It's not as bad as JIRA, although JIRA is marginally more useful than LinkedIn.

Imagine the MBA that had this idea. This is peak, distilled Microslop engineering right there.

It's legitimately useful for networking, and also for keeping track of professional events.

On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.

This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.

I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.

But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.

I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.

I think it depends on who you follow/connected with. I only follow people that are prone to write their own posts, and I feel Linkedin is less filled with AI crap as mass public platforms like X.

It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work. It has all the negative attributes associated with a social network and none of the upsides (apart from the occasional recruiter message).

Over time, when I see a login gate on a website, I've gone from "I should join this exclusive site" ca. 2005 to "I guess they don't want me here" currently. If there are others like me, Linked in is a net negative for hiring. I literally have no idea what's on it anymore.

I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if that’s where my network is and that’s where everyone posts jobs. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.

I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?

But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.

Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?

Desperate job seekers. Nobody wants LinkedIn.

to investigate people of interest

I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what they're up to these days.

Recruiters keep reaching out. I didn't have to seek a new job in perhaps last 15 years, all I had to do was to flip "looking for opportunities" on and start sorting out the messages and emails.

This works.

It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look for candidates. That's why.

I got my last job there, and I have a steady queue of recruiters reaching out the whole time. So I will probably continue to use it as long as I need to eat. I don't engage with the feed at all though.

I believe the same applies to many others as well

[delayed]

Yes, it's low quality but you can find employment, you can establish some industry connections and you can find the right people to hire if you need to.

Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.

I have to admit that this is also what keeps me coming back to LinkedIn. My brain is dangerously easy to motivate by dangling a virtual leaderboard in front of it.

??? Who outside of startups (in a professional environment) even use Slack?