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Comment by RileyJames | Hacker News Reader

“I have a lifelong enthusiasm for developers and the experience they have building software together”

And then drops a link to contact them, via LinkedIn…

LinkedIn is the polar opposite of GitHub. It’s the worst example of social media, from its news feed, to spam invites. And it’s broken every rule in the “be a good netizen” play book, from constant spam, to slurping your email contacts and surveillance to the extreme.

I struggle to imagine a developer saying “I’d like to contact xxx, and I’d love to do it via LinkedIn”

Why not drop your email? Or a GitHub profile with a public email, and readme containing other contact methods, would have been more dev centric.

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It hadn't really clicked until your comment that both Github and LinkedIn are owned by the same company.

True, but both of them have stuck to their original objectives even now. GitHub at doing things Devs like and LinkedIn at doing things HR likes.

WaPo and AWS are both owned by the same person. That doesn't mean both (have to) charter in the same territory.

I agree with you about LinkedIn. I also would have agreed with you about how silly that is, until I started working with giant banks and other huge finance industry people. Many of the devs there legit do use LinkedIn. A number of people actually blog and post updates and stuff on LinkedIn. It was really surprising. Startup culture and big corporate tech, despite using many of the same technologies, are miles apart culturally.

Devs use LinkedIn for blog posts? Are they using it as way to get other devs to read it, or as a way to get potential employers to notice them?

Tbh, I don't a single dev who uses LinkedIn unless they looking for a new role I.e they're certainly not using LinkedIn as a dev-oriented news feed

Yes, surprisingly many of the devs used LinkedIn for blog posts. The type of blog posts that they did were somewhat different as well. It was normal to see posts that had to do with engineering culture and how to structure an engineering department, things like that. They would also often talk about technology from a high level. For example "why I think vert.x is the future of Java high performance programming", or something like that.

I assume it’s so that they can mine your LinkenIn connection data and make it available to their sales teams to upsell you and people you know. I’d imagine they would end up storing all that data in some kind of web-based CRM, possibly sold as a SAAS product.

Hmm, yeah, maybe one where with "sales" in its name. I think you're into something here.

Whoa, whoa, what kind of conspiracy theory are you trying to force, here?

> LinkedIn is the polar opposite of GitHub. It’s the worst example of social media, from its news feed, to spam invites.

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but LinkedIn is the worst? Really?

I can think of a couple social media platforms that add less value to society.

LinkedIn has helped democratise the recruitment landscape significantly across many parts of Africa; we rely on it extensively.

Not wanting to pick a fight here, but that’s one helluva hyperbole I just couldn’t let slide ^_^

Email address is good but also an issue tracker or better yet IRC or something public would be good.

Agreed, for the specific issue. But it seems like he’s asking ppl to contact him more generally.

It does pose the question, what is the most developer friendly contact method??

GET /contacts

POST /message

Interested to hear ideas.

I guess it depends on what "developer friendly" means. If it means 'easiest method for a developer to contact me' that's email. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has at least one. It's easy.

If it means 'easiest method for only developers to contact me' that would probably be some documented REST API.

Either way, I agree the answer isn't Linkedin.

Email address and / or GitHub. No one's saying he needs to show off what a great programmer he is through his contact methods, just don't use a site that's infamously bad for dark patterns and recruiter spam.

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