Discussion

kace91: I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?

noitpmeder: The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses

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

dave333: Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.

eitally: 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.

jadbox: 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.

mft_: 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.

reactordev: You have to look at who owns LinkedIn and why building a meetings and calendar was not “part of the plan”

mckirk: 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.

port3000: 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).

paoliniluis: LinkedIn feed now brings dumb posts from AI bots that contacts follow. All social networks tend to follow the same principles now: bring to everyone’s feed what’s most engaging, which is normally clickbaits or posts that use exaggerated words

kristopolous: Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.Why not?

projektfu: 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.

monsieurbanana: I work remotely so I had no idea. I'd have thought that unless you're in HR you wouldn't scroll a website whose primary purpose is to look for new jobs.

jmye: 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?

dzonga: for jobs - indeed is better or other small avenues in their heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through hn)other avenues - local slack channels.linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuablelinkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups

alsetmusic: I've not understood why people wanted it to be a social network. That aspect always seemed bizarre to me until it had been true for long enough to stopped being strange. But this doesn't make sense to me either.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.

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

thunky: It's the user's fault. They vote for this crap with their attention. Junk sites like this shouldn't exist but they do amd aren't going anywhere until people stop using them.

cjbgkagh: Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.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.

itsthecourier: to investigate people of interest

__natty__: And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like always trackers and ads.

miyuru: LinkedIn crashes chrome for me.microslop indeed.

Spooky23: [delayed]

psalaun: I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I only follow people posting these opinions). It's the closest we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won't ever meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree) politely with them because I'm CTO of a company and I can't publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.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!

DeathArrow: 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.

Spooky23: It’s a great way to spot phonies if you don’t have a lot of time. If you encounter someone who seems to know things but you’re not sure what or how well, check LinkedIn.If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.

beAbU: 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

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

lucb1e: AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it doesn't crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB (edit: found it in message history, yes it was "20% of 7GB" = 1.4GB precisely)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, or pages that have a simple background animation where it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (e.g. Reddit's new UI.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (DeepL's translator is an example of the latter)Every time (including for AWS) 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

r_lee: I think a big problem is the fact that many web frameworks allow you to write these kind of complex apps that just "work" but performance is often not included in the equationso 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 updatedand 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...

kalaksi: Some users might enable these kind of features with their attention, but I don't think users actually want these features and any kind of "voting" is likely unintentional. It's manipulation. The fault lies mainly with the company and their carefully planned dark patterns. Ideally, users should punish them by e.g. leaving the platform but there's friction that may be a bigger problem than the dark patterns (depending on user).

arun6582: linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again

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

tom1337: kinda offtopic but as somehow currently outgrowing trellos capabilities, do you have any good suggestions instead of Jira?

calderwoodra: Linear

andrewl-hn: > It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work.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”.

inaros: I was always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.

barbegal: I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.

maccard: I want my compiler, language server IDE, to do that not LinkedIn

MegaDeKay: A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.

maccard: My company started using slack in 2015 and at that time I put in a bug report to slack that their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE on a 1M+LOC C++ project. I used to stop slack to compile…

lucb1e: Or another process will die at random instead, which might be your desktop environment, the main browser process, Signal (10% chance at corrupting message history each time), a large image you were working on in Gimp...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 killerbut alsoit'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

general_reveal: Um.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.

progval: It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other applications' files.

IG_Semmelweiss: Yes, its sometimes extreme. I often wondered if it was my FF browser, but then i'd switch to Opera or Brave, and i would see the same pattern.Its quite insane

richardstahl: This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.https://www.cringebot3000.com/

bluedino: I've also gotten my last few jobs there. It's great for that. Even if it's 90% low effort recruiter spam.It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.

surajrmal: That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your tabs will be discarded.

saadn92: This. That's the only reason I'm on there too. I completely avoid the news feed, but it does help when you having people reaching out and you need jobs.

baal80spam: Nah, it's just bad engineering, period. I "like" aljazeera too - they hijack your freaking PageDn and PageUp keys.

lucasfin000: uBlock origin on Firefox or Brave, which will block most of the tracker bloat, causing the RAM spike. It's not a perfect fix, but it will cut out a significant chunk of it. Tab Wrangler also helps by suspending inactive tabs automatically. You should try out both.

user070223: Github hogging cpu when js is turned off

m132: I noticed that there's a developing trend of "who manages to use the most CSS filters" among web developers, and it was there even before LLMs. Now that most of the web is slop in one form or another, and LLMs seem to have been trained on the worst of the worst, every other website uses an obscene amount of CSS backdrop-filter blur, which slows down software renderers and systems with older GPUs to a crawl.When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main page 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.

cyanydeez: eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of course that's an easy target, it's already text based. GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?

fredgrott: LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to use it....No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake

mft_: On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.