Is LinkedIn worth keeping?

[hans]

I am genuinely wondering why I'm still on LinkedIn and if I should keep it. The feed page is like Facebook nowadays. Lots of circlejerk, plain commercial advertisements, etc. Maybe its great for "public speakers" or sales people to get a kick from their delusional circle of influence.. (they appear as "recommended" from nowhere) but to me plain social media garbage. For this reason I ditched Facebook about 10 years ago. I also don't like my data being in the hands of a large corporation.

However, in contrast to Facebook, to me I perceive LinkedIn to have some value from e.g. network connections, jobs section or heck.. try to play a game with recruiters to snatch a better deal. However are these points really worth it vs the cons?

It's not like I'm chatting with my professional network on a daily basis. In reality, it never happens spontaneousely..

The recruiters are a hassle. Some random kid straight from corporate BS school with zero people knowledge.. giving sparse details on a job that probably doesn't exists.. in the wrong area.. the wrong industry.. the wrong pay.. only to catch a commision. Their 2nd InMail always asks for a phone number so they can keep on bugging you for years to come.

So that leaves only the jobs search section of their website. But I wonder if that's really a high enough USP against competing vacancy sites.. or doing my own scouting for interesting companies/jobs and applying directly instead.

I wonder what guys think?

[madires]

LinkedIn is great for training SPAM filters. They had so many data scraping incidents that my email address should be on most address lists. This is the only good thing about them, seriously. As with other social media platforms there's also scam and foreign intelligence services looking for opportunities. It might be useful for finding a new job, but be careful.

[bd139]

https://old.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/

[tggzzz]

I joined linkedin when it first appeared. Seemed like a good idea.

Then acquaintances started to repeatedly request that I "recommend them". Er no. "Recommendation" implies more than "have talked to them on the phone".

I left pretty soon afterwards.

I've recently rejoined to see what's happened to colleagues who have now retired. I get a lot of spam from "people" (and I use that term loosely) advertising things/themselves.

Only tolerable since it is easy to train spamfilters

[tom66]

I maintain a LinkedIn account but rarely contribute.

I have gotten all of my previous jobs through the platform, besides the very first one, so I regard it as being useful from that end, but it is mostly recruiter spam these days.

[joeqsmith]

Worth keeping?  How about is it worth setting up an account?  I never joined.

[Stray Electron]

  I never joined.

   X2.  SHORT answer to OP:  No! 

   Linkedin is about as useful as Change.Org; it only exists to collect your personal data.

[tszaboo]

I got my last 2 jobs from contacts/headhunters on linkedin, and both time I got a salary bump.
If I scale those raises for the next 20 years, then my linkedin page has about the same monetary value as an asset as my house.