I frequently post on LinkedIn, on topics related to AI, startups, open source, etc. I try to have a pragmatic and realistic take and don't use AI to write the posts.
I find that just by not being cringe, obviously AI or obviously over the top sales-y makes the posts stand out and raise my (consulting) profile enough to land a meaningful number of clients, just as a second-order effect.
Lately I've been even more annoyed at the walls of its walled garden being raised higher, eg. no way to export my own posts, or having to log in to open linkedin shortened urls, which breaks my firefox site containers workflow.
I want to do this but I can't get myself to do it, I guess I'm too self-aware. Does this come naturally for you to do or did you have to push your self hard? How did you start?
I found the bad S/N ratio on LinkedIn to be freeing. I have a blog as well but often suffer from writer's block and trying to write really good content.
On LI the majority of the stuff is so bad, I have zero self-awareness and just write whatever comes to mind (ie. an approach more like what you'd do in a comment like this one, than a "proper standalone post"). Many of my posts are just commentary on what's going on in the niche (eg. comments on a new AI model) which doesn't require a ton of extra research.
I also try to have a weekly/monthly cadence: at least one LI post a week, and one blog post on my own domain per month.
Hm? The self-awareness is the advantage. Instead of just regurgitating cringy bullshit, write something sincere, something you actually find interesting, something you liked writing and something you'd enjoy reading.
Like any sincere creative work, it takes effort. You may have to push yourself hard, yes. But like most things, it does get easier with practice.
I'd like to think that the era of AI slop will cause more people to become more sincere and thoughtful because it's a competitive advantage!
I planned to get into LI posting this half of the year, and I struggled to write drafts both for LI audience and me. Your blogs and their separation is inspiring. Sincere thanks.
With the Elonification of Twitter there has been a splittering of tech/biz audiences across different platforms, each with their own problems, and the split is different in different parts of the world.
It so happens that LI continues to be popular with the audience segment and geographic location I'm primarily working with.
Agree with all negative comments about the platform tho.
LinkedIn is pretty much the only social network out there where the average person has a shot at a little reach for their posts.
Even if it’s just past and present colleagues and various acquaintances, I actually have an audience of people who are sometimes interested in what I have to say. I can't say that for any other social network.
Can you elaborate? My personal niche was very popular on twitter until Elon bought it and everyone left, now I don’t know anyone still using twitter who was in that niche.
Indeed Twitter has seen a resurgence among the (serious) AI crowd in particular. For example Bluesky (not to mention the fediverse) can get aggressively negative towards authors posting what seem to be pro-AI posts.
Ignoring the political issues, my problem with Twitter is more prosaic: the character limit is too short for basically anything of substance. I really don't like the thread style it effectively forces.
(Oh, and the new name is unbelievably stupid. I ain't never calling it that.)
That's pretty much my one gripe with the general culture of the Fediverse, a lot of people have made opposition to AI in general part of their identities and it can be a little tedious to have discussions at times because of it.
Just because a lot of cringe stuff happens there doesn't mean it is a useless platform. For me it's been the best way to get jobs - just by having a filled in profile and occasionally replying to recruiter spam when they have an interesting looking job. I got my current job which has an insane salary with that method.
I also copy/paste non-cringe blog posts there occasionally. I think more people read them than on my actual blog.
A genuine question for the people here, I am just a college student so maybe I am missing something, but does anybody actually browse through linkedin? The only times I actually open it up is when either I did something that I would like to remember when I update my Resume at a later date, or when my friends text me to open it up and like their post :)
Linkedin is just glorified contact list. People lose their email addresses, change emails with a job, lose phone numbers, move countries, stop using social networks, but usually keep using same Linkedin profile over decades.
Also in many social situations such as expos, meetups and such asking for a personal whatsapp or phone number can be a cringeworthy especially if you actually want to followup with some business proposal or solicit your services / asking for referal / etc.
At the same time 99.9% of people will be okay to connect on Linkedin and you will have that +2% trust boost that can be sufficient to make sure your message wont be ignored.
So Linkedin is really worth it as long as you are not using it as social network.
While I agree that most of the feed is filled with useless posts, for some business sectors it actually contains useful posts.
I work in the European energy market sector and LinkedIn is one of the to go places to catch up with developments in the markets, the latest the analyses, and upcoming events. And some posts are actually good, you just need to filter out the rest. I wish there would be a better platform for this specific content (maybe I'm simply missing it) but for now, I find it there.
Coming from a computer science background and kinda accidentally ended up in energy markets, I was surprised that LinkedIn is the place for this content I(in contrast to the computer science field).
I, unsurprisingly, am making the same observations. Sometimes I do think about shipping a slim Chrome extension (~Ad Blocker) to classify and filter out useless content. Could make it a bit more bearable and useful.
When I'm bored and Tiktok brain rot isn't enough, I sometimes scroll through LinkedIn to see what happened in my network. The most interesting events to me is "oh, that guy has been at <company> for <number> years now, cool" and "ah that guy got a new job, how nice"... and then I go to bed. :D
Most people randomly accept invitations on LinkedIn: "We're both humans, so I felt we should connect!".
But if you actively prune / curate WHO you add to your LinkedIn, you end up with a feed that is genuinely useful.
What you do need to know is WHY you want to use LinkedIn. It could be to find your next job, finding potential customers, or just keeping up to date with <INDUSTRY>.
