7 ms·

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. LinkedI

by eximius 6mo ago

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).

estebank 6mo ago
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?
- eximius 6mo ago
  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!).
- deanishe 6mo ago
  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.
  - rglover 6mo ago
    > 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.
mahirsaid 6mo ago
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.
- salawat 6mo ago
  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.
  - hunterpayne 6mo ago
    Counterpoint, Meta just shutdown its VR project. And with all the data gathering, you aren't the customer, you are the product. You just don't realize that the market (marketing departments) said yes. Your vote is to either use a specific service or not. And if enough people vote yes, it stays even if you or me don't like/use it.
fritzo 6mo ago
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?
- glitchc 6mo ago
  [dead]
- serf 6mo ago
  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.
- kingstnap 6mo ago
  A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.
- pndy 6mo ago
  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.
- zero-st4rs 6mo ago
spike021 6mo ago
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.
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.
  - spike021 6mo ago
    I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.
- blharr 6mo ago
  Most social media is actively against that, feeding you recommendations to keep you on the platform.
  - spike021 6mo ago
    The only site that actively funnels me with recommendations is Youtube at this point. In most cases that's fine for my taste because I use youtube as more of a learning platform for things like car mechanics, photography, etc. So it doesn't serve me anything toxic. For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.
- pndy 6mo ago
  Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags. They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new content there. Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things. Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months. Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users. So there's this "curation" for me.
pks016 6mo ago
I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.
- raphar 6mo ago
  Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.
  - nelsonic 6mo ago
    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.
    - shwaj 6mo ago
      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).
    - freehorse 6mo ago
      > 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.
    - pks016 6mo ago
      Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't want another fb or insta. The circles and community were great.
tombert 6mo ago
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 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.
- userbinator 6mo ago
  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.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I got an email from Indeed for this today: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/doordashusa/jobs/7727512 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.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
      > and it's a mandatory field. It's also an EEO violation. Report them. I've never had a Li account and never will because of their slimy tactics early on and their eventual conversion into a narcissist circle jerk.
  - joombaga 6mo ago
    Software jobs for sure, but I've been applying for jobs with employers that have other types of jobs too (nursing, accounting, industrial engineering, etc.) and the requirement is not solely for their software jobs. Some have fields that pattern match (for these I put something like "https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN") while others use an integration that actually require you to sign in to Linkedin (some of these I've created accounts for and then deleted them, some I've managed to bypass by hacking on the POST a bit, and others I've decided not to apply for).
johanneskanybal 6mo ago
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.
- the_af 6mo ago
  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.
  - johanneskanybal 6mo ago
    A lot I guess or noone would use it. Personally two out of my last 4 jobs (contractor so switch often). All social media is bad by nature so just ignore that part. I much prefer having all recruiters in a single place rather than spread out in my email and even worse directly calling. I tend to reply to all requests there short but polite.
  - guzfip 6mo ago
    I got a job from LinkedIn in 2022 or so. Of course it only lasted about a year lol. I’ve also gotten jobs via direct application a few times. Certainly not the greatest of jobs, but people often question if anyone gets jobs that’s way too. The only reason I’m employed now though is basically nepotism. What a great future we’ve built for ourselves.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
wolvoleo 6mo ago
Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.
- kube-system 6mo ago
  LinkedIn has aggressive anti-bot features. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of that 2.4G is that
  - wolvoleo 6mo ago
    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.
KellyCriterion 6mo ago
To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)
- hatsix 6mo ago
  nah, their feed became algo driven just like FB... im constantly seeing things that I have no relation to
snackerblues 6mo ago
>Twitter X*
ojr 6mo ago
hackernews has a good signal to noise ratio, noise is bad
- AussieWog93 6mo ago
  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.
- malthaus 6mo ago
  hackernews as a whole has the same issue software engineers have - overestimating one's wisdom and overapplying it with confidence to everything, resulting in horrible takes that might look like signals but are mostly noise
xnx 6mo ago
> Google+ had promise No ads was a huge plus. Take away the financial incentive and you get rid of most of the worst behavior.
- Hobadee 6mo ago
  Facebook didn't have ads when it started either.
- xenator 6mo ago
  If you don't have adv from platform itself it doesn't mean that site content is not flooded by endless spammers content. LinkedIn is great example where you have both.
Yhippa 6mo ago
This reminds me. Google Reader had comments enabled from your friends on posts you shared. This was the best form of social media I have ever experienced.

