Ask HN: Why is everyone so fake on LinkedIn?

[wfinn]

Long time HN lurker, don't ever feel that I have anything that important to add.

I go on LinkedIn and I wan't to cry. Why so much fake enthusiasm ?

Do you use LinkedIn and what are your thoughts ?

[nerevarthelame]

A while back I was in the office at a Fortune 500 company. I was getting in the elevator to go home around 7:00 PM, which is later than I would've liked. A few other people boarded the elevator too, and we exchanged knowing nods and grumbled about late nights, the excessive workload, and bad weather.

The next floor, our CEO got on. Everyone's attitude shifted 180 degrees. We all had smiling, perky, and enthusiastic. I don't subscribe to the deification of our executives, but in that moment, I certainly acted like I did.

Anyway, on LinkedIn, people act like their current or next CEO is reading their posts. Because they might be.

I agree that it's fake, and I find my personal LinkedIn newsfeed to be extremely unpleasant - and more or less useless - to read. But when push comes to shove, the next time I'm around the CEO, I know I'll have the same fake enthusiasm.

[animal_spirits]

To me that sounds like your CEO is inspiring confidence just by walking in

[xtracto]

LinkedIn is basically a marketing channel. For companies' marketing team to market their products, for HR teams to market how "awesome" is to work at the company and for people to market themselves.

I am of the thought that most marketing is bullshit, hence I believe most of what you will read in LinkedIn is bullshit as well.

[johny115]

Your feed is made up of the content written by people you're connected to.

If you see only the cringe posts then you follow the wrong people. I am in marketing and so I follow lot of great growth people, content marketers, copywriters, performance folks and as I am not a deep expert in all these sub-categories of marketing I quite often find super valuable content posted by my connections. Frameworks, templates, good ideas. Stuff I can use. The competitiveness of the environment forces people to post lot of good stuff for free to get engagement, they otherwise would never share.

And in reverse if you post there too and want your content to be read and liked, then you should have only connections relevant to your content. Ie dont have HR connections and then post about coding, instead have mostly dev connections. Because LinkedIn algo tests your post by showing it to only small part of your connections, if your post about coding gets shown to HR people, nobody will like it and thus your post will end up failing the test and LinkedIn will kill its visibility.

In short. Don't blame LinkedIn, blame your managment of your connections.

[mohanmcgeek]

What about employees humble bragging about their "achievements" and fake made up stories about them doing something compassionate when they interviewed someone ?

[literallyaduck]

Same reason corporate music is bad, it can't have anything meaningful or it wouldn't be work friendly. The message is I'm employable, I signal the current corporate virtues, looks at what all I'm learning, wow Jim it has really been ten years at Saber, wow the years have flown.

Say the wrong thing, canceled, not only from future employment but current.

There is nothing genuine about a corporate business lunch and this is just another location.

[gitgud]

> Why so much fake enthusiasm ?

Lack of anonymity. Profiles on LinkedIn have more real information on them then any other platform, meaning that what you say might have real consequences to you.

Basically saying anything negative or critical might be used against you in the future of your career. (see Miranda rights)

Other platforms like reddit and Twitter don't mind anonymous accounts, which ironically invites more honest criticism and discussion, as it doesn't directly link profiles to professional careers.

[naveen99]

It might also be true that fake enthusiasm also suffers the consequences. People who don’t like fake may unfollow and not want to associate with them in the future. But yeah, confrontation is a more risky than fake.

[newacc9]

It took about a decade for people to learn that expressing yourself candidly online must be done anonymously or in a private space, or there will be negative consequences. I think long-term this will doom facebook (the website), but not meta.

[bredren]

Christopher Poole of 4chan was talked about this in 2011:

>Poole complains that Facebook and Google+ are making identity "black and white," forcing users to be the same person in all contexts -- offline, online, at home, at work, etc. "We all have multiple identities. That's not abnormal. It's part of being human. Identity is prismatic," he says.

