>“You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office,” said Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief. “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.”
That is pretty much it. As for the rest of the article it just elaborates on that and I'm not sure I understand what the article is asking.
Maybe I missed it in the article but ... why should we be talking about LinkedIn relative to the other platforms? It is just a site with very a specific use case that isn't what the other sites do.
There's also some insinuation that LinkedIn is some super corporate friendly place. Maybe it is but you know what, AS A USER (not a corporation) I also DO NOT WANT LinkedIn to be Facebook. It might seem corporate friendly, but I'm willing to bet most users want things the way they are as far as not being Facebook as well.
Side note: I really hate questions in titles like this. It's like some attention begging non specific "oh woe is me" social media post. Just tell me what exactly the topic is.
There are a few people who are extremely active on LinkedIn, as if it were Facebook.
I get their posts and articles and notes, and am in some bizarre way slightly bothered by it. Why are you cluttering my interface into what should be a well-designed, single-purpose, focused interaction and experience? This is not where I come to read about your breakfast, exercise, or even life philosophy :-/
I also do not want to be "friends with my grandma or neighbour" on LinkedIn...
I agree. LinkedIn is actually a good example about how stricter boundaries in one area can lead to a relaxing or loosening boundaries in another.
I've received linkedin connection requests from people I have only met for a couple hours in a meeting. I've sent a few here and there as well. These requests in a business context are standard fare, but friending someone on a social media network (like Facebook) after a brief meeting could be considered odd, and perhaps in some circumstances even inappropriate.
>“You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office,” said Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief. “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.”
On that note, I've heard of creepy people treating LinkedIn like it's a dating site. So it's just like an office in the bad ways too.
> Maybe I missed it in the article but ... why should we be talking about LinkedIn relative to the other platforms?
I think the title of the article, "Why Aren't We Talking About LinkedIn?" isn't suggesting we should be talking about LinkedIn and are not, but asking us to think about what's special about LinkedIn that makes it exempt from the chatter that plagues other social media sites.
It is a bad title, and does read like clickbait. I think the author/editor is being too clever.
It does seem like a rather redundant article. I actually enjoy linkedin, although it does have some quality control issues these days, its still one of my favorite tools for having jobs presented to me, rather than searching for them myself. I think part of what makes all of this work is that linkedin monetizes user data just like the other major social media sites, but is much more in the business of selling that data directly to companies, mostly recruiting firms I imagine, rather than to advertisers who are just trying to peddle commercial goods to consumers.
If you use linkedin in a manner where your goals and linkedin's goals align, it works great. I use it to get leads on making money, and linkedin uses my desire to make money, to make their own money. Its not perfect, but its win/win for now.
A more charitable reading of the title is that it is a straightforward question that the article answers (as opposed to a hand-wringing exhortation as we naturally assume media questions to be)
> Maybe I missed it in the article but ... why should we be talking about LinkedIn relative to the other platforms? It is just a site with very a specific use case that isn't what the other sites do.
LinkedIn is interesting because it has a notion of identity and social norms based on rewards that enforce reasonable behavior. The content does not pose a threat to democracy (for example) and it's actually very helpful for professionals. I depend on it and use it every day. At least some of this is not the use case but the structure of the social interaction and how behavior is tied to real-life consequences.
It's worth looking at why LinkedIn is this way and other platforms are not.
Nope, LinkedIn is in fact the best social website you have this day. I post same content on FB, Twitter and LinkedIn all the time. To my surprise, I get most most engagement on LinkedIn! Not only that but LinkedIn engagement is typically higher value because its not some random dudes and long lost friends liking and moving on but your colleagues and collaborators who you see everyday.
In my view, Twitter as a social media is only useful to those who have won the lottery of a viral tweet and have racked up few thousands followers. Without that you might as well be talking into a empty bucket. As I often say, Twitter is best described as broadcast media for 1% while the rest 99% talks into the black hole.