I used to accept only people I worked with/met in person, but the feed is crap anyway so why bother. I now accept pretty much everyone and prune the feed.
You don't need to accept at random. I'm selective - I only connect with people I worked with or know well from the industry - and it's still 99% AI slop.
Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.
It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.
Unfortunately even with a heavily pruned list the feed is still a spam fest of recommendations that are just terrible. And every email notification is Facebook-level bait and switch clickbait.
To me, LinkedIn is a write-only site. It’s a pain to automate LinkedIn posting (it requires app verification and manual token renewal every 60 days), so I see the site whenever I have a blog post that fits there. Even then, it’s barely worth doing.
I do sometimes have interesting connections through the service, but they’re so hard to spot against the constant stream of nonsense notifications. Every time I turn off a notification type I’ll never care about (“X is celebrating Y years at Z!”, “It’s been more than a week since you posted!”, “Give us your passport to validate your existence!”), it feels like two more are created. Maybe there are LinkedIn warriors out there, but I don’t think I’d want to bump into one at a party.
The trick here is to have connections that follow and like content that is worth following, ever since connecting with some peers in the database space, my feed is filled with things like new research, C++ performance optimizations, and the like, instead of management fables and feel good stories.
I ignore the feed but there are comments here saying that posting stuff has helped them get consulting clients.
I just use it 1 - to stay in touch with people I know professionally and 2 - when I have a meeting with ppl I don’t know, to look them up and see if we know anyone in common or at least see what other stuff they’ve been doing.
It's offering was: "Talking about my CV/resume and engaging with potential employers have to be so stiff, corpo and outdated. Why can't it be more casual and easy to do like a Facebook Bio but still usable? Also, business cards suck and get lost. Another thing, working in <insert industry> is demanding and going to networking events is awkward and too full on. I wish I could maintain connections and have occasional conversations with people and actually remember who they are"
This worked for a while. In 2012 to 2015 getting jobs entirely via recruiters and conversational interactions on LinkedIn often led to interviews and other things. Then they started needing to make money, so adverts became a thing, the premium became a thing, then marketing departments caught up and started aggressively promoting crap, then later influencers arrived, and now AI. It's a death by 1000 cuts, it's fundamentally made out of low-stakes dishonestly from people just trying to keep their career going. But the end state is that it's probably the most dishonest social media platform to date. When you have Instagram and Facebook to compare it to, that's quite an achievement.
LinkedIn used to be good-ish before MS bought it, when connections meant a thing, and you could "ask Joe to introduce you to Mary" . The network was valuable.
When they added the story /post section it became a glorified Facebook .
I would say it was growth that killed it, and what would kill any platform that allows some sort of public-facing, user content.
Keep adding people, and you would both lower your bar towards an obviously low average, and you increase the pressure to "particpate", which is damaging even to scenes that do have high barriers of entry [1].
MS added the KPI-maxxing corpo cancer that boosted the decay, but I don't believe they were a cause. To quote the AI bros, "it's inevitable."
When I see people post on LinkedIn, I stop taking them seriously. Because they’re spending time and energy well spent elsewhere, posting into a meaningless haze of obligatory connections.
I get an occasional request from a friend who is trying to build a following to interact with their posts to boost their visibility. I'll go through, like a few then sit around for a while desperately trying to think of something non-generic to say in a comment, fail to think of anything and just add an "I agree" comment.
It’s been on the long slow decline for a decade. It used to be filled with interesting content and made it easy to access interesting people and get your message out. It’s really in the dregs now but I still open it and post to it more out of habit than anything. I’ve deleted the app and just use it from my laptop to try and break the habit and it’s very questionable ROI.
I get some useful industry news, and info about what colleagues are up to there. There's a lot of noise - and that noise is getting more and more cringe - but there's a certain amount of signal that makes it worth it.
I don't add people to my network to reduce the noise. I don't pay but get "requests" for software development that are not personally directed, so I delete those. Any job advertisement I am notified about is closed by the time I click on it, within seconds of the email. Any misspelt ad is a phishing crime in the making.
I think it depends what your career is. It used to be that developers hated it because during the ZIRP era they were being spammed with badly fitting job offers from sketchy recruiters.
Now that the market has tanked, their feelings may have softened somewhat.
And some of the industry posts can be interesting.
> but does anybody actually browse through linkedin?
Sometimes I do, reflexively, when I check my messages or some specific people. I get no value out of it. But I do know people who seriously use linkedin, as in read, post, comment, and message people.
Startup guy in cybersecurity here. If u plan to start a company/business/whatever, LinkedIn is actually awesome.
Connected with the CTO of a $1B Israeli company over LinkedIn and was on a plane to Telaviv a week later. They ended up acquiring my co.
My second startup partnered with the worlds largest ed tech co in cybersecurity (with their head of learning dev) off the back of a cold our reach on LinkedIn ..
If u learn to not be super fragile and bothered by all the cringe content .. it’s basically ur personal M&A firm. Gives u tremendous leverage for partnering, sales, intros without needing some fancy old boys network.. or startup incubator bs
When Twitter imploded I expected technical discussions to migrate to Mastodon or Bluesky. What happened next shocked me.
Technical content appeared on LinkedIn.
Not just one or two posts. Tens of posts. Every day. Technical content from the thought leaders in the industry.
Yes, there was still corporate slop.
Yes, LinkedIn still mostly serves for self-aggrandisement.
But there were nuggets of gold, for those prepared to sift for them.
