Do people actually interact with each other over LinkedIn? The only people I've every talked to are recruiters. I thought it was just a directory of potential employees for recruiters. If people actually do social things on LinkedIn then that's news for me.

After a long time in software development, I'm now a sales engineer, and LinkedIn is a very different place when your weeks involve interactions with C-suite and marketing types. I find LinkedIn to be pretty absurd, and I'm never going to (or want to) compete with the people who share life-affirming abstract business nonsense in a vertical video shot from their car, but I get a surprising amount of interaction from my screeds about the ecommerce ecosystem. I'm not using LinkedIn to boost my personal brand, but I do use it to talk about the Saas ecommerce platform we sell (because a lot of people hate Magento and find Shopify doesn't suit their needs)

A coworker has at times referred to me as a LinkedIn Shitpost Memelord, although I don't use image macros/memes. I just share information about a very niche corner of the internet, and it's way more effective than advertising. It actually serves as an outlet for the kind of writing I used to do, and sometimes still do, on forums - but instead of being about music and bands, it's about commerce and software. It's weird, but it scratches an itch I guess.

I do see more 'social' posts on LinkedIn, and it's pretty close to the worst of the net. It's like YouTube comments, except you can see the people who post them all wear suits in their photos. A surprisingly large number of people who like & reply to self-help garbage, effusively, as though Gary Vee's latest you-can-do-it schlock saved them from offing themselves at the water cooler that morning.

I see some people using LinkedIn in an attempt to boost their public relevance in their fields, but I only see recruiters interact with their content. Hence, nobody cares about the content.

There is a very small subset of people who do.

There's also companies who are posting things like "Hey we won some irrelevant award yay us." Or more likely, employees posting this about their own as a public signal that they are "all in" on "company."

It's mostly for signalling for especially aspirational people. But generally speaking, 99% of the utility of LinkedIn is to have a public resume so recruiters can find you. At least in my case.

My linked in is only for recruiters. I rarely update it. Every time I go on it I get kind of sick I guess? Like I can't really say what makes me dislike it, maybe it feels corporate? It feels like everything there is just to promote yourself? Idk but I hate it.

I think LinkedIn suffers from people treating it as an extension of a CV or prospectus, which probably isn't an unfair assumption on their part. Which means not introspecting failures, only commenting or reacting on banal platitudes, and not saying anything that might be remotely controversial for an employer.

This is sad, but as someone who will happily admit failures, frustrations and annoyances on LinkedIn I have been in interviews where people have dinged me heavily for it. So far these have all been quite toxic work environments - maybe you could count it as a useful filter, but I understand given this why people feel pressure to do little more than copy/paste the same Oleg posts ad infinitum.