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).
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.
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.
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" 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.
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?
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!).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 (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
I was researching laptops at BestBuy and every page took ages to load, was choppy when scrolling, caused my iPhone 13 mini to get uncomfortably hot in my hand and drained my battery fast. It wouldn’t be noticeably different if they were crypto-mining on my iPhone as I browsed their inventory.
Best Buy is actually one of the worst and slowest websites from any large retailer. I cannot believe how bad it is. It's like they set out to make it pretty and accidentally stepped in molasses.
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 equation
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...
The Grok android app is terrible in that sense. Just writing a question with a normal speed will make half of the characters not appear due to whatever unoptimized shit the app does after each keystroke.
Sounds quite overengineered. CEOs have basically no idea what they're doing these days. If this were my company, I'd start by cutting 80% of staff and 80% of the code bloat.
it's unironically just react lmao, virtually every popular react app has an insane number of accidental rerenders triggered by virtually everything, causing it to lag a lot
> 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?
It is to do with websites essentially baking in their own browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as possible.
Spot on. It's why I quit adtech in 2015. Running realtime auctions server-side is one thing, but building what basically amounts to live-feed screen capture ..
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…
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 (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) 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.
Hit this exact wall with desktop wrappers. I was shipping an 800MB Electron binary just to orchestrate a local video processing pipeline.
Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.
Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of overhead.
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?
Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.
> Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
> I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
Hiring can remain irrational longer than you can remain unemployed.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
> Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement. Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
I dunno if that is really true. I've started posting technical things on LinkedIn because it gets pretty good engagement from real people that I know. I've also seen some great technical posts there.
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.
> Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
Same with Pinterest in Germany which seems bizarre to me. It's supposedly more popular than Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Reddit (but below TikTok, Instagram and Facebook).
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'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.
The comedy/tragedy of this is; whenever I talk to people outside of engineering at social gatherings, this is what they do. Tell me their resume and accomplishments. I’m like, can we just a have a conversation please?
I think one of the most objectively pathetic things in the world is trying to ride the counterculture wave against a thing, while shilling the exact same thing.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
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.
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.
Easy. That is the only social media site that is so comically bad, that it does not trigger me in any way with the feed. I am using it as a way to reach out to colleagues from the past - a bit like facebook circa 10 years ago.
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap everything in this weird language.
I doubt many people go to LinkedIn for the cringey and obnoxious feed. It's more write-only than anything.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
And be careful with AI elsewhere in the hiring process.
Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...
I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.
I used it 18 months ago when I was looking for a job, and I found a paid subscription genuinely useful. Before and since: almost never. If I change jobs again then I'll use it again.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
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.
And the converse is true: If you read something with substance, you can know it is VERY important to them; they're likely literally risking their livelihood to do so.
The difference is that the recruiters come to you on LinkedIn. This is quite handy when you're currently employed since opportunities come to you that you wouldn't have otherwise looked for.
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).
> 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”.
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.
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.
The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Much like X, it's what you choose to use it for. Papers are posted, approaches are debated, and loose groups form to align. It's easy to scroll past the pandering, but there is useful stuff in the dross.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
That is not the primary purpose of LinkedIn though. It is used extensively by a class of people who are generally decision makers and those selling services to them.
I work in research and people post their papers there. Signal to noise ratio is getting worse and worse though.. My "favorite" was probably an AI generated post (3 em dashes in one sentence, its not this.its that. And so son) about how bad AI is and how it hallucinates.
Sales people using it a lot to scout prospects and understand a person's seniority in an organisation, to target better and prepare a strategy to pitch higher up the chain.
A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.
There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or who are retired and just don't care. They publish some hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth visiting!
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.
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.
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
its a professional contact list is all it is, for me anyway. its where I go to gather intel on a person/company or where I go to lookup a contact for an outreac
I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't have their email or phone number anymore.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist some of their most inane excesses.
That's the first I've heard of LinkedIn-driven revolutionary endeavors towards social change. I think that's the point we've all reached given all else has failed.
I use LinkedIn. I’ve posted some blog posts on both Hacker News and LinkedIn and determined that LinkedIn is a bit more evergreen. A post on the HN front page gets thousands or tens of thousands of views in a day but a LinkedIn post has thousands in the long tail.
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
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.
From the online job searcher's point of view, it's one of the least awful circle jerks in a Dante's Inferno-esque series of circle jerks. It is only the first or second circle jerk, at worst.
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.
In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are, thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to what I find here on HackerNews.
The articles are mostly BS, but I got all of my previous jobs from LinkedIn, except for the first one. Which else should I use? I guess networking is better, but I'm not really a networking type of person. LinkedIn at least shows me which companies have openings so I can network with the hiring managers. Those openings could be fake, but hey at least there is some data.
It feels important to remember that all the Severed employees were there by choice. Perhaps not the choice of the innie, but hey someone made that choice for their reasons.
