feels like it’s structured in a way where top influencers form closed groups and don’t promote outside their circle, almost like a hierarchical system that reminds me of the dynamics we sometimes see in Asian companies.

For me, LinkedIn is useful primarily for job opportunities, but outside of that, it feels like a platform full of noise with not much else to offer. The real support system seems lacking, and I’ve found that engagement can be difficult to generate unless you're already in those top circles. So, I agree—there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement.

LinkedIn is not a “social media” site for me. I have my profile up and respond to recruiters and that’s about it. I’ve never posted anything to it.

I’ve had a profile since 2012 after leaving my third job. My fifth job in 2015 came from my reaching out to an internal recruiter who posted a job opening. My 8th and 10th job came from my responding to recruiters who messaged me in 2020 and last year and my 9th job came from targeted outreach to a couple of companies where they were looking for my combination of skills.

On the other hand, when I was looking for my last two jobs both last year and the year before, LI is horrible for applying for jobs blindly unless you have a niche skillset. Every application gets literally hundreds of applications within the first few hours after posting and it’s impossible to stand out. It still works pretty well for responding to inbound messages.

It might have been better before 2020 and even now if I were looking for an in office or hybrid role.

I've used it since they launched it and have paid for premium for years. I probably use it multiple times a day and have never had a single issue. Yes, it's a commercial social network and the self-aggrandizing posts are terrible, but I don't really pay attention to them. I feel the same way about Instagram and other social media which I don't pay attention to.

I use it as a way to maintain and leverage my network and learn about people and companies. I don't know how I'd stay current with the many thousands of people I've met over the years otherwise. Manually curate a mailing list?

I get that it doesn't work for people who don't work in tech and/or don't see the value in maintaining work connections. I find it's often those people asking me how they can find a job when they've put zero effort into it over the years.

This post feels like it should be on linkedin. Have we reached the point of LinkedIn-ify'ing HN?

Correct me if I’m wrong but the dumb thing was literally but to help people find and apply to jobs. I login then to go search for jobs in my city and the 1st 200 pages of recommended jobs are all labeled US. We really need to mass delete our LinkedIn’s and all agree to utilize indeed because unlike LinkedIn they’ve gotten significantly better at helping the user.

Also, if anyone hates LinkedIn and the current hiring process with a burning passion. I’ve been working on a software that auto applies to jobs for users and could use help. I’ve been working on it for 2 years and am honestly almost done but want to make it divine. The idea you ask? A user fills out 1 job application and just waits for emails to come in.

The one upside is it generates so much amazing content for the r/LinkedinLunatics subreddit

No i disagree X.com is the worst, was the other guy on this sub and I think you are correct on the whole point is the people that have a right and the people that do have the ability and ability are not necessarily people that have a responsibility.

I kept Linkedin profile since 2018, and it LI content made sense back then.

2 years ago I got more active, and noticed it turn to worse: much AI slop (premium users group full of polls with questions like high-school essay titles -- probably LLMs talking to each other). Every interesting job posting already having 200+ applications, and requirements inflated (because if you demand less than masters degree, you have to walk through and seriously read 1000+ applications).

But you could still get at least something.

Until about half a year ago it got its vacancy search broken, that it always shows the same list, no matter what keywords you type in the search field.

You haven’t quite finished the saga though. When you finally decide to quit (I did, having suffered a lot less pain than you), you can’t.

They follow you. They email you, they are relentless. I’m 10+ years on the outside and still they spam.

Visit https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/ to improve your mood :)

I wouldn't want to be new to the Internet these days.

Everything requires your phone number, sometimes photo or even ID. You can get flagged as a bot randomly and they won't even tell you.

When I signed up for Instagram, I was banned before I could even log in, but they didn't tell me about it, so I thought the sign up process had just failed. I only found out after googling it.

I had similar problems creating a Twitter account. On Reddit, you can't even post threads on most subreddits at first.

Conversely, signing up on Tumblr, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Mastodon was pretty easy and didn't require a phone number or app.

> made me take a photo of myself and of my passport

I'm not sure how this has become the go-to method for every site that needs person verification, and it's kinda terrifying because you just know they keep all of it stored somewhere forever with half assed security and the whole DB will get leaked sooner or later like it always is, leading to so much identity theft it's not even funny. The only camera that should ever get to see anyone's passport is the border police scanner.

