Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
LinkedIn was an employment focused social network. Nowadays, my feed is mostly about stuff you expect to see on Twitter or Facebook (war, politics, etc). Is it because the decline of Twitter? Is it more an intentional move by LinkedIn to promote that staff to everyone's feed so that they can make more money? Or is it just the fate of every niche social network once it gets big?
Politics and war discussions have been increasingly common at work too. Companies have promoting ERGs in the hope of diversity and in the name of "bringing your authentic self to work", and these groups have become a hotbed of activism. I've witnessed flamewars in work channels on the topics of BLM, war in Gaza etc in the past two companies I've worked.
Maybe it's your circle? My LinkedIn feed is mostly self-promotion and various achievement notices, with the occasional deviation, i.e. what it always was.
About a decade ago, we’d refer to LinkedIn as “the network everyone has, but nobody is on.” Meaning, everyone has an account but there’s no reason to log in unless you’re seeking an employment change. Looks like they tripled-down on features to change it. Always seeking DAU.
I think you are getting distracted by the feed widget on the front page. LinkedIn still works perfectly fine to store your resume and talk to recruiters. You can straight up ignore the social/feed aspect of it. It is a visible but irrelevant block of text on the front page to me, nothing more.
It feels like people want to be "though leaders" and boost their personal brand. Heck people are using to pick up dates. People are pushing a lot of political stuff too. It is kind of turning into facebook.
Linkedin is the example of the clickbait engagement society we live in. Everything turns arround self promotion full of bullshit titles and descriptions of mostly thin air. Everybody is an uber executive leader responsible for mind blowing changes impacting the entire world.
I gave LinkedIn a serious go five years ago and estimate I invested around ten hours a week interacting with spammers, fake jobs, and worse. And the in-app chat didn't work at all. I had to ctrl-r the website to receive a new message. Have they fixed that bug yet?
At one point I had followed all of the CEOs in India because they were claiming there were so many great jobs in India. Since they followed me back I started conversations with all of them in an attempt to get a work visa for India --- near the end of an entire year searching for a job in America on Linkedin I was pretty disillusioned with the local job market. All of these CEOs in India ghosted me! Finally a friend from India explained that there is no work visa for American programmers and that is why they were dropping the conversation.
After that I decided to delete the account since it seemed to be mostly wasting my time.
At local meetups everyone tells me to get on there, that it is the only way I'll find a job. Then I ask them: well, what job have you found on there? But they are looking for a job, so they explain to me that is why they are on Linkedin. After this the other party tends to offer to diagnose me with depression or autism if I do not find someone else to IRL network with.
Does anyone have professional networking site recommendations beyond LinkedIn and HN Who's Hiring? Leave recommendations below!
Intentional move by Linkedin. They wanted to make it more social to make it more "sticky" and boost engagement stats. So making it feel more like social media that people routinely visit vs a static career page you only look at when you're job hunting. Hence the feed and the algorithm and the self-promotional and random topic posts. I have a dude in my feed who routinely posts about his son and things they do on weekends. It's basically facebook now.
Linkedin wants to be a social network and people who like to socialize through business channels aren't there to be authentic but in its very nature shallow
So I started social accounts for the Carolina Code Conference that I took over this past March. LinkedIn has outpaced them all and they were all started at the same time.
Content is delivered equally to all platforms, aside from a couple of experiments here and there.
Here are the numbers from a couple of weeks ago…
LinkedIn is by far the leader in the house, with 538 followers outpacing our 440 Substack subscribers followed by Instagram with 103, Twitter/X with 85, YouTube with 55, Threads with 30, Facebook with 18 and Mastodon with 16 followers. YouTube didn’t have any content until September, so that’s encouraging. Facebook has been a real disappointment so far.
Probably going to be shuttering the Threads and Facebook accounts soon to focus our efforts where it makes sense.
Despite the low follower counts, Mastodon has seen pretty good engagement from the followers that are there at least.
Politics and war discussions
This is true, they pull people in, but it's the why of it that counts.
LinkedIn, once it became the defacto job board, had no where to grow.
They need more users, more members, more engagement, so that their numbers look ever greater, and therefore their stock continues to rise.
A plateau is a horror to such companies. It's never enough to do a thing, and do it well.
Even if every person on the planet logged on daily, and spent 16 hours doing things, someone at LinkedIn would be going bananas because it wasn't 16.2 hrs.
And thus, it turns to trash.
Social networks tend converge, in my opinion.
