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#linkedin#content#don#more#job#slop#something#writing#human#same
Discussion (101 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
- If you're a job seeker, most of the jobs are fake for pretend growth optics. - If you're a senior level or executive you're targeted non-stop by sales people telling you about "the conversations they're having ..." - If you're looking for actual thought leadership or interesting information, you're bombarded with random tik-tok style videos, totally contrived stories and "lessons" to how ordering at Starbucks is like managing cloud infrastructure
It's turned into a completely artificial and useless community because Microsoft chased the same growth and engagement metrics as Facebook did, now no one considers it to be a place for serious discussion.
They could even make it more useful if they'd put actual thought in their paid Sales Navigator product, currently I find it hard to make it useful without better filtering and blacklisting mechanisms.
Though I'm put in a strange situation with the EU intent to roll out age verification, as LinkedIn might force me to verify through Thiel's Persona platform. Which I very much would not want to do, and have to plan for some form of exit strategy while still having a way to network professionally.
As far as AI content goes, the platform is drowning in it. I can only hope that once the AI Act disclosure requirements comes into play at least I can flag content that is not AI tagged.
For reasons unknown, LinkedIn seems to have decided that I’m not me a few months ago and blocked my account, though it would apparently be willing to reconsider as long as I provide whatever it is that Persona wants these days. (Evidently contacting me directly via my company — where my role as one of the directors is a matter of public record and my email address was listed in my LinkedIn profile — was too much trouble. :sigh:) Since I have no interest in giving any personal information to Persona, I no longer use LinkedIn and remain blissfully ignorant of all the AI-driven content that I keep seeing complaints about, but I do miss the occasional good news stories about people I actually know. I should probably send a formal GDPR request at some point, since my profile is probably quite misleading by now.
Maybe, but it continues to be one of the best places to find work.
I used to have decent luck with Who is hiring threads but not recently as there's relatively little for mid level engineers.
I hardly doubt it is legit. I do not know why they are doing it, are they scraping data or just showing off, some are plain scammers but it is visible and HN doesn’t help by not allowing discussions about it.
My suggestion is to have a separate discussion thread so people can be aware of it and share their experiences.
Yep. My LinkedIn feed is now polluted with the same political, rage content that made me exit Facebook 10 years ago. It sucks.
I barely go on there any more its gotten so bad.
Though LinkedIn really pissed me off a few weeks ago when it popped up something saying I shouldn't apply for a job because it doesn't match my profile well.
I agree, though in the context of this thread I'd add that LinkedIn was already useless before LLMs.
The site was already lost to nearly infinite corporate bro platitude posting long before LLMs started to see widespread use.
LLMs likely increased the overall amount of worthless posts on LinkedIn by a significant amount, but I don't think they changed the percentage as very nearly 100% were already worthless for a decade or so now.
Boy, was it controversial. I could not believe how hard some people were pushing back in the comments.
Quoting from myself there:
"When you write your own words, you are forging your own voice. It is distinctive, conveys your unique world view, and connects with others in a way that is specific to you alone.
If you use an AI tool to write for you instead, you lose all of that."
That seems blindingly self-evident to me, but apparently a lot of folks disagree.
Something else I said:
"Writing is hard because thinking is hard. When you write, you forge your thoughts, distinctions, mental models and even feelings into the clarity of precision that the written word demands. When you outsource your writing to an AI tool, you lose more than you know."
I guess a lot of people don't want to bother with all that.
Also there are so many folks, especially on LI, who don't even have fluent English, or decent grammar, and therefore behind the filter of an erudite LLM is an excellent place to stay, pull some levers, and plop out some really compelling word-salad.
That is just the way of the world today. Whether people are doing minimal processing, through SpellCheck or Grammarly, or just prompting an LLM to generate walls of text, they're using assistance to actually find their voice, or filter their own weak voice through something that will win friends and influence more people than they ever could on their own.
Nobody thinks they are about to read an actual analysis of some industry relevant development. People aren't there to provide advice about how to "connect to your true self" either.
You post on LinkedIn to say "hey I'm alive, and I'm around for this kind of thing". Even if you are just commenting, people will see you. When you post something, people look at your CV, and they are either going to offer you to interview for a job or other business opportunity.
The actual content matters very little. Most of it is people saying "hey I'm still a lawyer, don't forget me next time you need one".
In the last few years I have been going back to RSS feeds, subscribing to blogs I like. What I lose there is that I don't get suggestions for blogs I don't already know.
I genuinely wonder if there could be an opportunity for webrings there. Like blogs could have an RSS feed of "blogs I follow" by the author, and I could choose to follow them or at least visit them and selectively subscribe.
The thing is that many times, there is one article I like in a blog but not necessarily the rest. So more than "blogs I follow", it could be "articles I liked". So that if I subscribe to the RSS feed of someone, I get exposed to articles they "bookmarked", and eventually it can help me discover blogs I want to subscribe to.
Or maybe it all exists already. Or used to exist, probably.
It's bleak out there, on the internet.
We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.
Either the product is something I was curious about and hadn't decided to spend time and money on yet, in which case a negative review might save me the trouble, or it's something I've already done and formed my own opinion about, in which case I'm probably not reading reviews.
> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too
One relatively minor counterpoint: amazon has seemed to resolve their review squatting issue. Several years ago, there were companies selling one type of product and getting 4* reviews, then swapping all of the product details for a completely unrelated product, presumably with a huge markup. So you might think you were buying a 4* say, hot water thermos, but if you actually read the reviews, they would all be for a USB charger or something. All the recent reviews would be much lower.
I haven't seen this in a while now. Or maybe they're just better at it :/
The problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.
I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).
Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.