Seriously: LinkedIn is still mostly garbage. The quality of discussion is not great. But it has improved a bit, and given the fractured nature of social media at the moment it's somewhat viable to use it for technical content. It very much depends on the specific area. If you want to talk about the new hotness (e.g. using LLMs to write software) there is a lot. For more niche areas I expect other venues will do better.
I find it's easy to scroll past very sloppy posts. And 1 in 2 posts are genuinely interesting/teach me something new about the world and the people in it - how people conduct business - and most of all their improbable trajectories that got them where they are currently in their career. It's very interesting and the recommendations are great for me. I don't find too much slop or cringe content, and am confused when people complain about it so much. It feels like people don't really know how to separate slop content (self-promotion/empty AI posts) from genuinely written life and work experiences. And HN is definitely an echo-chamber, I see a huge amount of people (more than instagram tbh in mid-30s age bracket) contribute regularly to linkedin.
Then tech jobs stopped existing and now Linkedin is a pure AI content driven jerk off engine for desperate people without a (real) job to sound important.
Me and my friends have a lot of jokes about linkedin, a lot of prejudices. I'm going to let you form your own opinion. Trust me, you will form one, once you start working in different offices with office people.
Important to remember that this style of writing originates well before the AI era. It's called direct mail marketing. It's the same style of writing you'd read when you got your physical junk mail from your physical mailbox and made the mistake of opening it.
Oh jeez, I cannot wait for the Words. Standing. Alone. trend to be over, it makes me want to hurl.
It sorta made sense when it was clever and the words actually made sense both alone or together, but now that it's become something every two-bit marketroid aims for, they force it even when it doesn't really work, and the result is atrocious.
Makes me yearn for pet rocks. At least that fad knew it was dumb.
The problem isn't this, its enough people actually consuming it. These things always follow money first. Blame those people and appeal to them if you think it will change something, not venting off here among folks who are hardly the main source of this.
No, I don't have the solution for this age of dumb. It used to be that people were ashamed of how primitive they are, now they celebrate it as openly as possible and non-trivial amounts of similar folks follow.
Too bad the thought leader is spewing 500 Internal Server Error. "Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again." isn't something I'm proud to post to Slack.
Funny how easy it is to turn any banal situation into something that sounds profound.
I put my situation as "Playing with a frisbee, alone." and your person says "Life is like a Frisbee. You can't control the wind. You can only adjust your throw."
This is a different phenomenon, sending one paragraph per message is tidy and also if the messages arrive in quick succession it implies this is off the cuff and free flowing conversation. It's native to the medium. Writing one sentence per paragraph on the other hand is an in-group signifier for a cult.
Very nice. I thought it wasn't going to save a "You Go Girl" style story about "My Dick", but it turned it into a conference anecdote with a powerpoint slide about Richard III. Hilarious.
10% useful for maintaining a contact list and just occasionally checking up on what former colleagues are up to.
5% Occasionally come across some useful or actually intriguing post that does give me some insight.
85% PR puffery or posts from grifters. If you see someone leading with “Top X LinkedIn” whatever, generally really best to run the other way quickly. Top folks never actually lead with that crap.
The truly most successful and knowledgeable folks typically only post on LinkedIn rarely or not at all. That leaves LinkedIn this odd pool of people trying to impress other people that mostly aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn.
I always wonder what motivates people to write posts on LinkedIn. Even before AI slop, it’s been the same for years with the cringiest posts somehow getting traction (“and the whole room applauded!”) - do people make money from the posts or something or is it more just a validation thing.
Apps like that (a customizable system prompt with a token api endpoint) would become more common if the cost of tokens decreases. Current AI subscription providers have been trying to crack that nut with GPTs, skills, extensions, etc, but they have the n+1 problem. The scope is too much to do it securely and get value other than entertainment from it. If one could make a link to take you to a Claude.ai interface for “generate a legit LinkedIn post”, next people are gonna want to connect it to their email and documents, and LinkedIn account then build a workflow for making posts and addressing comments, messaging leads and cross posting to Twitter or Reddit.
I've never seen "the n+1 problem" used in a context like this, can you explain what that means? To me "the" n+1 problem is the one where you do your DB queries in a for loop instead of using joins or something like that: https://docs.sentry.io/product/issues/issue-details/performa...
I was drawing the distinction more between productivity vs entertainment uses, as opposed to power vs regular users.
The problem with the later is AI’s entire sales pitch is to flatten those definition. If you can type it, the AI should be able to figure it out for the most part. You don’t even have to be very clear in your typing. You can just address the AI casually as you would address a person.
Entertainment apps are about increasing engagement. Like an AI driven game, ARGs, or this site. For example, Sora app was an AI entertainment app but it obviously was the wrong approach. I think there is an untapped potential there, but it remains under-explored because most are focusing on productivity now.
A few weeks ago, LinkedIn introduced a "This looks like AI slop" button and to linkedIn's credit, my feed has been a lot better since that happened.
There's still some going around of course, but it's far less than the endless stereotypical linkedIn chum in the feed that there was.
I don't know if engaging with that button means I'm less likely to be served such content, or whether it's cleaning up everyone's feeds.
The worst were the ones starting, "I had a client phone me up", and when you'd look at the profile they wouldn't even obviously have such clients, and certainly wouldn't be the obvious person to call in that scenario.
I can't imagine being that shameless, and just to boost an artificial reach.
