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Ask HN: Why did LinkedIn become what it is today?
37 points by tinyhouse 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments
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.


> 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.

…and it’s absolutely vile. Leave me alone at work. Work is not your place to advocate for whatever agenda you happen to have. Whether I agree or not isn’t relevant to the mission of the company, and it’s not the company’s job to support your cause.


> "bringing your authentic self to work"

Except only certain views are allowed to be expressed.

And of course, dating among coworkers is heavily discouraged and risks your career, but isn't that part of your "authentic self" too?


Curious questions, but don't many good relationships started at the work place? How many of those actually majorly affected the company?


>> hotbed of activism

Funny that "activism" now just means arguing via text without any intention of convincing the other side of anything.


what is ERG?

[edit] ok this is news to me So what are Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)?

Employee Resource Groups are voluntary, employee-led groups whose aim is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace aligned with the organizations they serve.


I guess it's this: https://www.greatplacetowork.com/resources/blog/what-are-emp...


Employee resource group, basically a group of employees that have some shared interest or background


Although as with most race, gender, or interest groups, it would be unwise to try to start one for specific combinations. Strangely, the same combinations that are labeled “oppressors”.

I’m not saying I would want to, but I find that ERGs for every other combination starts to feel like a way for organized preferential treatment to happen for all those other combinations, and all their various interests to be promoted, to the exclusion of a handful of other combinations.

No conspiracy theory here, also no prejudice here, just how it seems to work, and how I sometimes perceive these interest groups.


Society is the ERG for the specific combinations that aren't systematically held back.

What preferential treatment are your peers getting that are advancing their interests beyond yours? What are their interests that don't align with your own?


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.


Mine is both?

Self promotion partly via virtue signaling by "supporting the current thing" (war, politics), everyone's making their gender or race their whole identity even in work context, oh I'm a GDE now, wannabe influencers churning out "my top 20 books about coding interviews" posts twice a day, rehashing the landing page of a popular technology in a 10 page PDF, some fake house building technology (from 2004) that somehow will revolutionize housing, code snippets that do trivial things with 5 arrows on them, reposting poor quality work memes and cartoons from reddit with ten emojies and a caption "wdyt".

My LinkedIn experience is insufferable, and honestly, I don't even know what would make it better. Now that I'm happy at my workplace and extremely busy in my personal life, I check in once a month, scroll a minute, and feel somehow sick, so close the window immediately.


I am not sure anyone has an accurate idea of what's going on, including people running LinkedIn. Everyone just sees their own slice of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant


Thanks for sharing, interesting parable that applies more and more due to the polarization from algorithms.


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.


> Looks like they tripled-down on features to change it. Always seeking DAU.

The irony is that all the extra nonsense keeps a lot of us away even more. I think even the next time I want to change jobs, there are platforms I'll use before I go back to LinkedIn.

I guess it's like any social media platform. Once you invite too many people, you dilute the original purpose and community, and just end up with memes and cat photos.


LinkedIn is like certifications now:

There's an entire industry around claiming it's important, using it, optimizing it, etc.

But all of that is orthogonal to getting actual work done and the skills to do so.

... or in other words, LinkedIn is what would have happened to Craigslist, if CL had decided they wanted people to spend more time on the site, instead of concluding their business as quickly as possible.


> there are platforms I'll use

Citation needed.

Seriously though, what alternatives should we consider?


Not sure what geographies it covers as I've only used it for UK-based roles, but I love the experience on cord.co.

It's what I believe recruiting should be. Potential applicants upload their bio and skills, say what they're interested in (in terms of salary range, WFH vs WFO, etc). Potential recruiters list jobs, with somewhat decent transparency (at least for the UK, where salary is rarely listed). Then one party or the other initiates a conversation.

The best applications I've been through all started via cord, and the interactions all felt genuine and were all with internal recruiters rather than agencies.


Thanks for sharing, that is a pretty cool tool. Seems like it'd lead to more meaningful discussions. It'd be nice if there were more roles available but it seems like it might have a higher bar of entry in support of higher expected quality.


