I use this daily and just wanted to highlight two downsides:

• 1 some instances are quite slow in response

• 2 some instances are non English, so everything except search results might be unreadable unless you know that language

The second one has been happening less frequently recently though, not sure if there are just more English instances or some other reason behind it.

Damnit Derek!

I’ll say it straight forward, if you are considering an academic career you are just shooting yourself in the leg with this. It is already hard to make it in academia, using a pseudonym and expecting people to believe you or check additional proof it is actually your publication is not going to fly.

If you already know that you won’t stay in academia but go to industry it might not be much easier. People won’t care as much about publications but they still look good on your CV.

Ah, also just doing a PhD might make you end up in some publicly available database where your thesis will end up in. And I strongly doubt any reputable university would give you a PhD under a pseudonym.

The software updates are maybe not an argument when it comes to degoogling? Then it depends if the OS they plan to use still sends updates.

Well honestly, that’s too soft. They did not decide. They were pushed by regulators to follow the law. So bowing to pressure is more appropriate in my view.

You got 2 apps on your phone???

…sorry, could not resist

Yes, but people were claiming they had a good reason not to be FOSS. They could have easily just not mentioned it at all but instead they name a reason that isn’t an issue for many others.

If you still want to use a VPN style adblocker, I moved from Blokada some time ago to Adaway. Works the same.

Which today though does not mean that if you pay for something like this that you are not also the product. Double-dipping for companies, so to say.

So I am definitely not trying to defend LinkedIn but a lot of arguments you make are basically: other sites or services can do that too. Which isn’t a great argument to make since monopoly on these will not lead to more usefulness.

The last one I can give a counterargument. You should care because if you are looking for a new job you can try and find people to talk to, which can help figure out if a job you didn’t consider so far might be interesting. Maybe the area you work in is not helped with that. I work in R&D and had students reach out to me via LinkedIn just to ask about what kind of work I do at this company and what does the day to day look like. Now not everyone will be happy to talk and not everyone will give you useful answers but then you just go and message the next person.

Downside of this is that LinkedIn makes it artificially difficult to just message people, either promoting their paid subscription or not allowing you to contact people because they are 3rd rate connections or worse. So that’s crap again but if you get enough relevant connections this might be better. You can also get sneaky about it and just email a person on their work account by sending a message to firstname.lastname@companyurl.TLD. This you can also only do if you know who works where.

To be fair, company culture is a lot of self promotion. But there are OK ways to do that and terrible ways, what you describe is more of a terrible one.

I think its OK if you are looking for a job, yes. Not fully minus the feeds really, because I used to also see a lot of people advertising jobs in th feeds or saying they are leaving their jobs and looking for something. That is drowned out slowly by those shitty posts I mentioned.

Its been turning into Facebook for a while now. I used to have a relevant work feed, but more and more I have these feel good posts and even memes popping up.

Oh, and its pretty toxic in content too. Had this post the other day where some woman director of some company posted how tough it was to lose her husband to some disease, how tough it is to take care of the kids alone, finishing with how it helps her to be engrossed in her work.

Like half of that was about her work actually. A very very weird read.

Another post on woman’s day celebrating the working women who open their laptop again (for work) when the kids are in bed.

Such things, just ugh. And those gets lots of likes too.

I used to see such things only in the linkedinlunatic subreddit , but now I see it my feed.

But you don’t have to worry if you got nothing to hide… /s

Holy shit, reading that name unlocked some very old memories!

But so does newpipe? Or do I remember that incorrectly…

Of course not. Do they have a reason to?