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?
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, and from genuine employers, and that means something that recruiters will use to find us.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
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" ...`
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)
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!
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
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, and from genuine employers, and that means something that recruiters will use to find us.
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...
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.
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.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
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.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
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.
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.
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.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
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 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.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
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.
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.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
https://www.cringebot3000.com/
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
This works.
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.
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
But 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.
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 site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
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 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.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
The 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.
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!
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).
Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?
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.
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.
Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post was actually the cause?
Amusingly, this was someone high up in HR.
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.)
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 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.
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.
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
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 is to do with websites essentially baking in their own browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as possible.
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.
Its quite insane
>> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.
Makes no sense to me...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
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.
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.
Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.
Why not?
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
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'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" ...`
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
That and its dog slow, of course.
"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