People already posted this slop "by hand" before generative tech accessibility. In fact, generative models are good at it because they were trained on massive amounts of horse crap people posted and shared.
In my case it was interesting to note that the same prompt with different "Cringe Style" uses the exact same food analogy for a topic of tube amp superiority.
Vulnerability:
> Digital modeling amps are the Bluetooth earbuds of guitar amplification. Technically impressive. Completely missing the point. A Kemper can model a 1959 Plexi the way a photograph can model a meal.
Truth To Power:
> A modeling amp will simulate 47 vintage amplifiers and nail exactly none of them. It is a photograph of food. It looks correct. You cannot eat it.
Another anecdote supporting the opinion that gluing the words in coherent paragraphs can hide the shallowness of the conceptual grasp behind it pretty well.
PS: Had to override the JS to lift the limit a bit to paste the whole "crystal lattice" quote by Dumble.
I may or may not have instructed Claude to built me a LinkedIn Bot that creates posts for predefined topics, comments and likes others posts and scarpes the page for jobs. Let's say a minority on LinkedIn actually reads the content others post, so my reach and impressions are continually growing without me doing anything on that cesspool of a social app. Thanks AI, I guess.
Been laughing for the past 10 minutes, thanks for this one.
(I tried the death of my cat by car in front of my house in a Go Girl manner, absolute cinema)
How is this so good. After playing around a bit with different inputs I then put in real beliefs and selected different cringe types and I wanted to off myself reading the beliefs I had parsed through these lens.
I frequently post on LinkedIn, on topics related to AI, startups, open source, etc. I try to have a pragmatic and realistic take and don't use AI to write the posts.
I find that just by not being cringe, obviously AI or obviously over the top sales-y makes the posts stand out and raise my (consulting) profile enough to land a meaningful number of clients, just as a second-order effect.
Lately I've been even more annoyed at the walls of its walled garden being raised higher, eg. no way to export my own posts, or having to log in to open linkedin shortened urls, which breaks my firefox site containers workflow.
I want to do this but I can't get myself to do it, I guess I'm too self-aware. Does this come naturally for you to do or did you have to push your self hard? How did you start?
I found the bad S/N ratio on LinkedIn to be freeing. I have a blog as well but often suffer from writer's block and trying to write really good content.
On LI the majority of the stuff is so bad, I have zero self-awareness and just write whatever comes to mind (ie. an approach more like what you'd do in a comment like this one, than a "proper standalone post"). Many of my posts are just commentary on what's going on in the niche (eg. comments on a new AI model) which doesn't require a ton of extra research.
I also try to have a weekly/monthly cadence: at least one LI post a week, and one blog post on my own domain per month.
> I guess I'm too self-aware
The word you're looking for is self-respecting :)
Hm? The self-awareness is the advantage. Instead of just regurgitating cringy bullshit, write something sincere, something you actually find interesting, something you liked writing and something you'd enjoy reading.
Like any sincere creative work, it takes effort. You may have to push yourself hard, yes. But like most things, it does get easier with practice.
I'd like to think that the era of AI slop will cause more people to become more sincere and thoughtful because it's a competitive advantage!
Do you also run a blog?
Yup, two. A personal one at https://blog.senko.net/ (general and more opinionated stuff) and more corpo oriented at https://senkorasic.com/articles/
I planned to get into LI posting this half of the year, and I struggled to write drafts both for LI audience and me. Your blogs and their separation is inspiring. Sincere thanks.
Why are you engaging sincerely on a platform created for boot licking?
Audience.
With the Elonification of Twitter there has been a splittering of tech/biz audiences across different platforms, each with their own problems, and the split is different in different parts of the world.
It so happens that LI continues to be popular with the audience segment and geographic location I'm primarily working with.
Agree with all negative comments about the platform tho.
Yep.
LinkedIn is pretty much the only social network out there where the average person has a shot at a little reach for their posts.
Even if it’s just past and present colleagues and various acquaintances, I actually have an audience of people who are sometimes interested in what I have to say. I can't say that for any other social network.
A professional answer, to the point, ignoring cheap flame attempt. I have no doubt you get more than enough work like that
Twitter has never been better but okay bro
Can you elaborate? My personal niche was very popular on twitter until Elon bought it and everyone left, now I don’t know anyone still using twitter who was in that niche.
Indeed Twitter has seen a resurgence among the (serious) AI crowd in particular. For example Bluesky (not to mention the fediverse) can get aggressively negative towards authors posting what seem to be pro-AI posts.
Ignoring the political issues, my problem with Twitter is more prosaic: the character limit is too short for basically anything of substance. I really don't like the thread style it effectively forces.
(Oh, and the new name is unbelievably stupid. I ain't never calling it that.)
That's pretty much my one gripe with the general culture of the Fediverse, a lot of people have made opposition to AI in general part of their identities and it can be a little tedious to have discussions at times because of it.
Just because a lot of cringe stuff happens there doesn't mean it is a useless platform. For me it's been the best way to get jobs - just by having a filled in profile and occasionally replying to recruiter spam when they have an interesting looking job. I got my current job which has an insane salary with that method.
I also copy/paste non-cringe blog posts there occasionally. I think more people read them than on my actual blog.
Because parent post derives clients from it. It's in the post.
>> Why are you engaging sincerely on a platform created for boot licking?