> I think even the next time I want to change jobs, there are platforms I'll use before I go back to LinkedIn.

Like what? I'm genuinely curious because I've found my last two jobs through LinkedIn recruiters and I would like to know if there's a better platform out there to be my digital resume / recruiter spam dumping ground


linkedin wishes it was all meme and cat photos.


There is a massive reason for some people to log on which seems fairly new (last few years) : b2b sales.

I watch our sales people use LinkedIn heavily for prospecting and cold reach outs. They rely on tools like Lusha which are basically databases of contact information that are sold on a subscription basis.

If you work in management or any sort of position where it's possible you're involved in procurement and that is reflected in your job title you will get hounded incessantly by people - sometimes directly on LinkedIn but more often they /found/ you on LinkedIn and then paid Lusha or one of the other contact database tools for your email address and contact info.

Fwiw you can opt out of Lusha. I tried it and the number of inbound calls and emails I got dropped significantly.


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.


> LinkedIn still works perfectly fine to store your resume and talk to recruiters

Right, but this is not so much the social network aspect of LinkedIn.

I don't want to ignore the feed cause there's always been useful stuff in it. Like links to interesting blog posts, new model/paper/repo announcements, etc. It's just that there's a lot of other crap as well, like marketing posts, which are annoying but at least make sense given the professional audience on the platform. I'm specifically asking about the rest - posts about politics, personal life updates, etc.


I don't know if i've ever seen a useful post on linkedin that couldn't be found here or a focused subreddit given the amount of trash you have to wade through.

the only value i see is job postings


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 Lunatics

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/


Thank you for sharing this. It's the sub I didn't know I needed.


LinkedIn Cringe. That's whole genre on YouTube. And literally that.


I think this is a huge part of it. It's the natural extension of "all publicity is good publicity" as manifest at the individual level. I'm actually less annoyed by the off topic things, which are easy to gloss over, and more annoyed by the rah-rah capitalism posts. "Look at this person who overcame overwhelming odds, you should too!" "Here's a webinar from the B2C company I work at that has no relevance to me or you but my company gamified spamming my personal social media with it so here we are." "Enjoy this fluff story about how we took an afternoon off to do a mandatory team building volunteer project that was way less impactful than if we donated even a fraction of the revenue our company made during the same three hours."


I’m not sure how many are employed at LinkedIn today, but at the end of 2019 there were 65 journalists at the company. This is clearly a strategy to get people to spend more time in the site.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/23/media/linkedin-journalist...


What an odd comment. According to your link the journalists were employed for a LinkedIn feature called LinkedIn Daily Rundown. This is seemingly a journalistic endeavor, and as with any product offering would be a strategy to keep people engaged with the site. Why not also point to LinkedIn offering direct messaging as "clearly a strategy to get people to spend more time on the site"?

I say this because your dangling comment seems to imply that LinkedIn's employment of journalists is so that they may practice their journalistic dark-arts on unsuspecting users in a ploy for them to spend more time on the site.


Right. Establishing a newsroom and providing dm functionality is an apples-to-apples comparison in the context of a social networking website.

It’s totally normal for social networking websites to establish newsrooms and hire lots of journalists. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook… and now LinkedIn.

Sorry, Dad. /s


As a product offering of their platform they are. As well they were transparent that they were establishing a newsroom...as a product they were offering. Just because other social networks didn't do it doesn't meant it's nefarious.

Beyond that, why would normal have anything to do with what you're offering your users? Do you think Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook thought "what's a normal social media product we can offer"? I guess the whole "go fast and break things" ethos ends with "but totes don't hire journalists and create a newsroom as a possible profit center because some people don't know how to evaluate disparate sources of information on the internet".


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.


It really has devolved into adtech and affiliate link hustling like everything else.


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.


Why are you still following him?

