LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs

I don’t understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it’s all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves (“what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling”).

Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?

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

I’ve also gotten my last few jobs there. It’s great for that. Even if it’s 90% low effort recruiter spam.

It’s also full of “greatest team in the world”, pizza parties, “incredible” training sessions, and “meetings of great minds”. And now it’s turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.

> It’s a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work.

YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.

I’ve not understood why people wanted it to be a social network. That aspect always seemed bizarre to me until it had been true for long enough to stopped being strange. But this doesn’t make sense to me either.

I wouldn’t load the site at work because I wouldn’t want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn’t accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn’t work there anymore. I wouldn’t want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I’m shopping around for a new job, for example.

> I wouldn’t want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I’m shopping around for a new job, for example.

If I’m not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select “show open to being hired only to people outside your company”.

Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren’t really issues.

Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.

A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.

The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.

In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.

Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the one hand, yes – and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren’t aligned with your users, so it fits.

On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling – so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) – and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a ‘premium’ offering.

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 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?

I’ve been using LinkedIn for years. I’m one of those cynics who loath all those “inspirational” and “leadership” posts, but there’s more than that. I’ve met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I’ve met people who later became friends and our kids play together.
I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn’t have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I’m just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I’m often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.

The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It’s perfectly fine to become some influencer if that’s what one wants. It’s equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It’s massive platform, so it’s inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.

I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I only follow people posting these opinions). It’s the closest we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won’t ever meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree) politely with them because I’m CTO of a company and I can’t publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.

The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It’s interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don’t care anymore for looking stupid on internet.

This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!

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.

AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it doesn’t crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB (edit: found it in message history, yes it was “20% of 7GB” = 1.4GB precisely)

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? (Reddit’s new UI and various blogs I’ve come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL’s translator)

Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it’s done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines

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…

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.

Some users might enable these kind of features with their attention, but I don’t think users actually want these features and any kind of “voting” is likely unintentional. It’s manipulation. The fault lies mainly with the company and their carefully planned dark patterns. Ideally, users should punish them by e.g. leaving the platform but there’s friction that may be a bigger problem than the dark patterns (depending on user). And I don’t think there are any platforms that always guarantee good user experience now and in the future.

Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren’t all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.

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

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.

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.

for jobs – indeed is better or other small avenues in their heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through hn)

other avenues – local slack channels.

linkedIn – good for initial connection with strangers you don’t know and might find valuable

linkedIn – good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups

LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to use it….

No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state….rookie mistake

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.

Jira’s problem is that it’s effectively free-form, and there are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams – one using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs with story points, and a third using waterfall with time estimates – all in the same project, with the same workflows, and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your team are generating reports from.

That and its dog slow, of course.