I frequently post on LinkedIn, on topics related to AI, startups, open source, etc. I try to have a pragmatic and realistic take and don't use AI to write the posts.
I find that just by not being cringe, obviously AI or obviously over the top sales-y makes the posts stand out and raise my (consulting) profile enough to land a meaningful number of clients, just as a second-order effect.
Lately I've been even more annoyed at the walls of its walled garden being raised higher, eg. no way to export my own posts, or having to log in to open linkedin shortened urls, which breaks my firefox site containers workflow.
A genuine question for the people here, I am just a college student so maybe I am missing something, but does anybody actually browse through linkedin? The only times I actually open it up is when either I did something that I would like to remember when I update my Resume at a later date, or when my friends text me to open it up and like their post :)
Linkedin is just glorified contact list. People lose their email addresses, change emails with a job, lose phone numbers, move countries, stop using social networks, but usually keep using same Linkedin profile over decades.
Also in many social situations such as expos, meetups and such asking for a personal whatsapp or phone number can be a cringeworthy especially if you actually want to followup with some business proposal or solicit your services / asking for referal / etc.
At the same time 99.9% of people will be okay to connect on Linkedin and you will have that +2% trust boost that can be sufficient to make sure your message wont be ignored.
So Linkedin is really worth it as long as you are not using it as social network.
While I agree that most of the feed is filled with useless posts, for some business sectors it actually contains useful posts.
I work in the European energy market sector and LinkedIn is one of the to go places to catch up with developments in the markets, the latest the analyses, and upcoming events. And some posts are actually good, you just need to filter out the rest. I wish there would be a better platform for this specific content (maybe I'm simply missing it) but for now, I find it there.
Coming from a computer science background and kinda accidentally ended up in energy markets, I was surprised that LinkedIn is the place for this content I(in contrast to the computer science field).
I, unsurprisingly, am making the same observations. Sometimes I do think about shipping a slim Chrome extension (~Ad Blocker) to classify and filter out useless content. Could make it a bit more bearable and useful.
It’s been on the long slow decline for a decade. It used to be filled with interesting content and made it easy to access interesting people and get your message out. It’s really in the dregs now but I still open it and post to it more out of habit than anything. I’ve deleted the app and just use it from my laptop to try and break the habit and it’s very questionable ROI.
Most people randomly accept invitations on LinkedIn: "We're both humans, so I felt we should connect!".
But if you actively prune / curate WHO you add to your LinkedIn, you end up with a feed that is genuinely useful.
What you do need to know is WHY you want to use LinkedIn. It could be to find your next job, finding potential customers, or just keeping up to date with <INDUSTRY>.
I used to accept only people I worked with/met in person, but the feed is crap anyway so why bother. I now accept pretty much everyone and prune the feed.
You don't need to accept at random. I'm selective - I only connect with people I worked with or know well from the industry - and it's still 99% AI slop.
Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.
It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.
When I'm bored and Tiktok brain rot isn't enough, I sometimes scroll through LinkedIn to see what happened in my network. The most interesting events to me is "oh, that guy has been at <company> for <number> years now, cool" and "ah that guy got a new job, how nice"... and then I go to bed. :D
The trick here is to have connections that follow and like content that is worth following, ever since connecting with some peers in the database space, my feed is filled with things like new research, C++ performance optimizations, and the like, instead of management fables and feel good stories.
I get an occasional request from a friend who is trying to build a following to interact with their posts to boost their visibility. I'll go through, like a few then sit around for a while desperately trying to think of something non-generic to say in a comment, fail to think of anything and just add an "I agree" comment.
It's offering was: "Talking about my CV/resume and engaging with potential employers have to be so stiff, corpo and outdated. Why can't it be more casual and easy to do like a Facebook Bio but still usable? Also, business cards suck and get lost. Another thing, working in <insert industry> is demanding and going to networking events is awkward and too full on. I wish I could maintain connections and have occasional conversations with people and actually remember who they are"
This worked for a while. In 2012 to 2015 getting jobs entirely via recruiters and conversational interactions on LinkedIn often led to interviews and other things. Then they started needing to make money, so adverts became a thing, the premium became a thing, then marketing departments caught up and started aggressively promoting crap, then later influencers arrived, and now AI. It's a death by 1000 cuts, it's fundamentally made out of low-stakes dishonestly from people just trying to keep their career going. But the end state is that it's probably the most dishonest social media platform to date. When you have Instagram and Facebook to compare it to, that's quite an achievement.
