> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
We have to, if we want to stay in business.
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]
[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?
So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.
The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.
LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.
is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
and funnily enough, this is still marketing
"build it and they will come" doesn't work
So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.
Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.
But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> winning on linkedin
> push them to
* vomits *
> millions of dollars
dirty money.
</rant>
At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.
Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.
I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.
All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.
It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.
For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.
>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.
> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.
>Building in public
Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".
I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.
In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.
Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.
At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?
We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
...
Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.
"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"
in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.
That’s how I find LinkedIn useful.
When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.
Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
I have seen people say for recruiting advise.
* They recommend you hustle. E.g. deliver your resume pretending to be a food delivery
* Don't follow up if explicitly not told to by your recruiters instructions.
* You must have an up to date linked in.
Usually in hot take format that if you dont do that you got no chance.
So everyone stick to measuring for the role!
Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.
Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.
Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”
I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.
Sorry, ahem:
#Inspiring #CastTogether
I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.
What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.
Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.
Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.
It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.
Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.
The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.
It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".
This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.
Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866666
That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)
It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad
HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.
My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:
It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.
Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.
It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
back to posting on LinkedIn I guess..
I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.
1) Change your preferred feed view to “Most Recent Posts” : https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/preferred-...
2) Unfollow all of your connections. You’ll stay connected but won’t see their annoying posts anymore.
…and there you have it! Focused peace and zen on an otherwise excruciating website.
When I did the above two things, it completely nerfed my feed so that I could just focus on jobs.
I hate that this is the only option available. I want to follow my connections, for their own posts, if any. What I don't want is to see everything they like, share, and comment on -- but LinkedIn won't let you turn that part off.
Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.
But there actually IS good content on LinkedIn. It's professionals doing interesting work and posting about it. One user that springs to mind for me does UX for the automotive industry and posts concepts, designs, and experimentations. Its fun and fascinating to watch. And I think it has much more traction to the folks that matter than any post he could do about what his weekly grocery trip taught him about the creative process.
Maybe put another way, build a content brand and not a personality brand. You can still get meaningful, career changing traction. Or do what this author does and just set up your own small tent miles outside the fairground because that's what makes your soul happy. I love the indie web.
The quality bar is very low. People post so much fluff and AI thought leadership that the algorithm has recently started rejecting it, and LinkedIn essentially ran out of content.
For the past couple of months it's been showing people posts from two or three weeks ago due to the lack of suitable material.
What I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to stand out and build an audience if you just post honestly and thoughtfully about the interesting little puzzles or dilemmas you face during your workday.
Some posts of mine that have hit it off:
> Why is it hard to find clothes for men? > Why do people think it's weird when I drink milk on Zoom? > Should I post on X, or do people still frown on it?
Try posting about what you don't know, rather than what you do. People like that more.
LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.
I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.
And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.
I would so love to just delete my LinkedIn, but you can't do that now. A lot of job applications require you give your LinkedIn. So I am stuck logging in occasionally. It's dystopian.
It took me approximately 5 minutes to install uBlock Origin and create a filter that removes the feed. No more toxic mediocrity to see because there are no posts to see. It makes Linkedin a lot more bearable for me.
www.linkedin.com##[aria-label="Main Feed"]
At best, you can nerd-out in your subject area, but even that's limited as you risk being seen as either a show-off or you may make a mistake one day and be shuned for it. It's kind of high-stakes. It's like social networking but with your employer potentially scrutinizing your posts.
On LI, people are always one bad post away from losing their income. You're never going to get fully honest takes in such environment.
The only people who can share everything honestly on LI are people who are very predictable and basically don't have any opinion about anything... Not the most exciting kinds of people.
Though at least this self-censorship boringness ceiling does make it easier to get eyeballs for your content if you're willing to get risky. It's easier for content to stand out.
Devil's advocate: what else are they going to say? They're trying to land new business so they can pay those invoices. "We're really struggling and desperately need your money now!" is unlikely to help...
I've spent most of my adult life using using linkedin for business development and job search. What people don't realize, it's the worlds most accurate business database. Highly effective for networking, where you can see peoples interests and interaction and match up with like minded peers and contemporaries.
I agree that the user generated content is indeed mediocre.
When it comes to posting content, I subscribe to Cal Newport's theory, if you produce something that is valuable and rare, people will find you. People spending their time posting large amounts of content are not creating anything valuable or rare.
Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.
Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).
I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_client-side-rende... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_resource-download...
I'm obviously being provocative but those are the dynamics
For example, stop following toxically mediocre connections.
LinkedIn will show you things based on what you follow/like/engage with. In my experience, there's troves of real operators posting genuine and helpful advice.
The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.
Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/biltahir_sometimes-i-get-into...
Everyone I know just use it as a glorified Rolodex
I have a (subjectively) high (self-imposed) bar for posting on my blog, but my bar is much lower for LinkedIn. I also have a much larger audience there.
I sometimes turn the LI posts I'm really happy with into blog articles, so they also serve as a kind of preprint for me.
