Why Is It So Hard to Share Links on LinkedIn?

I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it didn't exist, but have a profile because you have to play the game. I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is what you did (a short resume) and your connections number. If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. The quality of those connections does not matter to the people who look at that number.

So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with 19 out of 20 users there against their will.

Not only that. LinkedIn is now plagued by these little diagrams posted and re-re-posted that tell absolutely nothing about a topic, useful just to some people that only want to get traction/attention on the platform. Then you have all these annoying suggestions of topics that at least for me 99% of the time I'm absolutely not interested in wasting my time on. Suggestions and posts that are from someone on the other side of the planet that I have absolutely no relation to. When I negatively posted about these diagrams, after few days my critic "magically" dissapeared from the platform. Gone. Then you are also invited to answer random questions I have zero interest on. I lost the count how many times I clicked "Not interested in topic" only to see it coming back over and over again. The list goes on and on. It is an absolutely rotten platform. Many many years ago LinkedIn was something completely different, and was quite enjoyable to use. Big companies really know how to ruin products.

> “Back in the day, people used to sort of get around LinkedIn stuff by just dropping a link in the comments and saying, ‘Hey, check out the comments,’” Jung explains. “Problem is, LinkedIn actually parses if you're the first person to comment in your post, if you're the first person to add a link, even if you actually write, like, the website, but remove the .com and say ‘dot com,’ this algorithm is on to you. It's immediately going to take your post and downrank it.”

Is that really true? It sounds like the kind of superstition that shows up in opaque systems like LinkedIn and TikTok all the time. But maybe it IS true?

I'd love to see experimental confirmation of this, but it's hard to design transparent experiments like that without the risk of burning a valuable LinkedIn account.

I've never been a big user of LinkedIn but started writing the occasional blog post a few months back after my employer said I needed to increase my "external eminence". I was pleasantly surprised at the number of reactions and comments I got. More recently I have shared a few external links along with some commentary on them and hardly gotten any reactions or comments. I guess that explains it.

Cancer on top of cancer. Please someone better this platform and end it.

I have no trouble sharing links. Even multiple links in one post, although the first one will define the preview. Nor do I have a problem sharing images and including urls in the post body. Nor do I understand why people only share the link in the top comment.

What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful?

I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an expert is how I get work.

The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group... one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.

To me, LinkedIn is another social media website where I find people posting achievements every month and get the feeling that I'm leftover with me doing PhD and wasting my time doing some less cool research. I find people getting titles, posting about their new certificated, moving to another job. Some are participating in some events in their company that I don't know about because the only events we have is seminars with some free food. I also find people from the same field of research posting about a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm that is going to change the world. All of that while I sat down and debug some weird CUDA bugs and do fits for a data that will measure some elementary particle and improve our physics understanding of the world (which actually seems much less cool that my writing made it sound). I don't know if that is just me or that people on LinkedIn are really those super cool people who have all these achievements and cool stuff to share. I updated my LinkedIn twice in a decade. One of them after I got my Masters, and the other one was reposting a post by mistake.

Yes, I hate LinkedIn and I hate that many people in industry and academia expects you to have presence there. And I hate that networking is the first thing you should focus on to have a job.

I don't want to be famous or influencer or grow an audience. I'm not interested about all marketing yourself aspect and keeping track of how do algorithms changes affect that. I really wish that I didn't have to create an account. I don't like visiting the algorithmic timeline with this all probably fake/not-very realistic posts.

The UX of LinkedIn is terrible. Once I went into a futile debate with a support person (yes, it was that ancient time couple of years ago), so I had to conclude the 'support' is even worse. I do not use it that much like when I thought it would be good for finding a job (I did eventually, but not there) and memories fade, but I recall that searching for keywords is like triggering a random number generator, search profile gives notifications about dozens of new positions but when I trigger manually the very same search then it is 0 results, and whenever I did something then I got a notification that I just did that, very useful thanks, and it stayed there until you manually close it, also you have more and more otherwise, very annoying. Feels like genuine Microsoft quality.

I deleted my linkedin account around the beginning of covid and haven't thought about it since. That place was a disaster zone.