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.
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.
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
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?
I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts, but there's more than that. I've met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later became friends and our kids play together.
I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
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!
The feed actually surfaced people working on open source projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's a useful signal source for things outside your usual field of view.
There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
Scroll hijacking like that feels like product brain rot.
You can see the trade in plain sight they slow the user down so feed metrics look better, and the side effect is that keyboard nav, accessibility tools, and UI automation all get wierd in ways the people shipping it probably never have to touch.
Older laptops already choke on LinkedIn.
Adding fake drag on top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a stalled car.
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.
Is it really the users fault when the apps are literally designed by neuroscientists that explicitly design it to be addictive toward humans all of which is being funded by monopolists companies whose leadership tend to have antidemocratic views about humanity?
Maybe we should finally regulate these addict boxes as the dangerous substances they are.
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). And I don't think there are any platforms that always guarantee good user experience now and in the future.
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.
Users are not perfect agents. How can you expect the average non-technical person to figure out what is happening? For most people, if they don't see visually see something happening on the screen, it doesn't exist. They simply have no frame of reference to figure out that LinkedIN is hijacking their scroll speed.
That code is minimal. It’s definitely not the source.
Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it’s a good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
I know I'm old, but I now find LinkedIn to be my favorite social media site, and I'll explain why.
Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely valuable and here's why:
Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of them all.
My postings on LinkedIn have definitely had direct consequences in my professional life.
I consider them all good because ultimately if you get upset by the way I behave then that's probably going to be true if we work together also.
Sometimes people like to tell me that I'm very authentic and it's clear that I'm not trying to suck up to anyone, which they respect. Some people quietly retreat from me and I find out later that it's because I hurt their feelings inadvertently by shitting on AI or calling out web development as largely being inefficient in resources or something.
Love this response, and as some one who does perhaps a bit too much spending/wasting time on other types of social media, including here, I've made a conscious decision to post on LinkedIn more.
And it's such a difference. It forces me to slow down and think about a lot of things. The most important being: Is this even worth posting AT ALL?
And then, okay -- how can I say this in a future-proof way that both appeals to normies and tech folk like myself. I feel like I'll be doing better the more I post to places like that, and maybe less here?
There was a bit of a scandal at my employer some years back and IIRC it was kicked off by someone posting/boosting some really questionable stuff on LinkedIn.
If you fuck up badly on Twitter, maybe someone cares
If you fuck up badly on Facebook, people you know find out, maybe no one else.
If you fuck up badly on LinkedIn, you have to find a new job and you've stained yourself in this market.
Thus, anyone posting to LinkedIn is subconsciously saying -- I'm aware that this might STRONGLY hinder my ability to eat but I'm posting it anyway because I think it is that important for some reason. (now that REASON may be fluffy, but still.)
I generally agree with what you're saying here -- I don't mean that "other people ACTUALLY care."
I suppose -- I'm trying to explain why I believe the choice, and thus the material itself, to post LinkedIn might be special in a way that the rest might not?
Like I'm guessing a lot of people do fall into the "spotlight effect" and that affects what is posted.
I disagree completely. If you post something racist on LinkedIn you're probably going to lose your job. Try it, if you don't believe me. If you post something racist here you're going to get downvoted.
This can be read as why to avoid LinkedIn. Job searching is already hard, if you manage to land an interview you still have to spend time, as an old dude, studying Leetcode like you're a kid with five years experience instead of twenty. Then it's competitive. Etc.
So to this you wish to add the increased risk of negative exposure by saying a bad thing? Or that someone, someones, or people five years from today consider a bad thing?
I love writing and posting and engaging (you can tell from my history here alone), but I'm not crazy enough to risk spilling my feelings on a site full of people in suits and ties, with Leader next to their names.
I agree with you generally; what I am saying here right now is that how people behave on LinkedIn creates an interesting filter for content in this way in the present, without saying necessarily SHOULD people behave this way.
As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
Actually I think I'll play mean, specifically _because_ I want to be radioactive to investors and private equity. I sincerely believe there is a better way to exist and work without being beholden to a system that incentivises quarterly thinking at the cost of everything else.
Yep, I've co-founded several companies and sold them for near $1B in aggregate. My investors and customers are on there, sometimes posting nice things about us. So I give it a thumbs-up and move on. Nothing worth rage-bating about. Mostly I go there to play linkedin.com/games.
For sure higher quality social network than Facebook. I personally like it. (Note that I follow only lithuanian posts. It may be our local language specifics.)
I keep my profile updated as a consultant because it lets clients and others in my company get a fuller gauge than my one pager. I’ve also got my most recent and prior job from having a price and responding to the right recruiter, I’ve also had a handful of interviews as well, which is honestly more than I’ve gotten from trying to apply to random job board postings.
