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We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.

Im pretty sure that is the current sentiment amongst the judicial body at the moment, Meta and Google have been taking blows left and right. They are also not allowing else to take shape that might make their business model obsolete. With all that we have more and more laws that are redistricting the use of social media by their own bad doing. So if another company wants to offer something innovative, now they have an unfair playing ground due to the enormous amount of regulation that are NOW being implemented. Another words the longer these large tech companies are able to keep their business the harder it is for innovation in this sector from other players. The spill over to polotics is dangerous and counter-productive to innovating technology.

I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.

I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.

So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.

I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.

To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)

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?

Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?

I kind of love Linkedin tbh. It's where you get jobs. They created Kafka. Definitly don't spend a lot of time there though just more if you need a new job.

Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.

>Twitter

X*

social media is only bad if you don't curate what you're looking at. most the platforms these days have features to block posts containing certain words or hashtags.

i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.

I was researching laptops at BestBuy and every page took ages to load, was choppy when scrolling, caused my iPhone 13 mini to get uncomfortably hot in my hand and drained my battery fast. It wouldn’t be noticeably different if they were crypto-mining on my iPhone as I browsed their inventory.

It’s astonishing how bad the experience was.

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...

> 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.

Yes, its sometimes extreme. I often wondered if it was my FF browser, but then i'd switch to Opera or Brave, and i would see the same pattern.

Its quite insane

Hit this exact wall with desktop wrappers. I was shipping an 800MB Electron binary just to orchestrate a local video processing pipeline.

Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.

Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of overhead.

What us this AWS you talk about? :-)

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 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 believe the same applies to many others as well

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 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, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.

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...

You had me almost spit out my coffee. That's hilariously on point.

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.

That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap everything in this weird language.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating

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.

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.

It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look for candidates. That's why.

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).

This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.

https://www.cringebot3000.com/

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.

Sales people using it a lot to scout prospects and understand a person's seniority in an organisation, to target better and prepare a strategy to pitch higher up the chain.

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.

Because after Stackoverflow Jobs went bust, LinkedIn and Xing (in DACH space), are the best ways to reach out to head hunters.

All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.

There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or who are retired and just don't care. They publish some hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth visiting!

As a hiring manager, it’s still the best place to try and find people for a given role.

Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.

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.

This works.

> Out of all places to doomscroll

Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?

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.

I always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.

its a professional contact list is all it is, for me anyway. its where I go to gather intel on a person/company or where I go to lookup a contact for an outreac

Many people use it.

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.

It's legitimately useful for networking, and also for keeping track of professional events.

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.

I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what they're up to these days.

I've gotten two very good jobs from linkedin.

it’s deteriorated to the point where shit-posting is becoming normalized, so it has that going for it

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.

Desperate job seekers. Nobody wants LinkedIn.

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.

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.

The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling

The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:

https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...

I keep an up-to-date profile so recruiters reach out.

It's useless otherwise.

It's great for niche fields or small credentialed network groups. The social media side is complete nonsense, don't use it.

I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.

Yea, I quit recently, got absolutely nothing positive out.

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.

to investigate people of interest

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.

LinkedIn has the most clear para-social relationship. Post and interact to look good for recruiters and future employers.

Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.

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?

There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.

So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?

Goes with the territory of allowing remote code execution arbitrarily and all the time otherwise you won't be able to..

* checks notes *

read text on the internet.

The scroll jacking drives me nuts

Scroll down through jobs, hit next page. Page reloads at bottom of list on next page. Have to scroll up then scroll down, every page.

Baffles me ui like this exists in 2026.

Scroll hijacking like that feels like product brain rot. You can see the trade in plain sight they slow the user down so feed metrics look better, and the side effect is that keyboard nav, accessibility tools, and UI automation all get wierd in ways the people shipping it probably never have to touch.

Older laptops already choke on LinkedIn. Adding fake drag on top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a stalled car.

Imagine the MBA that had this idea. This is peak, distilled Microslop engineering right there.

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.

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.

Yep, I've co-founded several companies and sold them for near $1B in aggregate. My investors and customers are on there, sometimes posting nice things about us. So I give it a thumbs-up and move on. Nothing worth rage-bating about. Mostly I go there to play linkedin.com/games.

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.)

What does that have to do with RAM?

I think I’ve legitimately taken career hits because I cannot stomach it. The culture of LinkedIn is absolutely repulsive to me.

“What trying to protect the feelings of a group of people who will never care about me taught me about b2b sales”

The VCs I know think the LinkedIn feed is a joke, too.

Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.

I give 0 fucks about it.

I know a lot of people who use LinkedIn, and I don't think any of them are happy with their job. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I sell my labor. I don't sell my respect.

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" ...`

Honestly, while I'm sure Linked is bloated, HN in Chrome is taking 204meg for the front page on my MBP. That's with no images, no videos, a minimal amount of css. `document.body.textContent.length` says 4278

Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78

I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture. If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg. Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.

Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.

I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the reason these things take lots of memory is because these things take lots of memory.

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!

Probably a memory leak

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)

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

??? Who outside of startups (in a professional environment) even use Slack?

Most of the heavies in my industry don’t even bother with linkedin. They get plenty of applications on their career pages already I guess. Only really startups (which aren’t really hiring at all) and the occasional blast from a middle weight company. There are more jobs for ai trainer than real jobs on linkedin right now.

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

Reclaiming memory is not free.

It's better not to use 2.4G RAM in the first place. Imagine LinkedIn isn't so hostile to users and instead actually cares about user experience.

It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other applications' files.

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.

I want my compiler, language server IDE, to do that not LinkedIn

Um.

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.

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.

Well if that gets us LinkedIn, we should move as far away from that as possible, and not listen to the people who want real names everywhere.

> destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD

Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post was actually the cause?

LOL you've nailed LinkedinSpeak here

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.

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.

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.

It's not as bad as JIRA, although JIRA is marginally more useful than LinkedIn.

> i will get negative karma again

"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