I think that's Kink.com :)
A genuine question for the people here, I am just a college student so maybe I am missing something, but does anybody actually browse through linkedin? The only times I actually open it up is when either I did something that I would like to remember when I update my Resume at a later date, or when my friends text me to open it up and like their post :)
Linkedin is just glorified contact list. People lose their email addresses, change emails with a job, lose phone numbers, move countries, stop using social networks, but usually keep using same Linkedin profile over decades.
Also in many social situations such as expos, meetups and such asking for a personal whatsapp or phone number can be a cringeworthy especially if you actually want to followup with some business proposal or solicit your services / asking for referal / etc.
At the same time 99.9% of people will be okay to connect on Linkedin and you will have that +2% trust boost that can be sufficient to make sure your message wont be ignored.
So Linkedin is really worth it as long as you are not using it as social network.
Spot on!
While I agree that most of the feed is filled with useless posts, for some business sectors it actually contains useful posts.
I work in the European energy market sector and LinkedIn is one of the to go places to catch up with developments in the markets, the latest the analyses, and upcoming events. And some posts are actually good, you just need to filter out the rest. I wish there would be a better platform for this specific content (maybe I'm simply missing it) but for now, I find it there.
Coming from a computer science background and kinda accidentally ended up in energy markets, I was surprised that LinkedIn is the place for this content I(in contrast to the computer science field).
> most of the feed is filled with useless posts
I, unsurprisingly, am making the same observations. Sometimes I do think about shipping a slim Chrome extension (~Ad Blocker) to classify and filter out useless content. Could make it a bit more bearable and useful.
I use LinkOff https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linkoff-filter-and-...
It has a 'gentle mode' so you see what gets blocked.
I think it's thanks to it that I don't feel animosity towards LinkedIn anymore.
I just unfollow everyone on LinkedIn
Sounds like there is room for Hackers news on Energy market sector then
When I'm bored and Tiktok brain rot isn't enough, I sometimes scroll through LinkedIn to see what happened in my network. The most interesting events to me is "oh, that guy has been at <company> for <number> years now, cool" and "ah that guy got a new job, how nice"... and then I go to bed. :D
Most people randomly accept invitations on LinkedIn: "We're both humans, so I felt we should connect!".
But if you actively prune / curate WHO you add to your LinkedIn, you end up with a feed that is genuinely useful.
What you do need to know is WHY you want to use LinkedIn. It could be to find your next job, finding potential customers, or just keeping up to date with <INDUSTRY>.
I used to accept only people I worked with/met in person, but the feed is crap anyway so why bother. I now accept pretty much everyone and prune the feed.
You don't need to accept at random. I'm selective - I only connect with people I worked with or know well from the industry - and it's still 99% AI slop.
Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.
It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.
Unfortunately even with a heavily pruned list the feed is still a spam fest of recommendations that are just terrible. And every email notification is Facebook-level bait and switch clickbait.
To me, LinkedIn is a write-only site. It’s a pain to automate LinkedIn posting (it requires app verification and manual token renewal every 60 days), so I see the site whenever I have a blog post that fits there. Even then, it’s barely worth doing.
I do sometimes have interesting connections through the service, but they’re so hard to spot against the constant stream of nonsense notifications. Every time I turn off a notification type I’ll never care about (“X is celebrating Y years at Z!”, “It’s been more than a week since you posted!”, “Give us your passport to validate your existence!”), it feels like two more are created. Maybe there are LinkedIn warriors out there, but I don’t think I’d want to bump into one at a party.
The trick here is to have connections that follow and like content that is worth following, ever since connecting with some peers in the database space, my feed is filled with things like new research, C++ performance optimizations, and the like, instead of management fables and feel good stories.
I ignore the feed but there are comments here saying that posting stuff has helped them get consulting clients.
I just use it 1 - to stay in touch with people I know professionally and 2 - when I have a meeting with ppl I don’t know, to look them up and see if we know anyone in common or at least see what other stuff they’ve been doing.
Linkedin used to be good(ish).
It's offering was: "Talking about my CV/resume and engaging with potential employers have to be so stiff, corpo and outdated. Why can't it be more casual and easy to do like a Facebook Bio but still usable? Also, business cards suck and get lost. Another thing, working in <insert industry> is demanding and going to networking events is awkward and too full on. I wish I could maintain connections and have occasional conversations with people and actually remember who they are"
This worked for a while. In 2012 to 2015 getting jobs entirely via recruiters and conversational interactions on LinkedIn often led to interviews and other things. Then they started needing to make money, so adverts became a thing, the premium became a thing, then marketing departments caught up and started aggressively promoting crap, then later influencers arrived, and now AI. It's a death by 1000 cuts, it's fundamentally made out of low-stakes dishonestly from people just trying to keep their career going. But the end state is that it's probably the most dishonest social media platform to date. When you have Instagram and Facebook to compare it to, that's quite an achievement.
LinkedIn used to be good-ish before MS bought it, when connections meant a thing, and you could "ask Joe to introduce you to Mary" . The network was valuable.
When they added the story /post section it became a glorified Facebook .
I would say it was growth that killed it, and what would kill any platform that allows some sort of public-facing, user content.
Keep adding people, and you would both lower your bar towards an obviously low average, and you increase the pressure to "particpate", which is damaging even to scenes that do have high barriers of entry [1].
