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Shlinkedin – Satirical Social Network (shlinkedin.com)
307 points by tbabej on Sept 4, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 57 comments



Wow so cool to see this here! I’m the co-creator of this and happy to answer any and all questions. Shlinkedin is definitely a bizarre passion of mine so it’s awesome to see it resonate - turns out a lot of people find a lot LinkedIn ridiculous :)

This has also been a good excuse to learn Elixir/ Liveview. I’ve made all the code open source if anyone wants to take a look!

https://github.com/cbh123/shlinked


Great job! I absolutely love dumb, useless projects that make no sense, and this fits the bill perfectly.


Thank you thank you :) I have spent an embarrassing amount of time on this and I can’t stop. It might be a problem.


Hilarious: need a way to tag stuff I see on linkedin to automatically post it to shlinkedin. Something like #nottheonion

There is so much hilarious content not being appreciated over on the original.


Friend of mine pointed out the insane amount of "Keanu Reeves is a literal god" content.

Any chance of adding a Keanu Reeves setting to the content generator?


How was working with tailwind in Elixir?

My understanding is that Liveview does SSR paired with a very light JS/AJAX framework to keep state on the client, similar to htmx for example.

Tailwind however generates tons of CSS classes that you might or might not use, so it parses your HTML and "purges" unused classes afterwards. It seems that this is far easier if working with a more mainstream framework.

Did you have any problems setting this up?


This is pretty much exactly how it works! But I would say I had no problems combining tailwind with liveview. I do wish my HTML was cleaner but from a technical perspective there were no problems.


Thanks. This brightened up my world substantially today.


Awesome! Very funny.

How do I close the Shlinkedin account I created?


I can close it for you — just email me charlie@shlinkedin.com. Sorry that it’s manual right now, I haven’t gotten around to adding a button. I’ll put it on my list to add this weekend!


It would be in spirit to not add a button. Or a button that keeps moving as the mouse approaches it. Or some dark pattern somehow :)


Satire would be to graciously close the account and immediately delete all data.


Yeah. True that.

Not urgent will email later.

You could instead go the NYT subscription cancellation route and require me to either phone or IM.

(And then have ridiculous IM response times)


Ok cool, I will make this easier ASAP! In the meantime we also accept snail mail and telegram.


I love this, and the content generator is brilliant. "I lived in a decrepit neo-modernist mansion barely worth $3.2 million. We had to fight to survive — I once had to pickup my seamless order in person because of an issue with their app."


Th content generator is amazing at times:

Hi ding-dongs, I'm thrilled to announce I am now Warren Buffet. I could never imagine accepting such an amazing position. #StopTheCount


LinkedIn is the very worst social network… except for all the others.

I agree, it’s a complete joke of corporate gushing and posturing and humblebragging and wannabe “thought leaders”. And this is a great parody. I appreciate the work here.

And yet. There’s a kind of innocence to LinkedIn, no? It’s the feeling of a recruiting call or a job interview, where everyone involved knows it’s a completely artificial atmosphere but none of it matters very much, and we’ll soon step out of the game back to our real lives, with no meaningful consequences. I don’t remember any insurrections launched on LinkedIn, or successful disinformation campaigns by foreign states to subvert democracy, or hate speech fanning the flames of genocide. And that’s just Facebook - don’t even get me started on Twitter.

Don’t misunderstand me - I’d love to see LinkedIn fall into a deep deep sinkhole in the ground. But doesn’t the fun of this parody come from a place of safety? A good Facebook or Twitter parody would be much, much, darker.


I agree with this sentiment. LinkedIn is completely vapid and full of all sorts of signaling with no effort, but there's sort of a corny charm to it. Like a compilation of office H.R. instructional videos. I'm sure that future decades' equivalent of vaporwave will incorporate LinkedIn imagery into their retrospectives of the '10s.

The data gathering that undergirds it is probably bad though, or at least when the site does things like make it impossible to opt-out of things or spams everyone in your contacts with invites.


That's why you never let Linkedin access your mail. More than five years since I created my profile there and it asks me every single time I login if I want to invite my contacts.


LinkedIn has some really hostile design to it. I hate that anyone can pay LinkedIn money and then DM me advertisements.

I think part of why I like shlinkedin (i'm the other co-founder btw), is that it gives folks a place to vent about all that shit in a fun way. And I think it's probably healthy for people to take LinkedIn less seriously—maybe this'll nudge 'em towards that.


"LinkedIn is comparatively safe relative to other communication platforms because it is not used for real communication" is not exactly a strong defense.


yah the bar is on the floor lol


The stupid pressure of not only being expected to have a LinkedIn account, but also using it to be relentlessly upbeat is so ridiculous. I'm happy to live without FB and don't have a reddit account, use Twitter sparingly. Dropping LinkedIn is the next logical step.


At least i can leave fb and twitter. Linkedin is basically expected at this point if you want a job.


> I don’t remember any insurrections launched on LinkedIn, or successful disinformation campaigns by foreign states to subvert democracy, or hate speech fanning the flames of genocide.

That is only because it hasn't been widely publicised anywhere yet[1]. Sorry for only dropping one reference but it is the only one I have ready on hand in my library and it is late. Linkedin is far from safe, it is just as bad if not worse than the others.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/datenstrom/library/-/blob/master/espionag...


Maybe once, but it feels like content on LinkedIn is becoming more and more like a Facebook or Twitter feed. Whether it’s people arguing over general neutral bathrooms or COVID-19 vaccinations.