Facebook is becoming less and less effective social media because it literally ignores majority of posts from friends and instead shows posts from random pages you liked or groups you became member of. On any day, you can click on your individual friends and see astonishing amount of their posts you missed while FB served you all the other clickbaity junk.
This leaves LinkedIn. You see posts from your actual connections and your connections see your posts. Engagements and impact is very real.
When you regulate one thing there a natural incentive to want to expand it and apply it to everything that looks similar, even preemptively or when the original motives for the oversight aren’t there.
The fact they mentioned the number of content editors/mods high up in the article rather than some specific privacy issues or bad incidents says everything about the why.
There’s a strong interest in how SV is self regulating speech online.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the article is getting it. It's a work-specific forum for mostly white collar workers, so there's a certain degree of self-moderation when it comes to what people post and how they present themselves.
I absolutely am on LinkedIn. My only accounts online are HN and LinkedIn. While I agree that it has excessive recruiter spam, I politely respond to every single one of them, telling them where my career is, and what I would need to move. It only takes a minute to do so, and builds a network. Admittedly, most cannot meet my needs, but I have connections to almost every company in my area, so if I ever do need to move, it is not difficult to get rolling. I have found every single job I've held since 2007 from LinkedIn (Admittedly, that is only 3.)
But I don't talk on LinkedIn. I don't 'like' anything, I don't engage with any posts. I'd wager that 90% of what I see on the feeds is just marketing blurbs from my connections' employers. It isn't meaningful to me, so I mostly ignore it.
For me, LinkedIn is a great place to hold my resume, maintain connections to recruiters and former co-workers... and that is it.
Same. I actually wrote the Ask A Manager site to see if I was being rude by just blocking people I don't know - if that had the potential to cost me down the road. Her response was that they expect that, so I feel free to use LinkedIn less as a social media site and more a living rolodex.
- I get so much connection SPAM from LinkedIn that I consider LinkedIn one of the biggest cesspools on the internet. (Mostly recruiters who I've never worked with trying to connect, but sometimes people trying to connect as a way to promote their business.)
If they (LinkedIn) better policed connection SPAM, I'd use it. Maybe I'm in the minority; but constantly getting connection requests from people who I don't know is a major turnoff to me.
That being said, IMO, the observation that LinkedIn has a good tone to its conversations makes it an attractive alternative to platforms like Facebook where the tone turns toxic.
Linkedin is a platform that seemingly no one except recruiters and "entrepreneurs" actually use as a social network. Linkedin is a great resource when used as a kind of living resume, but it falls pretty flat as a social network because it doesn't really fill any niche that other social media platforms don't.
That said, there is definitely a slimy underbelly of Linkedin that's filled with narcissists and braggadocios who spin self-aggrandizing tall tales. They're mostly harmless, but I could imagine it devolving into something more toxic if it's left unchecked, the way that many other social media platforms have.
There's a great twitter account @StateOfLinkedin that catalogs the most ridiculous of the blow-hards that's pretty entertaining
There's a lot of professional humblebragging on LinkedIn, which can have similar depression-inducing effect like FB and Instagram. I think it's much worse effect than recruiters.
I disagree. I use it as a way to stay in touch with ex-colleagues who have moved on to new organizations and I wasn't close enough to have their personal contact details but they will go for coffee with me so helpful networking.
No one is talking about LinkedIn because nobody yet looked on the integration of LinkedIn with the Office suite and the privacy implications.
No one is talking about LinkedIn because it's boring. So boring that most people won't open it except when they need to. The conversations are also boring. The most banal as well as the nearly outrageous posts receive the same polite stream of likes and bland congrats comments. No one ever will say anything of merit.
No one is talking about LinkedIn because it isn't really a social network, it is mainly a tool for finding jobs/employees and for business marketing.
Over the last 10 years I've got all my jobs thanks to LinkedIn, 2 times through random recruiters, 1 time on my own by looking at jobs. I also receive a lot of appealing offers from people working directly for companies that are hiring (usually startups with 20-100 employees).