MS added the KPI-maxxing corpo cancer that boosted the decay, but I don't believe they were a cause. To quote the AI bros, "it's inevitable."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish
When I see people post on LinkedIn, I stop taking them seriously. Because they’re spending time and energy well spent elsewhere, posting into a meaningless haze of obligatory connections.
For some of us (founders, sales, GTM engineers), LinkedIn is "the place to be" if you want to find and engage with prospects.
My customers are in healthcare, and they don't hang out on X for example (which is where I get most of my tech news alongside HN).
How do you reach prospects if the network is mostly "uh okay can't hurt to accept this connection I guess" type relationships?
Are your prospects mostly existing business relationships?
Multiple ways:
- Cold outreach (rapidly becoming impossible with the amount of unhinged automation pouring over LinkedIn)
- Engaging on the posts with my "takes", not selling anything, just genuinely helping / contributing
- Warm connections that I've made, for me it's attending work fairs / conferences then connecting on LinkedIn
- Posting as myself (the founder): AI-assisted engineering, industry takes, etc
I get an occasional request from a friend who is trying to build a following to interact with their posts to boost their visibility. I'll go through, like a few then sit around for a while desperately trying to think of something non-generic to say in a comment, fail to think of anything and just add an "I agree" comment.
It’s been on the long slow decline for a decade. It used to be filled with interesting content and made it easy to access interesting people and get your message out. It’s really in the dregs now but I still open it and post to it more out of habit than anything. I’ve deleted the app and just use it from my laptop to try and break the habit and it’s very questionable ROI.
The contact list point of LinkedIn was explained.
I do post things like a promotion, certificate, speaking opportunity or a new blog post I made.
I can only hope I'm not too cringe and corrupted.
I get some useful industry news, and info about what colleagues are up to there. There's a lot of noise - and that noise is getting more and more cringe - but there's a certain amount of signal that makes it worth it.
Employers do use it, among many other signals, in their hiring/shortlisting process. How much depends on state and sector.
I don't add people to my network to reduce the noise. I don't pay but get "requests" for software development that are not personally directed, so I delete those. Any job advertisement I am notified about is closed by the time I click on it, within seconds of the email. Any misspelt ad is a phishing crime in the making.
Maybe I should give them money :)
I think it depends what your career is. It used to be that developers hated it because during the ZIRP era they were being spammed with badly fitting job offers from sketchy recruiters.
Now that the market has tanked, their feelings may have softened somewhat.
And some of the industry posts can be interesting.
> but does anybody actually browse through linkedin?
Sometimes I do, reflexively, when I check my messages or some specific people. I get no value out of it. But I do know people who seriously use linkedin, as in read, post, comment, and message people.
The daily puzzle games have more worth than the average linkedin post.
I open it to do the daily puzzles. But it means that I'm subject to 1 or 2 cringe posts before I get there.
Startup guy in cybersecurity here. If u plan to start a company/business/whatever, LinkedIn is actually awesome.
Connected with the CTO of a $1B Israeli company over LinkedIn and was on a plane to Telaviv a week later. They ended up acquiring my co.
My second startup partnered with the worlds largest ed tech co in cybersecurity (with their head of learning dev) off the back of a cold our reach on LinkedIn ..
If u learn to not be super fragile and bothered by all the cringe content .. it’s basically ur personal M&A firm. Gives u tremendous leverage for partnering, sales, intros without needing some fancy old boys network.. or startup incubator bs
You have to ruthlessly prune the feed to get something worth reading.
I have a simple rule to decide when to add someone to my social network: if we met in real life, would we say hi to each other? No? Don't add.
Yes, because I've banned myself from all the good sites.
When Twitter imploded I expected technical discussions to migrate to Mastodon or Bluesky. What happened next shocked me.
Technical content appeared on LinkedIn.
Not just one or two posts. Tens of posts. Every day. Technical content from the thought leaders in the industry.
Yes, there was still corporate slop.
Yes, LinkedIn still mostly serves for self-aggrandisement.
But there were nuggets of gold, for those prepared to sift for them.
Seriously: LinkedIn is still mostly garbage. The quality of discussion is not great. But it has improved a bit, and given the fractured nature of social media at the moment it's somewhat viable to use it for technical content. It very much depends on the specific area. If you want to talk about the new hotness (e.g. using LLMs to write software) there is a lot. For more niche areas I expect other venues will do better.
Those unfortunate enough to be desperate for a job (or keeping the one they have) do. Which sadly translates to a very huge portion of the population.
I find it's easy to scroll past very sloppy posts. And 1 in 2 posts are genuinely interesting/teach me something new about the world and the people in it - how people conduct business - and most of all their improbable trajectories that got them where they are currently in their career. It's very interesting and the recommendations are great for me. I don't find too much slop or cringe content, and am confused when people complain about it so much. It feels like people don't really know how to separate slop content (self-promotion/empty AI posts) from genuinely written life and work experiences. And HN is definitely an echo-chamber, I see a huge amount of people (more than instagram tbh in mid-30s age bracket) contribute regularly to linkedin.
It used to be relevant.
Then tech jobs stopped existing and now Linkedin is a pure AI content driven jerk off engine for desperate people without a (real) job to sound important.
Oh dude, welcome to the business.
I've been in IT since before linkedin existed.
Me and my friends have a lot of jokes about linkedin, a lot of prejudices. I'm going to let you form your own opinion. Trust me, you will form one, once you start working in different offices with office people.
it is more interesting than internal ms viva
I left LinkedIn long time ago. I'm now a proud member of ShlinkedIn
https://shlinkedin.com/
I can’t stand the current trend in social media posting.
