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- 🍐#140 What Hacker News says about LinkedIn, and a nerdy riddle billboard idea
🍐#140 What Hacker News says about LinkedIn, and a nerdy riddle billboard idea
Diapers, diapers, diapers, and even less sleep.
Jakub Czakon
January 11, 2026
Hey,
Question. Why did nobody tell me that two kids are way harder than one? I really need to up my diapear game 🍐.
This week on the agenda:
What Hacker News crowd says about LinkedIn
Nerdy riddle billboard idea from Listen Labs
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 5min
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Developer marketing insights
1. Nerdy riddle billboard idea from Listen Labs
Check this out.
So they ran this billboard creative with no logo, no value prop, no explanation. And they supposedly got 10k submissions.
Devs love riddles. Curiosity, proving that you can solve something, proving that someone is wrong is hard to resist. Especially for devs.
They will figure out what it is and go to the website that you put out there. And they will be delighted to see that it was another riddle/task.
Listen Labs played into those beautifully with this campaign.
Another billboard of similar style that plays into curiosity + “let me prove you wrong” vibe is this one.
The nerdy idea here is that “exa” (the search api startup) is a prefix for 1018 and they compete with Google, and gogol is a prefix for 100100 . And they are saying they are better. Cool ;)
Some people get it, most people don’t. But they definitely got people fired up and engaged with this which is half the battle in marketing.
2. What Hacker News crowd says about LinkedIn
Had to go over this thread when I saw it:
Takeaways are:
Can be great depending on a niche (but can also be horrible).
Curate your feed and it will respect your preferences.
Many devs hate it and/but mostly think about it from the recruitment perspective.
A few of my favorite comments.
I think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available
I agree with a lot of the sentiment here about the actual app itself but I'm surprised that people aren't seeing LinkedIn for what it is, a tool.
If you're a founder, LinkedIn is a great place to find talent & drive inbound sales, at minimum. If you're not using it, I bet your competition is.
Sure, the feed is terrible but look at it purely as a talent & sales pipeline. There isn't anything else like it out there.sieep
I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles.
…
But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting.
…
So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from
Reminds me of a blog post I once read from a manager writing about all the qualities of being a good manager. I read it nodding along that they all seemed like good traits.
Then in the comment section there was a post from someone saying something like "You were my manager at one point and honestly you were one of the worst managers I've had in my career. I didn't see many of these behaviours from you".
The author responded with something like "I don't disagree. There's sometimes a gap between knowing and doing"
>I really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired.
I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a cohort of “retired” people to actually deliver things and eschew the performative bullshit. There’s presumably a lot of experience and skill that can be leveraged. I’d happily partake despite having nowhere near the right age for that, my feeling is the same and I’m not even 30 (hell, I’d learn a lot in such an environment).
In my niche, bioinformatics, linkedin has become somewhat of a force ever since many people left Twitter/X during the 'rebranding'? It's quite weird.
They're mostly posts announcing new packages etc. but there seems to be more bioinformatics-y activity than, say, mastodon or bluesky. The posts definitely have a different tone than what OP decries.
LinkedIn is mostly people trying to impress folks that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. As such it just becomes an echo chamber of self-promotion and grifters while 99% of folks that are legit top tier in their field aren’t wasting any time there.
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