LinkedIn used to be good-ish before MS bought it, when connections meant a thing, and you could "ask Joe to introduce you to Mary" . The network was valuable.
When they added the story /post section it became a glorified Facebook .
I think it depends what your career is. It used to be that developers hated it because during the ZIRP era they were being spammed with badly fitting job offers from sketchy recruiters.
Now that the market has tanked, their feelings may have softened somewhat.
And some of the industry posts can be interesting.
> but does anybody actually browse through linkedin?
Sometimes I do, reflexively, when I check my messages or some specific people. I get no value out of it. But I do know people who seriously use linkedin, as in read, post, comment, and message people.
I don't add people to my network to reduce the noise. I don't pay but get "requests" for software development that are not personally directed, so I delete those. Any job advertisement I am notified about is closed by the time I click on it, within seconds of the email. Any misspelt ad is a phishing crime in the making.
I find it's easy to scroll past very sloppy posts. And 1 in 2 posts are genuinely interesting/teach me something new about the world and the people in it - how people conduct business - and most of all their improbable trajectories that got them where they are currently in their career. It's very interesting and the recommendations are great for me. I don't find too much slop or cringe content, and am confused when people complain about it so much. It feels like people don't really know how to separate slop content (self-promotion/empty AI posts) from genuinely written life and work experiences. And HN is definitely an echo-chamber, I see a huge amount of people (more than instagram tbh in mid-30s age bracket) contribute regularly to linkedin.
Me and my friends have a lot of jokes about linkedin, a lot of prejudices. I'm going to let you form your own opinion. Trust me, you will form one, once you start working in different offices with office people.
When Twitter imploded I expected technical discussions to migrate to Mastodon or Bluesky. What happened next shocked me.
Technical content appeared on LinkedIn.
Not just one or two posts. Tens of posts. Every day. Technical content from the thought leaders in the industry.
Yes, there was still corporate slop.
Yes, LinkedIn still mostly serves for self-aggrandisement.
But there were nuggets of gold, for those prepared to sift for them.
Seriously: LinkedIn is still mostly garbage. The quality of discussion is not great. But it has improved a bit, and given the fractured nature of social media at the moment it's somewhat viable to use it for technical content. It very much depends on the specific area. If you want to talk about the new hotness (e.g. using LLMs to write software) there is a lot. For more niche areas I expect other venues will do better.
Then tech jobs stopped existing and now Linkedin is a pure AI content driven jerk off engine for desperate people without a (real) job to sound important.
Too bad the thought leader is spewing 500 Internal Server Error. "Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again." isn't something I'm proud to post to Slack.
Funny how easy it is to turn any banal situation into something that sounds profound.
I put my situation as "Playing with a frisbee, alone." and your person says "Life is like a Frisbee. You can't control the wind. You can only adjust your throw."
Very nice. I thought it wasn't going to save a "You Go Girl" style story about "My Dick", but it turned it into a conference anecdote with a powerpoint slide about Richard III. Hilarious.
Apps like that (a customizable system prompt with a token api endpoint) would become more common if the cost of tokens decreases. Current AI subscription providers have been trying to crack that nut with GPTs, skills, extensions, etc, but they have the n+1 problem. The scope is too much to do it securely and get value other than entertainment from it. If one could make a link to take you to a Claude.ai interface for “generate a legit LinkedIn post”, next people are gonna want to connect it to their email and documents, and LinkedIn account then build a workflow for making posts and addressing comments, messaging leads and cross posting to Twitter or Reddit.
I've never seen "the n+1 problem" used in a context like this, can you explain what that means? To me "the" n+1 problem is the one where you do your DB queries in a for loop instead of using joins or something like that: https://docs.sentry.io/product/issues/issue-details/performa...