It’s not writing, it’s crap.
A few sentences.
Alone.
Incorrect grammar.
Not sentences, just phrases.
You’re supposed to think it has more impact.
It doesn’t.
If you can’t be bothered to write your own words on social media, then just don’t post.
Important to remember that this style of writing originates well before the AI era. It's called direct mail marketing. It's the same style of writing you'd read when you got your physical junk mail from your physical mailbox and made the mistake of opening it.
Oh jeez, I cannot wait for the Words. Standing. Alone. trend to be over, it makes me want to hurl.
It sorta made sense when it was clever and the words actually made sense both alone or together, but now that it's become something every two-bit marketroid aims for, they force it even when it doesn't really work, and the result is atrocious.
Makes me yearn for pet rocks. At least that fad knew it was dumb.
The problem isn't this, its enough people actually consuming it. These things always follow money first. Blame those people and appeal to them if you think it will change something, not venting off here among folks who are hardly the main source of this.
No, I don't have the solution for this age of dumb. It used to be that people were ashamed of how primitive they are, now they celebrate it as openly as possible and non-trivial amounts of similar folks follow.
Too bad the thought leader is spewing 500 Internal Server Error. "Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again." isn't something I'm proud to post to Slack.
I created a similar tool a year ago -> https://infiniteutils.com/internet/linkedin-post-generator
Funny how easy it is to turn any banal situation into something that sounds profound.
I put my situation as "Playing with a frisbee, alone." and your person says "Life is like a Frisbee. You can't control the wind. You can only adjust your throw."
Error 1102 Worker exceeded resource limits
It's a strange realization that this looks so much like LinkedIn because it actually is LinkedIn.
It seems that an LLM is deliberately being forced to generate in the style of LLM slop.
Try Kagi translate to LinkedIn
https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=linkedin
Ironically also offline:
> Kagi Translate is temporarily offline for free users.
Whenever it gets back I recommend everyone to use it. My go to prompt for demoing it to others is "I eat poop off the floor"
Excellent.
Though many follow a shorter sentence style.
Like this.
To go on and on about what they're going on about.
Paragraphs are old.
Brevity is the new thing.
Make it short. (Lift, bro.)
We talk about words here
insert 10 short one sentence life experiences about words
you can subscribe to my word salad workshop for $5
It would seem to be.
Anyone under 35 seems to type things in multiple messages on message apps, rather than one :-)
I remember when SMS had a cost per message.
This is a different phenomenon, sending one paragraph per message is tidy and also if the messages arrive in quick succession it implies this is off the cuff and free flowing conversation. It's native to the medium. Writing one sentence per paragraph on the other hand is an in-group signifier for a cult.
Any linkedin devs here? Would be interesting to hear about the algos
Well, it certainly isn't wrong
https://pastebin.com/60MJYFJj
"Your browser should not have to negotiate a certificate chain the length of a CVS receipt"
:D
I have just spent the last 20 minutes enjoying AI writing.
> What topic do you want to write about?
Robots suck, the future is cheap human Labour
> Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again.
:(
Very nice. I thought it wasn't going to save a "You Go Girl" style story about "My Dick", but it turned it into a conference anecdote with a powerpoint slide about Richard III. Hilarious.
I asked for inspiring post about robbing orphanage and i am laughing soo hard
LinkedIn is about:
10% useful for maintaining a contact list and just occasionally checking up on what former colleagues are up to.
5% Occasionally come across some useful or actually intriguing post that does give me some insight.
85% PR puffery or posts from grifters. If you see someone leading with “Top X LinkedIn” whatever, generally really best to run the other way quickly. Top folks never actually lead with that crap.
The truly most successful and knowledgeable folks typically only post on LinkedIn rarely or not at all. That leaves LinkedIn this odd pool of people trying to impress other people that mostly aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn.
Permalinks to generated content would make it even more viral. I don't want to post to LI/X, just share to friends without copy-pasting.
I always wonder what motivates people to write posts on LinkedIn. Even before AI slop, it’s been the same for years with the cringiest posts somehow getting traction (“and the whole room applauded!”) - do people make money from the posts or something or is it more just a validation thing.
Its precisely what it appears to be. Self-promotiom.
Kagi translate had this linkedin speak translator, it was hilarious.
Apps like that (a customizable system prompt with a token api endpoint) would become more common if the cost of tokens decreases. Current AI subscription providers have been trying to crack that nut with GPTs, skills, extensions, etc, but they have the n+1 problem. The scope is too much to do it securely and get value other than entertainment from it. If one could make a link to take you to a Claude.ai interface for “generate a legit LinkedIn post”, next people are gonna want to connect it to their email and documents, and LinkedIn account then build a workflow for making posts and addressing comments, messaging leads and cross posting to Twitter or Reddit.
I've never seen "the n+1 problem" used in a context like this, can you explain what that means? To me "the" n+1 problem is the one where you do your DB queries in a for loop instead of using joins or something like that: https://docs.sentry.io/product/issues/issue-details/performa...
Power users will always want custom tools. But most users aren't power users
I was drawing the distinction more between productivity vs entertainment uses, as opposed to power vs regular users.
The problem with the later is AI’s entire sales pitch is to flatten those definition. If you can type it, the AI should be able to figure it out for the most part. You don’t even have to be very clear in your typing. You can just address the AI casually as you would address a person.