>"We are multi-faceted. Google and Facebook would have you believe you are a mirror, that there is one reflection that you have, one idea of self... but in fact we are more like diamonds. You can look at people from any angle and can see something totally different, but they are still the same."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/20/chris-po...

[timeon]

This was common sense in 90s and early 00s.

[Jugurtha]

I call it CringedIn for a reason. People acting like they just had the orgasm of a lifetime when receiving a laptop, a mouse, and a bad quality nylon backpack from Tata Consulting Services and the following automated/template response from the employer always gets me. The whole "boss/leader", "We're a family", "We have collaborators not employees" trip is icing on the cake. Posts from "Influencers" I'm not subscribed to or "inspirational" posts finding their way to my page. The threads with thousands of messages that say "Interested". People I screened out during interviews for lacking basic skills inviting me to workshops to teach me the very skills I declined them for lacking. It is a freak show. A creature to be admired not for its beauty, but for its ugliness.

Keep in mind that I have these emotions and thoughts in a fraction of a second. They hit me in the tiny time I spend on the platform to check or édit something.

[rkk3]

IMO the worst is middle aged guys walking recording self-help/promotion sales selfie videos.

But what do you expect them to say?

Excited to talk at this upcoming conference --> My company just paid thousands of dollars for me to get on stage and have the audience listen to an informercial.

Excited to be named one this years people who are persons --> I spend all my time working to make partners at a Consultancy/PE/VC Bank rich, but it-least they paid to nominate me, I can show my parents! Do people still read magazines?

[seattle_spring]

> IMO the worst is middle aged guys walking recording self-help/promotion sales selfie videos.

Paging "The brutal truth about marketing" guy that records selfie videos in a suburban neighborhood. Maximum cringe.

[foogazi]

Or the cringy “kudos” posts calling out a coworker that helped someone out at work

[vanusa]

But it's a core facet of their business model. Their secret sauce, as it were.

That is to say: the intrinsic feature set is of course based on self-promotion; at the same time, nearly everyone on LinkedIn (by virtue of the fact that they have time to tend to their profile, beyond a perfunctory business card level) knows, on some level, that they aren't that special. Plus they know that their profile can be looked at any minute, by anyone, from friends to past colleagues to prospective future ones, to crushes and exes to your old friggen higs school crew, for heaven's sake.

So they're always looking over their shoulder, and on some level, fearing their own shadow. The only thing that (momentarily) lifts this veil of gloom (at feeling fundamentally unworthy and illegitimate) is of course more positive attention, or at least the feeling that their profile is slightly less boring than those of their peers.

So they're they go, sprucing their chronology, finding a better headshot or background image... while everyone else is doing the same. Which leads to more gloom, and more insecurity. All as a proxy, a stand-in for building meaningful professional relationships and improving one's actual skill set -- that is to say, one's intrinsic relationship and career capital (to use a catchphrase of this cottage industry).

Meanwhile, an entire generation has grown up believing axiomatically that a strong LinkedIn profile is absolutely essential to your job search, because how else are recruiters going to know anything about you? And you have to put up a headshot because otherwise you must have something to hide.

Thus the cycle of perpetual inadequacy goes on and on, like an Escher staircase.

[Spooky23]

When I mentor interns about how to present or interact in meetings, I always stress that if they are a stakeholder in a project that is discussed, they should be prepared to add something intelligent to a discussion about it.

“Something intelligent” isn’t pithy commentary, it is a contribution that adds some value to what is happening.

In the context of LinkedIn, you’re always selling something. Either yourself, your company/product or something else. Usually that means offering something that makes you look smart or empathetic to stay active in your extended network. Many people are very bad at it.

Personally, I post about the nonprofit organization whose board I serve on. I may get some brownie points, but mostly it’s marketing so I can try to liberate peoples money later to donate to the cause.

[NullPrefix]

This sounds like spam. The need to always say something.

[monkeybutton]

LinkedIn is cringe levels of shameless self promotion, feel good corporate bs, and spam from recruiters. But it also has gotten me jobs and helped me keep in touch with old colleagues so I tolerate it.