I honestly don't understand all the hate on HN. Maybe LinkedIn became useless in the Silicon Valley (I saw a girl from SF the other day on Twitter, a "tech influencer", saying Twitter was the new LinkedIn), or in the US in general (?), but it's still really useful in the rest of the world to find a new job.
I don't use it at all for reading posts and comments tho.
I remember a few years ago we used to talk a lot about LinkedIn, mostly negative things. How scummy they were, how they tried to trick you into entering your gmail password to spam your contacts. LinkedIn definitely wasn't "controversy free".
I don't know about other people, but I'm an IT professional and mostly gave up on LinkedIn. I get the occasional contact from recruiters, but I almost never actively check the website. I classify most of LinkedIn's notifications as spam/noise.
I hate linkedIn and will leave it the minute it is no longer required for my professional work. It wouldn't surprise me if others feel the same.
1. My linkedIn connections include hundreds or possibly even thousands of people I have definitely never opted in to linking with. I don't know where they came from but I remove them at a rate of at least 10 or 20 per day and never seem to run out.
2. LinkedIn suggests connections derived from underlying data that are really scary from a privacy point of view. Eg for a while it kept recommending I connect with a person who I have literally no digital connection with whatsoever, no connections in common etc and the only way they could connect us is that we used to live at the same physical address. So it knows my address history and his.
3. I wish I could just automatically unconnect with anyone who reshares motivational posts by Oleg Vishnepolsky. This guys posts drive me absolutely crazy but the trite nonsense keeps infecting my feed because someone will reshare his thoughts about what makes a good boss or whatever. Just no more Oleg Vishnepolsky.
4. I have definitely seen the fake profile catfish thing attempted on LinkedIn. Presumably other forms of scams that have infested other social media are also growing.
For 2, they've publicly posted about how they determine people you might know, it's just a triangle closing algorithm on second degree connections. It's pretty easy to find you and a co-worker with two jumps.
For #3 you can go to their profile and block them if they're really worth it. I think you only get like 100 blocks and then you just have to suffer through the motivational inspiration-porn quotes :)
IMO LinkedIn is one of the more compelling online social networks for two reasons:
1.) The platform’s incentives are well aligned with the user’s incentives. The platform makes money if recruiters can make money by offering jobs to users.
You could argue that recruiter spam is a problem but it would then be a problem for the product and the users. Facebook on the other hand has much less incentive to stop selling ads at the user’s detriment.
2.) It facilitates social interactions that are not necessarily possible IRL. You can reach out to people of interest even if you don’t know them personally. The formality means that we can start conversations with some degree of formality.
LinkedIn needs to work on pervasive phishing and identity theft. I recently found out about an account that copied my profile photo, name, and CV information and used that to connect to 500+ people at my company and elsewhere, using my reputation to pitch people on some blockchain diamond Ponzi scheme. The account has been shut down, but I have no idea if the connections have been warned that this was a fake account trying to scam them, who the account had connected to, and if anyone was victimized. Speaking with coworkers, these kinds of scams are common. It doesn't seem like there is even a basic automated check during user signup to see if the account is impersonating someone else who is already in the system.
I've long deleted my Facebook account. Tried LinkedIn recently, thinking it won't suck much time and will be a bit more privacy respecting than Facebook and the like--but boy was I wrong. I found LinkedIn more aggressively attention and details grabbing. I felt that it nags us to comment on others post and update our profiles recently. The e-mail notification frequency was so high that I thought to delete the account right away but then found out that we can turn it off selectively. I don't know the plight of Facebook now but it shows us even more reasons to glue to our profile/upgrade to the premium plan like "You've been searched X times this week". The more data and attention they get, more can they make from premium accounts. It's no better from Facebook and such from these two perspectives(attention and privacy).
I really don't want to create an account on LinkedIn, but recruiters seem to want it, and I'd like more leads to be picky about, as I wrap up my consulting business.