I was drawing the distinction more between productivity vs entertainment uses, as opposed to power vs regular users.
The problem with the later is AI’s entire sales pitch is to flatten those definition. If you can type it, the AI should be able to figure it out for the most part. You don’t even have to be very clear in your typing. You can just address the AI casually as you would address a person.
Entertainment apps are about increasing engagement. Like an AI driven game, ARGs, or this site. For example, Sora app was an AI entertainment app but it obviously was the wrong approach. I think there is an untapped potential there, but it remains under-explored because most are focusing on productivity now.
People already posted this slop "by hand" before generative tech accessibility. In fact, generative models are good at it because they were trained on massive amounts of horse crap people posted and shared.
A few weeks ago, LinkedIn introduced a "This looks like AI slop" button and to linkedIn's credit, my feed has been a lot better since that happened.
There's still some going around of course, but it's far less than the endless stereotypical linkedIn chum in the feed that there was.
I don't know if engaging with that button means I'm less likely to be served such content, or whether it's cleaning up everyone's feeds.
The worst were the ones starting, "I had a client phone me up", and when you'd look at the profile they wouldn't even obviously have such clients, and certainly wouldn't be the obvious person to call in that scenario.
I can't imagine being that shameless, and just to boost an artificial reach.
I may or may not have instructed Claude to built me a LinkedIn Bot that creates posts for predefined topics, comments and likes others posts and scarpes the page for jobs. Let's say a minority on LinkedIn actually reads the content others post, so my reach and impressions are continually growing without me doing anything on that cesspool of a social app. Thanks AI, I guess.
Been laughing for the past 10 minutes, thanks for this one.
(I tried the death of my cat by car in front of my house in a Go Girl manner, absolute cinema)
How is this so good. After playing around a bit with different inputs I then put in real beliefs and selected different cringe types and I wanted to off myself reading the beliefs I had parsed through these lens.
I frequently post on LinkedIn, on topics related to AI, startups, open source, etc. I try to have a pragmatic and realistic take and don't use AI to write the posts.
I find that just by not being cringe, obviously AI or obviously over the top sales-y makes the posts stand out and raise my (consulting) profile enough to land a meaningful number of clients, just as a second-order effect.
Lately I've been even more annoyed at the walls of its walled garden being raised higher, eg. no way to export my own posts, or having to log in to open linkedin shortened urls, which breaks my firefox site containers workflow.
A genuine question for the people here, I am just a college student so maybe I am missing something, but does anybody actually browse through linkedin? The only times I actually open it up is when either I did something that I would like to remember when I update my Resume at a later date, or when my friends text me to open it up and like their post :)
Linkedin is just glorified contact list. People lose their email addresses, change emails with a job, lose phone numbers, move countries, stop using social networks, but usually keep using same Linkedin profile over decades.
Also in many social situations such as expos, meetups and such asking for a personal whatsapp or phone number can be a cringeworthy especially if you actually want to followup with some business proposal or solicit your services / asking for referal / etc.
At the same time 99.9% of people will be okay to connect on Linkedin and you will have that +2% trust boost that can be sufficient to make sure your message wont be ignored.
So Linkedin is really worth it as long as you are not using it as social network.
While I agree that most of the feed is filled with useless posts, for some business sectors it actually contains useful posts.
I work in the European energy market sector and LinkedIn is one of the to go places to catch up with developments in the markets, the latest the analyses, and upcoming events. And some posts are actually good, you just need to filter out the rest. I wish there would be a better platform for this specific content (maybe I'm simply missing it) but for now, I find it there.
Coming from a computer science background and kinda accidentally ended up in energy markets, I was surprised that LinkedIn is the place for this content I(in contrast to the computer science field).
> most of the feed is filled with useless posts
I, unsurprisingly, am making the same observations. Sometimes I do think about shipping a slim Chrome extension (~Ad Blocker) to classify and filter out useless content. Could make it a bit more bearable and useful.
I use LinkOff https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linkoff-filter-and-...
It has a 'gentle mode' so you see what gets blocked.
I think it's thanks to it that I don't feel animosity towards LinkedIn anymore.