Now, AI is participating in that process. It reads human words, and some of those words end up getting used more based on the algorithm, and then people read those words and copy some of them. This will feed back in to the AI as it ingests more content, and the feedback cycle is complete.
I think that's kinda wonderful, actually.
Skullface from MGS5 predicted this. Hideo Kojima sends his regards.
It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but still interesting the extent to which this type of content is viewed as the business opportunity for him.
I did the same but I'm aware that LinkedIn is probably how people got in touch with me in the past, eventually leading to a job. So I'm waiting before not having looked back until the next time I need a job :) Regardless, it's not the world I want to live in anymore so you just gotta disconnect.
Even posting a polite congratulatory comment to someone you admire is now also being exploited for self gain and views.
> our latest AI detection model, which achieves a 0.01% false positive rate
But, then in their linked article on false positives, they suggest you should have something far larger than most social media posts:
> The text is long enough (over a couple hundred words)
That said, I think there are two things worth noting about that site:
1. The content was mostly slop before AI became a thing, AI has just increased the amount of it tenfold. 2. It's still not the worst content on the site. As one check of LinkedIn Lunatics shows all too well, there's a depressingly large number of people who seem to treat the site like a personal diary, and rant about their political views on what's supposed to be a business focused network.
At this point, LinkedIn is basically Twitter/X wearing a suit and tie.
As for the other sites mentioned... yeah, those track too. Medium and Reddit were already being gamed like there was no tomorrow before AI entered the picture, now it's just become even easier for the parasites to flood them with garbage. Twitter/X is basically the wild west at this point, and Substack seems to appeal pretty heavily to the types of people that absolutely love AI and everything about it.
I started to see articles about mycorrhizal fungi pop up on sites and LLMs. In January of 2026 an evolutionary biologist won a prize regarding the fungi, there were some interviews and media items surrounding it. But then I could trace the original media items to AI content aggregators, which led to other AI generated posts about mycorrhizal fungi, and some of that entered LLM training data, causing LLMs to bring up the topic.
And here I am, a human, writing about it, which may get consumed into training pipelines and help disseminate the idea into the future even further.
https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/ai_detector_fails/blob/main/... - I posted this link in another thread the other day. I might do more of these tests in the upcoming days and put universal jailbreaks for people to fool these 'AI detectors'.
[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...
On Instagram, I'll get fed "real" content, but you read the description and it's this giant 3-4 paragraph thing that I don't bother to read because I know with certainty that it's AI slop. Before AI, the descriptions of sports videos or meme videos were 2 sentences, now they're entire theses.
The only people left reading this crap are people that still haven't caught up with the concept of AI slop
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgoo
1) Glorified Rolodex
2) Place too see which of my peers got promoted or moved dormant
3) Source material for /r/linkedinlunatics
Reading the crap in the feed has never been a thing
Of course, I invariably found those LLM posts to be vacuous and pointless and so it was very easy to begin skimming right past them as I figured out they were cut from the same cloth.
To LinkedIn's credit, though: in 2020 I landed "my pandemic job", a dream job that was 100% remote (thanks to the lockdowns) and had a 100% flexible schedule and I had a really great time with the enjoyable work I was doing.
This job was somehow landed through LinkedIn. To this day, I cannot recall how or when I applied to the company. But I know I was filling out "1-Click Apply" forms there, and I had splashed up my involvement with the community college (though I would not actually graduate from college for another 3 years) and eventually a recruiter telephoned me to ask if I was interested. And as I was juggling some crazy issues in my personal life along with the pandemic lockdowns, I had to assure the recruiter multiple times: yes I'm interested, no please do not hang up, yes please let us continue with your process!
And it was that sort of tenacity that landed the initial job, and helped me hang on to this employer through M&A and multiple job-role changes. They formally terminated me about 4 times, but I was hired 5 times so it sort of evened out, I suppose.
If it were not for LinkedIn or community college, that recruiter never would've found me. I never would've got that job. My life would be so different, especially my pandemic-lockdown life! So grateful.
Ironically, my employer (EdTech industry) began to 100% embrace LLMs for their students and even offered a front-page LLM for students to ask about their homework, and other assignments. It was definitely crazy times for us, as we were the ones tasked with detecting plagiarism and other types of cheating in that homework, while students were being actively encouraged to tap into LLM-based resources for answers...
Now we have these tech-savvy people generating worthless images and producing generic, emoji-infested takeaways.
We've societally come to the consensus that, we want to reward a race to the bottom slop. passive scrollers by not doing anything about it, active posters by contributing to it.
but there is no way else to win in this game.
A friend of mine writes the most human curated thoughtful newsletter about AI, spending 100 hours. and maybe 200 people know of its existence.
Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.
> rule of three, em dashes, etc
You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.
It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).
> You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.
I did read their paper (which is, by the way, very scant on details), and they trained their classifier in the laziest way possible: here's a chunk of "human-written" text and here's a chunk of "AI-written" text, put them in the right bucket, and do this a zillion times. Literally zero sophistication. Also: what do you think "pattern recognition" is, if not a "classifier"?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/1rm11rs/pangram_c...
What I don't get is how these people don't feel shame in their super obvious blatant use of LLMs for everything, even responding to posts. Maybe it's just me but when I'm attaching things to my name like that, I would absolutely not want everything to be obviously slop shit. Do they think people can't tell or something? I know at least every technical person I know can immediately tell (most of the time) when writing is LLM generated.
If anything, I think people are triggered by it all because it exposes something more deep in people -- most people don't want to admit most of their lives have been wasted in front of a computer. But here we are. So stop complaining and start coming up with more creative uses of AI writing if you have a problem with it.
If I see a post that starts with this type of sentence structure I don't even bother to read any of it. I feelt like this happens on LinkedIn the most, so I'm happy to finally have some data to back up my observations.