I tried the HN monthly jobs post... and some startup emailed me to say they'd scraped my info off HN, and created some kind of resume presence for me on their site. (Dear startup person, if I wanted to be on a creepy resume site, I'd be on the one that recruiters actually use.)
I deleted my linkedin account couple of years ago.
My main reason for that has been how it is used in doxxing people. After returning to employment after spending a decade being my own boss, I realized that if you have opinion on the internet and no matter how careful you are about expressing it, people are always going to be mad at you for it. And they will do everything in their power to make it uncomfortable for you to keep expressing your opinions. And telling your employer that you have some opinion that they dont agree with is a low hanging fruit.
Hope linkedin introduces better profile visibility controls, where my public profile has extremely or essentially no information. And visibility of private profile can be tuned to my own comfort levels.
I am a developer and I also maintain a blog. I share my new blog posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium. Based on my analytics I found love from Twitter and Facebook(shared by others) and Medium but hardly any good feedback/shares from LinkedIn. I kind of got surprised because I was thinking that there are more professionals on LinkedIn than FB or Twitter.
LinkedIn is the worst content experience of all available social networks, and that's the trade-off here. It's stricter social boundaries, but as the context has shifted to "social selling", it's more of a vapid marketeering platform than genuine thoughtful exchanges. But hey, at least it's less toxic?
Yes. I use it to research people and companies, keep in touch with former coworkers, and to have some good converstions with people, mostly in industry-specific groups.
I'm using LinkedIn to stay in touch with a few people network-wise and avoid littering them with too personal information (as on Facebook, Instagram, whatever.)
It would be pretty cool, but they do exactly the same mistake as Facebook. Their timeline does not provide useful information. If you follow a company (because /sometimes/ you want to see what's going on, their posts are as important as the ones from your network. If you see a post from one of your contacts, hit refresh and it is gone.
I recently did my first own post on LinkedIn. Despite discussion from my network, LinkedIn thought it's not important for my timeline.
This is an ad for linkedin and thus a marketing effort on behalf of microsoft. It's not meant to be a serious platform for people to use - it's meant to be a product. I've been on linkedin for a few years and it's only been a waste of time despite plenty of interactions.
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
That is pretty much it. As for the rest of the article it just elaborates on that and I'm not sure I understand what the article is asking.
Maybe I missed it in the article but ... why should we be talking about LinkedIn relative to the other platforms? It is just a site with very a specific use case that isn't what the other sites do.
There's also some insinuation that LinkedIn is some super corporate friendly place. Maybe it is but you know what, AS A USER (not a corporation) I also DO NOT WANT LinkedIn to be Facebook. It might seem corporate friendly, but I'm willing to bet most users want things the way they are as far as not being Facebook as well.
Side note: I really hate questions in titles like this. It's like some attention begging non specific "oh woe is me" social media post. Just tell me what exactly the topic is.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|6 years ago|reply
I also do not want to be "friends with my grandma or neighbour" on LinkedIn...
[+] [-] geebee|6 years ago|reply
I've received linkedin connection requests from people I have only met for a couple hours in a meeting. I've sent a few here and there as well. These requests in a business context are standard fare, but friending someone on a social media network (like Facebook) after a brief meeting could be considered odd, and perhaps in some circumstances even inappropriate.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|6 years ago|reply
On that note, I've heard of creepy people treating LinkedIn like it's a dating site. So it's just like an office in the bad ways too.
[+] [-] amiantos|6 years ago|reply
I think the title of the article, "Why Aren't We Talking About LinkedIn?" isn't suggesting we should be talking about LinkedIn and are not, but asking us to think about what's special about LinkedIn that makes it exempt from the chatter that plagues other social media sites.
It is a bad title, and does read like clickbait. I think the author/editor is being too clever.
