this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Is there a specific problem with linkedin?
Its been turning into Facebook for a while now. I used to have a relevant work feed, but more and more I have these feel good posts and even memes popping up.
Oh, and its pretty toxic in content too. Had this post the other day where some woman director of some company posted how tough it was to lose her husband to some disease, how tough it is to take care of the kids alone, finishing with how it helps her to be engrossed in her work.
Like half of that was about her work actually. A very very weird read.
Another post on woman's day celebrating the working women who open their laptop again (for work) when the kids are in bed.
Such things, just ugh. And those gets lots of likes too.
I used to see such things only in the linkedinlunatic subreddit , but now I see it my feed.
I get sick from the sleazeball slimey replies like ''I'm so happy to have been part of project a''. People chiming in to shamelesly self promote on other people's posts.
To be fair, company culture is a lot of self promotion. But there are OK ways to do that and terrible ways, what you describe is more of a terrible one.
Yeah there's something that feels so wrong about the site. One of my (fake) favourites by @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange when LinkedIn was down a couple weeks ago:
Apart from the absurd types of text being shared around there, most features of LinkedIn seemed redundant to me:
So I am definitely not trying to defend LinkedIn but a lot of arguments you make are basically: other sites or services can do that too. Which isn't a great argument to make since monopoly on these will not lead to more usefulness.
The last one I can give a counterargument. You should care because if you are looking for a new job you can try and find people to talk to, which can help figure out if a job you didn't consider so far might be interesting. Maybe the area you work in is not helped with that. I work in R&D and had students reach out to me via LinkedIn just to ask about what kind of work I do at this company and what does the day to day look like. Now not everyone will be happy to talk and not everyone will give you useful answers but then you just go and message the next person.
Downside of this is that LinkedIn makes it artificially difficult to just message people, either promoting their paid subscription or not allowing you to contact people because they are 3rd rate connections or worse. So that's crap again but if you get enough relevant connections this might be better. You can also get sneaky about it and just email a person on their work account by sending a message to firstname.lastname@companyurl.TLD. This you can also only do if you know who works where.
Assuming that directors post was real, I am sure she wanted to properly grieve for her husband and have enough time to heal and provide for her children, to tie loose ends and close that chapter of her life in privacy.
But all she had was a sanitized corporate billboard where all she knew was to unconsciously make her post into a self congratulatory advertisement, of a heroic single mother sacrificing her mental health for her work.
It's all tragic.
I think its OK if you are looking for a job, yes. Not fully minus the feeds really, because I used to also see a lot of people advertising jobs in th feeds or saying they are leaving their jobs and looking for something. That is drowned out slowly by those shitty posts I mentioned.
But they're adding games!
In the early days they would quietly take all your contact info on your phone and send emails in your name that made it seem like you were reaching out to those contacts. Something like “(your name) is trying to reach you on LinkedIn”.
Back then, Android didn’t have app permissions like it does now where you have to ask the user explicit permission for access to certain data. It would only show up on the very first app install and only if you’d be looking for that.
I cancelled my account back then and never looked back.
Android not having proper permissions back from KitKat era caused a lot of contact lists being leaked like rainwater. I'm still jaded at Google for that one.