Keep in mind this is memory used by a browser tab, not "how bug the website is". Probably a memory leak as the feed is scrolled or something, but it is a massive download when you first load the page.
I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred), a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB transferred).
A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__` -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were fully client-side rendered.
The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195 _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
Honestly, while I'm sure Linked is bloated, HN in Chrome is taking 204meg for the front page on my MBP. That's with no images, no videos, a minimal amount of css. `document.body.textContent.length` says 4278
Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78
I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture. If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg. Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.
Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.
I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the reason these things take lots of memory is because these things take lots of memory.
That's the sort of question a reasonable person would ask. To answer this correctly, you need to occupy the mind of a madman. Now, we've got a boatload of KPIs to optimise or our necks are on the chopping block!
But other ideas:
- all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed
- FE indexed search engine
- bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)
Nearly all the top level comments are about the value of Linkedin at all rather than the technical reasons that 2.4G of RAM for a website is atrocious.
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
It probably depend on where you live and who you are. LinkedIn is my backup in case of a layoff. It's the site where I can reach everyone who worked with me or have made offers in the past.
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
I think before linkedin people were doing this with email and phone. Literally cold calling your old coworkers. Not sure linkedin really created anything that didn’t exist previously especially if you live in some major hub of industry as you indicate.
It did make it easier though. I don't have to keep a list of potentially outdated phone numbers and email adresses. LinkedIn makes it much simpler to broadcast your availability.
Most of LinkedIn is just garbage though, especially if you somehow connected with social-media people or marketing people. Marketing people on LinkedIn are weird, they can't form coherent sentences and they can't even sell themselves.
You could strip down LinkedIn down to your resume, availability status and your email address and it would be fine.
try https://corvi.careers I been building it purely as job search platform, has good coverage of startups and public companies but I’d still recommend to use LI for network tho
Most of the heavies in my industry don’t even bother with linkedin. They get plenty of applications on their career pages already I guess. Only really startups (which aren’t really hiring at all) and the occasional blast from a middle weight company. There are more jobs for ai trainer than real jobs on linkedin right now.
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.
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 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
I dunno I have 96GB of RAM and I still get the whole "system dies due to resource exhaustion" thing. Yesterday I managed to somehow crash DWM from handle exhaustion. Man, people really waste resources....
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.
I've already described above what the browser's behavior is. That your browser works differently is good for you; I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There are also other downsides that this other behavior does not fix, mentioned in sibling comments
This is not a chrome problem but an OS problem. Android does a much better job here by comparison. Desktop Linux is simply not well optimized for low RAM users.
This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
MADV_FREE (since Linux 4.5)
The application no longer requires the pages in the range
specified by addr and size. The kernel can thus free these
pages, but the freeing could be delayed until memory
pressure occurs.
and
MADV_DONTNEED
Do not expect access in the near future. (For the time
being, the application is finished with the given range, so
the kernel can free resources associated with it.)
After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics
of memory access in the specified region are changed:
subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but
will result in either repopulating the memory contents from
the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for
shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem-
based techniques such as System V shared memory segments)
or zero-fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private
mappings.
Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you’re talking about real RAM issues.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
I use a Mac which has really good memory management but still seeing that 10 GB of my SSD is clogged up with useless crap just because modern development systems are complete and utter crap feels bad.
March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature comfort features like loading in chat history from the server, mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake. The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people don't even consider what memory is.
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.
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.
I rarely use Linkedin but for my new app that I'm building the Linkedin is good platform to find out & engage possible customers so last few weeks I'm using it more. But man.. so sorry for people using it daily. Such a bad experience. I didn't surprise it takes that amount of RAM because every component in the page is laggy, you feel very unsafe. You're getting some error but you have no idea what it is. Don't wanna mention about the content at all. But like many people mentioned in the comments it's still the number one place for their work
I was searching for jobs using it a while ago and it consumed 80 percent of my iphone’s battery in under 40 minutes. It’s quite impressive. Not even highest end mobile games can do that.
They do other unholy things. I don’t know what, but consistently while playing music on my HomePod opening that site makes it stutter within a few minutes, fully stop working shortly afterwards and it needs a reboot to work again.
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.
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.
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.
But there’s so many good games out there. Check out Zachtronics/Coincidence.games for some cool examples. Walk to a bookstore and get one of their many sudoku/puzzle books. Check out the App Store for some puzzle games. Write your own puzzle game!
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
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
And also keeps showing a red dot on the feeds tab every time you navigate to another screen, so that they can trick you with interacting with one more ad.
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
Beyond being useful for a quick check on someone’s career history, LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters pretending to be experts in things while the actual experts never post about the subject on LinkedIn.
