Why do people use LinkedIn? I think I had an account for 10 years and all I got was recruiter spam.

Coworkers all use it. For what I don’t know. None of them were hired from there.

> Why do people use LinkedIn?

I used it to follow Lumon Industries.

But at some point when I turned on 2FA linkedin locked my ~15 year-old account and demands that I upload ID to a 3rd-party for verification, which I'm not going to do.

I missed out on the heydey of LinkedIn tech hiring frenzy, because I was just doing my work (on a very small, super-effective team), and didn't want to be on sketchy LinkedIn. Then an SF colleague told me what I had been missing out on, and that other people were job-hopping constantly, and making many times more than I was making.

That job market era is past, but now I think of LinkedIn as a serendipity lottery ticket. Because you're on LinkedIn, some founder or hiring manager or legitimate recruiter doing a keyword search stumbles upon you, some past colleague can see you're available, etc.

(Though the last recruiter I agreed to a call with there sounded possibly delegated to LLM, then said his colleague would be doing the call. On the recruiting firm's Web site, I saw the colleague's title was Customer Success, so the recruiter wasn't even willing in invest in the call like I was. Also on their site, they had an infographic example placement success... and the featured example was into what might be the most infamous tech company right now. I bowed out of that one last week, but I'm keeping the LinkedIn lottery ticket.)

2 out of my last 3 jobs were the result of LinkedIn recruiter spam

I use it to keep tabs on competitors, finding out what potential prospects are posting, mapping out relations between companies in our focused industries, etc. Basically for new business signals.

It’s a great additional channel to find recent info on companies and people. Sites are usually stale, people post a ton of stuff on LinkedIn. We don’t get our clients through linkedin, but it gives our salespeople better angles to attack.

We used it for recruiting but it’s not great for that, tons of low quality replies. We never reach out, i personally hate that.

It’s nice I can send LinkedIn instead of keeping my resume up to date and redoing it

I have gotten jobs through contractions on it, which materially improved my life.

And I have old acquaintances that I like to know what they’re up to/to keep options open.

It's more or less expected that candidates have one, at least in tech/eng jobs I've looked at. For some, the field to enter your profile URL is required in the form.