Props to this - and I think that I've just found some inspirational writing by Paul Graham on it. The username seems to be a pseudonym, probably because of his typical modesty, but the concepts and style are unmistakable. ;-)


Linkedin for shitposting is probably the most dangerous concept ever. Amazing. Edit: wow this is savage, well done.


i mean isn't this already happening, the posts about buying bezos a coffee and getting a ride on his rocket etc...


Is this functional or just few demo pages? Can I view the profiles without register? I just want to sneak up on God (Real) to learn his gym schedule.


This is functional!

Unfortunately you have to make a profile right now before you can see a profile page, but I have a PR in the works to fix that. I made the silly decision to have the home page require a bunch of dynamic information about the logged in user to render the page, so I'm working on making it so an anonymous user can see everything too. Should be done soon!


Genius!! Out of curiosity how many (ex) LinkedIn employees went through the following 7 stages of fear:

1. Saw this

2 Didn't take offence to it

3. Thought it was funny or true or both

4. Decided to share and started a linked in post

5. About to hit the share button

6. Paused and thought "my ex bosses are still there!" "Tech industry is way too small".

7. Finally hit share!

I got to step 6!!


Not nearly slow enough. Please rewrite the frontend in pidgin Ember and the backend in confused Scala.


Changing my profile photo does not appear to work. And I have such great hustler pictures too.

Edit: Never mind, it started working. As long as I upload only one image at a time. Or my images were too big at first, not too sure.


The adversity generator is lovely.


If I was a VC I would back this


At least on Firefox/Linux this is now generating a security warning about it being a scam 'Warning: you could be getting scammed!'.


So close - should have been "ShmlinkedIn"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkdQSHgduEw



Hahahaha the marketplace is pure gold on that site. I am all in


Amazing :)


BT is blocking the website due to virus's it says.


Oh boy oh boy I hope the site creator reads this. I've had an idea for years now to make a satirical reddit/hn. I call it 'skimmedit'. Please steal my ideas.

1. Instead of subreddits, content is sorted by font. The available fonts are Helvetica, Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Wing Dings, Arial Wide, Papyrus and braile.

2. When you submit a link, the title shows up as blue and underlined but is not actually a hyperlink. Here at skimmedit we just assume no one actually reads beyond the headline before jumping to the comment section.

3. We know that thinking of original things takes effort. So in an effort to reduce friction and increase positive, well moderatd engagement, all comments and replies are chosen from a drop down menu of pre-approved text blobs. The possible comments are "well actually this is wrong", "came here to say this", "thanks for the gold", "7/11 was a part time job", "I know the answer, but alas there is not enough room in the margins of this text box", "50% off lobotomies today only", "I wish I could upvote this more than once" and "this was a lovely 30 second distraction from the insatiable march of time which pushes us all ever closer to the grave."

4. Finally a real use for "reddit gold". Want to write an original comment? Really really want to spend the time and mental effort letting people on the internet know how stupid and wrong they are? Well for just 10 cents per letter, we'll let you violate the third premise and write a wholly original piece of text. In fact, we will add your original comment to the repertoire of comments in the drop down menu. If you're comment is popular enough, people will pay to use it and we will give you a royalty. Thus you can maintain the illusion that you can make a living off being a writer while wasting your life on our online dopamine casino.

5. Ever wish you could upvote or downvote something more than once. On skimmedit we are soft believers in firm libertarian values like free speech and markets or some shit. We believe that if you're willing to spend the price (in time or money), then you must be more invested in the outcome so your opinion should matter more. That's why we've removed all limits on the number of times you can upvote or downvote something. Good luck!

6. One in ten times the page won't load. Not cause the server can't handle it, but because we hate our userbase <3.

7. Some of our posts are by advertising partners. Those bits of blue underlined text really are hyperlinks.

8. In accordance with our vaguely pro-liberty bullshit, moderation is done by a jury of your peers. When content is reported, we ask 12 random users to decide "guilty or not guilty", and refuse to let them peruse the site any further until they pick one. No further instruction is given before asking them to make this decision.


Number 3 reminds me of how online messages are shared on Fromsoft games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Players leave messages with "fill in the blanks" type form and a limited set of words to choose.

It works really well and there are some genuine gems scattered throughout the games.


Idea 4 is...actually kinda genius, and I love it. For 8, what happens if the randos vote "guilty", what happens to the poster?


The post is re-categorized as Wing Dings, unless it was already Wing Dings in which case the jurors are promptly banned for perjury.


looool we've got our hands full with ShlinkedIn at the moment but this is awesome. maybe our next project ;)


This is hilarious, I want this site to exist.


:) great collection. Addendum to 5 - let the world know at the end of each day who the highest up and downvoters are.


Do you remember Fiendster? This reminds me of that.


Do you mean the great Nemester? https://zapatopi.net/nemester/


How are the satirical posts being generated?


Within the site it’s all user generated!

For the content generator, it’s a state of the art GPT3 markov chain, also known as a mad lib: https://github.com/cbh123/shlinked/blob/main/lib/shlinkedin/....


Quick question for the site runner: are my ShlinkPoints redeemable for HN karma in any way?


ShlinkMail me, we can make it happen :)


Great, just put you on my ShlinkList!


Seeking Reagan Maintainer ass@toast.ninja Asdfghjkl1!




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