If I were PM at LinkedIn, I would do some cross social network info pollination to correct the LinkedIn. I would promote power users from bluesky or twitter who are technical or otherwise have lot of good analysis. Experts are prolific users and make use of Zipf’s Law to promote good content. Also through graph analysis, the users who get followed by power users will be promoted as well. Whatever you might say about Instagram and Tiktok, their recommendation system is SOTA. I even love ads from Instagram, they know exactly what kind of ads I might engage with.
Jira’s problem is that it’s effectively free-form, and there are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams - one using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs with story points, and a third using waterfall with time estimates - all in the same project, with the same workflows, and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your team are generating reports from.
Jira (hasn’t been JIRA for a long time) is great when you have proper Jira governance in place, with admins who say “no, you can’t have a new custom field, use this one with a new context”, configure good workflow transitions with validators and conditions, design appropriate create, view and edit screens (instead of using the same one for three separate operations), etc. The problem is always crappy administration, not Jira. Jira can be fantastic when properly managed.
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.
The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time
We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about memory usage, a lot is fonts and images.
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).
To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)
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.
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.
I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.
Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.
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" 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.
Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.
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?
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!).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.
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.
It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.
I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.
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 (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
I was researching laptops at BestBuy and every page took ages to load, was choppy when scrolling, caused my iPhone 13 mini to get uncomfortably hot in my hand and drained my battery fast. It wouldn’t be noticeably different if they were crypto-mining on my iPhone as I browsed their inventory.
It’s astonishing how bad the experience was.
Best Buy is actually one of the worst and slowest websites from any large retailer. I cannot believe how bad it is. It's like they set out to make it pretty and accidentally stepped in molasses.
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 equation
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...
The Grok android app is terrible in that sense. Just writing a question with a normal speed will make half of the characters not appear due to whatever unoptimized shit the app does after each keystroke.
Sounds quite overengineered. CEOs have basically no idea what they're doing these days. If this were my company, I'd start by cutting 80% of staff and 80% of the code bloat.
it's unironically just react lmao, virtually every popular react app has an insane number of accidental rerenders triggered by virtually everything, causing it to lag a lot
well that's any framework with vdom, the GC of web frameworks, so I'd imagine it's also a problem with vue etc..
I don't understand though why performance (I.e. using it properly) is not a consideration with these companies that are valued above $100 billion
like, do these poor pitiful big tech companies only have the resources to do so when they hit the 2 trillion mark or something?
It's not a problem with vue or svelte because they are, ironically, reactive. React greedily rerenders.
It's also not a problem with the react compiler.
Nobody gets promoted for improving web app performance.
yep. I think this is the root problem, not the frameworks themselves
> 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?
It is to do with websites essentially baking in their own browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as possible.
Spot on. It's why I quit adtech in 2015. Running realtime auctions server-side is one thing, but building what basically amounts to live-feed screen capture ..
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…
It's always good to not slack when compiling.
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 (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) 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.
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
Hit this exact wall with desktop wrappers. I was shipping an 800MB Electron binary just to orchestrate a local video processing pipeline.
Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.
Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of overhead.
What us this AWS you talk about? :-)
my employer's choice of premium hosting provider
I know what AWS is...that is why your statement
>> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.
Makes no sense to me...
I think they are talking about AWS dashboard, but I might be wrong.
the web interface
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?
Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.
I recommend to block the Linkedin feed with uBlock.
> Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
> I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
Hiring can remain irrational longer than you can remain unemployed.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
Agreed.
Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix, every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff… the first answer to an HR “off limits” question will be given soon enough if I get the job.
Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
> Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement. Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
I have consulted for CEO’s and other executives who think like this. You certainly dodged a bullet.
I dunno if that is really true. I've started posting technical things on LinkedIn because it gets pretty good engagement from real people that I know. I've also seen some great technical posts there.
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.
> Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
Same with Pinterest in Germany which seems bizarre to me. It's supposedly more popular than Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Reddit (but below TikTok, Instagram and Facebook).
EDIT: Data from 2023: https://medias.smart-home-fox.de/SDE/Social%20Media%20Statis...
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
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.
You forgot "I am honoured and humbled to announce <insert mundane recognition>."
The comedy/tragedy of this is; whenever I talk to people outside of engineering at social gatherings, this is what they do. Tell me their resume and accomplishments. I’m like, can we just a have a conversation please?
I think one of the most objectively pathetic things in the world is trying to ride the counterculture wave against a thing, while shilling the exact same thing.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
Beeper has LinkedIn integration, so you can chat with recruiters with any Matrix app without ever opening the website.
https://www.beeper.com/
Still need a LinkedIn account for beeper to connect to though.
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.
It's a difference between "using it" and just having a dormant profile you wake to live when interested, though.
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.
+1 I haven't made an account on a new website in years, and god forbid I will ever link my gmail with anything other than g-suite.
Easy. That is the only social media site that is so comically bad, that it does not trigger me in any way with the feed. I am using it as a way to reach out to colleagues from the past - a bit like facebook circa 10 years ago.
