[meowtastic]

I really want to believe in this, but from personal experience it hasn't worked out. I used to spend a lot of time posting frequently on LinkedIn, nothing came out of it. Maybe I didn't try hard enough, maybe there's survivor bias in the success stories, who knows.

[dewey]

> I used to spend a lot of time posting frequently on LinkedIn

Maybe it's just the people I have added on LinkedIn but it always strikes me as a very superficial place and not the one for deeper connections or discussions about projects. Twitter on the other side seems to be more promising (at least in my case).

[hobofan]

I'll throw in Reddit into the mix. For deeper discussions about projects, it has a way better interface than Twitter, and also as a "newcomer" you have way better chances if you pick out the right communities. One other factor is probably also frequency of posting.

While my posting cadence of "something interesting" every few months works well for Reddit, that's not something that gets people to follow and engage with you on Twitter.

[meowtastic]

I got a few really good exchanges on Reddit. But I always feel weird reaching out to people directly afterwards, I feel the platform isn't made for that.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I would not consider LI to be a place to make "new" friends. I consider it a place to help tell people, who already know who I am, from elsewhere, more about myself.

In my case, doing nonprofit/volunteer work has been a great place to make new friends (and the occasional enemy).

[meowtastic]

I agree, it's more for reminding existing connections that you exist.

Sadly not interested in nonprofit volunteering at the moment, too worried just making ends meet. London’s very expensive these days and wages aren't great.

[meowtastic]

I find Twitter conversations are just as shallow unfortunately. I do follow a couple of people there - Benedict Evans and patio11, but comments on their tweets aren't any better.

[dewey]

I think your chances of having a good conversation is higher on small accounts in the niche you are interested in.

[meowtastic]

How do you find those smaller accounts though? When you look by topic you tend to get tweets from popular influencers. And I may sound lazy but I don't like the idea of doomscrolling through Twitter just to find the right person.

[dewey]

Depends on what kind of community you are looking for, for me it's mostly IndieHackers and HN so I often click through profiles on HN comments or if there's a blog post shared on a personal blog I look for their Twitter account there.

After you built up a few interesting accounts finding more accounts via Twitter is easier and less noisy.

[meowtastic]

Oh, never thought of doing it like that. I'll give it a go, thanks!

[CalRobert]

LinkedIn probably isn't a great choice. Randomly, have you looked for local groups that share an interest on Slack or Discord? There's an Irish Tech Community slack, for instance, where I've made many friends (real life ones too!)

[meowtastic]

I tried Slack and Discord groups, but they had too much noise.

[freddref]

I've had the same experience on linkedin, and I think it's because a lot of the content is not specific enough, it increasingly feels like facebook.

I think there may be other places with a higher density of very specific purpose, like angel.co

edit: this point is made in the article - "The beginners guides to everything have already been written. What’s missing is more advanced content."

[meowtastic]

Yes, when I realised it's just like Facebook I decided to stop posting altogether. I never heard of angel.co as a social platform, only know of it for startup jobs. I'll have another look, thanks!

[freddref]

Right, angel.co is not exactly a social platform by design, but people on there are in the startup space, likely very motivated, working on something very specific and open to discussion/proposition.

I guess the specificity of the discussion is the main thing interesting there, provided startups are your thing.

For other things, hobbies etc., there may be more specific places where you get a concentration of focused discussion on a topic.

[whywhywhywhy]

What did you post though? A lot of LinkedIn writing is very generic. Think the point of this article is that being honest and maybe a little provocative can be used as a filter, not things that come to mind with LinkedIn posts.

[meowtastic]

Those were the kind of posts I was writing, and they didn't work. A lot more effective to do a low quality outrage-economy style post. My most successful one by 100x was a generic complaint about tech recruiters.

[david_allison]

Post one in a reply to this. What are you looking for?

[meowtastic]

Sure, here are a few things on my mind now: - Practical use cases for crypto/blockchain. I don't believe in the speculative financial assets that came out of it, but I am intrigued by the idea of a central bank digital currency for example. - How to make some side income while having a full-time dev role in London. - General startup ideas chat with people who aren't too attached to one particular view.

[otikik]

LinkedIn might not be the best place for that... even Hacker News is a better platform for that I think.

If you want to find friends (not just potential business associates), I suggest trying to find some other personal interest of yours that isn't money-related. Perhaps sharing on a different platform as well.

[meowtastic]

I was actually posting about data science / ML during that time.

It's these kind of topics that I enjoy talking to people about though. I get very quickly bored if we talk about other stuff. Sad I know.