I used to accept only people I worked with/met in person, but the feed is crap anyway so why bother. I now accept pretty much everyone and prune the feed.

You don't need to accept at random. I'm selective - I only connect with people I worked with or know well from the industry - and it's still 99% AI slop.

Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.

It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.

I haven't logged into LinkedIn in over a year. My contacts are only people I've worked with or good friends (or that cutie from logistics)... people I've physically met and respect. I'd like to keep up with what's going on in their professional lives. The problem is my feed is full of garbage that they have engaged with. I don't care about levels deeper than the first.

LinkedIn is unusable, and wasn't even helpful at all in finding a new job.

Unfortunately even with a heavily pruned list the feed is still a spam fest of recommendations that are just terrible. And every email notification is Facebook-level bait and switch clickbait.