> an organic audience on LinkedIn

Is there such a thing? Are there people actually interested in reading Thought Leader Posts?

> the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success

I have no idea how one defines such a thing, but is... is it at all correlated with anything? Or is it just warm fuzzy feelings, equivalent to Reddit points?

Anyway, this reinforces me view that LinkedIn is a bad company that has not fundamentally changed its dark patterns in any significant way, and I'll be staying off of it until I'm on the brink of homelessness.

Everything said here about LinkedIn is also true on X.com (Twitter).

As Elon posted in 2023:

> "Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform."

Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1709244708533264592

All of my business comes from Linkedin. I get inbound leads from content I post to Substack. I then promote it with a pithy summary on Linkedin. I don't encounter any of the stuff in this article. I typically get 5-30K views of my posts and have 38K followers. I was in the first cohort of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator program which was held the three months before I launched my SaaS. The secret to hacking the algorithm is no secret. Post original content four times a week. Because my SaaS is a data platform on cybersecurity and 95% of my followers are in cybersecurity I get tremendous engagement. I remember all the hacking community deriding Twitter when it launched. Back then the cool kids were on Digg. Now they are on Twitter deriding LinkedIn where they cannot pose as something they are not.

For people who complain about the LinkedIn feed, I agree it’s almost entirely useless, but I wonder what people would prefer as an alternative? If your answer is “no feed” you can accomplish that by exiting the app when you’re done with it. It’s pretty clear the only purpose for the feed is to deliver ads, but I wonder how much revenue that really makes.

I would prefer the app was rearranged though. It’s core functionalities are 1) update my profile 2) chat with recruiters and 3) search for jobs. It doesn’t need a feed, it doesn’t need a video tab.

Well. I have multiple LinkedIn profiles, a regular one where I list my job history, current company I'm working for, education, achievements etc. I check it from time to time and it's useful like every 5-10 years when I change jobs :)

And a "hustle" account where I promote my website and eventually RIA (registered investment advisor) business. Quantitative finance and trading tutorials on the website, proprietary strategies on the RIA: https://www.aquarianz.com/

Why two accounts? First, I don't particularly want employers to find about my hustle (although I don't particularly care) but mostly, I did got my hustle account suspended. Maybe someone didn't like what I said and ratted me, maybe LinkedIn algorithm marked me as spam, I dunno. I did manage to get my account reinstated but yeah, I don't don't wanna lose my "putting bread on the table" account.

I had read somewhere that LinkedIn does this to favor content that's on LinkedIn itself rather than going to a third party website. So if the links are going to LinkedIn itself, they won't be penalized.

I personally do find this to be a hassle. E.g., how should I cite references that are outside LinkedIn?

Now that LinkedIn has some popularity, I think this Link policy should be reversed.

And what's with needing to Like your own post? I refuse to do that in spite of it supposedly making the 'algorithm' happier.

Between Google and Yahoo, et al, the Philoposhy Google search held was to let the users get what they were looking for and move out as soon as possible, whereas the other search providers were making portals to offer more and more on their own website. I cannot say whether this should apply to LinkedIn as well, however, surely alternate approaches have been there.

I honesstly don't understand why anyone posts on LinkedIn. It seems like such a pick me move from anyone who can't build an audience on Twitter. The only people who I see post on LInkedIn are wanna-be "thought leaders" and people who are looking for a job.

LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social proof and never think about it otherwise.

As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.

I only go to LinkedIn when I feel the urge to cringe. Everything about it is utterly cringeworthy.

Even the marketing tools (which I was forced to use by a marketing company we hired) were so bad they made my skin crawl.

The link related functionality only adds to the hell of this vile, spammy platform.

They want to maximize the time you spend on linkedin, one way is to make it less likely you'll click on a link to take you somewhere else.

I'm bemused by the fact that there are people who actually engage with LinkedIn.

Do people here know that LinkedIn now has games. Currently for me I only see word games but I think they are a/b testing more games probably for mobile too (saying this based on a tweet I saw).