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|6 years ago|reply
If you use linkedin in a manner where your goals and linkedin's goals align, it works great. I use it to get leads on making money, and linkedin uses my desire to make money, to make their own money. Its not perfect, but its win/win for now.
[+] [-] dasil003|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hodgesrm|6 years ago|reply
LinkedIn is interesting because it has a notion of identity and social norms based on rewards that enforce reasonable behavior. The content does not pose a threat to democracy (for example) and it's actually very helpful for professionals. I depend on it and use it every day. At least some of this is not the use case but the structure of the social interaction and how behavior is tied to real-life consequences.
It's worth looking at why LinkedIn is this way and other platforms are not.
[+] [-] sytelus|6 years ago|reply
Nope, LinkedIn is in fact the best social website you have this day. I post same content on FB, Twitter and LinkedIn all the time. To my surprise, I get most most engagement on LinkedIn! Not only that but LinkedIn engagement is typically higher value because its not some random dudes and long lost friends liking and moving on but your colleagues and collaborators who you see everyday.
In my view, Twitter as a social media is only useful to those who have won the lottery of a viral tweet and have racked up few thousands followers. Without that you might as well be talking into a empty bucket. As I often say, Twitter is best described as broadcast media for 1% while the rest 99% talks into the black hole.
Facebook is becoming less and less effective social media because it literally ignores majority of posts from friends and instead shows posts from random pages you liked or groups you became member of. On any day, you can click on your individual friends and see astonishing amount of their posts you missed while FB served you all the other clickbaity junk.
This leaves LinkedIn. You see posts from your actual connections and your connections see your posts. Engagements and impact is very real.
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
The fact they mentioned the number of content editors/mods high up in the article rather than some specific privacy issues or bad incidents says everything about the why.
There’s a strong interest in how SV is self regulating speech online.
[+] [-] phjesusthatguy3|6 years ago|reply
Because this article is about LinkedIn.
Maybe you should write an article about all of the platforms everywhere, so we can have a good discussion about all of them at once.
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saargrin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynoclast|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ggg3|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] codingdave|6 years ago|reply
But I don't talk on LinkedIn. I don't 'like' anything, I don't engage with any posts. I'd wager that 90% of what I see on the feeds is just marketing blurbs from my connections' employers. It isn't meaningful to me, so I mostly ignore it.
For me, LinkedIn is a great place to hold my resume, maintain connections to recruiters and former co-workers... and that is it.
[+] [-] msmerberry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|6 years ago|reply
Two reasons:
- I don't need another Facebook
- I get so much connection SPAM from LinkedIn that I consider LinkedIn one of the biggest cesspools on the internet. (Mostly recruiters who I've never worked with trying to connect, but sometimes people trying to connect as a way to promote their business.)
If they (LinkedIn) better policed connection SPAM, I'd use it. Maybe I'm in the minority; but constantly getting connection requests from people who I don't know is a major turnoff to me.
That being said, IMO, the observation that LinkedIn has a good tone to its conversations makes it an attractive alternative to platforms like Facebook where the tone turns toxic.
[+] [-] jzymbaluk|6 years ago|reply
That said, there is definitely a slimy underbelly of Linkedin that's filled with narcissists and braggadocios who spin self-aggrandizing tall tales. They're mostly harmless, but I could imagine it devolving into something more toxic if it's left unchecked, the way that many other social media platforms have.
There's a great twitter account @StateOfLinkedin that catalogs the most ridiculous of the blow-hards that's pretty entertaining
[+] [-] polskibus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Blackstone4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nullabillity|6 years ago|reply
Not really, since it locks your CV behind a login-wall.
[+] [-] taneq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fizwhiz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaat|6 years ago|reply
No one is talking about LinkedIn because it's boring. So boring that most people won't open it except when they need to. The conversations are also boring. The most banal as well as the nearly outrageous posts receive the same polite stream of likes and bland congrats comments. No one ever will say anything of merit.
No one is talking about LinkedIn because it isn't really a social network, it is mainly a tool for finding jobs/employees and for business marketing.