by eximius 6mo ago

estebank 6mo ago

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?

eximius 6mo ago
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!).
deanishe 6mo ago
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.
- rglover 6mo ago
  > 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.

mahirsaid 6mo ago

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.

salawat 6mo ago
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.
- hunterpayne 6mo ago
  Counterpoint, Meta just shutdown its VR project. And with all the data gathering, you aren't the customer, you are the product. You just don't realize that the market (marketing departments) said yes. Your vote is to either use a specific service or not. And if enough people vote yes, it stays even if you or me don't like/use it.

fritzo 6mo ago

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?

glitchc 6mo ago
[dead]
serf 6mo ago
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.
kingstnap 6mo ago
A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.
pndy 6mo ago
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.
zero-st4rs 6mo ago

spike021 6mo ago

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.

LtWorf 6mo ago
It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.
- spike021 6mo ago
  I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.
blharr 6mo ago
Most social media is actively against that, feeding you recommendations to keep you on the platform.
- spike021 6mo ago
  The only site that actively funnels me with recommendations is Youtube at this point. In most cases that's fine for my taste because I use youtube as more of a learning platform for things like car mechanics, photography, etc. So it doesn't serve me anything toxic. For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.
pndy 6mo ago
Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags. They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new content there. Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things. Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months. Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users. So there's this "curation" for me.

pks016 6mo ago

I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.

raphar 6mo ago
Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.
- nelsonic 6mo ago
  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.
  - shwaj 6mo ago
    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).
  - freehorse 6mo ago
    > 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.
  - pks016 6mo ago
    Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't want another fb or insta. The circles and community were great.

tombert 6mo ago

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 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.

userbinator 6mo ago
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.
- tombert 6mo ago
  I got an email from Indeed for this today: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/doordashusa/jobs/7727512 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.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
    > and it's a mandatory field. It's also an EEO violation. Report them. I've never had a Li account and never will because of their slimy tactics early on and their eventual conversion into a narcissist circle jerk.
- joombaga 6mo ago
  Software jobs for sure, but I've been applying for jobs with employers that have other types of jobs too (nursing, accounting, industrial engineering, etc.) and the requirement is not solely for their software jobs. Some have fields that pattern match (for these I put something like "https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN") while others use an integration that actually require you to sign in to Linkedin (some of these I've created accounts for and then deleted them, some I've managed to bypass by hacking on the POST a bit, and others I've decided not to apply for).

johanneskanybal 6mo ago

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.

the_af 6mo ago
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.
- johanneskanybal 6mo ago
  A lot I guess or noone would use it. Personally two out of my last 4 jobs (contractor so switch often). All social media is bad by nature so just ignore that part. I much prefer having all recruiters in a single place rather than spread out in my email and even worse directly calling. I tend to reply to all requests there short but polite.
- guzfip 6mo ago
  I got a job from LinkedIn in 2022 or so. Of course it only lasted about a year lol. I’ve also gotten jobs via direct application a few times. Certainly not the greatest of jobs, but people often question if anyone gets jobs that’s way too. The only reason I’m employed now though is basically nepotism. What a great future we’ve built for ourselves.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

wolvoleo 6mo ago

Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.

kube-system 6mo ago
LinkedIn has aggressive anti-bot features. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of that 2.4G is that
- wolvoleo 6mo ago
  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.

KellyCriterion 6mo ago

To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)

hatsix 6mo ago
nah, their feed became algo driven just like FB... im constantly seeing things that I have no relation to

snackerblues 6mo ago

>Twitter X*

ojr 6mo ago

hackernews has a good signal to noise ratio, noise is bad

AussieWog93 6mo ago
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.
malthaus 6mo ago
hackernews as a whole has the same issue software engineers have - overestimating one's wisdom and overapplying it with confidence to everything, resulting in horrible takes that might look like signals but are mostly noise

xnx 6mo ago

> Google+ had promise No ads was a huge plus. Take away the financial incentive and you get rid of most of the worst behavior.

Hobadee 6mo ago
Facebook didn't have ads when it started either.
xenator 6mo ago
If you don't have adv from platform itself it doesn't mean that site content is not flooded by endless spammers content. LinkedIn is great example where you have both.

Yhippa 6mo ago

This reminds me. Google Reader had comments enabled from your friends on posts you shared. This was the best form of social media I have ever experienced.