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap everything in this weird language.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating
I doubt many people go to LinkedIn for the cringey and obnoxious feed. It's more write-only than anything.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
And be careful with AI elsewhere in the hiring process.
Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...
I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.
You had me almost spit out my coffee. That's hilariously on point.
My favorite is this:
The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary, Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author. Father."
That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income and achievements to shame.
I used it 18 months ago when I was looking for a job, and I found a paid subscription genuinely useful. Before and since: almost never. If I change jobs again then I'll use it again.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
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.
And the converse is true: If you read something with substance, you can know it is VERY important to them; they're likely literally risking their livelihood to do so.
It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look for candidates. That's why.
Do they not also make posts on Indeed or other non-social sites?
The difference is that the recruiters come to you on LinkedIn. This is quite handy when you're currently employed since opportunities come to you that you wouldn't have otherwise looked for.
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).
> 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”.
It depends on your role. People in sales have it open all the time since it's a legitimate research tool for them.
Yep. Sales and biz dev people use LI constantly not necessarily for connecting, but learning about contacts.
If you’re considered valuable at your current company, instead of being a red flag it can help you get a raise or other benefits.
This. I would rather post on any other social media site at work than Linkedin. It's a major signal that the person is looking for work.
Especially the "Let me show you i have a open linkedin tab while screen sharing so you guys know i hate this place" move as if anyone cares.
No more such thing as commit to the company in western world anymore. Companies are definitely not commited to you.
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.
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.
Yammer was probably one of the most bizarre m&a stories ever.
The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
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.
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?
I actually didn’t know that was a thing. I was trying to cook up something quick and absurd. Truth is stranger than fiction!
> 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.
Is it terrible if your employer finds that you're looking for another job? If they like you, maybe they'll intervene to make your life better?
If they hate you, they're less likely to go through a termination process including severance.
I used to always worry about them finding out. Now, I'm having trouble not blurting it out from the rooftops.
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.
Much like X, it's what you choose to use it for. Papers are posted, approaches are debated, and loose groups form to align. It's easy to scroll past the pandering, but there is useful stuff in the dross.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
That is not the primary purpose of LinkedIn though. It is used extensively by a class of people who are generally decision makers and those selling services to them.
This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.
https://www.cringebot3000.com/
I work in research and people post their papers there. Signal to noise ratio is getting worse and worse though.. My "favorite" was probably an AI generated post (3 em dashes in one sentence, its not this.its that. And so son) about how bad AI is and how it hallucinates.
“This wasn’t just AI generated — it was a paragon of hallucinated AI slop.”
Sales people using it a lot to scout prospects and understand a person's seniority in an organisation, to target better and prepare a strategy to pitch higher up the chain.
A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.
Bluesky doesn't push an algorithmic feed, so it looks empty if you aren't following people who are posting.
FWIW starter kits and topical feeds are a great way to jumpstart your algorithm.
There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or who are retired and just don't care. They publish some hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth visiting!
Because after Stackoverflow Jobs went bust, LinkedIn and Xing (in DACH space), are the best ways to reach out to head hunters.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
I will never understand why SO did not lean into its jobs feature. I got two jobs from it, I thought it was great.
As a hiring manager, it’s still the best place to try and find people for a given role.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
> Out of all places to doomscroll
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
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.
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.
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
its a professional contact list is all it is, for me anyway. its where I go to gather intel on a person/company or where I go to lookup a contact for an outreac
I always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.
Many people use it.
But let’s be honest…
it’s not just a social media platform.
It’s a mindset. A daily ritual. A lifestyle. A place where every thought becomes a “lesson”
...
Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange staccato posts.
Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things happening in your industry you can learn about.
But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work family dribble.
"My father died from cancer, and this is what it taught me about B2B SaaS sales..."
I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what they're up to these days.
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've gotten two very good jobs from linkedin.
it’s deteriorated to the point where shit-posting is becoming normalized, so it has that going for it
I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't have their email or phone number anymore.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
Desperate job seekers. Nobody wants LinkedIn.
"No one goes there, it's too crowded" type energy
The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist some of their most inane excesses.
That's the first I've heard of LinkedIn-driven revolutionary endeavors towards social change. I think that's the point we've all reached given all else has failed.
I use LinkedIn. I’ve posted some blog posts on both Hacker News and LinkedIn and determined that LinkedIn is a bit more evergreen. A post on the HN front page gets thousands or tens of thousands of views in a day but a LinkedIn post has thousands in the long tail.
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
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.
From the online job searcher's point of view, it's one of the least awful circle jerks in a Dante's Inferno-esque series of circle jerks. It is only the first or second circle jerk, at worst.
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.
In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are, thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to what I find here on HackerNews.
> what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling
The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...
I keep an up-to-date profile so recruiters reach out.
It's useless otherwise.