[+] [-] ggregoire|6 years ago|reply
I honestly don't understand all the hate on HN. Maybe LinkedIn became useless in the Silicon Valley (I saw a girl from SF the other day on Twitter, a "tech influencer", saying Twitter was the new LinkedIn), or in the US in general (?), but it's still really useful in the rest of the world to find a new job.
I don't use it at all for reading posts and comments tho.
[+] [-] LargeWu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_af|6 years ago|reply
I don't know about other people, but I'm an IT professional and mostly gave up on LinkedIn. I get the occasional contact from recruiters, but I almost never actively check the website. I classify most of LinkedIn's notifications as spam/noise.
[+] [-] seanhunter|6 years ago|reply
1. My linkedIn connections include hundreds or possibly even thousands of people I have definitely never opted in to linking with. I don't know where they came from but I remove them at a rate of at least 10 or 20 per day and never seem to run out.
2. LinkedIn suggests connections derived from underlying data that are really scary from a privacy point of view. Eg for a while it kept recommending I connect with a person who I have literally no digital connection with whatsoever, no connections in common etc and the only way they could connect us is that we used to live at the same physical address. So it knows my address history and his.
3. I wish I could just automatically unconnect with anyone who reshares motivational posts by Oleg Vishnepolsky. This guys posts drive me absolutely crazy but the trite nonsense keeps infecting my feed because someone will reshare his thoughts about what makes a good boss or whatever. Just no more Oleg Vishnepolsky.
4. I have definitely seen the fake profile catfish thing attempted on LinkedIn. Presumably other forms of scams that have infested other social media are also growing.
[+] [-] GaryNumanVevo|6 years ago|reply
https://engineering.linkedin.com/teams/data/projects/pymk
[+] [-] gopher2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeldg|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blululu|6 years ago|reply
You could argue that recruiter spam is a problem but it would then be a problem for the product and the users. Facebook on the other hand has much less incentive to stop selling ads at the user’s detriment.
2.) It facilitates social interactions that are not necessarily possible IRL. You can reach out to people of interest even if you don’t know them personally. The formality means that we can start conversations with some degree of formality.
[+] [-] pemulis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jk2faster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
I tried the HN monthly jobs post... and some startup emailed me to say they'd scraped my info off HN, and created some kind of resume presence for me on their site. (Dear startup person, if I wanted to be on a creepy resume site, I'd be on the one that recruiters actually use.)
[+] [-] iamsb|6 years ago|reply
My main reason for that has been how it is used in doxxing people. After returning to employment after spending a decade being my own boss, I realized that if you have opinion on the internet and no matter how careful you are about expressing it, people are always going to be mad at you for it. And they will do everything in their power to make it uncomfortable for you to keep expressing your opinions. And telling your employer that you have some opinion that they dont agree with is a low hanging fruit.
Hope linkedin introduces better profile visibility controls, where my public profile has extremely or essentially no information. And visibility of private profile can be tuned to my own comfort levels.
[+] [-] pknerd|6 years ago|reply
I have stopped sharing there now, hardly share.
[+] [-] fisherjeff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crsv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpindar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9120310|6 years ago|reply
It would be pretty cool, but they do exactly the same mistake as Facebook. Their timeline does not provide useful information. If you follow a company (because /sometimes/ you want to see what's going on, their posts are as important as the ones from your network. If you see a post from one of your contacts, hit refresh and it is gone.
I recently did my first own post on LinkedIn. Despite discussion from my network, LinkedIn thought it's not important for my timeline.
[+] [-] lota-putty|6 years ago|reply
2011: Opened an a/c on LinkedIn with colleagues, soon Managers posted recommendations on request. Left it defunct there, stop updating profile since.
I always argued team-bonding happens at office during actual office work.
LinkedIn might help if you're between jobs, but then so does job-sites.
[+] [-] meesterdude|6 years ago|reply