It’s been on the long slow decline for a decade. It used to be filled with interesting content and made it easy to access interesting people and get your message out. It’s really in the dregs now but I still open it and post to it more out of habit than anything. I’ve deleted the app and just use it from my laptop to try and break the habit and it’s very questionable ROI.
Most people randomly accept invitations on LinkedIn: "We're both humans, so I felt we should connect!".
But if you actively prune / curate WHO you add to your LinkedIn, you end up with a feed that is genuinely useful.
What you do need to know is WHY you want to use LinkedIn. It could be to find your next job, finding potential customers, or just keeping up to date with <INDUSTRY>.
I used to accept only people I worked with/met in person, but the feed is crap anyway so why bother. I now accept pretty much everyone and prune the feed.
You don't need to accept at random. I'm selective - I only connect with people I worked with or know well from the industry - and it's still 99% AI slop.
Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.
It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.
When I'm bored and Tiktok brain rot isn't enough, I sometimes scroll through LinkedIn to see what happened in my network. The most interesting events to me is "oh, that guy has been at <company> for <number> years now, cool" and "ah that guy got a new job, how nice"... and then I go to bed. :D
The trick here is to have connections that follow and like content that is worth following, ever since connecting with some peers in the database space, my feed is filled with things like new research, C++ performance optimizations, and the like, instead of management fables and feel good stories.
Employers do use it, among many other signals, in their hiring/shortlisting process. How much depends on state and sector.
I get an occasional request from a friend who is trying to build a following to interact with their posts to boost their visibility. I'll go through, like a few then sit around for a while desperately trying to think of something non-generic to say in a comment, fail to think of anything and just add an "I agree" comment.
Linkedin used to be good(ish).
It's offering was: "Talking about my CV/resume and engaging with potential employers have to be so stiff, corpo and outdated. Why can't it be more casual and easy to do like a Facebook Bio but still usable? Also, business cards suck and get lost. Another thing, working in <insert industry> is demanding and going to networking events is awkward and too full on. I wish I could maintain connections and have occasional conversations with people and actually remember who they are"
This worked for a while. In 2012 to 2015 getting jobs entirely via recruiters and conversational interactions on LinkedIn often led to interviews and other things. Then they started needing to make money, so adverts became a thing, the premium became a thing, then marketing departments caught up and started aggressively promoting crap, then later influencers arrived, and now AI. It's a death by 1000 cuts, it's fundamentally made out of low-stakes dishonestly from people just trying to keep their career going. But the end state is that it's probably the most dishonest social media platform to date. When you have Instagram and Facebook to compare it to, that's quite an achievement.
LinkedIn used to be good-ish before MS bought it, when connections meant a thing, and you could "ask Joe to introduce you to Mary" . The network was valuable.
When they added the story /post section it became a glorified Facebook .
I think it depends what your career is. It used to be that developers hated it because during the ZIRP era they were being spammed with badly fitting job offers from sketchy recruiters.
Now that the market has tanked, their feelings may have softened somewhat.
And some of the industry posts can be interesting.
> but does anybody actually browse through linkedin?
Sometimes I do, reflexively, when I check my messages or some specific people. I get no value out of it. But I do know people who seriously use linkedin, as in read, post, comment, and message people.
I don't add people to my network to reduce the noise. I don't pay but get "requests" for software development that are not personally directed, so I delete those. Any job advertisement I am notified about is closed by the time I click on it, within seconds of the email. Any misspelt ad is a phishing crime in the making.
Maybe I should give them money :)
I open it to do the daily puzzles. But it means that I'm subject to 1 or 2 cringe posts before I get there.
I have a simple rule to decide when to add someone to my social network: if we met in real life, would we say hi to each other? No? Don't add.
The daily puzzle games have more worth than the average linkedin post.
Yes, because I've banned myself from all the good sites.
You have to ruthlessly prune the feed to get something worth reading.