The articles are mostly BS, but I got all of my previous jobs from LinkedIn, except for the first one. Which else should I use? I guess networking is better, but I'm not really a networking type of person. LinkedIn at least shows me which companies have openings so I can network with the hiring managers. Those openings could be fake, but hey at least there is some data.
It's great for niche fields or small credentialed network groups. The social media side is complete nonsense, don't use it.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
Yea, I quit recently, got absolutely nothing positive out.
It feels important to remember that all the Severed employees were there by choice. Perhaps not the choice of the innie, but hey someone made that choice for their reasons.
to investigate people of interest
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.
You have to look at who owns LinkedIn and why building a meetings and calendar was not “part of the plan”
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.
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
I think we're basically in violent agreement. MS sucks, big organisations often suck, misaligned incentives everywhere, etc.
LinkedIn has the most clear para-social relationship. Post and interact to look good for recruiters and future employers.
Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
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?
I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts, but there's more than that. I've met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later became friends and our kids play together. I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
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!
The feed actually surfaced people working on open source projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's a useful signal source for things outside your usual field of view.
There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
Goes with the territory of allowing remote code execution arbitrarily and all the time otherwise you won't be able to..
* checks notes *
read text on the internet.
The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses
Scroll down through jobs, hit next page. Page reloads at bottom of list on next page. Have to scroll up then scroll down, every page.
Baffles me ui like this exists in 2026.
Scroll hijacking like that feels like product brain rot. You can see the trade in plain sight they slow the user down so feed metrics look better, and the side effect is that keyboard nav, accessibility tools, and UI automation all get wierd in ways the people shipping it probably never have to touch.
Older laptops already choke on LinkedIn. Adding fake drag on top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a stalled car.
Imagine the MBA that had this idea. This is peak, distilled Microslop engineering right there.
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.
Is it really the users fault when the apps are literally designed by neuroscientists that explicitly design it to be addictive toward humans all of which is being funded by monopolists companies whose leadership tend to have antidemocratic views about humanity?
Maybe we should finally regulate these addict boxes as the dangerous substances they are.
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). And I don't think there are any platforms that always guarantee good user experience now and in the future.
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.
Users are not perfect agents. How can you expect the average non-technical person to figure out what is happening? For most people, if they don't see visually see something happening on the screen, it doesn't exist. They simply have no frame of reference to figure out that LinkedIN is hijacking their scroll speed.
Nah, it's just bad engineering, period. I "like" aljazeera too - they hijack your freaking PageDn and PageUp keys.
I wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent screen scraping?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
That code is minimal. It’s definitely not the source.
Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it’s a good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
Really? Then why else do adblockers seem to take up so much memory, other than an arms race with countermeasures that sites take?
I know I'm old, but I now find LinkedIn to be my favorite social media site, and I'll explain why.
Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely valuable and here's why:
Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of them all.
> destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD
Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post was actually the cause?
No, but as I've said below, this isn't about what will actually strongly happen, but what I think people think. I could be wrong here.
My postings on LinkedIn have definitely had direct consequences in my professional life.
I consider them all good because ultimately if you get upset by the way I behave then that's probably going to be true if we work together also.
Sometimes people like to tell me that I'm very authentic and it's clear that I'm not trying to suck up to anyone, which they respect. Some people quietly retreat from me and I find out later that it's because I hurt their feelings inadvertently by shitting on AI or calling out web development as largely being inefficient in resources or something.
Love this response, and as some one who does perhaps a bit too much spending/wasting time on other types of social media, including here, I've made a conscious decision to post on LinkedIn more.
And it's such a difference. It forces me to slow down and think about a lot of things. The most important being: Is this even worth posting AT ALL?
And then, okay -- how can I say this in a future-proof way that both appeals to normies and tech folk like myself. I feel like I'll be doing better the more I post to places like that, and maybe less here?
There was a bit of a scandal at my employer some years back and IIRC it was kicked off by someone posting/boosting some really questionable stuff on LinkedIn.
Amusingly, this was someone high up in HR.
LOL you've nailed LinkedinSpeak here
Let me try again, then
If you fuck up badly on here, no one cares at all
If you fuck up badly on Twitter, maybe someone cares
If you fuck up badly on Facebook, people you know find out, maybe no one else.
If you fuck up badly on LinkedIn, you have to find a new job and you've stained yourself in this market.
Thus, anyone posting to LinkedIn is subconsciously saying -- I'm aware that this might STRONGLY hinder my ability to eat but I'm posting it anyway because I think it is that important for some reason. (now that REASON may be fluffy, but still.)
Oh, you were not joking.
No, people do not care. You're not a celeb. This is textbook spotlight effect.
Your life becomes a lot more enjoyable if you don't take yourself so serious, try it sometime
I generally agree with what you're saying here -- I don't mean that "other people ACTUALLY care."
