[a_bonobo]

In my niche, bioinformatics, linkedin has become somewhat of a force ever since many people left Twitter/X during the 'rebranding'? It's quite weird.

They're mostly posts announcing new packages etc. but there seems to be more bioinformatics-y activity than, say, mastodon or bluesky. The posts definitely have a different tone than what OP decries.

[kfarr]

Yes there are a bunch of weird niches that got a lot of Twitter traffic but found a home on LinkedIn when there's an overlap with professions. Another niche example that I see is applications for AI powered architectural visualization, many folks posting actually useful stuff there on a regular basis.

[epolanski]

Honestly I wish people stuck with good old forums. There's forums for everything out there, in every niche, gaming, modding, hardware, cars, boats.

Every single community you can think of has likely a great forum out there, easily readable and searchable, where discussions on single topics last _years_ and go in extreme informative depth, the kind of depth that no platform like HN/Lobsters/LinkedIn can ever dream of.

The closest surrogate we have are issue trackers (like GitHub) or mailing lists, but even those offer such a poor UX that I can't but wonder..

[a_bonobo]

Bioinformatics has biostars :) https://www.biostars.org/

The difference to linkedin is that biostars has 'in-domain experts' only; the postdocs, the staff bioinformaticians, etc. those are not the people who will hire you. The people who will hire you are on linkedin.

[kfarr]

Yeah it's definitely a combination of posting for peers but also creating material that is helpful for finding the next gig