Let's be real, LinkedIn is full of LinkedIn Lunatics but pretty much all mainstream social media is pretty shit. They're just different flavors of shit. LinkedIn: bad. Facebook: bad. Twitter: I literally think it contributed to the collapse of discourse and rise of shallow thought / rejection of expertise. I'm not going to list more because the theme is, you guessed it, they're bad.
Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
Im pretty sure that is the current sentiment amongst the judicial body at the moment, Meta and Google have been taking blows left and right. They are also not allowing else to take shape that might make their business model obsolete. With all that we have more and more laws that are redistricting the use of social media by their own bad doing. So if another company wants to offer something innovative, now they have an unfair playing ground due to the enormous amount of regulation that are NOW being implemented. Another words the longer these large tech companies are able to keep their business the harder it is for innovation in this sector from other players. The spill over to polotics is dangerous and counter-productive to innovating technology.
When your definition of innovation includes "move fast, break things, ignore regulations until you can scale big enough for the lawyers hopefully to outpace the legal system" it is arguable that any of that should be allowed at all. There's room for leniency for innovation sake, then there's building the wrong damn thing and not taking no for an answer when you should. Tech is beyond that point by leaps and bounds.
I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.
I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.
So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.
Agreed. There are lots of people posting shitty things on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but on LinkedIn, everyone is so fake. They're putting their best professional face on, heavily self-censoring themselves, and their content plays to the whole "employment culture". It's not even a little bit genuine.
I don't even know why they do it. Everyone knows it's fake and performative, this couldn't possibly actually help their careers could it?
AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.
now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.
What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.
I got an email from Indeed for this today: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/doordashusa/jobs/7727512
About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and it's a mandatory field.
There are tons though.
Social media being bad is partly because of shady business practices, and partly because a lot of people suck (in different ways, at different times, including us).
Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?
Mastodon, Bluesky, etc are neat - both in what they're trying to be and their technology. But ultimately these days I reject them in favor of more local socialization (again, not geographically). What this looks like is a constellation of private (or pseudo private) discord communities. If I make friends in one, I often get invited to another. I recognize the merit in broader social forums like Mastodon, but it is not worth the drawbacks to me.
As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but with community servers run independently. That is, there are some "federated" identity providers so community servers can agree on identity across servers, then each community server runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community server - private channels in a community server are not E2E encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays (with a special class of relay server for people who want to DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such high latency (even locally!).
A large part of the problem, imo, is that people haven't used the ability to talk to the entire planet as an opportunity to broaden their horizons, but to build themselves a transnational bubble of like-minded individuals.
Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the void was kinda understandable, but these days you can literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.
That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.
> That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.
A brutal reality to navigate if you're not acting in bad faith.
To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)
nah, their feed became algo driven just like FB... im constantly seeing things that I have no relation to
Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?
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That'd be the thing indeed.
hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.
A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.
I think the distinction is pretty easy imo. HN is topic centered, Social Media is person-centered. Before MySpace there was a pretty big proliferation of forums and other topic centered discourse. The profile was such a minor part of those tools.
When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.
A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.
well moderation is ubiquitous , but yeah -- personalization/targeting/social graph are essentially the things that people expect out of a social media platform.
I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.
I also know that's a naive view.
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I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.
Oh they tried to - in a simple "please fill out the form" way. I'll link to my prev comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425198#46429370
IIRC they tried at some point incorporating G+ on youtube but that didn't work either
Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.
Nope. Google+ was a ghost town. They made the right call to shut it down and focus their efforts on YouTube.
The videos and comments on YT are superb training data, every bit as good as Google+ was.
In 2025, YouTube’s total revenue (advertising + subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60 billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies. Google+ would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular social network.
Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't want another fb or insta. The circles and community were great.
> comments on YT are superb training data
This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a bit more effort into that side of their platform.
The videos are good training data, but the comments? The comment UX is so non-conducive to discussion, and the general quality is very low compared to what used to be on Google+ (to be fair, the self-selected users of Google+ were not representative of the general population).
I kind of love Linkedin tbh. It's where you get jobs. They created Kafka. Definitly don't spend a lot of time there though just more if you need a new job.
How often do people get jobs via LinkedIn? I have never.
Their "social media" aspect sucks. LinkedIn is 99% bullshit posts about people hyping up they have "learned lessons" or sucking up to whoever just hired them.
Kafka is a neat piece of engineering though, I'll grant you that.
hackernews has a good signal to noise ratio, noise is bad
Honestly, HN has a lot of people getting infuriated by storms in teacups and spouting shit. Definitely an order of magnitude better than Reddit or Facebook but still not the same as IRL.
Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.
LinkedIn has aggressive anti-bot features. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of that 2.4G is that
I know but I think it's more of a 'feature' to prevent recruiters and advertisers from avoiding their overpriced subscriptions and scrape data.
Knowing that doesn't make LinkedIn a better platform in my eyes, on the contrary. It's more an 'if you pay you can do whatever you want' kinda thing.
>Twitter
X*
social media is only bad if you don't curate what you're looking at. most the platforms these days have features to block posts containing certain words or hashtags.
i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.
Most social media is actively against that, feeding you recommendations to keep you on the platform.
It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.
I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.