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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space and especially a professional space that is going to be your first impression for a new job prospect. Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects. Even if you'd like to run a live blog on some project you're working on as a sort of portfolio - do it on a platform you have full control of in case you want to rescind it or modify it later.

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There are a lot of valid business interactions which are basically people in certain niche asking questions or talking about things which are going on which are super relevant to other companies in that niche. These can be informative (most industry insiders who might be interested in your live blog aren't subscribed to it, but most of them have LinkedIn accounts) and even lead to actual collaboration, purchases or funding.

ChatGPT takes on $globalevent are not examples of that. But they seem to be more favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm because of rather than despite how generic they are and how artificial their engagement boosting is.

I agree. If you follow people that are really interesting to you and if you don’t just connect with anyone who tries to connect with you, your feed can be pretty good. Sometimes LinkedIn reminds me of the good old days when everyone had a Twitter account and people could discuss there their work and other related stuff without too much politics involved

You are looking through the eyes of an individual contributor, but it is not a social network for individuals and job search is a side effect. The main audience is marketing and sales services and executives, to advertise and network in their niche. The generic posts are equivalent to billboard ads, made by people literally paid to spend their day doing marketing (and so post generic things on LinkedIn). What might be confusing is there is also a huge wannabe/aspirational individual entrepreneurs and marketers crowd that are LARPing being successful on it, and as an individual you might only see this surface.

> Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects.

At one of my past companies, I recall a recruiter disqualifying a candidate for a SWE role solely for having a "weird" headline banner image on their LinkedIn profile.

The "weird" image was a benign screenshot of a landscape backdrop of some Miyazaki film. No characters, no action sequences -- literally just trees, mountains, shit like that.

This is the kind of lunacy you're up against.

I’d imagine that there are not too many situations where someone having anime on their LinkedIn profile is not a huge red flag.

Nothing necessarily wrong with watching anime, but choosing to broadcast that on LinkedIn would generally demonstrate severely lacking judgement.

I think GP assumes that Myazaki's films have transcended the "anime" label. They certainly have with me, and with most mainstream film critics. But based on the LinkedIn reaction, and your comment, maybe not? That's interesting.

I think Miyazaki films are cool, but I seriously doubt most people who aren’t film buffs will really recognise them.

I think many if not most people will have negative associations when they think of adult anime enthusiasts, therefore most people with good social skills would not put anime on their LinkedIn.

I also probably wouldn’t want to hire someone who’s holding a gun in their LinkedIn photos (unless it was related to their work), even though I’m a hobbyist shooter myself. I think shooting is a cool hobby, but I understand that for many people it’s a weird enough hobby that it would be downright stupid to advertise it in an unrelated professional context.

The problem isn’t anime (or guns), it’s the poor judgement demonstrated by adding pointless question marks on what might otherwise be a good profile.

I think we agree with each other, but also that you missed my point: the "mistake", as it were, wasn't to do with social skills as much as assuming Miyazaki / Studio Ghibli had crossed into the mainstream, which... It seems isn't accurate.

Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"? (I don't know; I've never used LinkedIn in any capacity.)

> Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"?

I think it really depends on the film. I doubt the expected value of putting a special background on your LinkedIn profile is very high.

> gawk at

Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?

It's really just people being terminally online, but with a thin veneer of professional growth.

English speakers don't experience this, but in my language LinkedIn-speak has so many calques from English that, in order to understand it, I often have to translate words one by one to English and then the result back to my language.

> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space

people want to socialise in all sorts of contexts. think of it as hanging out at the bar after hours at a conference.

> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space

As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.

Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.

Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.

Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.

LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.

probably because businesses can now use it as a digital resume and bypass all those pesky *-descrimination laws.

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