Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
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.
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 wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
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?
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
This works.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
Why not?
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
Its quite insane
With DeepL specifically, I once left their main page open and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom of the page that got stuck in a SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event and thus itself to be triggered again.
I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are far from new and yet web developers have only been getting increasingly disconnected from reality.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
arun6582•2h ago
porise•2h ago
tom1337•53m ago
calderwoodra•27m ago
maccard•12m ago
maccard•9m ago
That and its dog slow, of course.
lucb1e•9m ago
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html