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Comment by jmye | Hacker News Reader

I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if that’s where my network is and that’s where everyone posts jobs. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.

I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?

But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.

Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?

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I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts, but there's more than that. I've met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later became friends and our kids play together. I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.

The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.

I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I only follow people posting these opinions). It's the closest we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won't ever meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree) politely with them because I'm CTO of a company and I can't publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.

The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.

This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!

The feed actually surfaced people working on open source projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's a useful signal source for things outside your usual field of view.

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