Opening two LinkedIn tabs takes 2.4GB of RAM. The Hacker News community roasts the platform's scroll hijacking, bloated trackers, and AI-generated garbage.
Ever opened just two browser tabs and suddenly your laptop fan sounds like a Boeing 747 preparing for takeoff? If so, you're probably scrolling LinkedIn. Yesterday, Hacker News erupted into a massive roast session when someone pulled out their task manager and revealed a dark truth: LinkedIn is hogging a whopping 2.4GB of RAM for just two open tabs. Mind-blowing, right?
The drama started with a post exposing the absurd weight of LinkedIn's frontend. It's mostly text, some tiny thumbnails, and a useless chat box. Yet, it consumes more RAM than some of us use to run local Kubernetes clusters.
One HN veteran hit the nail on the head: This isn't a framework issue. This is what happens when Marketing and Tech managers allow a ridiculous amount of trackers, background ads, and pure bloatware. There's absolutely zero justification for static content and a chat feature to eat 2.4GB of RAM. It's tech heresy.
If it were just a RAM issue, we devs would probably just cry and buy another 16GB stick. But no, LinkedIn has a much dirtier trick up its sleeve: Scroll Hijacking.
Ever feel like scrolling through your LinkedIn feed is like navigating through molasses? One user brutally called it out as "product brain rot."
Here’s the deal: The product team intentionally slows down your scroll speed so that their "time on feed" engagement metrics look better for quarterly reports. The collateral damage?
As one commenter put it, adding fake drag on top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a stalled car. Peak "Microslop engineering."
Diving into the comments, the community was divided into a few distinct camps:
1. The AI-Generated Sludge Many devs pointed out that the platform has devolved into a parody of itself. Every time you log in, it’s just AI-generated hustle culture garbage. Think: "What walking my dog taught me about B2B SaaS scaling." It feels like an episode of Severance.
2. The Necessary Evil Here’s the bitter pill: Despite falling deep into the "enshittification" hole, LinkedIn is still the default. Recruiters live there. Sales teams rely on it. Sure, HN's "Who is Hiring" and local Slack groups are great, but when massive tech layoffs hit, everyone goes crawling back to update their LinkedIn profiles. We hate it, but we need it to pay the bills.
3. The Only Saving Grace: Mini-games Surprisingly, retired devs admitted the only thing bringing them back are the daily puzzle games like Queens. The human brain is dangerously easy to manipulate with a virtual leaderboard.
What's the lesson here for us code monkeys? First, don't let PMs ruin the user experience just to game their engagement metrics. Making an app artificially laggy to boost "time on site" is a crime against frontend development. Second, optimize your damn code. A social feed shouldn't require AAA gaming PC specs. And finally, complain all you want, but keep your resume updated. The tech market is brutal right now, and pride doesn't pay the rent!
Source: Hacker News
