Hackers (and I do think that, by and large, HN is still populated by "hackers") are aesthetes. When we say that something is "good" or "evil," we're not making a moral judgement, but rather an aesthetic one.
Consider, for example, that most people here would consider the famous MIT pranks to be "good." There is no argument that can be made that they are morally good—but they are certainly aesthetically pleasing, and we respect that. This article points out the contrapositive: PayPal, no matter its ethical implications (which breck pointed out above), is aesthetically displeasing—it offers a bad communicative interface to the developer (a bad API), and the rules governing it cannot be elegantly described (a bad design).
This also explains quite a bit of what HN seems to love or hate. We love Apple because they care about aesthetics, but we hate the App Store because it is capricious and seemingly internally shoddy/"crufty." We love Google because they're open about everything they do, and so they're predictable—they give us a sense of being a controllable force, even if they're too large to actually control.
None of this has anything to do with whether their actions are helping or harming us. It's purely a matter of subjective Quality, with no quantitative measurements going on behind it. No one here ever shuts up and multiplies[1]—and that's okay. Humanity is pointless without subjective experience. But it's good to be conscious that that's what we're really talking about here.
I certainly didn't say that it did...I only suggested that some sort of amusement (at the very least: discussion) might be an important part of interaction.
But, since we're making rhetorical straw men: what does their desire for users to interact more have to do with the site being useful?
Competing with CareerBuilder and Monster is a waste of time. Both of these sites will eventually become irrelevant -- searching for a job by typing in a few keywords is unnatural. People hear about jobs thru friends, professional acquaintances, work product (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc), and local businesses (signs) and as LinkedIn becomes more prevalent they will grab more then their fair share of this market without trying very hard.
The far bigger opportunity for LinkedIn is to aggregate business leads. Are you looking to outfit your company with new laptops this year, looking for a block of hotel rooms for a conference, looking for an event management company, looking to upgrade accounting systems. Each of these leads is worth hundreds of dollars and helping businesses find good vendors is not easy (consultants make billions of dollars/yr making vendor recommendations).
The existence of the recruiting industry belies that claim. The job market is incredibly inefficient: I would bet that no professional in a big city could name more than 10% of the people who would be willing to employ him at that moment.
Most of the jobs I see and hear about are of no interest to me; I can search careerbuilder (or LinkedIn) and instantly find some jobs that are relevant.
The recruiting industry will not go away, but sites like CareerBuilder and Monster as major players within the recruiting industry will. The value of matching job seekers to jobs is far more efficient within LinkedIn.
Spent 1.5 years as lead Product for Yahoo HotJobs and this post is spot-on -- nicely captured. To put it rather bluntly there is more innovation happening in most small sized municipal utilities (see the Palo Alto Green program) then in the online job recruitment space. Given how incredibly important talent is to companies the CEO needs to reset incentive structures for their HR organizations.
