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).

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

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>.

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.

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.

When I see people post on LinkedIn, I stop taking them seriously. Because they’re spending time and energy well spent elsewhere, posting into a meaningless haze of obligatory connections.

I ignore the feed but there are comments here saying that posting stuff has helped them get consulting clients.

I just use it 1 - to stay in touch with people I know professionally and 2 - when I have a meeting with ppl I don’t know, to look them up and see if we know anyone in common or at least see what other stuff they’ve been doing.

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.

To me, LinkedIn is a write-only site. It’s a pain to automate LinkedIn posting (it requires app verification and manual token renewal every 60 days), so I see the site whenever I have a blog post that fits there. Even then, it’s barely worth doing.

I do sometimes have interesting connections through the service, but they’re so hard to spot against the constant stream of nonsense notifications. Every time I turn off a notification type I’ll never care about (“X is celebrating Y years at Z!”, “It’s been more than a week since you posted!”, “Give us your passport to validate your existence!”), it feels like two more are created. Maybe there are LinkedIn warriors out there, but I don’t think I’d want to bump into one at a party.

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.

Employers do use it, among many other signals, in their hiring/shortlisting process. How much depends on state and sector.

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 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.

I get some useful industry news, and info about what colleagues are up to there. There's a lot of noise - and that noise is getting more and more cringe - but there's a certain amount of signal that makes it worth it.

> 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.

Yes. There are genuine thought leaders for niche topics, with real posts and discussions. Banking, infosec, finance, etc.

Software development is not niche.

And also Twitter is 5x better for this.

The contact list point of LinkedIn was explained.

I do post things like a promotion, certificate, speaking opportunity or a new blog post I made.

I can only hope I'm not too cringe and corrupted.

The daily puzzle games have more worth than the average linkedin post.

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.

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.

Startup guy in cybersecurity here. If u plan to start a company/business/whatever, LinkedIn is actually awesome.

Connected with the CTO of a $1B Israeli company over LinkedIn and was on a plane to Telaviv a week later. They ended up acquiring my co.

My second startup partnered with the worlds largest ed tech co in cybersecurity (with their head of learning dev) off the back of a cold our reach on LinkedIn ..

If u learn to not be super fragile and bothered by all the cringe content .. it’s basically ur personal M&A firm. Gives u tremendous leverage for partnering, sales, intros without needing some fancy old boys network.. or startup incubator bs

You have to ruthlessly prune the feed to get something worth reading.

Yes, because I've banned myself from all the good sites.

Only with a timer set to not miss the exit

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.

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.

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.

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.

it is more interesting than internal ms viva

Those unfortunate enough to be desperate for a job (or keeping the one they have) do. Which sadly translates to a very huge portion of the population.