I Built a LinkedIn Slop Detector in 90 Minutes
LinkedIn Larpmaxxing
The author rants about LinkedIn's performative culture, where every other post is a generic computer vision project, like hand tracking or pothole detection. To prove how trivial these are, he builds his own YOLO-based detector for such posts in 90 minutes, from data collection to training. The real issue, he argues, is that LinkedIn rewards looking interesting over actual skill, so everyone claps and moves on.
It’s a platform built around selling yourself for a job, so what survives isn’t skill; it’s looking interesting. It’s just LARPing productivity.
- mawadev
I joined a call once to meet a guy and he was all energetic and speaking in tongues of an LLM hitting epic one liners and I thought he was just a coke addict. Turns out his reality is basically linkedin. Like how the hell can you be like this unironically?
- rietta
Slightly off topic. I've had exactly one consulting engagement come from LinkedIn, back in 2013. Someone met with a VC, was told they needed a Ruby on Rails developer, found me, and it was off to the races. That was it. No lead since, in any format. I paid for Premium for a while and eventually stopped.
I have connections, and friends occasionally like a comment when I share something. I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform, even in the comments. That makes it really hard to share a good blog post.
Honestly, I get more engagement on Facebook. My mom and in-person friends find what I do slightly interesting, at least when the algorithm decides to show it. Same story there, though. Links to a blog get buried compared to native content.
- shantanujoshi
Wonderful read thank you!
- kleiba2
I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
- MisterMunchkin
You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
- gadders
Don't hate the player, hate the game. If it gets them a better job and more money, good luck to them.
- stronglikedan
[delayed]
- jmathai
LinkedIn is truly an odd place. I think it’s more performative than Instagram.