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Ask HN: Why are so many "AI evangelists" posting such insufferable content?
My LinkedIn feed is absolutely unreal right now. 90% (I don't even think I'm exaggerating) of the posts in my feed are from connections who have changed their title to something like "AI Thought Leader | AI Native | Thought Coaching". They post *daily* about something LLM/agentic. The biggest problem is that it's never "hey check out this cool thing", it's "if you're not doing this, you're a dinosaur who will be left in the past."
Other common content is regurgitating blog / Twitter folks from "AI influencers", associated with statements like, "Boris McAI said software engineering is dead. Here's 5 reasons why he's right."
I felt this way a bit when cryptocurrency was at its height, but it never got this embarrassing or self-fellating. How do so many of my connections (more than 800 at this point) have literally zero shame? Hell it's not even first-degree connections.
- Postessia 2mo ago[flagged]
- witos2 3mo ago[flagged]
- dinkleberg 3mo agoIt is a true hellscape. It is useful when looking for work, but that is about it. Though it isn't without comedy. Seeing former co-workers posting about their keys for success and about how they've made it when you know damned well that they do worse than mediocre work is always a laugh.
- Qision 3mo ago> My LinkedIn feed Do you seriously use that?
- snicky 3mo agoNot OP and I don't, but I know a few people who are very active on LI with their daily self-promotion posts only barely disguised as thoughtful remarks about the industry and this seems to be helping them to get into upper mgmt roles in companies most of us know here. It feels true even for people who weren't doing particularly great when I worked with them to put it politely.
- srbsa 3mo agoDon't you remember the time that people were solving the 'Strait of Hormuz' crisis on LinkedIn with lines drawn on maps and showing their 'problem-solving' skills? ... or was it just my feed?
- playorizaya 3mo agoLinkedIn was always sooo fake and bad as in it was a living nightmare dystopia some of the shit people would write. I often wondered: Is this how you get promotions? No way does that actually work or do anything... And then I'm like holy shit is it genuine??? Is this really coming from the heart and I'm the cold, dead, psychopath who can't appreciate a genuinely thoughtful update from a corporate peer? I had to get out of there. I'm not on LinkedIn anymore... but I imagine it's even worse now that all the b2b saas posters have gone full agentic. You never go full agentic.
- maxrev17 3mo agoNo one provides any value in their posts. I want to try to generate leads for my business and I’m told to use LinkedIn. I’m trying to provide some value - useful things such as how to configure home assistant to see if kids devices were pulling data in the night (when they should have been asleep), etc. it’s not exactly getting the back patting as ‘trillion dollar markets’ musings or soc2 congratulations… but if one person benefits I’ll be happy . But yes that does mean I’m a LinkedIn wanker… can’t beat em, join em!
- CM30 3mo agoLinkedIn doesn't really reward meaningful content. People there are just looking for meaningless business related platitudes at the expense of all else. Well, that and based on my experience, most AI 'evangelists' tend to be pretty bad at coming up with creative ideas in general. Many of them are basically the same grifters that tried to cash in on crypto and NFTs, except with a new fad of choice.
- mrdependable 3mo agoI think of LinkedIn like walking into a Tony Robbins event. At least, what I imagine they are like from those old infomercials.
- bitbasher 3mo ago[flagged]
- sloaken 3mo agoThose that can, Do. Enough said.
- add-sub-mul-div 3mo agoMaybe it's the mediocre people who are most excited about AI because they see it as equalizing them with more interesting and original people.
- jdlshore 3mo agoI think it’s more that they can’t recognize the downsides of AI. They work with AI and it’s so smart! And magical! They don’t have the expertise to recognize the problems in its output, and they’re confused by complaints. It looks like stubborn resistance to them, so they turn to evangelism to try to get people to “see the light.” They don’t engage with legitimate criticism because they don’t understand it. (That and the normal herd of grifters who pile on to every fad.)
- cedws 3mo agoWhat worries me is how it will be harder to differentiate the two now. I don’t want to work with people who just completely delegate their thinking to LLMs all day, but how do you effectively filter them out as an interviewer/interviewee?
- deafpolygon 3mo agoTalk to them, without a computer or device as an intermediary. You’ll find out quickly… as they often will have relegated the bulk of their thinking to LLMs.
- cedws 3mo agoI've always preferred in person interviews on both sides, but since COVID it's gone out of fashion unfortunately.
- Breza 2mo agoI recently hired for a tech position on my team. I ended up hiring an amazing internal applicant. I consider myself lucky. The hiring process has gotten awful on both sides in recent years.
- 3mo ago
- xg15 3mo agoWho unironically writes "thought leader" as their job description?
- seattle_spring 3mo agoI just went to check-- I have 6 first-degree connections with the phrase "thought leader" in their title. This out of about 800 connections, all of which are people I've met in-person. Some real-world examples: * "Independent Thought Leader and Consultant" * "Strategy, Innovation, and Distruptive Technology thought leader in the Hyperscale/Cloud business" * "AI Thought Leader + Founder at <company name>.ai" * "C++ expert and agile process thought leader" When expanded to 2nd degree connections, I get more than 10 pages of results when searching for the phrase "Thought Leader" (in quotes, so it's not a fuzzy search phrase).