Basically, I use it like I'd use Twitter if it still existed and allowed for somewhat longer posts, and BlueSky if it had any users.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...
It’s just marketers marketing to each other. If that’s useful you can join a mutual promotion group and auto-comment on each others’ posts without damaging anything of value. If not you can stay away and completely ignore any posts when you come back for an occasional job search.
I cannot log in to Linkedin any more on my default browser, which is Firefox with the built in privacy protections on and uBlock Origin (that one on the default settings). The front page redirects me to the cookie dialog which goes to the front page which goes to the cookie dialog again ad infinitum.
I suppose it would work if i accepted, but they shouldn't even ask me for the cookies absolutely required for the site to function so I'm viewing the rest as something optional that I should deny.
That's the problem with all social networks anyway. The algorithm would encourage content that reaches a wider audience, not target niches.
Also add the LinkedIn pods (which is a group of people that will like and comment nonsense on posts to boost), same concept of bots in other social networks.
That said, LinkedIn is still the only social network where I have real people that I know and have done business with.
8<------- What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor. 8<-------
in other words, linked in the resume hosting and career networking site doesn't reward the behaviour, linked in the random social network that happens to be hosted on the same site does. just ignore the latter.
I update my job when necessary, and from time to time a recruiter sends me a decent job posting.
Beyond that it’s mostly a bunch of folks spending time on LinkedIn trying to impress people that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. Which ironically drives away the people folks seem to be trying to impress. Spend time there if you wish, but you’re “marketing” to people that mostly aren’t there.
The whole “influencer” thing on LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters claiming to be experts at things they’re not really experts at. When someone starts off by saying they’re a “top influencer” on LinkedIn I run the other way, quickly. If you have to market yourself as an influencer then newsflash you’re probably not. If you are, you just are.
That, and it's so rare to find real content on the site that isn't just some mimetic rehash of the same thing other people are saying.
Frankly, it's a very ominous network to interact with—it's very unsettling to see how quickly and deeply people have adopted a performative mask that's uniquely a "LinkedIn character."
Endless droves of "think pieces" from people you can tell have never really been challenged in their field, have limited experience, and insist that they are the expert missing from your sheathe.
The saddest part is that the mediocrity will only ever increase, not decrease, in a world that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence.
But trying to show it to people is not.
I like „content guardians” everywhere saying „oh this does not belong to HN”, „oh this doesn’t belong to linked in.
Fuck that - let people do what they want and express themselves even if it is mediocre shoveling of ideas
/s
Nevertheless I update my own from time to time, it can still be useful if you navigate through the garbage. Also it helps me to cross-check a bit some people if they have a contact that you both know and you trust.
More than once I encountered people with 100% fake profile and fake work history. Maybe LinkedIn should only allow to add that you worked somewhere doing something with some kind of verification process.
I look at LinkedIn as a purpose-built tool for marketing my brand (my dev experience). It works well. Just like any tool LinkedIn has some problems. But it is the best in that niche.
Now that we have HR going whole hog on AI processing of job applications, up to and including the first round interview, can we please get rid of LinkedIn?
Instead, I would much rather see job applications come in three parts. A cover letter, a human resume overview page, and then the deeper multi page CV that is primarily for AI processing.
I really feel as if I retired at the best time possible.
While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.
I get a lot of useful information from LinkedIn because I choose who to follow and block.
Oh wow, I’m sure this isn’t going to be an evenhanded look at the situation.
This way, Linkedins basic premise of being a centralized “CV as a service” would become obsolete, leaving just the social network, which I personally would gladly abandon.
Learning and Employment Records (LERs)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcollison
> Dynamically communicate prospective opportunities and proactive technologies. Efficiently aggregate interactive materials before state of the art collaboration and idea-sharing. Credibly supply cross-media metrics via leading-edge solutions.
>I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity
four paragraphs later
>The vast majority of it falls into a category I would describe as Toxic Mediocrity.
The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know without a profile picture (open to work btw) posting "signs of a bad manager"..
They have linked a tiktok style video, how fun, let's see, so the video starts with a women in a lab coat. She seems to have a problem, mounting her phone in the car, she starts with roll of tape that she hangs around the mirror, pulls a strip down and sticks her phone back to the tape.
Seems like she's a bad manager. Obviously tape doesn't go over the mirror, well she's leveled up her skills in the next few seconds. She installs the brilliantly designed mirror-mount-phone-holder-multi-axis.png (TM).
No she's a good manager, she's meeting her employees in the middle, both passenger and driver can pull the phone right next to their face in case they need to see the map. Good managing! Fractional leadership!
I do wonder when the next car digs itself into a ditch, whether putting the phone in front of the drivers face was ideal. But hey, I'm just a lay-engineer struggling to form a sentence with an aw shucks look, far from the hallowed halls of what an MBA or fractional CTO could know.
This seems emblematic of something...
