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.

Unfortunately even with a heavily pruned list the feed is still a spam fest of recommendations that are just terrible. And every email notification is Facebook-level bait and switch clickbait.