I suppose -- I'm trying to explain why I believe the choice, and thus the material itself, to post LinkedIn might be special in a way that the rest might not?
Like I'm guessing a lot of people do fall into the "spotlight effect" and that affects what is posted.
I disagree completely. If you post something racist on LinkedIn you're probably going to lose your job. Try it, if you don't believe me. If you post something racist here you're going to get downvoted.
This can be read as why to avoid LinkedIn. Job searching is already hard, if you manage to land an interview you still have to spend time, as an old dude, studying Leetcode like you're a kid with five years experience instead of twenty. Then it's competitive. Etc.
So to this you wish to add the increased risk of negative exposure by saying a bad thing? Or that someone, someones, or people five years from today consider a bad thing?
I love writing and posting and engaging (you can tell from my history here alone), but I'm not crazy enough to risk spilling my feelings on a site full of people in suits and ties, with Leader next to their names.
I agree with you generally; what I am saying here right now is that how people behave on LinkedIn creates an interesting filter for content in this way in the present, without saying necessarily SHOULD people behave this way.
As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
Actually I think I'll play mean, specifically _because_ I want to be radioactive to investors and private equity. I sincerely believe there is a better way to exist and work without being beholden to a system that incentivises quarterly thinking at the cost of everything else.
Yep, I've co-founded several companies and sold them for near $1B in aggregate. My investors and customers are on there, sometimes posting nice things about us. So I give it a thumbs-up and move on. Nothing worth rage-bating about. Mostly I go there to play linkedin.com/games.
For sure higher quality social network than Facebook. I personally like it. (Note that I follow only lithuanian posts. It may be our local language specifics.)
What does that have to do with RAM?
Absolutely nothing, as 99% of comments to the post. But it is the norm on HN it seems.
I think I’ve legitimately taken career hits because I cannot stomach it. The culture of LinkedIn is absolutely repulsive to me.
“What trying to protect the feelings of a group of people who will never care about me taught me about b2b sales”
The VCs I know think the LinkedIn feed is a joke, too.
Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.
I give 0 fucks about it.
I know a lot of people who use LinkedIn, and I don't think any of them are happy with their job. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I sell my labor. I don't sell my respect.
I keep my profile updated as a consultant because it lets clients and others in my company get a fuller gauge than my one pager. I’ve also got my most recent and prior job from having a price and responding to the right recruiter, I’ve also had a handful of interviews as well, which is honestly more than I’ve gotten from trying to apply to random job board postings.
Is it not possible to collar the amount of RAM a browser tab is able to use? If not, would love for someone to develop this!
Web developers of HN: how is this possible? What can use 1.2GB RAM for a website? Preloaded all videos?
Keep in mind this is memory used by a browser tab, not "how bug the website is". Probably a memory leak as the feed is scrolled or something, but it is a massive download when you first load the page.
I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred), a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB transferred).
A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__` -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were fully client-side rendered.
The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195 _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
Honestly, while I'm sure Linked is bloated, HN in Chrome is taking 204meg for the front page on my MBP. That's with no images, no videos, a minimal amount of css. `document.body.textContent.length` says 4278
Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78
I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture. If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg. Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.
Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.
I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the reason these things take lots of memory is because these things take lots of memory.
That's the sort of question a reasonable person would ask. To answer this correctly, you need to occupy the mind of a madman. Now, we've got a boatload of KPIs to optimise or our necks are on the chopping block!
Probably a memory leak
But other ideas: - all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed - FE indexed search engine - bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)
Then why does pretty much every site seem to have a "memory leak" of this type (besides unicorns like HN that try to be minimal)?
Nearly all the top level comments are about the value of Linkedin at all rather than the technical reasons that 2.4G of RAM for a website is atrocious.
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
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 valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
It probably depend on where you live and who you are. LinkedIn is my backup in case of a layoff. It's the site where I can reach everyone who worked with me or have made offers in the past.
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
I think before linkedin people were doing this with email and phone. Literally cold calling your old coworkers. Not sure linkedin really created anything that didn’t exist previously especially if you live in some major hub of industry as you indicate.
It did make it easier though. I don't have to keep a list of potentially outdated phone numbers and email adresses. LinkedIn makes it much simpler to broadcast your availability.
Most of LinkedIn is just garbage though, especially if you somehow connected with social-media people or marketing people. Marketing people on LinkedIn are weird, they can't form coherent sentences and they can't even sell themselves.
You could strip down LinkedIn down to your resume, availability status and your email address and it would be fine.
try https://corvi.careers I been building it purely as job search platform, has good coverage of startups and public companies but I’d still recommend to use LI for network tho
??? Who outside of startups (in a professional environment) even use Slack?
Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.
Why not?
Most of the heavies in my industry don’t even bother with linkedin. They get plenty of applications on their career pages already I guess. Only really startups (which aren’t really hiring at all) and the occasional blast from a middle weight company. There are more jobs for ai trainer than real jobs on linkedin right now.