And I'm sure they say they delete all of it after verification, and then probably laugh about it afterwards if anyone believes that bullshit.

I've started blocking people in LI for doing a typical LI post. It hasn't improved the experience as those things are endless.

Some time ago, they added another new feature that is dark pattern where every time re-enter the site, I have 10-20 new update notifications, all of which are complete fluff.

Perhaps a time for a new platform for business communication. A slightly customized Lemmy, perhaps?

Ran into a similar ban recently and it has infuriated me to a level I have trouble describing - except I've been a paying user of this site for 10+ years. It seems to me what triggered it was enabling MFA + password change, which is a completely normal thing to do. It also seems like they're flagging people for VPN usage now. Persona, the application they use to "verify" you, has a really gnarly privacy policy and it does seem completely intentional to just sell the shit out of your data.

My situation to avoid posting the same thing in multiple places: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050578

To me it's really weird they're taking such elaborate measures to ban legitimate paying users when the site is completely infested with AI/bot spam anyway. They seem out of their depth. Oh, and as an extra screw you, they're still billing me, because of course they are.

Linkedin is horrible, but rarely do I see a post like this that doesn’t get a smackdown. LinkedIn surely doesn’t do public smackdowns, so I’ll ask - what kind of content were you sharing? Were you doing anything you may consider not-super-approved of? Have you previously scraped LinkedIn or potentially have your ip flagged by any security computers for unscrupulous behavior in the internet?

LI is the worst, but it has the reach and revenue. I don't know what works for it. But it's where professional world (cringe at times) resides. So love it or hate it, it's here to stay.

Like others here, I dislike the content but find LI useful for finding new opportunities and staying in touch with former colleagues. One effective way for me to reduce irrelevant posts was to set the feed to display posts chronologically rather than by popularity. You barely see any click-baity posts before losing interest and moving on.

I hate it, but it's a job search engine basically?

What's wrong with just sticking to that one use case? Posting about how you're a "problem solved, founder, writer, sports fan, recruiter , marathon runner -- and father" gets old quickly. That stuff can mostly be ignored and there's always Gaviscon or Tums when it gets really bad.

But yes, I use it for letting recruiters contact me.

I kept catching myself scrolling down their idiotic feed and wondering what the hell I was doing. Mindless dreck, all of it. Yet I still get cold inbound from it that turns into business, so I can't just abandon the platform entirely.

I wrote a ~50 LOC browser extension that always redirects away from the feed to your profile. Works great, sideload and forget.

https://github.com/classvsoftware/nofeeds

Deleted my account years ago, and I'm not surprised LI has become even more of a cesspit. I'll continue to find meaningful things to spend my time doing by talking with actual humans by email, phone, and in person.

Stop complaining and post examples of good social media geared towards professional contacts and career development below.

The actual jobs and networking aspect is fine imo, but I loathe the feed/content, even the SWE-related stuff is a lot of times bad or clickbaity.

I hide the feed + sidebar with a uBlock Origin filter and it's a much nicer experience: linkedin.com##main[aria-label="Main Feed"],aside[aria-label="Add to your feed"]

it still works pretty well for its intended purpose.

i voluntarily left work for several months last year, when i was ready to enter the workforce again i made the template “open to work” post. within a day or so a VP who I know saw the post and offered me a job on his team. pretty much every job i’ve gotten is via linked in

deleted linkedin in 2017 and havent thought twice about it since

Linkedin used to be business. Today is just idiota trying to sound smart or business influencers.

Seems like LinkedIn boost people with less useful content ever seen.

There are ton of people (mostly Indians) who just copy good articles from internet and put into Linkedin without quoting the real authors.

I fucking hate LinkedIn so much it's unreal. When it comes to that platform, I lose all rationality altogether. Perhaps I need to go to therapy, but not before LinkedIn influencers are all assembled in the town square and publicly executed for their crimes upon humanity.

I was on LinkedIn for years. I quit a couple of years ago and have not regretted it one bit. I hasn't resulted in a single sale or new client for me. It's really for salesmen and headhunter and perhaps government officials, not technical people.

Every experienced LinkedIn user knows that you're not supposed to actually use LinkedIn.

Of course, worldwide, setting up new profiles is (burecratically) discouraged, due to fake profiles with AI help hammering the networks and marketplaces. Harder than even to set up a new profile for any purpose.