It probably is because of the constant search for "engagement" so they either copy same dynamics or discover the same triggers.
Point is, given the same objective function you get similar solutions.
I wished it was otherwise, particularly for LinkedIn. The combo of a social graph with everyone's CV should be a treasure for say advising on career advancement, crafting educational programs, bypassing traditional hiring, and what not. Instead, we have the Nth iteration of MySpace.
Fuzzy but here is how I remember. The founders left, and then they got Pulse and tried to become a Social Media website instead of a Professional connection platform.
> LinkedIn was an employment focused social network
It very much still is focused on employment, you just have to use it to that end and avoid their 'feed'.
I can't answer the question of how LinkedIn become what is today but having had a presence there for close to a decade now, I can't say I ever remember it being anything else than the cringe worthy place it is.
As a way of maintaining a social graph with other professionals and keeping a publicly available resume, it is fine.
But the feed and the posts? Can't imagine why anyone would care for that part if it.
You need to tune the algorithm.
Are you following people who are pushing politics on their LinkedIns?
I've found following relevant VCs, PMs, Academics, and corporate leadership has drastically improved my LinkedIn with almost zero noise.
Mute and unfollow people who post too much politics on LinkedIn, and engage with content that is more relevant to you. The algorithm will tune itself for you accordingly
Does anyone else remember when LI had the basically illegal idea to replace users mail servers with their own, so they could scrape email content/address information? I remember hearing an interview about this on NPR, I think. They were quite pleased with themselves, too. Since that day I've always blocked them in the local firewall.
For the most part, mine is fairly "professional": business-related posts, often promotional in nature, but not necessarily out of the place. The posts that are low-quality seem to come from recruiters, colleagues-of-colleagues that I haven't really met, etc. I suspect if I pruned a bit I'd not out the 10% or so of low quality.
LinkedIn started by hiring massive spam farms out of India. I don't know when it was ever respectable.
They've been around forever. "Everyone has it but no one is on it" was always the description.
One good application is finding someone you USED to work with (if they have email notifications turned on, of course). And hearing where your friends are working now.
As for revenue: job listings. That's it.
Views mean money. And what gets views is politics, lewd images and whatever the hell the algorithm likes.
Is the unrelated stuff actually worse than the plague of fake-inspirational/aspirational bullshit?
Other than perhaps meeting a recruiter for a job change, I can't imagine why one would really spend time there. It's always been gross and clingy.
Just mute everything you don't like. I muted tons of stuff after the war broke off.
I have sometimes considered to incorporate in my will that my family should post about my passing using my LinkedIn account. That will reach 95% of everyone in my circles of the last 20 years. Yes, it is disappointing...
In Europe / London politics are very much off the table for LinkedIn. It would be crazy to talk about anything except some charity helping in place X.
linkedin was never good. remember it started by hiring content farms to feed fake profiles? it was just marginally better than monster jobs. nothing else. now Microsoft cleared that a bit but online they are an advertising business, so, they don't care if you get a job, but how many ads you see daily.
I would say this is the fate of all products where the decision makers are focused on short term metric gains instead of long term quality. Data driven decision making encourages myopic product vision in a lot of scenarios.
Good data organizations acknowledge that all metrics can be manipulated and take changes in metrics with a grain of salt. They combine a/b testing with first principles thinking and make imperfect decisions based on imperfect information. They don't always get it right, but they embrace uncertainty and critically evaluate outcomes both "good" and "bad", because they know a/b test metrics don't tell the full story.
Bad data organizations focus on the a/b test metrics and ignore common sense logic, because short term metric wins are rewarded. Rinse and repeat for years on end and the product evolves to puzzling place like you mention. It was all the result of someone winning an a/b test over and over, and not critically thinking about the long term.
Also see: expedia, quora, facebook, instagram, etc.
It's not so much the war and politics - I don't see so much of that luckily - but all the "thought leaders", influencers and other grifters filling up the feed with their drivel.
My favorite has to be the motivational gurus and hucksters, that just spout absolute nonsense. I saw one example, it was something like this:
"You don't understand scale.
Use $50 to buy 10 tomato plants.
In 6 months you have 250 tomatoes.
Plant those into 250 plants.
6 months you have 6250 plants.
Plant them.
6 months you have 156k tomatoes.
Plant them.
6 months you have 3.9MM tomatoes.
Sell them for $1 each."
Another genius went on with this motivational piece:
"If you double $1 every day, you will be a millionaire in 20 days. What's your excuse?"