[42_]

Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed". Its full of mostly useless content by wannabe thought leaders drowning out a few posts which may have been insightful/relevant. Job search and add/message connections are the only features I have found useful.

[allanbreyes]

I use uBlock Origin to completely block out the news feed and messaging, and it makes my LinkedIn experience orders of magnitude better. When I visit linkedin.com, now, I'm greeted with a navigation header bar and a blank page where the news feed used to be. It's perfect.

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

[searchableguy]

Reading the comments here. I find it scary that people are willing to deal with broken "tools" to such an extent and manipulate their own behavior to fit profit-seeking companies. I can see why we will be stuck with the same few social media and recruiting platforms because people are not willing to change but they are willing to put in the effort.

[gonehome]

All the recruiters are on LinkedIn and pretty much use it exclusively.

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.

[zenhack]

Fwiw, I still get recruiter emails now and then years after having shut off my LinkedIn account. If they mention how they found me, it's usually through GitHub.

...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.

[HenryBemis]

Perhaps you are a dev, then GitHub/Lab is a good place to search for something specific, if your recruiter knows what the they exactly seek. In my line of work (audit/sec/GRC) most of my contracts start as "6 months of THIS" and they end 2-3 years later after I have worked on their operational model, on the manner their control framework is defined and executed, their deliveries to their external auditor are defined and scripted, and some more process-control-audit related parts are etched in stone (oh and some SOX 404 just because I was in the neighborhood)..

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).

[gonehome]

Even as a dev I think the person you're replying to is wrong.

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.

[quadrifoliate]

Are you are involved with recruiting in any way? Then be the change you want to see in the world. Does the company you work for use LinkedIn or use recruiters that send messages of LinkedIn? Make an effort to stop hiring them, and use neutral tools like email.

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.

[gav]

> use neutral tools like email

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?

[xtracto]

> www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed

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

[loughnane]

I use UBO a bunch but I've not considered to focus on linkedin. This is excellent. Thanks so much!

[mancerayder]

> wannabe thought leaders

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.

[sk0g]

What really grinds my gears is CEOs and the likes fishing for validation with dumb, usually copy pasted "anecdotes" that seem to glorify employee-exploitation practices.

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?"

[deckard1]

Yeah that's up there with the "unlimited" vacation scam.

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.

[bonestamp2]

I don't get any of these. Can you unfollow these people or are they some kind of sponsored/injected content?

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.

[everythingswan]

You can unfollow them if they are a connection by clicking the three dots on the top right of a post. You remain connected but you no longer see their updates in your feed.

[jjtheblunt]

'N habits of people with emotional intelligence' sorts of posts are very common in what i see, and so formulaic

[ssijak]

Or people pasting gotcha dumb math “problems” where hundreds of people reply the answer. I could never understand that.

[vulcan01]

People like being told that they are smart, indirectly. If someone posts a "hard" math "problem" and the viewer can solve it... that indirectly means that the viewer is smarter than the poster. Which viewers love.

[staycoolboy]

Did you read the comments from the guy that left facebook? It was like reading YouTube comments. People were flaming him from their professional accounts.

[_v7gu]

It's like the reverse of the /g/ or /sci/ meme with a picture of Makise Kurisu saying "You should be able to solve this" accompanied by a laughably difficult problem.

[the_af]

"83% of people won't be able to solve this" (some basic puzzle follows).

[Phrenzy]

83%‽ That's almost half!

[antonyh]

Of late (this year) in my experience the job section is mostly reposts of other jobs or positions already filled or fake roles.

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.

[jonfw]

My experience last year was the opposite- I used Linkedin, as well as my university board and competitors, but LinkedIn landed me 3/4 offers

[Nextgrid]

LinkedIn has their own job platform with the “Easy apply” feature, but also seems to scrape job ads from a lot of third-party sites.

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.

[falcor84]

I'm not sure what you're seeing is scraping. There are various services where companies can upload a job posting once and it's automatically posted across multiple job platforms, with LinkedIn being one of them. Formatting often gets lost on the way.

[C1sc0cat]

All scraper job sites have low quality inventory eg indeed.

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.

[hirako2000]

No company wants automation played against them, they want automation put to use by them, to benefit them. Hypocrite paradox. It wouldn't be the first one.

[non-entity]

I agree, it's not uncommon to see pages of the same listing by a dozen different recruiting companie, many with no logo.

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.

[apple4ever]

I noticed that too when I was looking for a job. I've learned to tell which is a real company and which is a scammy recruiter.

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.

[distances]

It's easy enough to block the feed in your browser. I've done exactly that with Facebook. I haven't deleted my FB account as I still get some random messages from old acquaintances that don't have my phone number, but I removed the feed with uBlock to make sure I'm not exposed to that.

[smt88]

FYI your Facebook profile and Messenger account seem to be decoupled now. I deleted my profile but still have a Messenger identity that people can message.

[reportgunner]

Are you sure you deleted it ?

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.

[smt88]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I deleted it. You may be right.

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.

[smhmd]

I did something similar lately. But it's hard to keep up with local news, now. I couldn't find a news aggregator for my country/province. Maybe, I need to build that myself.

[eddieroger]

I recently started reinvesting in RSS via reader that I can sync, and was pleased to remember that my local paper (a Gannett paper, which matters since they use the same engine on all their properties) supports several RSS feeds, from a site-wide news feed to counties or topics. It's been good enough for me to not push further, but I imagine my local TV news sites have similar feeds. This should scale up from county to city and state, I'd think.

