alt Hacker NewsI don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
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I got my last job there, and I have a steady queue of recruiters reaching out the whole time. So I will probably continue to use it as long as I need to eat. I don't engage with the feed at all though.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
Over time, when I see a login gate on a website, I've gone from "I should join this exclusive site" ca. 2005 to "I guess they don't want me here" currently. If there are others like me, Linked in is a net negative for hiring. I literally have no idea what's on it anymore.
Easy. That is the only social media site that is so comically bad, that it does not trigger me in any way with the feed. I am using it as a way to reach out to colleagues from the past - a bit like facebook circa 10 years ago.
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
I doubt many people go to LinkedIn for the cringey and obnoxious feed. It's more write-only than anything.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
You had me almost spit out my coffee. That's hilariously on point.
My favorite is this:
The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary, Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author. Father."
That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income and achievements to shame.
It's a social network for employment. If you want to employ, or be employed, that's the social network for that.
It’s a great way to spot phonies if you don’t have a lot of time. If you encounter someone who seems to know things but you’re not sure what or how well, check LinkedIn.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
I used it 18 months ago when I was looking for a job, and I found a paid subscription genuinely useful. Before and since: almost never. If I change jobs again then I'll use it again.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look for candidates. That's why.
It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work. It has all the negative attributes associated with a social network and none of the upsides (apart from the occasional recruiter message).
That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap everything in this weird language.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating
This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.
I work in research and people post their papers there. Signal to noise ratio is getting worse and worse though.. My "favorite" was probably an AI generated post (3 em dashes in one sentence, its not this.its that. And so son) about how bad AI is and how it hallucinates.
Sales people using it a lot to scout prospects and understand a person's seniority in an organisation, to target better and prepare a strategy to pitch higher up the chain.
A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.
Because after Stackoverflow Jobs went bust, LinkedIn and Xing (in DACH space), are the best ways to reach out to head hunters.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
As a hiring manager, it’s still the best place to try and find people for a given role.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
Recruiters keep reaching out. I didn't have to seek a new job in perhaps last 15 years, all I had to do was to flip "looking for opportunities" on and start sorting out the messages and emails.
This works.
There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or who are retired and just don't care. They publish some hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth visiting!
I think it depends on who you follow/connected with. I only follow people that are prone to write their own posts, and I feel Linkedin is less filled with AI crap as mass public platforms like X.
> Out of all places to doomscroll
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
I always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.
It's legitimately useful for networking, and also for keeping track of professional events.
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what they're up to these days.
Many people use it.
But let’s be honest…
it’s not just a social media platform.
It’s a mindset. A daily ritual. A lifestyle. A place where every thought becomes a “lesson”
...
Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange staccato posts.
Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things happening in your industry you can learn about.
But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work family dribble.
its a professional contact list is all it is, for me anyway. its where I go to gather intel on a person/company or where I go to lookup a contact for an outreac
it’s deteriorated to the point where shit-posting is becoming normalized, so it has that going for it
I've gotten two very good jobs from linkedin.
I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't have their email or phone number anymore.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist some of their most inane excesses.
A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
Yes, it's low quality but you can find employment, you can establish some industry connections and you can find the right people to hire if you need to.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
I use LinkedIn. I’ve posted some blog posts on both Hacker News and LinkedIn and determined that LinkedIn is a bit more evergreen. A post on the HN front page gets thousands or tens of thousands of views in a day but a LinkedIn post has thousands in the long tail.
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are, thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to what I find here on HackerNews.
completed deleted my linkedin, it's not even the least bit useful. it's full of fake stories and communication that sounds more robotic than human
The articles are mostly BS, but I got all of my previous jobs from LinkedIn, except for the first one. Which else should I use? I guess networking is better, but I'm not really a networking type of person. LinkedIn at least shows me which companies have openings so I can network with the hiring managers. Those openings could be fake, but hey at least there is some data.
> what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling
The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...
I keep an up-to-date profile so recruiters reach out.
It's useless otherwise.
It's great for niche fields or small credentialed network groups. The social media side is complete nonsense, don't use it.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
Yea, I quit recently, got absolutely nothing positive out.
It feels important to remember that all the Severed employees were there by choice. Perhaps not the choice of the innie, but hey someone made that choice for their reasons.
to investigate people of interest
I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if that’s where my network is and that’s where everyone posts jobs. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
LinkedIn has the most clear para-social relationship. Post and interact to look good for recruiters and future employers.
Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.