Obviously LI has an incentive to add engagement, and users want interaction, but LI provides tools to help you get rid of the garbage. I am amazed by how many people adamantly refuse to use those tools.


afaik I've never followed or unfollowed anyone. I just let it load and do it's thing. I guess I could unfollow him but I don't care that much to actively customize it.


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.


I find I get a lot of likes and reposts when I post about my app on LinkedIn but it doesn’t translate into any actual sales.

Posting about a code conference is a lot different than an app but I’m curious if your follower counts and interactions translate to conversions / conference attendees.


Yea. Ticket promotions, call for speakers, speaker and sponsor features with video that are tagged. Same for the podcast interviews.


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


But… I don’t follow anyone on LinkedIn, I don’t use it as a social network. This suggestions seems like how you’d make it a better “work twitter” which is a product I don’t think I need.


When you add a connection on LinkedIn, you end up automatically following them.

If your network is filled with people who liked stunting on LinkedIn or doing unnecessary arguments it will come up on your feed.

The assumption is you will keep your LinkedIn trimmed and managed with only people you care about.

Make your LinkedIn curate better content by following people who generate actually insightful content.

Also, I am connects with actual politicians and staffers on LinkedIn because of my previous career and they almost never post any political flamewars on there. It's basically used as a constructive Twitter for those of us who don't need the noise that comes from Twitter.


I didn’t think there was a way to mute people, only to unfollow or disconnect entirely.

I find it annoying that I can’t tell LinkedIn to show me less of this, like I can with other social networks.


On the top right of a post there is an X button. Click that. It will remove that content from your feed and offer less content like that.

Like content you find relevant and X out the content you find useless. In 1 week your LinkedIn will be completely tuned

Also, as someone who I think might be a 2nd or 3rd degree connect of yours, the Bay Area Asian American HS network has been fairly high quality. Leverage and optimize for the network of friends and alums who ended up becoming IBs, PEs, Engineers who deliver, VCs, Academics, etc. And then optimize to follow whoever they follow in turn.


Interesting, I've X'ed posts in the past but haven't found there to be much effect. Maybe the algo is changed now; I'll try again.


I find it annoying that other social networks offer "hide this" or "see less" features which are ineffective. E.g. Facebook won't stop putting clickbait "shorts" at the top, no matter what I do. YouTube keeps showing me ads for some kind of dating crap with suggestive pictures of women despite my best efforts (apart from adblock, which stopped the obnoxious and repetitive ads...)


It's true, this is possibly worse than not offering the option at all!


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.


What? Can you elaborate? I just remember the email invite spam.


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.


> 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.

This is literally the only thing I care to use it for so of course it’s nearly impossible to use it this way.

Would love to log in once a year and see a simple list of “person X is now working at company Y”


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...


“4 things I learned by leaning in to non-existence this year”


At first I was unsure what you were referring to but now I get it, I should post as a ghost! Haha, good one!


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.


I have seen quite a lot related to Gaza, and before that about CO2 / climate change. And also a lot about women empowerment. So many networks for women. Quite exclusionary, if you ask me.


Not the European LinkedIn network I’m in. Plenty of Gaza posts and the usual energy political tribalism around. I try to restrict my engagement on that kind of content though


No idea. Like I said, my feed is pretty clean in the UK.


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.


Don't worry, with Microsoft's recent and extremely aggressive Copilot infestations[0][1][2] it's only a matter of time before LinkedIn becomes the "AI social network."

0. https://9to5google.com/2024/01/03/microsoft-edge-ai-browser/

1. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/ai-comes-for-your-pc...

2. https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/fed-up-with-wind...


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.


Money.


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?"


I dunno, there’s a pretty convincing episode of Lovejoy about this.


These gurus. Very virtuous. Servant leaders. "I saw one of my team member in elevator. He was very down. I asked him. He said was worried about the last quarter's results. I told him how great he did in last quarter. He started to ease a bit. He thanked me and left the elevator smiling. His simle made my day. Compliment your coworkers. I think if we make it a habit, we can make the world a better place."

And such.




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