I find it's easy to scroll past very sloppy posts. And 1 in 2 posts are genuinely interesting/teach me something new about the world and the people in it - how people conduct business - and most of all their improbable trajectories that got them where they are currently in their career. It's very interesting and the recommendations are great for me. I don't find too much slop or cringe content, and am confused when people complain about it so much. It feels like people don't really know how to separate slop content (self-promotion/empty AI posts) from genuinely written life and work experiences. And HN is definitely an echo-chamber, I see a huge amount of people (more than instagram tbh in mid-30s age bracket) contribute regularly to linkedin.
Oh dude, welcome to the business.
I've been in IT since before linkedin existed.
Me and my friends have a lot of jokes about linkedin, a lot of prejudices. I'm going to let you form your own opinion. Trust me, you will form one, once you start working in different offices with office people.
When Twitter imploded I expected technical discussions to migrate to Mastodon or Bluesky. What happened next shocked me.
Technical content appeared on LinkedIn.
Not just one or two posts. Tens of posts. Every day. Technical content from the thought leaders in the industry.
Yes, there was still corporate slop.
Yes, LinkedIn still mostly serves for self-aggrandisement.
But there were nuggets of gold, for those prepared to sift for them.
Seriously: LinkedIn is still mostly garbage. The quality of discussion is not great. But it has improved a bit, and given the fractured nature of social media at the moment it's somewhat viable to use it for technical content. It very much depends on the specific area. If you want to talk about the new hotness (e.g. using LLMs to write software) there is a lot. For more niche areas I expect other venues will do better.
It used to be relevant.
Then tech jobs stopped existing and now Linkedin is a pure AI content driven jerk off engine for desperate people without a (real) job to sound important.
it is more interesting than internal ms viva
Too bad the thought leader is spewing 500 Internal Server Error. "Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again." isn't something I'm proud to post to Slack.
I created a similar tool a year ago -> https://infiniteutils.com/internet/linkedin-post-generator
Funny how easy it is to turn any banal situation into something that sounds profound.
I put my situation as "Playing with a frisbee, alone." and your person says "Life is like a Frisbee. You can't control the wind. You can only adjust your throw."
It's a strange realization that this looks so much like LinkedIn because it actually is LinkedIn.
It seems that an LLM is deliberately being forced to generate in the style of LLM slop.
Error 1102 Worker exceeded resource limits
Try Kagi translate to LinkedIn
https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=linkedin
Ironically also offline:
> Kagi Translate is temporarily offline for free users.
Whenever it gets back I recommend everyone to use it. My go to prompt for demoing it to others is "I eat poop off the floor"
Excellent.
Though many follow a shorter sentence style.
Like this.
To go on and on about what they're going on about.
Paragraphs are old.
Brevity is the new thing.
Make it short. (Lift, bro.)
We talk about words here
insert 10 short one sentence life experiences about words
you can subscribe to my word salad workshop for $5
It would seem to be.
Anyone under 35 seems to type things in multiple messages on message apps, rather than one :-)
I remember when SMS had a cost per message.
> What topic do you want to write about?
Robots suck, the future is cheap human Labour
> Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again.
:(
Very nice. I thought it wasn't going to save a "You Go Girl" style story about "My Dick", but it turned it into a conference anecdote with a powerpoint slide about Richard III. Hilarious.
Oops! Our thought leadership engine is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again.
Just like LinkedIn, this is not working as intended, so it’s spot on. (… getting the Oops-error).
I asked for inspiring post about robbing orphanage and i am laughing soo hard
Kagi translate had this linkedin speak translator, it was hilarious.
Apps like that (a customizable system prompt with a token api endpoint) would become more common if the cost of tokens decreases. Current AI subscription providers have been trying to crack that nut with GPTs, skills, extensions, etc, but they have the n+1 problem. The scope is too much to do it securely and get value other than entertainment from it. If one could make a link to take you to a Claude.ai interface for “generate a legit LinkedIn post”, next people are gonna want to connect it to their email and documents, and LinkedIn account then build a workflow for making posts and addressing comments, messaging leads and cross posting to Twitter or Reddit.
I've never seen "the n+1 problem" used in a context like this, can you explain what that means? To me "the" n+1 problem is the one where you do your DB queries in a for loop instead of using joins or something like that: https://docs.sentry.io/product/issues/issue-details/performa...