> The second thing I saw after I refreshed the feed was a person I don't know
The two common failure points for developers using social media are getting triggered at the first instance of content they dislike in the feed and not following sources of content they want to read.
Nobody should feel compelled to use any social media if they don’t want or have to. If you actually want to understand what other people see in the platform, though, you have to understand how they use it.
Any social media with a feed requires an ability to skim and filter. If you stop and read the obviously low quality content to either hate-read or to get triggered then you won’t make it far on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Hacker News comments.
Second, you have to curate your sources. If you strongly dislike a post then use mechanisms to see less of it. If you want to see more of something then like it. Follow people who produce good content. Once you’ve given the algorithms some signal the content improves to your liking, even though it’s not perfect.
Telling people to “raise the bar”, and then suggesting they should aim for less engagement just sounds strange. Who decides where the bar is, and why should hitting it require fewer people to see what you made?
I agree that a lot of LinkedIn content is cookie-cutter garbage, but advising others to invest serious effort into thoughtful writing with the expectation of no reach feels deeply unhelpful.
Instead, you could encourage others to write content on LinkedIn that sounds less "what X taught me about B2B sales" and improve the culture of "toxic mediocrity".
Question is: What can you do? We can't stop this trend. People are looking for "reach". And you can achieve that using differet approaches. What we experience at LinkedIn is the simplest approach: Spam the system with your AI generated "nonsense" posts, add a selfie and people will follow. It's not even bad content, it's positive content, emotional content, touching content. But first it's way easier to create than writing long technical articles or analysis. And seconds it's easiere to consume - people want short messages.
And it's not only LinkedIN, it's everywhere. Medium, Facebook, you name it.
Sad for everyone trying to communicatae more than just "calendar mottos". But true.
I have found a lot of value in LinkedIn recently after I started interacting with news, posts, and people that have something interesting to say. It is as if you tell the algorithm what you like, it will show more things like that.
I also proactively flag things I don't like to see. That also helps a lot in improving my feed, I assume.
Th "updates" feed with all the opentowork, hiring, promotions doesn't bother me much. it has it's uses, and its easy to just eyeball and move on.
What I don't understand is the grandstanding about how LinkedIn and its users are all dumb. You can always timebox your interactions with LinkedIn and ignore it rest of the time if you cannot afford to NOT have a LinkedIn account.
Oh! and learn to use the notification settings. Turn off email alerts etc.,
I would never use their site for anything, though I've seen coworkers apply for jobs using it. Personally I've found the other nonsocial platforms and email to be the best for getting a high paying position.
I actually think creators who produce valuable work should be just as visible as the mediocre ones, so that over time, the difference becomes clear and mediocrity slowly fades. Sure, the marketing and self-promotion side of things might feel uncomfortable, especially for developers. But in a society where the ignorant are bold, if the thoughtful and knowledgeable don’t show the same courage, that society is doomed.
No matter what kind of nonsense you come across, let science and reason be your guide—and keep creating and sharing.
Most who post absolute BS on such "professional" forums as a way to gain a larger "network" easily attract similar ones with relatable mediocrity index. The network effect kicks in and mediocrity gets amplified.
Everyone thus gets forced to either to act insanely ridiculous or just GTFO to retain whatever little sanity they have left in them.
Most corporate jobs are just mediocrity-maxxing absolutely BS jobs. It is only natural that the most popular corporate SM amplifies and promotes BS and mediocrity at scale.
Sure, let's hear the counter-example of the noble startup, taking massive risks to build The Coolest Thing. Like the enthusiastic wiggly sperms, one in a million succeeds -- and the consequences of initial success are to grow mediocre over time.
LinkedIn is marketing slop, aimed at the lowest common denominator, because that's the most numerous denomination of the walking wallet. Of course it is saturated with family friendly, inoffensive, endless streams of softcore corporate propaganda.
As a "visual animal", I find it very hard to tune out this kind of noise. I consequently try to hide such content from my feed, but the LinkedIn algorithm will not budge.
I did an Ask HN a while ago trying to find browser add-ons which will hide (or blur) such images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43833961), which turned out fruitless.
I've gotten two good jobs from posting on LinkedIn. Mutual connections see your posts, and recruiters can find and contact you. When you list it on your resume, people do look at it. So yes it "changes" your career, by helping you get jobs.
Yeah it's full of drivel. All social media is full of drivel. Stop paging through the drivel and use it as a tool. Collect good connections, keep up with old colleagues, network. That's what it's for.
People must have no spine or self-worth to be reposting all their employer's hot air like that.
But yeah Microsoft is all about mediocrity. Their game is becoming the biggest common denominator, not the best.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
> I find it deeply depressing
Please don't fulminate on HN.
It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.
If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.
Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.
But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.
Are you mind-hacking your friends when you text them “Good morning”?
Edit: grammar
I see zero slop on my feed. Maybe because I only follow friends and former coworkers that I liked. How many people are you following?
I’m more interested in what their content actually looks like if it’s that “successful”