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.
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 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
I dunno I have 96GB of RAM and I still get the whole "system dies due to resource exhaustion" thing. Yesterday I managed to somehow crash DWM from handle exhaustion. Man, people really waste resources....
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.
I've already described above what the browser's behavior is. That your browser works differently is good for you; I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There are also other downsides that this other behavior does not fix, mentioned in sibling comments
This is not a chrome problem but an OS problem. Android does a much better job here by comparison. Desktop Linux is simply not well optimized for low RAM users.
Reclaiming memory is not free.
It's better not to use 2.4G RAM in the first place. Imagine LinkedIn isn't so hostile to users and instead actually cares about user experience.
It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other applications' files.
This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
Linux supports it too through madvise():
and Does Chrome use it, though?I want my compiler, language server IDE, to do that not LinkedIn
Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you’re talking about real RAM issues.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
I use a Mac which has really good memory management but still seeing that 10 GB of my SSD is clogged up with useless crap just because modern development systems are complete and utter crap feels bad.
March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature comfort features like loading in chat history from the server, mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake. The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people don't even consider what memory is.
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.
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.
Step 0- don't use a browser created by an ad company
I rarely use Linkedin but for my new app that I'm building the Linkedin is good platform to find out & engage possible customers so last few weeks I'm using it more. But man.. so sorry for people using it daily. Such a bad experience. I didn't surprise it takes that amount of RAM because every component in the page is laggy, you feel very unsafe. You're getting some error but you have no idea what it is. Don't wanna mention about the content at all. But like many people mentioned in the comments it's still the number one place for their work
I was searching for jobs using it a while ago and it consumed 80 percent of my iphone’s battery in under 40 minutes. It’s quite impressive. Not even highest end mobile games can do that.
They do other unholy things. I don’t know what, but consistently while playing music on my HomePod opening that site makes it stutter within a few minutes, fully stop working shortly afterwards and it needs a reboot to work again.
It also constantly uses about 50% of my CPU.
I only open LinkedIn... very rarely. When done, I just close it.
Don't scroll. Don't read stories. Don't do anything except message recruiters. Get them into email or a phone call. That's it. Fuck LinkedIn.
Not for me even if I completetly turn off uBlock https://files.catbox.moe/5a3bcq.png
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.
Don’t go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet website. Problem solved.
This isn't all that accurate. Unless Chrome only presents the private working set, this will include shared or sharable memory.
uBlock Origin -> My Filters:
Closed mine ages ago, along with most of my social media. No need for it, never was a need for it.
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.
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.
But there’s so many good games out there. Check out Zachtronics/Coincidence.games for some cool examples. Walk to a bookstore and get one of their many sudoku/puzzle books. Check out the App Store for some puzzle games. Write your own puzzle game!
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
whatttt
For sure there is more to what they just show
Github hogging cpu when js is turned off
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
And also keeps showing a red dot on the feeds tab every time you navigate to another screen, so that they can trick you with interacting with one more ad.
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
Beyond being useful for a quick check on someone’s career history, LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters pretending to be experts in things while the actual experts never post about the subject on LinkedIn.
And? Who uses (is used by) Linkedin?
LinkedIn is full of crap. Unfortunately is the only way to get recruiters visibility.
linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again
If I were PM at LinkedIn, I would do some cross social network info pollination to correct the LinkedIn. I would promote power users from bluesky or twitter who are technical or otherwise have lot of good analysis. Experts are prolific users and make use of Zipf’s Law to promote good content. Also through graph analysis, the users who get followed by power users will be promoted as well. Whatever you might say about Instagram and Tiktok, their recommendation system is SOTA. I even love ads from Instagram, they know exactly what kind of ads I might engage with.
It's not as bad as JIRA, although JIRA is marginally more useful than LinkedIn.
Jira’s problem is that it’s effectively free-form, and there are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams - one using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs with story points, and a third using waterfall with time estimates - all in the same project, with the same workflows, and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your team are generating reports from.
That and its dog slow, of course.
Jira (hasn’t been JIRA for a long time) is great when you have proper Jira governance in place, with admins who say “no, you can’t have a new custom field, use this one with a new context”, configure good workflow transitions with validators and conditions, design appropriate create, view and edit screens (instead of using the same one for three separate operations), etc. The problem is always crappy administration, not Jira. Jira can be fantastic when properly managed.
kinda offtopic but as somehow currently outgrowing trellos capabilities, do you have any good suggestions instead of Jira?
The answer is unfortunately jira.
Gitlab has pretty good Kanban functionality. People tend to hate Jira but there aren't a lot of great alternatives
Linear
Both of them are equally garbage.
> i will get negative karma again
"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
[flagged]
well it is a microslop product, what do you expect?
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.