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Comment by joshhart | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone,

I'm Joshua Hartman, the lead engineer for all of LinkedIn's consumer products. Thanks for all the passionate feedback here and we really appreciate it. I just wanted to say that we've been hard at work trying to improve the clarity of our products over the last year and this is something that we will continue to focus on going forward. Many of you have spoken of high volumes of emails. In 2015 LinkedIn built a piece of infrastructure called the "Air Traffic Controller" to make sure our communications are relevant. This infrastructure enabled us to cut the volume of email we sent by 50% and reduce customer complaints by 40% in 2015 - http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/11/10/sending-less-email-is-ju.... We know we have a lot more work to do for LinkedIn to work really well for the tech industry, and we have heard you and will keep refining the experience.

Thanks! - Josh Hartman

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Hm. You brag on your own LinkedIn profile about several interesting things: "Increased the number of invites generated from "people you may know" recommendations by 50%", "Intelligent blending of ads into the feed - able to increase sponsored content revenue by 50% without harming engagement".

So okay, you're already very familiar with LinkedIn's misleading dark patterns. You are, for instance, making ads look like real content in order to get people to mistakenly trust them more.

This makes your claim that you're hard at work "trying to improve the clarity of our products" mean something different than I had expected.

Hi angelbob, the specific work you referenced was algorithmic in nature. Simply put, users that are less likely to interact with ads will see fewer on their feeds. I hope you will agree with me that it is a better experience.

Good. I hope that's all "intelligent blending" means. Too often, that's a euphemism for "making ads look like more non-ads" to fool the user, with "progress" measured in metrics like how often they get clicked on -- which is, by any reasonable measure, a dark pattern.

And LinkedIn certainly does that kind of thing (example: sponsored posts on the front page inserted between posts from people I know, formatted identically, differentiated only by a medium-gray-over-white "Sponsored.")

But glad to hear that in this case you just mean showing fewer ads to those who don't click on them.

Hi Josh,

Glad to hear about the reductions in email.

Regarding your statement "We've been hard at work trying to improve the clarity of our products over the last year" — this just doesn’t ring true, as it seems to imply that lack of clarity has been an accidental shortcoming, when it is very plainly intentional confusion (hence why everyone is calling it "dark UX"). So when you are talking about trying to improve the clarity, do you mean to say that there is an internal struggle for the soul of linkedin? Engineering vs. suits, or something along those lines?

Hi alanh, my personal opinion on this is that since Jeff Weiner assumed dual CEO and Chief Product Officer roles the company has done a much better job using both qualitative experience in conjunction with quantitative metrics when making decisions rather than making a decision only on numbers.

I have a question! I'm a student and have noticed 5 or so profiles that connect with 20+ of my classmates/friends with impressive but beleivable titles at well known companies (Human resources at IBM) [1] and generic job histories. The names only exist on linkedin. Its obvious they are either just scraping profiles or something more nefarious. What are you doing to stop the creation of these fake profiles? Why are my friends so dumb?

[1] Fake profile examples, with 20+ in common connections: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-bargo-04b09829 https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-bertoli-48909829

Due to boredom I did more research. Reverse image searched the profile pic, found it on a yelp profile writing fake 5 star reviews and one of those fake sites that 'let employers fight over you.'

Some people approve every request because LinkedIn incentivizes users to have 500+ connections. And your friends are possibly dumb, but almost certainly ignorant of social media data vacuuming/social engineering techniques such as this.

Really? Where?

You still use dark patterns all over the place. Misdirection to get users importing contacts, burying opt-outs (try figuring out how to disable InMail), removing features from free accounts.

Oh, the irony. AMA comments on HN by employees of companies in the news are usually very well received. We naturally give a chance and the benefit of doubt. LinkedIn may have especially pissed off developers since we have so many headhunters after us with high margins. It looks like a MS person logging in a Linux forum under the era of Steve Ballmer.

You are quite cynical. And Ballmer was still better for the general public than the masters of evil patterns Gates and Gates v2 "Satya".

Here's another idea - don't give me a push notification anytime someone in my network has an update.

That's for their actual customers, the recruiters. Recruiters want to know when somebody updates because that's usually a sign they're about to start looking. It's a big deal.

Sucks for you, but you're the product, not the customer.

You're a brave man, posting this here. Not least because if LinkedIn continues to add clearly-intentional dark patterns, people here are likely to remember you said it.

So: I hope that's the optimistic sign it might be ;-)

It's not the clarity of the products, its the quality that needs work. There are still basic things that need work including broken UI and random bugs encountered everyday. I have a basic company/employee connection support issue outstanding for weeks now. Surely for a product that users actually pay for, the end result should be far better than this?

This is a really shitty thing to ask but have you cleared this text with your general counsel?

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