Why is so fking hard to use the web version of the site on my mobile. Constant popups to force installing the app. I dont want apps. I only want websites. I hate you linkedin product owners.

Everyone I know just uses it as a glorified Rolodex and recruiter messaging platform.

Hell company policy literally prohibits me from posting to it. (Whether this includes likes is widely debated)

Just a continuation of internet companies breaking open standards.

Hijacking copy paste in apps is pointless now that phone ocr on screenshots works so well to seemlessly reenable text selection and copy.

In defense of linkedin: there are different strains of toxicity and malevolence running rampant on every other major social media platform (body shaming, bullying, harassment, predation, scams, various kinds of radicalization, etc.), and many of those strains are rather subdued on linkedin.

Linkedin, of course, has some strains of its own (e.g. workism), but, surprisingly, I find it to be by far the healthiest social network out there.

That's probably owing more to self censorship than to moderation or algorithmic curation: your "professional" persona is more on display here than anywhere else.

So, yeah, sure, seems reasonable to suggest that linkedin has an anti-link bias, and the incentives for that bias are fairly intuitive. That being said, is it actually a bad thing, or does it also function as another tenet of their quiet but, in my mind, reasonably effective moderation approach?

Honestly, regulators should probably step in already when it comes to anti competitive practices on social media sites. It's clear they're doing everything in their power to kill off the open web and stop people using their platforms for anything other than self posts, and a few future legal guidelines saying platforms with X number of users or more can't limit posts based on corporate interests would do a lot to fix it.

Of course, LinkedIn's other issue is that the only content I've seen do well there is meaningless fluff about 'the hustle' and 'how millionaires/large companies have the right mindset to succeed'. If you're a Tony Robbins/TedX kind of person, then LinkedIn's probably a great place. If you actually want to share your knowledge about a subject you're qualified in/have experience in, then you're better off on Twitter/Substack/Hacker News/niche specific forums and Discord servers.

I do think Cory Doctorow has done an unwitting disservice with the word "enshitification". It's great to name a phenomenon, but after that it serves to hide more than it reveals. Far less often discussed is the emotional dynamics around 'social media'.

Way I see it, most all BigTech social media is bitterness and resentment. The platform owners have as much contempt for the users as the users have for the platform.

That is no basis for a 'community'.

I hate LinkedIn from the bottom of my heart. It’s absolute crap, just utter crap.

It’s exactly where all the LLM, SEO, “LeadGen” spam goes to and comes from.

Social networks are awful but I think I despise this one the most.

Because LinkedIn is a cancer.

Is it just me, or is LinkedIn giving priority to job postings from M$ and their subsidiaries?

I get the impression that they are, and I'm a little skeptical of the legality of it

My only guess as to why people put so much effort in trying to use platforms that are so obviously user-hostile, is the fear of missing out — not being where everyone else is.

If the company you're applying for cares whether you're on LinkedIn, consider withdrawing your application.

You know, there is this maddening trend on HN to bemoan how networks owned by large centralized corporations with profit motives enshittify everything (Skype, Reddit, LinkedIn)

But then as soon as an open, decentralized alternative not driven by the profit motive is introduced, it’s knee-jerk criticized and downvoted. How do you expect anything to change if you won’t support any solutions? (Other than, let’s use the government regulations / antitrust / whatever).

Here is a free and open alternative that I have been working on for 12 years:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Here is exactly how it would reinvent the profit-driven ecosystem behind the current centralized social networks:

https://qbix.com/ecosystem

It does to LinkedIn, Twitter et al what the Web did to AOL, MSN etc. Putting the control in the hands of the community. Here is what that looks like:

https://qbix.com/communities

And here is an application of the technology in one vertical, that I’m building using it. You can build your own:

https://rational.app

There are other solutions too, like Mastodon and Matrix. I just think they are much further behind and people expect features comparable to Facebook and Twitter, much like they expect the Impossible Burger to be as good as a meat burger as possible before they can switch. It’s not easy, but we need to support open source projects that get that done, rather than tear them apart. Just my 2c.

PS: If anyone with any sort of skills wants to contribute to this, more than happy to talk. My email is greg at the domain qbix.com