This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
Shacklz · 49m ago
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
inopinatus · 20m ago
It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.
nathanaldensr · 19m ago
It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.
NeutralCrane · 2m ago
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
makeitdouble · 21m ago
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
oytis · 18m ago
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebates about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
saagarjha · 18m ago
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
melvinroest · 33m ago
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
baq · 59m ago
Are you an employer or an employee?
porridgeraisin · 4m ago
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> winning on linkedin
> push them to
* vomits *
> millions of dollars
dirty money.
</rant>
zwnow · 59m ago
LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.
kkirsche · 53m ago
This has been my experience. Just a bunch of ego stroking
nathanaldensr · 18m ago
If you want to see how true this is, visit r/linkedinlunatics[1] on Reddit.
Gen X usually gets lumped in with boomers because they’re basically invisible. But Gen X DGAF either way.
HSO · 40m ago
are retiring
lots of phenomena that get incessantly overtheorized and misattributed these days can be simply explained by this
refactor_master · 52m ago
There are a lot of boomers out there though, and you won’t reach them on TikTok.
fnord77 · 54m ago
where are the non-boomers looking for jobs these days?
giantg2 · 8m ago
Retail - most of the good jobs are impossible to get. That's probably what I'll have to do when my current company finishes firing me with my disability. I have used a bunch of the regular job search boards - Dice, Ladders, Indeed, etc. I've also used LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Blind, Hackajob. The tech job market in my location seems abysmal.
democracy · 49m ago
LinkedIn is a vanity fair, and I'm not sure why it even matters in 2025 — it's just a job board when you need it.
giantg2 · 3m ago
It's not even a good job board anymore because it's filled with junk and evergreen postings.
__loam · 39m ago
LinkedIn is a great place to talk to recruiters still. If you're not picky about where you work, you can find a job pretty fast by working with recruiters directly and skipping the cold apply.
adidoit · 30m ago
Because LinkedIn makes your employment front and center it encourages status games .
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
adidoit · 9m ago
1. Self-Aggrandizement-as-a-Service
2. Tied to corporate status games
3. Delivered as an algorithmic feed
I'm obviously being provocative but those are the dynamics
tornikeo · 18m ago
Use the best tool for the job.
I look at LinkedIn as a purpose-built tool for marketing my brand (my dev experience). It works well. Just like any tool LinkedIn has some problems. But it is the best in that niche.
antihipocrat · 1h ago
There is no benefit to be gained from disagreement or debate. Any such discourse looks problematic to a potential employer.
RA_Fisher · 57m ago
True, aside from the exceptional employers that’ll actually provide a good career.
chiefalchemist · 52m ago
Agreed. The level of mediocrity and group-think on LI is freighting. It’s no wonder so many companies / brands struggle.
Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.
TrackerFF · 57m ago
r/LinkedInLunatics for the best of hits.
YetAnotherNick · 27m ago
Ironically, this post and comments here feels like it could be on Linkedin. Catchy title with low effort content. Nowhere in the blog he answers this question and the comments here just go with the title and common hate against Linkedin and "owned by Microsoft" as author calls it.
merksittich · 18m ago
What annoys me the most in my LinkedIn feed is low-effort visual AI slop, in particular based on fads such as the bland 4o comic style with text bubbles.
As a "visual animal", I find it very hard to tune out this kind of noise. I consequently try to hide such content from my feed, but the LinkedIn algorithm will not budge.
Full of people sucking each other BS. And then recruiters unable to understand the most basics of a profile.
Nevertheless I update my own from time to time, it can still be useful if you navigate through the garbage. Also it helps me to cross-check a bit some people if they have a contact that you both know and you trust.
More than once I encountered people with 100% fake profile and fake work history. Maybe LinkedIn should only allow to add that you worked somewhere doing something with some kind of verification process.
lloydjones · 1h ago
Exactly — depth is the new authenticity . #Reflecting #ThoughtLeader
lloydjones · 1h ago
Damn — HN strips emojis, putting my pastiche in danger of looking sincere
bootsmann · 48m ago
I think the hashtags save you from looking pretentious
lbyaus · 16m ago
Couldn't agree more
cheschire · 1h ago
I wish LinkedIn wasn’t seen as a valid background check tool.
Now that we have HR going whole hog on AI processing of job applications, up to and including the first round interview, can we please get rid of LinkedIn?
Instead, I would much rather see job applications come in three parts. A cover letter, a human resume overview page, and then the deeper multi page CV that is primarily for AI processing.
ChrisMarshallNY · 1h ago
That makes a lot of sense, but the inevitable result is an AI arms race, with AI tools for writing these, feeding AI tools for reading them.
I really feel as if I retired at the best time possible.
mr_toad · 27m ago
I don’t think anyone bothers to read cover letters anymore. Recruiters don’t even seem to read resumes very closely, judging by the number of times I’ve been asked questions that are literally in the first paragraph of my resume.
reactordev · 46m ago
This is precisely why I deleted my LinkedIn profile all together.