Entertainment apps are about increasing engagement. Like an AI driven game, ARGs, or this site. For example, Sora app was an AI entertainment app but it obviously was the wrong approach. I think there is an untapped potential there, but it remains under-explored because most are focusing on productivity now.
Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again.
Just like LinkedIn, this is not working as intended, so it’s spot on. (… getting the Oops-error).
What was the dataset this was trained on? I ask because it's pretty good.
A few weeks ago, LinkedIn introduced a "This looks like AI slop" button and to linkedIn's credit, my feed has been a lot better since that happened.
There's still some going around of course, but it's far less than the endless stereotypical linkedIn chum in the feed that there was.
I don't know if engaging with that button means I'm less likely to be served such content, or whether it's cleaning up everyone's feeds.
The worst were the ones starting, "I had a client phone me up", and when you'd look at the profile they wouldn't even obviously have such clients, and certainly wouldn't be the obvious person to call in that scenario.
I can't imagine being that shameless, and just to boost an artificial reach.
Wow, I didn't notice that, thanks for pointing it out.
> I don't know if engaging with that button means I'm less likely to be served such content, or whether it's cleaning up everyone's feeds.
I would guess it's both cause I've been having less AI slop on LinkedIn for the past few weeks (yet not none).
Why are you guys still looking at the feed is the real question.
I like to keep track of where my former colleagues have gone so I can feel bad about where I'm at.
same, also what I noticed
Most sites may end up destroyed by automation tools etc... I already no longer feel like posting on any website anymore.
People already posted this slop "by hand" before generative tech accessibility. In fact, generative models are good at it because they were trained on massive amounts of horse crap people posted and shared.
input: toilet humour, vulnerability post
output: elagabalus pranking his guests with whoopee cushions
nice
In my case it was interesting to note that the same prompt with different "Cringe Style" uses the exact same food analogy for a topic of tube amp superiority.
Vulnerability:
> Digital modeling amps are the Bluetooth earbuds of guitar amplification. Technically impressive. Completely missing the point. A Kemper can model a 1959 Plexi the way a photograph can model a meal.
Truth To Power:
> A modeling amp will simulate 47 vintage amplifiers and nail exactly none of them. It is a photograph of food. It looks correct. You cannot eat it.
Another anecdote supporting the opinion that gluing the words in coherent paragraphs can hide the shallowness of the conceptual grasp behind it pretty well.
PS: Had to override the JS to lift the limit a bit to paste the whole "crystal lattice" quote by Dumble.
Very curious to hear if someone actually posted one of these and got likes/new followers?
The evil characters on LinkedIn aren't the poor souls posting cringe, it's the 15 people who chime in with encouragement in the comments.
Friends don't let friends post cringe
I may or may not have instructed Claude to built me a LinkedIn Bot that creates posts for predefined topics, comments and likes others posts and scarpes the page for jobs. Let's say a minority on LinkedIn actually reads the content others post, so my reach and impressions are continually growing without me doing anything on that cesspool of a social app. Thanks AI, I guess.
So basically LinkedIn is now MoltBook [0].
[0]: https://moltsbooks.com/
What's the point?
How many days until the linkedin zombies actually use it for their posts?
zero, I guarantee whatever model provider this site is a frontend for is already powering a large portion of linkedin activity.
Tried it, produced a frighteningly good piece of text.
It’s probably great.
Unfortunately, I suspect that it’s being hugged to death (I keep getting the “oops” response). Hope they can afford the tokens.
Been laughing for the past 10 minutes, thanks for this one. (I tried the death of my cat by car in front of my house in a Go Girl manner, absolute cinema)
Can you post the result? My attempt of "Using AI for a novel financial scam" / "You go girl" didn't go through.
My first one (That happened: Wine snobs) is already hilarious! Looks like LLMs are coming for comedians next.
Would love to see what was it.
I enjoyed the “Hot Take,” in the Hall of Cringe (my boat).
It’s surprisingly well done, for AI-generated content.
I wish I could reply to the "I pooped" linkedin output. "Tongue firmly in cheek" is horrifying.
I first tried "Getting your ass rimmed" without knowing that was appended to all the generated texts. Got an extra chuckle before I figured that out.
Amazing. The hall of fame section is hilarious!
It's already hugged to death OR API token spend limit reached
Wow it nailed how every LinkedIn post reads to me. Dropped a veritable gem.
https://pastebin.com/kk8dd5t5
This could have been whipped up in 5 mins and been a bit meh, but it's excellent.
Whoever did this actually pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
Bravo
Backend is an openai model: Can talk about Tiananmen Refuses to talk about genocide in Palestine
How is this so good. After playing around a bit with different inputs I then put in real beliefs and selected different cringe types and I wanted to off myself reading the beliefs I had parsed through these lens.
10/10 for hitting the satire mark perfectly.
LOL the HN AI detector is killing all the copypast for the lulz people have been posting (thank you, showdead: yes)
This is brilliant, well done!
I like my LinkedIn cringe hand written, thank you very much.
I'm the proud author of Two such stories, if it pleases you:
* The One Shoe CEO
* Advice from a millionaire (true story)
You'll just have to find them.
I only want linkedin cringe if it's of the artisanal, hand crafted, organic, free range, GMO free, fair trade, heirloom variety.
My cringe has been handcrafted and vegan. Pure human slop!
the slop centipede