A little while ago, I deleted all social media apps from my phone. I wanted to reduce the useless screen time I waste during the day and deplete my dopamine. But I forgot to delete one app, which I realized weeks or months later. That app was LinkedIn.
I began thinking, “Why didn’t I notice this sooner?” Then it hit me: I don’t enjoy LinkedIn at all. In this post, I will explain why I personally don’t consume LinkedIn content.
PS. This is my take as a software developer and is totally subjective. I still use LinkedIn from time to time, engage on it but it’s drastically less than I used to. You could be enjoying LinkedIn and spending hours each day on it, and that’s okay. Good for you.
No Useful Programming Content
The programming advice people give on LinkedIn is fluffy and lacks depth. It’s mostly something catchy to get likes. More than once, I saw the same guy recycling his content from the year before, just with different letters put together or a different picture. Why is this necessary?
Twitter Does Tech Better
In contrast, Twitter excels at tech content. I love consuming insightful posts about technology, so here’s a sad story:
A few weeks ago, I purposefully opened LinkedIn, trying to find a specific tech-related post that really covered the given topic. After getting bored, I switched to Twitter. The second tweet I saw was from a teenager who had implemented his own compiler for a language he wrote, with a brief explanation of why he did it and a link to a detailed write-up.
Copycats
If you write a good post on LinkedIn, you can be sure that at least 1,000 people will write about it in the following months. It’s not just a repost; they actually post it and try to act smart. I would just like to ask why?
Linkedin Feels Fake
Everyone is just exaggerating everything. People working at McDonald’s have “top 1% of fry cooks” in their title. And no, it’s not sarcastic.
In the end, LinkedIn’s programming content leaves much to be desired. For insightful discussions and real-world projects, I’ll stick to Twitter and other communities that value substance over theorizing.