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Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

All those celebrating this event - don't.

If you think these guys were using shady and scummy tactics before to spam you and steal your contacts, what do you think they are going to do when their share price sinks? Suddenly reform and stop the borderline-illegal stuff?

LinkedIn will get even more aggressive at monetization. So expect even more of:

1) Random clicks that let you "invite" everyone in your address book

2) Incessant daily nag e-mails - "Complete your profile"

3) Blatant Man-in-the-Middle attacks for stuff you browse on your mobile

4) Data harvesting and selling even more stuff about you

5) etc, etc, etc

If ever there was a market ready to be "disrupted" this is it. Google could have done this with G+, Twitter can do this today with proper reorientation, Heck FB could wipe the floor with these jokers (WhatsApp could too).

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> Google could have done this with G+, Twitter can do this today with proper reorientation, Heck FB could wipe the floor with these jokers (WhatsApp could too).

I keep waiting for any of those companies to pull their heads out of their butts and realize this.

Google's product strategy seems to be a random-walk, Twitter's platform is too far from LinkedIn's workflow to make it work, but Facebook? Facebook is the kind of company I'd thought would have figured this out.

https://work.fb.com/ ?

Work is for internal team use, I think, not for personal professional development. Users accounts won't persist across multiple jobs.

It depends on how strong your sense of schadenfreude is.

If you really, really want the scummy behavior to stop, and you just really get off on seeing them crash and burn, your best hope is that they'll fall so hard and so fast that their "even more aggressive at monetization" phase lasts less than a year until the bottom falls out and they get acquihired by Google or Facebook or someone, and then they turn the servers off as soon as the deal closes.

Of course, the worst case scenario is that instead of an acquihire, they get swallowed a private equity firm who auctions off all their data piecemeal to all kinds of nefarious parties...

I say this every time LinkedIn comes up but there’s an easy way to fix this: delete your account[1]. If they keep on emailing you, unsubscribe. If they keep on emailing you, threaten to sue and you’ll be put on some sort of internal blacklist (worked for me). Job done.

[1] https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63/kw/dele...

If they keep doing well then they're getting positive reinforcement that their shitty practises work.

So, either way they keep acting shittily, at least this way other companies might learn a lesson not to.

I'n not in LinkedIn, so...

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