Ask HN: How do you manage your LinkedIn connections?

LinkedIn is useless for managing your contacts. Try finding out who you met a year ago today at a particular event, or try exporting everyone's vCard including email addresses.

It has degraded to a social media spam site where people self-praise completion of "introductory walking and breathing" on Coursera.

Important: never conduct a confidential chat there (because they can never be deleted, in case one day there is a breach), always take conversations to your email immediately.

There is a need for a LI-like tool that actually offers what professionals need, but it's not LI (and the fact that it is owned by Microsoft does not help).

The optimal way to use linkedin is to add as many people as possible from as many companies as possible that you're interested in. This way, when you want to apply for a job at any such company you have people already working there whom you can message directly and ask for a recommendation.

Just don't forget to unfollow everyone you connect with as well... there's only so many times a man ca read stories of how the dog was the CEO all along...

It's a rolodex of professional contacts for me. I connect to people I like but who I don't want to reveal my personal life to. I follow people I'm interested in who don't fit the above description.