¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

How to Replace Linkedin’s Algorithmic Timeline by Preslav Rachev:

Here is a quick tip on bringing back your sanity when using LinkedIn. Whether you are familiar with algorithmic timelines work or not, it has certainly come to your attention that your home feed page is not chronologically organized. Instead, you see posts from people and organizations that LinkedIn’s content-matching algorithms thought you might be interested in. Those are so good that you’d often catch yourself scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, often, forgetting why you were there in the first place. Not only that but even if you found something actually worth your attention, LinkedIn will likely rearrange your feed completely the next time you open the page.

This is a phenomenon called doomscrolling and is something that most social media applications make good use of. However, LinkedIn has turned that into perfection. The goal is no longer to deliver valuable updates from your professional contacts (which was its original purpose), but just to keep you engaged and coming back for more.

It turns out it’s possible to set the preferred feed / timeline view to “Most recent”, instead of the default “Most relevant posts (Recommended)”. Change the setting in your LinkedIn preferences. The link works at the time of the publication of this post.

A bit of fresh air, and less enshittification, I would say.

I don’t use LinkedIn often. Especially for news, I don’t think it’s a good place to become informed…however, while we’re here, if you work in Tech, feel free to connect with me (my profile is LinkedIn¹ the footer of this site). A cool “trick” I learned from a speaker at FOSDEM: if you write an avocado emoji in your intro message then I’ll (very likely) instantly accept you the next time I log in (which is not often).