The official, if undeclared, purpose of the entire Internet is of course to provide every human on Earth with a platform from which they can completely humiliate themselves.

Every person on Twitter publicly shopping for weed or Facebook user leaving personal messages on someone’s public wall already knows this. LinkedIn is no different — in fact, as a career building site, the stakes are even higher. Mess up here, and your professional aspirations will go the way of the “Crunk Bear.”

To avoid similarly sabotaging your professional reputation in the course of attempting to burnish it, hlntv.com provides some handy LinkedIn tips:

1. Do not post that hysterical link of “14 squirrels who look like Paul Rudd”: An easy rookie — and even veteran — mistake on LinkedIn is to use it like Facebook. Do not use it like Facebook. It’s a site for professional networking and as such, is a much more buttoned-up type of operation than the rest of your go-to sites. This is why LinkedIn is not very fun. However it can be useful... if you present yourself in a professional manner.

2. Do not post that very partisan, allegedly hysterical political link: The same generally off-limits topics you have among your co-workers and in the office apply here as well. This is not the place for things sure to anger or offend a large group of people. That’s for your inappropriate uncle to e-mail you. Not for you to share with people who might shape your career.

3. Have you adjusted your privacy settings? If not, do. Just as you wouldn’t sit at your desk at work flagrantly cruising job sites, be sure you’re not alerting your network you’re doing the same on LinkedIn. If your employer or co-workers see you’re updating your profile, adding some adjectives, putting in a new photo and making lots of new connections with recruiters, you may be looking for that new job sooner than expected.

4. Browse carefully: LinkedIn makes it very easy for you to see who’s been checking out your profile. Cool. But that also means others can see that you’re looking at theirs, so long as your privacy is not set to “Anonymous.” (If it is, you can’t see who has viewed your own profile. It’s a fair trade like that.) The Internet has always been great for harmless stalking, but you might just want to tread a bit more carefully on LinkedIn.

5. Write like the world will read your words: Which we can also call the Kelly Blazek Rule, for the woman mentioned above whose blistering reply (“I love the sense of entitlement in your generation,” “Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky.”) to a simple request to join a jobs list will now be the first thing anyone sees when they Google her name. It doesn’t take much for even private conversations to be made public on social media and LinkedIn, in particular, is a bad place to risk burning bridges