I came off social media in 2014 and haven’t regretted it. I still read aggregated news but I don’t participate. I do remain a member of Linkedin so I can keep in contact with former work colleagues as there is always that case of - If only John Smith was still here, he would be able to fix this undocumented process. I don’t post or participate on Linkedin either but the site is so pervasive, it fires notifications off all the time. What annoys me is that the majority is nothing to do with my ‘network’ or profile, it is just memes and advertisements masked as “promoted” content. The company has to make money somehow right? well I’m a premium member and you still cant turn this garbage off, it is a good job I got this membership as a free benefit of something I actually use else I’d be furious that this would happen even after paying. People like to blame the feed ‘algorithm’ but it is the users pushing any meme with the most tenuous connection to a business principal to get interactions and Linkedin is milking that. I do not understand how people derive value from the platform, but given that I do find a minor use for it, I have found a way around it.
First, don’t engage, disable al notifications besides private messages and network activity, and don’t view the Home page.
Second, using ublock add the following filter
1 | linkedin.com##:xpath(//span[text()[contains(.,'Suggested')]]/../../../../../../../../../../..) |
The result should be that if you happen to load the Home page based on a notification and the content was suggested or promoted then it just wont render that section of the page. You can still see activity of your network based on visiting their profile.
Force advertisements and nonsense memes on me even on a paid profile? Yes I am going to ensure I never see your content.
On the same subject of changing things up, the Stylus browser extension together with the following config https://userstyles.world/style/1898/hacker-news-dynamic-dark turns Hacker News into Dark mode. I’m still unsure why this isn’t available on that site by default but this extension is fantastic for forcing a dark mode where one doesn’t currently exist. My eyes really struggle with years of bright screens, plus it saves energy so, win win!