chat

when that site first got going, back in my 20s, it had the most aggressive recruitment strategy. it was walled off from non users and prompted new users to add all their contacts as a way to automatically connect them with each other "professionally". it would then spam email addresses not associated with a user account asking "Do you know [Name of Person]?", prompting/pressuring you to make an account and do the same to all your contacts.

just wave after wave of emails until I created some spam block rule for the entire site out of frustration.

it took seems like a decade for the network effect to really seize people, when some old fart would ask me why I wasn't on linked in. "Never saw the need" I'd say, "I'm trying to be on less social media sites, not more" maybe if they seemed like they'd understand.

I resolved in those first days I would never join such an aggressive site that flooded the shit out of my inbox "on behalf" of unsuspecting users. I didn't want to be part of the problem.

seeing what it has become as it's user ballooned into "Facebook for sociopaths" has been as disgusting as it is unsurprising.

I've changed jobs 4 times from age 30 to mid 40s and never used it. barring some true curveball between now and my last days, I expect I will be able to have cultivated an entire complex, professional career involving various credentials, professional associations, formal education/training, and technical skills networks without ever having a linkedin account.

and it feels fucking fantastic. fuck that scumsite.

i mean yeah, it's a website whose explicit purpose is for workers to market themselves to capital. it's designed to bring out the absolute worst in people

The idea of a social network website that solely meant for job seeker is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, I would imagine if done properly it would be a worthwhile tool for helping people find jobs or to find workers

respectfully disagree, it would, by design (social network website), promote an environment of competition between employees to get their basic needs met via employment under a capitalist economy, a situation which is inherently anti-human

any form of capitalism is a shit idea, there is nothing normal nor human like about entering ever-increasing insane levels of competition for the opportunity to cuck 80% of our lives away in alienated toil for no other reason than ensuring the elite continue to hoard vast quantities of wealth

I was told repeatedly by different people that LinkedIn was a good site to stay in contact with.

I made a LinkedIn account 3 times to give it another shot as both the jobcenter as well as trainers said it would be beneficial.

And I also deleted the third account I made after 3 months bc I sure as shit hate this site with my guts. Everything about it is toxic, from the fucking "headhunters" that just have to be bots to the job offers that aren't even remotely related to the field I was searching for nor the field I studied in.

In my presumably niche experience working in UK tech, it has been where I've found most of my jobs.

Engaging with any content or posts there is psychopathic and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. 99% of it is the weirdest and lamest stuff and you are very correct.

But for at least some industries, there are definite benefits to ignoring all that, but having a profile, 'connect'ing with professional contacts who'd actually recognise you, and applying for jobs/setting yourself as 'looking for work' and waiting for recruiters. I have gotten good jobs this way without even having to bother sending a CV or fill a form. You can also see if old co-workers work at a new place and namedrop them in applications.

My only post on there is one saying that the site makes me uncomfortable. I’ve gotten job opportunities from their job section, but the social media aspect is creepy as hell and the entire site reeks of exploitation.

Imagine of LinkedIn had been hijacked by workers to be used as a tool to organize (a fantasy, I know, it would have been shut down)

I have one but every time I try to use it I get the heebie jeebies, like this is how the alien mind control rays get you, because everyone on there acts like they're auditioning for They Live (or oh great, further evidence of how I'm constitutionally maladapted to capitalism). There are cool people on there for some inexplicable reason but the tsunami of slop you have to wade through to get to something genuine is mindboggling. I haven't deleted my profile because of FOMO but it's probably not great that I'm not Generating Content for the Content Beast

LinkedIn makes me think of bone cancer.

The only thing I use LinkedIn for is online storage for my resume details

I'm lucky in a lot of my connections (just coworkers mostly) post a lot of good takes on economics and Palestine. The more influential rando people I'm told are 'good to have because they are actually in STEAM' are the most wretched toxic positivity capitalist boot licker cult you can imagine, and its like how can you be that positive about the job search, you've been unemployed like 6 times in the last 2 years, basically making a career of typing Hallmark shit for Linkedin that gives the reader virtual food poisoning and your literal child calling you out about it.

I usually just go on there to filter through scammy and ghost listings and hope for something, maybe play with my headline etc since when you google me up the only thing that shows up is that linkedin. I would never pay for this nonsense.

Yeah, but I also don't see how it could be anything other than the hive of scum and villainy that it is. People are going to go on there and publicly suck their company/immediate supervisor off because it's not how you know who you blow, it's how you blow who you know. People are going to be asked by their boss to simp for their business. People are going to curate their profile to try and put on a good face. Tbth, when I've been involved in the interview process, a mostly blank LinkedIn wasn't much worse off than a busy, highly curated one; though a bad LinkedIn profile would hurt a candidate. When I say bad, I mean that I think of LinkedIn as a snapshot of what someone is like to work with; if your feed is full of you being needlessly contentious on other people's posts, that suggests to me that that's how it'll be to work with you; if your feed is full of religious proselytizing and Facebooky political junk, then that doesn't inspire a lot of optimism for how it'll be to work with you, etc. Whereas I tend to dismiss a highly curated LinkedIn as basically fake bullshit anyway.

So for my part, LinkedIn is more of an opportunity for people to self-report than anything.

when I signed up in 2016, the first post I saw was from the official LinkedIn account, about how medicare for all would be bad. I never went back on the site - and look at me now! (I'm a 30 year-old serially unemployed fuckup)

I fucking hate LinkedIn with a passion

Agree?