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Comment by autoreleasepool | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is a great example of how your platform can be useful to people in spite of a horrible UI, bad infrastructure, and grossly inconsistent user experience.

I swear the amount of times I wasn't sure if I actually accepted or sent a connection request is way too high. The endorsements are begging to be rigged, and the website is absolutely dismal in terms of social functionality - it pales in comparison to almost every other social media platform.

The only reason it's still popular is because it doesn't need to be any better to do the one thing it does best, which is to be a search engine for recruiters.

That all being said, I maintain an active linkedin profile and I use it regularly.

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I think endorsements are actually a non-product -- sort of like the "close doors" button on the elevator.

My sense is that LinkedIn doesn't use endorsements in any other dimension of the site. It's just an engagement tool, so that people are on the site longer. That way they see more ads -- and are perhaps more likely to tweak their profiles.

I work at LinkedIn, we actually do use skills in a number of places (like the job pages); typically they are used more of a "here's how your skills compare to other people's" and less of a "you'll get hired if you have skill X listed". We know people can game them, so we try to only use their skills in ways that would be helpful if their skills are actually real to give less incentive for people to lie.

As implemented, they're basically useless. Asking "does X know about Y?" without verifying that I have any knowledge of Y myself doesn't do much. My dentist has endorsed me for things like "Cloud", and while he's a great guy and good at his job he can barely work his iPad.

I personally view those as noise at best and very skeptically at worst -- if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they actually don't know much about it.

> if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they actually don't know much about it.

I disagree with your reasoning here. While I agree endorsements are useless, I also believe that makes them more or less meaningless. I don't think jumping to conclusions based on endorsements, weather positive or negative, is a good idea.

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