It’s used for keeping contacts, having your online resume in a standard place, and maybe messaging people.
The feed is a sideshow. It enrages a lot of people because it’s full of slop, but you need to treat it like almost everyone else: Ignore it. It’s a sideshow.
Also, I don’t recall where this setting is, but make the default behavior such that if someone finds you and tries to connect with you, they actually follow you instead. This cuts down aggressively on spammers because in order to actually connect with you they would have to view your profile, open the … menu, and then click connect. If they aren’t paying attention they’ll just follow you instead of connect which means you can broadcast to them but they can’t broadcast to you.
I do ignore the connections from random students though tbf.
Generally speaking, unless you operate at an elite level or at an elite institution, you're not getting a ton of worthwhile cold intros from recruiters.
Probably depends on the field but this definitely isn't always true. I've got my last two jobs through recruiters, and speaking to colleagues a lot of them do too.
> they can see your extended network, they know where you work, they find out all information you have shared with on your profile
This is public anyway though? Isn't that the point of LinkedIn?
> You also start to consume their content since you are connected.
I don't because I don't read LinkedIn. I pretty much only use it to get jobs. Although I have actually started posting technical stuff I've done there because people actually read it (I guess other people do read LinkedIn tbf!)
> Generally speaking, unless you operate at an elite level or at an elite institution, you're not getting a ton of worthwhile cold intros from recruiters.
I'm definitely not elite level and I would say ~20% of the jobs I get from LinkedIn recruiters are of interest. That's pretty good! Almost all of them are at least relevant to my field (silicon verification). Sometimes I get stuff about mechanical engineering validation, or software jobs that aren't relevant but that's pretty rare. It must depend on the field. Maybe the country too?
You can limit this. I don't think it's necessarily the point of LinkedIn - i.e. for others to connect with you and then have full visibility into all of the details of everyone you know and whatever you have on your profile. It's a bit naive to assume that operating in this manner doesn't make you a prime target for scammers, social engineers, hackers, &c., or even worse - solicitors.
> My experience is different
Yea, everyone has different experiences. I'm just describing how the platform generally works, as a matter of fact.