Since they added a "videos for you" section they completely acknowledged they've given up on trying to be the professional site they once were. I can't even open this at work because as soon you scroll it auto plays a video with titles likes "following elon musks lead to become an alpha male and slay it in the bedroom".

But how will people possibly know how successful I am without it?!?

It is actually not a social media at least not mainly.

The only real value for most people is when you need a job, and sometimes it works.

I do agree the social media part of LinkedIn is among the worst.

You forgot to add this:

"Agree?"

LinkedIn is a place where you can say anything you like in a political sense, even if your employer has policy, if your voice sounds off the same rattle as everyone else

The people who regularly post and comment on linked in about how great their company is are the ones who will take your job when you go on paternity leave.

Counterpoint: it is the perfect platform for Ken Cheng

The chain mail kidnapping of peoples' Hotmail accounts should have told us enough about the integrety of the site from the get go.

"Growth hack".

Genuinely curious what's a decent platform to keep in touch with companies and handle your career. Any tips?

take two biege pills and try again tommorow, if you are still feeling enthusiastic or creative and energetic in any way, the dose can be adjusted till you achive total blandness, then you can start to slowly build your contacts, to some completely improbable number and achive biegevana

Anything MSFT touches goes to shit, and LI is no exception.

One day I randomly checked my credit card and found that LI had charged me $60 for having a PREMIUM BUSINESS plan! I'm not a business owner, and last time I had any subscription was one month in 2024. Their system is totally unreliable.

And anytime a website blocks basic functionalities (e.g., who viewed my profile) for non-paying users, I know enshitification has already taken place.

LinkedIn is the corporate equivalent of a bureaucratic nightmare—shadow bans, mandatory passport selfies, and rankings that seem engineered by someone with a vendetta against real professionals. I rarely use it by choice, and when forced, it feels like navigating a labyrinth designed to obscure rather than showcase talent. No wonder your post got buried; it's just another casualty of their dark pattern playbook.

I fight back against cringe content by leaving cringe comments.

> Besides being full of AI-generated, useless content

I've found some pretty decent content if you're able to tune the recommender algo - the content reaches mid-2010s HN's noise-to-signal ratio if done right.

After Twitter/X degraded, a lot of Policy, VC, IB, PE, and DevTools+Cybersecurity shifted to used LinkedIn for posts, and a lot of unfiltered criticism does arise.

It does require an extreme commitment to tuning the algo (proactively removing content from your feed AND upvoting content you like).

That said, I don't think you'll find much purely technical content, but even HN sucks for that now. I'd use Lobste.rs for that (which reminds me of pre-COVID HN).

> the platform is also riddled with dark patterns

Yep, but that's expected for most platforms who's success metrics are judged based on usage.

I personally had a decent presence some years ago ( upwards of 10k followers ), but I dropped it, when it became clear that noise far outweighed the signal. I will admit that I am in a weird spot now, because soon I will be coaching kids to real job interviews ( and they are normally instructed to use LinkedIn to connect with their coaches ).. and I will feel obligated to point out that they may want to benefit from a different type of exposure ( github, portfolio page, email ).

TLDR: I dislike LinkedIn and what it has become ( because it did bring me some value before.. and I fear that is coming for github too ), but I struggle to offer a good alternative to people that are just starting since HR depts effectively EXPECT you to have one.

all of them are the worst, dude.

you know, like that famous quote: some people are more equal than others.

or something like that anyway, I cannot be arsed to check for the exact one, because it's pathetic shit, not important.

iirc it is from either of these two books by George Orwell: animal farm or 1984.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

LinkedIn befits the managerial class it serves.

From your description, you created from another country? Perhaps non-western?

I am not familiar with their internals but am assuming they deal with spam/scams and you are an unfortunate casualty.

What did you do to get shadow banned?

so while we are all here: what do you people wish LinkedIn had and had not?

Ah yes, LinkedIn, the site that, after my father passed away, harvested contacts from me and then sent me email purporting to be from my recently deceased father asking me to join LinkedIn.

Classy move guys. Been shitty sonce ‘15 at least!

It's useless as a social media or to interact with but excellent when you're looking to reach out to John at Corpo Corp who you met somewhere.

...or to check what your high scool girlfriend is up to 20 years later.

The worst