Honestly I am feeling a bit of joy watching LinkedIn take a hit. Not because I think their product is terrible but because of the endless spam emails I keep receiving from them, despite how many times I click unsubscribe.
You mean they scrapped it from your email account because you clicked on one of their links in your email.
At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.
I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"
It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...
I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top)
:(
It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.
That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
They're wasting 135 people's entire lives worth of time. Every single day. :(
That's close to the proportional death rate from air travel accidents (3.6 billion passengers/year, around 500 deaths).
Facebook takes---in Fermi numbers---about as many lives as plane crashes.
Why the hyperbole?
Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.
Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC.
If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam
And I don't need any more luck; my initial problem is solved (I no longer see spam from Facebook, and I am taking steps to ensure they are aware of their problem, in case they weren't).
The problem was worth the time I spent on the config; it is manifestly a waste for me to involve the FTC, since I don't have to worry about Facebook's spam anymore and am willing to eat the tiny amount of bandwidth involved.
This worked out fine for Facebook: I visit their webpage when I want to know what's going on over there, and they never send me email.
When I clicked connect, I thought I would invite her to my network, but it ended up with an invite to LinkedIn to her email.
The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn
Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.
I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses.
Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"
So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.
[And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]
As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services.
How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.
Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation.
It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.
I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous.
I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.
The biggest joke is the entire concept they have of using a connection to connect you to someone else who they know. Which of course depends on the definition of "know" which with linkedin means literally nothing.
This was all in the interest of keeping the numbers going up which is obvious. And that's fine if that is your business model. But the business model here seems to be showing growth for the sake of wall street as opposed to growing the business in a meaningful manner.
Linkedin does serve a purpose it allows people to humble brag which is helpful even if they aren't looking for a job and don't need the connections because, say they own a business (and I don't mean a startup but it could be that as well). It's become an acceptable way to show where you went to school, what you have done in the past, and where you work or what you are the owner of. There really aren't that many other ways you can do that w/o appearing to be actually bragging and trying to impress someone (meaning it's not the same as having a personal website or even pointing people to a link "about me" page on your business website or a wikipedia page.
What's amazing is that they apparently don't want to filter the bogus requests as opposed to merely the requests that are from legitimate people (not bots) and simply trying to build what appears to be a network.
Welcome to the world. Version 2.0. Codename: pointless.
For this reason, I'm somewhat lenient in adding LinkedIn connections, as long as I at least have some idea who the people are. Unfortunately, many connection requests are from people I've never met before.
My how things have changed.
And... I can't forget the fake invitations I receive every week with fake photos that I detect searching on Google images by an image.
"posting original stuff to groups with thousands of members and not receiving a single comment or click to some link"
LinkedIn had the chance to build some amazing forums. LinkedIn should be the place that you think about when you want to have a conversation about business. They clearly have the traffic. They could have done something amazing with their groups and discussions. They have wasted all of their chances.
They made a big (incomplete) UI overhaul which managed to make them less easy to use, and half the time fails to load posts (every 1-2 posts as you scroll down is loaded via script, fails a surprising amount of the time, or simply refuses to fire!).
I'm at a total loss as to why they hate Groups so much. Not enough page loads / ad impressions? We run a few groups - ranging from 10L to 90K in size, some of which are quite active. But discussions tend to engage ~.001% of users.
I have an account, turned off all email-based notifications, and stop by every half-year or so to see what's in my inbox. It's usually full of messages, but I never get any emails from them.
Am I just lucky? What's up?
LinkedIn is generally crappy at what is supposed to be its primary purposes, and they do shady UX stuff. But they have very granular controls for email and push notifications.
So both your experience and the grandparent's are possible - they respect you, once you've signed up.
"I am on linkined now. What do I do?"
I am pretty surprised that in SV, they have one of the worst performing mobile experiences. It is always super slow, lags, unclicks, takes me back to an entirely previous page when hitting back, as opposed to the screen I was looking at before I read that profile... etc...
I turned off all email notifications and despise the fact that they email my contacts about my activity.
On a monthly basis, I get LinkedIn "invites" from friends who simply didn't understand LinkedIn's hostile and deceptive user interface. They think they're just importing their contacts to conveniently++ find existing profiles but in reality, they're unwittingly giving permission to LinkenIn to spam their address book to recruit new members.
You may be good at defensive web surfing to keep your contacts private but most others are not.
Btw, there was a previous discussion from Feb 2014 about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276032
[1]https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
++ (understandably because they don't want to manually retype each contact name into Linkedin. Ain't nobody got time for that.)
I wonder if you can prevent them from stealing the address book if you install their Android app?
If gmail started emailing your friends because you used gmail, that would be a good reason to not use gmail.
You seem to be a little out of touch here. There are several examples of people withholding their contacts list from services like LinkedIn right here in this thread. It's not hard to imagine at all -- just read the posts.
In fact, right above your post that you responded to, the hn user vitd wrote, "why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact."
Lastly, you're trivializing the situation by suggesting that recipients just mark it as spam and move on. The issue is that LinkedIn deliberately crafted the emails with header "FROM: YOU" and your photo in the message body to make it look like you explicitly sent the email inviting them to join. It's clever social engineering so that the recipients harvested from your contacts list do not treat it as spam. Some recipients know the disguised nature of LinkedIn spam and know you didn't actually send it but many do not (especially older executives). In those cases, they think that you are one of those clueless flakes that signs people up for multi-level-marketing vitamins and vacation timeshares. People genuinely got embarrassed by LinkedIn's spam practices.
Enough people were angry about spam being sent behind their back that they sued LinkedIn: http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-settles-class-action...
It really is a poor product for what it looked like it might become.
http://lifehacker.com/unsubscribe-from-all-linkedin-emails-w...
Not sure if this is still valid.
If anything, this will cause them to send even more emails!