- idontwantthis 3mo agoIf I made my job title "Thought Follower" I wonder how many people would know it's a joke.
- andrei_says_ 3mo agoPeople? It’s an increasingly wrote-only medium where the writing is automated.
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoMidwits
- jw-open 3mo agoThe term of AI is definitely overused on the internet especially on social media platforms. One possible reason might be related to marketing. The fundamental behind AI is the same thing behind traditional software systems. So for the “AI evangelists” — the needs to be recognized is much stronger than the needs to be a great software engineer. I am using a metaphor, do you want to play soccer in the playground? Or do you want to be a great fan of soccer? Have you seen soccer evangelists to be great soccer players?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- icedchai 3mo agoI see the same thing. The majority of their posts are, of course, AI-generated and incredibly verbose.
- nitwit005 3mo agoThey probably just set up some AI tool to make posts automatically. A quick search shows things like this: https://apaya.com/lp/linkedin https://apaya.com/lp/linkedin
- throwaway81523 3mo agoIt's bot spam all the way down.
- inclinq 3mo ago[flagged]
- stAInley 3mo agoYou missed the AI generated graphic to go with the post.
- seattle_spring 3mo agoOr an unrelated half-naked thirst trap beach selfie. You know, to "drive engagement."
- jryan49 3mo agoThen why are you reading LinkedIn...
- sparqolead 3mo ago[flagged]
- PaiDxng 3mo ago[flagged]
- coldtea 3mo ago>My LinkedIn feed That's your problem right there. When has anyone's LinkedIn feed been anything else than blatant attempts at self-promotion, spam, cliche business advice and empty work-related platitudes (a lot of it AI generated itself nowadays, for extra-slopiness).
- lyfeninja 3mo agoFake it til you make it baby! They're just jumping on the hype train but can you really blame them? They've been hearing about how their job will be replaced, how they need to upskill with AI, and they see everyone else doing it. Many probably have no real skills so they're just trying to survive.
- homeonthemtn 3mo agoGet off LinkedIn.
- Grimblewald 3mo ago> why is linkdin shit? Because linkdin is shit? Ez.
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- hnthrow10282910 3mo ago[dead]
- AnimalMuppet 3mo agoIt's a desperate attempt to make up on volume for lack of value. Ironically, in doing so, they reduce the value even further, to zero or below it.
- cookiengineer 3mo agoThe real question is: why do you follow 800 people that post content like this? In the crypto bubble I used the opportunity to remove all that noise from my stream. Unsubbed from everyone with Crypto in their job title with no regrets. Doing the same for AI thought leaders helped reduce the noise a bit further. I like to keep my LinkedIn stream non AI generated, so if I see an AI generated post with all those shitty unicode bold letters, I'm just unfollowing and removing them from my connections. Now I get the real value out of LinkedIn, which is spammers and advertisers that have a LinkedIn Pro subscription that I cannot unsubscribe from. Yay! /s Jokes aside, you should reflect on how and for what you are using social media. Every second you spend reading there is likely a second wasted that you can spend building or doing what you enjoy. Social media is an attention grabbing business model, and your lifetime is too precious to waste it on...that. Every time I was opening social media in the past I am now doing a little bit of sports outside to reset my brain. Much more fun to be in the green than in the digital noise world.
- rstagi 2mo agoI think we have roughly the same rate of people following the hype as in the past, but their spamming capabilities is like 10x because of AI. I believe it'll adjust by itself, but for now let's brace through it together
- Haoran_Chen 2mo ago[flagged]
- psyklic 2mo agoThis is happening with many popular YouTube creators as well, pivoting from tech tutorials to AI. Kyle Cook made a video showing how engagement has cratered for non-AI stuff, making AI content extremely lucrative [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdTLLlby9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdTLLlby9E
- taklimakan 2mo agoToday it’s AI thought leader, yesterday it was crypto hacker, before then it was big data engineer, and so on. It’s marketing. It works, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it. Bullshitters will bullshit, especially in a business so bullshit-driven as tech. If you don’t buy it, then you are not their target.
- Quinzel 2mo ago1. Because people who post on LinkedIn ARE insufferable 2. Their content is AI generated which is also insufferable. Basically the internet has gone full circle. It started out pretty shit, got useful for a short time, and is now back to being pretty shit. I don’t use it for much more than emails and banking and occasionally doom scrolling which is becoming less because I find AI generated content so off putting. I don’t even use generic Google for study purposes any more because so much on there is just AI generated bullshit.
- slogansand 2mo agobecause it's all AI generated content. Unfortunately, no truth or human interest in reading it except what AI feels like with a gem of keyword manipulation of a million characters
- jeong_jeong 2mo agoTbh I think it’s propaganda. A lot of very powerful people are invested in AI adoption.