LinkedIn, how I loathe thee
LinkedIn sits firmly in the “it has to exist, but wouldn’t life be better if it didn’t have to?” quadrant of existence.
For the basics of a network of connections, and a way for others to find me, it works. But every time I close the tab, I can’t help thinking “this should work better than it does”.
- The endless scrolling encourages mindless interaction. There’s no “end” - it’s never “done” and finished with, so when is “enough” is a decision I have to make
- The random nature of the feed makes it virtually impossible not to lose things unless you you remember to bookmark something immediately
- Once a post has gone, you’re stuck with trying to remember enough detail to search
- Speaking of which, LinkedIn search sucks, and sucks badly
- Feed filtering is more unreliable than not, so the default is drown in garbage
- The feed doesn’t appear to prioritise your contacts (I assume to drive more connections)
All of this creates the feeling that the interaction patterns are optimised for some product manager’s perception of “engagement”, rather than my utility.
Fixing this shouldn’t be hard. There’s no reason why a useful UI can’t coexist with the river of broetry from the hustle pros and Gary Vee wannabes.
Provide a reverse-chronological feed of content from my contacts, and when it’s all read, it’s done - basically the pattern of Twitter before Elon Musk burned it to the ground.