[colek42]

I went through an "unfollowed" everyone in my feed except very close family and friends, the local farmers market, and my local newspaper. Facebook is actually useful now.

[bonoboTP]

Some people don't believe it when I say this, but when I unfollowed lots of people, after some time Facebook just automatically re-follows a few.

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.

[downvoteme1]

What country would that be?

[cylinder]

I did that manually on Facebook exactly four years ago. Unfollowed everyone one by one so I have no feed. Now I rarely log in to FB at all and have forgotten about so many people I had no business remembering but only did because of the Facebook news feed.

[smt88]

Before I deleted my profile, I fixed my feed by unfollowing all pages and all news. I unfriended people who were not true friends.

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.

[CrazyStat]

During the 2016 election cycle I started unfollowing everyone who posted political stuff unless it was someone I was actually close with (immediate family and a handful of close friends) or I thought their posts were actually interesting or insightful. My Facebook has been much nicer since. I still have a feed but it's people I care about and people who post actually interesting stuff.

[FlaSheridn]

LinkedIn has a news feed, and you actually look at it? There’s your problem. I’ve set up an OnMyCommand macro so that when I select some text and right-click, it will search for the selected name:

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

[dkersten]

Yeah, that’s why I basically use it as an online CV host and little else. I din’t think I’ve ever read a post that was shared on linkedin, and rarely ever bothered reading any of the news/notifications/updates.

[jhallenworld]

Some companies require engagement with social media as a requirement for advancement. So you are not wrong about the wannabe thought leaders. This is where they go. Nobody will make negative comments on these posts- it's like making a negative comment about your boss in public.

[kyuudou]

> ...it's like making a negative comment about your boss in public.

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.

[ghaff]

>That brings up another issue, that employment background checks are increasingly checking social media posts for "questionable" activity.

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.

[RonanTheGrey]

You're exactly right... In fact there is a girl on Twitter with a very large following (>800k) who spends all her time hunting down people on social media who have ever in their lives said anything that could be construed as "seriously questionable" (whose definition changes according to the times).

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.

[ghaff]

In general, I'm very happy that I couldn't publish to the Internet unfiltered until long after I internalized "Never say or write anything in public that you wouldn't want to appear on the front page of the newspaper." I pretty much stay away from politics online, especially on anything like twitter that is public--especially any opinions that are nuanced and easily misconstrued.

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.

[kyuudou]

You make excellent points. I do not envy hiring managers, that's for sure. How to combine respect for privacy and freedom of expression with protecting a company from undeserved harm? Maybe this the problem LinkedIn was trying to solve until it became a giant spam ground for annoying recruiters and influencer wannabes.

[kyuudou]

And this is my axe to grind - that these people exist and just one misconstrued, out-of-context quote and boom, career is over.

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/

[stallmanite]

So who is this horrible girl on Twitter who’s destroying lives? Surely naming names in this case would be justified.

[RonanTheGrey]

More than likely doxxing is against the rules here but her first name is Skai and shares a last name with a famous singer. Not hard to find.

[searchableguy]

Isn't this illegal in EU?

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.

[kyuudou]

According to this site[1], the GDPR would likely delegitimize most of the social media checks. "The GDPR also requires that employers only view social media profiles when the information is relevant to the position being applied for.

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...

[mihaaly]

My complaint is more like the ludicrously low quality user interface. Lots of inconsistencies, ridiculously persistent notifications on actions you just did, supplying a stream of suggestions to completely irrelevant job ads where one is claimed to fit well, user unfriendly search history, not to mention the hopelessly clueless user support unable to grasp what one is talking about and answering for never mentioned aspects after asking for already supplied details and explanations, like if they were in write only mode. Not so long ago all icons disappeared for weeks without any fix which I did not report to user support for the obvious reasons.

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

[Hoasi]

> Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed".

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

[42_]

I don't read it any more :) I used to go through the feed in search of quality content. Tried configuring it, but the signal to noise ratio is too low.

[asurty]

I've been using it more to read Dalio's articles. Which makes me curious why he is using linked in and not just hire someone to set up a personal blog for him ( ? )

[apple4ever]

The news feed, like many of them, is worthless. I rarely scroll.

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

[artsyca]

First thing I did was block the usual mega influencers and it got super quiet.. Not to mention any names but you know who I'm talking about.

[felipemnoa]

>>Not to mention any names but you know who I'm talking about.

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

[Nextgrid]

Agreed. I checked my LinkedIn newsfeed and while there's a lot of noise, I don't see any single source for it. It's actually worse, because the spam is now distributed instead of originating from a single bad actor.

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.

[dghughes]

To me it seems like (in no particular order): Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Richard Branson, Guy Kawasaki.

[Nextgrid]

The "verified" badge on there is a good heuristic for who not to follow (if not outright block them) because those are not people anymore, but marketing/PR operations.

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.

[snowwrestler]

Did you choose to follow those people at some point? I get regular "recommendations" on who to follow on LinkedIn, including Gates, Nadella, and Branson, but I never take them. And I don't have any content in my feed from any of those folks.

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.

[felipemnoa]

>>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".

[dghughes]

>Did you choose to follow those people at some point?

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

[artsyca]

To name a few but you're missing the top dogs the ones who can't even squeeze any more connections and give advice on how to gain more connections.

[artsyca]

Oh c'mon you know the top influencers on the leaderboards.. The guy with the clever cranium, the lady with all the stories about people she didn't fire who turned out to be awesome. Don't make me spell it out. You know what to do with your idols.