Power users will always want custom tools. But most users aren't power users
I was drawing the distinction more between productivity vs entertainment uses, as opposed to power vs regular users.
The problem with the later is AI’s entire sales pitch is to flatten those definition. If you can type it, the AI should be able to figure it out for the most part. You don’t even have to be very clear in your typing. You can just address the AI casually as you would address a person.
Entertainment apps are about increasing engagement. Like an AI driven game, ARGs, or this site. For example, Sora app was an AI entertainment app but it obviously was the wrong approach. I think there is an untapped potential there, but it remains under-explored because most are focusing on productivity now.
Most sites may end up destroyed by automation tools etc... I already no longer feel like posting on any website anymore.
People already posted this slop "by hand" before generative tech accessibility. In fact, generative models are good at it because they were trained on massive amounts of horse crap people posted and shared.
A few weeks ago, LinkedIn introduced a "This looks like AI slop" button and to linkedIn's credit, my feed has been a lot better since that happened.
There's still some going around of course, but it's far less than the endless stereotypical linkedIn chum in the feed that there was.
I don't know if engaging with that button means I'm less likely to be served such content, or whether it's cleaning up everyone's feeds.
The worst were the ones starting, "I had a client phone me up", and when you'd look at the profile they wouldn't even obviously have such clients, and certainly wouldn't be the obvious person to call in that scenario.
I can't imagine being that shameless, and just to boost an artificial reach.
Wow, I didn't notice that, thanks for pointing it out.
> I don't know if engaging with that button means I'm less likely to be served such content, or whether it's cleaning up everyone's feeds.
I would guess it's both cause I've been having less AI slop on LinkedIn for the past few weeks (yet not none).
Why are you guys still looking at the feed is the real question.
I like to keep track of where my former colleagues have gone so I can feel bad about where I'm at.
same, also what I noticed
How many days until the linkedin zombies actually use it for their posts?
zero, I guarantee whatever model provider this site is a frontend for is already powering a large portion of linkedin activity.
Very curious to hear if someone actually posted one of these and got likes/new followers?
The evil characters on LinkedIn aren't the poor souls posting cringe, it's the 15 people who chime in with encouragement in the comments.
Friends don't let friends post cringe
I may or may not have instructed Claude to built me a LinkedIn Bot that creates posts for predefined topics, comments and likes others posts and scarpes the page for jobs. Let's say a minority on LinkedIn actually reads the content others post, so my reach and impressions are continually growing without me doing anything on that cesspool of a social app. Thanks AI, I guess.
It’s probably great.
Unfortunately, I suspect that it’s being hugged to death (I keep getting the “oops” response). Hope they can afford the tokens.
Been laughing for the past 10 minutes, thanks for this one. (I tried the death of my cat by car in front of my house in a Go Girl manner, absolute cinema)
Can you post the result? My attempt of "Using AI for a novel financial scam" / "You go girl" didn't go through.
My first one (That happened: Wine snobs) is already hilarious! Looks like LLMs are coming for comedians next.
Would love to see what was it.
I wish I could reply to the "I pooped" linkedin output. "Tongue firmly in cheek" is horrifying.
Amazing. The hall of fame section is hilarious!
It's already hugged to death OR API token spend limit reached
LOL the HN AI detector is killing all the copypast for the lulz people have been posting (thank you, showdead: yes)
This could have been whipped up in 5 mins and been a bit meh, but it's excellent.
Whoever did this actually pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
Bravo
How is this so good. After playing around a bit with different inputs I then put in real beliefs and selected different cringe types and I wanted to off myself reading the beliefs I had parsed through these lens.
10/10 for hitting the satire mark perfectly.
This is brilliant, well done!
I like my LinkedIn cringe hand written, thank you very much.
I'm the proud author of Two such stories, if it pleases you:
* The One Shoe CEO
* Advice from a millionaire (true story)
You'll just have to find them.
I only want linkedin cringe if it's of the artisanal, hand crafted, organic, free range, GMO free, fair trade, heirloom variety.
My cringe has been handcrafted and vegan. Pure human slop!
the slop centipede