[dougmwne]

Just yesterday I saw a truly insane post from an AWS VP moving on to the next role. Thanking dozens of people for life changing experiences and getting thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. I have no earthly clue what is going on there.

[galoisscobi]

I love LinkedIn because it helps me stay in touch with people who I went to school with and old co-workers as I deleted my Facebook account years ago. If I didn't have LinkedIn, it would have been much harder to stay in touch with those people.

I do think that LinkedIn has a lot of low quality content so I entirely avoid the feed and use it more so as a rolodex and that alone makes it worth it for me.

[xydinesh]

I also deleted FB about a year ago. However I don't use LinkedIn to keep in touch with friends. I text them and call them. I feel like relationship with my friends improved after deleting FB. Also, number of friends reduced too. YMMV

[kjeetgill]

Exactly! Besides, the real feed is the recruiters we've met along the way.

[shahbaby]

I've always thought that showing off is poor taste and will never do it even if it's now somehow trendy to be a shallow sell out aka marketing.

[beenBoutIT]

Showing off is the whole point of social networks. Showing off pictures of dinner, children, girlfriends, boats and other things people might think are cool.

[dyeje]

People are fake on all social media. LinkedIn content is just more narrow and commercial, so that compounds the effect and makes it seem more pronounced.

[tommiegannert]

It's a recruitment tool, so you see the same things you see in an interview.

It just feels awkward because you've crammed all candidates into the same room, and they're now trying to shout louder than everyone else, leading to an escalation in "enthusiasm".

[tpoacher]

I don't know the answer, but I would like to take this opportunity to announce how excited I am to be an active contributor in an international project that aggregates tech and innovation news and delivers it to millions of exceptional people around the planet: hackernews.

#newsthatmatter #grateful #workhardplayhard #money #neuralnetworks #nanoscale #web3 #blockchain #openforhire #leverage #parallelmarkets #hitthegroundrunning #synergy

[janglezz]

I like keeping in touch with former colleagues and friends and giving them a thumbs up when they share something they are proud of.

I’m grateful to have some sense of job security from the weekly recruiter messages I get.

The fake enthusiasm was a big feature at my last company and it got us nowhere. It’s a red flag for me and as an manager, I’d be very skeptical of a candidate who spent too much time trying to be an influencer on LinkedIn.

[kamrani]

As long as you don't hide the identity of the users, you won't have an honest platform. You want to see how people really think, give the anonymity and you see the true society, good or bad.

[aaron_m04]

Truer, perhaps, but not true.

Anonymous posters will still try to rustle jimmies by saying something provocative.

[agumonkey]

Just yesterday someone suggested me to set up a linkedin profile, ensuring a rapid career onset.

I never thought linkedin had any value (beside being a weird phonebook). How is it these days ?

[scrapcode]

It's the recruiter's automated shotgun, in my experience.

[sergiotapia]

Literally owe my career, professional network and opportunities I would have never found to Linkedin. It is worth it's weight in gold.

[dougmwne]

Just doubled my pay. Bring on the recruiter spam.

[smitty1e]

I traditionally link up with people as they depart the project.

LinkedIn is a honking big office. Relationships span the globe at superficial depth.

[whateveracct]

It's a nice channel to get recruiter contacts. Want a new job? Ping a recruiter who pinged you months ago.

[willcipriano]

I spent some time on the platform a little over a year ago when looking for a new job. People outright rip other "influencers" on the platform off. I have seen, likely dozens of posts, all worded very similarly, along the lines of "This candidate wasn't a good hire on paper, but I went with my gut and two years later they are the CEO!". It takes them a couple of paragraphs to do what I did in a sentence there, but multiple unrelated people told that same narrative with minor details interchanged. Some of them direct copy and pastes. All within a week or two of each other.

Don't get me started on the "tech" people I've seen on there, they spend more time talking about getting a job in tech than coding, complete hacks (and not in a good way).