While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.
WhereIsTheTruth · 59m ago
It reflects society, everything rewards mediocrity and deception
HPsquared · 1h ago
Mediocrity can be measured.
cranberryturkey · 2h ago
Is it me or is LinkedIn nothing but Indians now?
ycombinete · 1h ago
India probably represents the largest “homogenous” block of the English speaking world. I think the internet is coming to reflect that more and more as it develops and more of the population comes online.
Edit: apparently it’s 2nd in number of English speakers to the USA.
dep_b · 30m ago
A reflection of the global tech pool minus China. I think they also might work LinkedIn a bit more on LinkedIn because they’re not spontaneously bumping into useful people for their careers in SF coffee shops.
Disposal8433 · 42m ago
0 indians for me. I only see French people because I'm French. And I also see only my friends because I'm not in a following frenzy.
incone123 · 1h ago
Might be an effect of your location, field and 3rd order connections. Also India is a big place with a lot of people in or looking for white collar jobs. Granted so is China so I guess the difference is LinkedIn is not so popular in China.
dep_b · 28m ago
They shot it down a while ago, but it was always something separated from the main LinkedIn population I think.
varispeed · 35m ago
LinkedIn isn’t a professional network, it’s a slave auction with a newsfeed. Workers line up to show their teeth - “failure is just learning in disguise”, “kindness is leadership”, all that drivel - while hoping to be picked by a master who won’t beat them too hard.
The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.
Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.
hubraumhugo · 46m ago
As a technical founder, I can't tell you how much I despise LinkedIn. My feed is mostly AI-generated slop, and ever since someone figured out selfies would boost reach/ranking, it’s just AI text paired with pictures of people. Ridiculous.
That said: we acquired our first customers through LinkedIn outreach and made successful hires through it. As much as I dislike it, I can’t ignore it. And if I compare it to the hassles of in-person networking, it's actually great.
nicksbg · 43m ago
The posts section always basically goes like: We did X but then what surprised us with X is something we did not see coming.
Disposal8433 · 43m ago
> My feed is mostly AI-generated slop
I see zero slop on my feed. Maybe because I only follow friends and former coworkers that I liked. How many people are you following?
tropicalfruit · 39m ago
linkedin is training data for tuning the corpo-speak, sycophancy and sociopathy tokens on microsofts AI models
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebates about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> winning on linkedin
> push them to
* vomits *
> millions of dollars
dirty money.
</rant>
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
lots of phenomena that get incessantly overtheorized and misattributed these days can be simply explained by this
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
I'm obviously being provocative but those are the dynamics
I look at LinkedIn as a purpose-built tool for marketing my brand (my dev experience). It works well. Just like any tool LinkedIn has some problems. But it is the best in that niche.
Daily I see an OP based on myth / incomplete ideas (read: ultimately the originator is sharing bad advice)and then 95% of the replies to that mindlessly agree. The flaws are often obvious, and no one notices.
As a "visual animal", I find it very hard to tune out this kind of noise. I consequently try to hide such content from my feed, but the LinkedIn algorithm will not budge.
I did an Ask HN a while ago trying to find browser add-ons which will hide (or blur) such images (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43833961), which turned out fruitless.
Nevertheless I update my own from time to time, it can still be useful if you navigate through the garbage. Also it helps me to cross-check a bit some people if they have a contact that you both know and you trust.
More than once I encountered people with 100% fake profile and fake work history. Maybe LinkedIn should only allow to add that you worked somewhere doing something with some kind of verification process.
Now that we have HR going whole hog on AI processing of job applications, up to and including the first round interview, can we please get rid of LinkedIn?
Instead, I would much rather see job applications come in three parts. A cover letter, a human resume overview page, and then the deeper multi page CV that is primarily for AI processing.
I really feel as if I retired at the best time possible.
While it's nice to have a cover letter. I've never included one myself, just a beefier resume with a strong opening statement. I'll read a cover letter if you send one but to me it's not required. Just your resume and your person is all that I need. Anything more is just pandering to indecision and wasteful spend.
Edit: apparently it’s 2nd in number of English speakers to the USA.
The algorithm is the overseer. It doesn’t want insight, it wants compliance: claps, congratulations, and endless oatmeal platitudes that prove you’ll play the game. That’s why your feed is full of garbage. The mediocrity isn’t a flaw, it’s the commodity being traded.
Anyone looking for substance is in the wrong marketplace. LinkedIn is about teaching people how to smile wider while the chain gets tighter.
That said: we acquired our first customers through LinkedIn outreach and made successful hires through it. As much as I dislike it, I can’t ignore it. And if I compare it to the hassles of in-person networking, it's actually great.
I see zero slop on my feed. Maybe because I only follow friends and former coworkers that I liked. How many people are you following?