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Comment by rogersmith | Hacker News Reader

So everyone agrees LinkedIn is shit and should be abandoned if only because every clickable icon in there is booby-trapped, yet the consensus seems to be "I'll keep using it because peer pressure and network"?

Apt summary of the perverse aspects of the so-called "network effect" if i've ever saw one...

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Everyone in this thread acts like LinkedIn doesn't know exactly how bad they are.

They are the perfect amount of bad for the sake of their business: Their minefield of garbage makes them loads of money, but it's not so bad that a successor can unseat it (ie not at MySpace levels).

LinkedIn does a fantastic job of living on that edge. If they keep being shitty but not super shitty, they'll continue to win.

Meh, I for one deleted (not just disabled) my linked in a few months ago. I realized I never made any connections on there that served me in any way. The shit wasn't bad enough to stop me from signing up, but after years it accumulated enough to make me leave.

If other developers like myself leave, then the recruiters who pay premium to be able to spam developers like myself will leave to. Then the model collapses.

In fact, the apps that don't bullshit me are the ones I use most (gmail, hn, craigslist, podcast websites).

I suspect the next successful business network will be more compartmentalized by industry. Sort of like how github is more or less becoming a business network for developers.

I guess, considering how much their valuation has tanked recently, that they are not the perfect amount of bad for the sake of their business.

There are many apps like this;

Skype, Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn are come to my mind (a few of my personal list), heck even Flash & Java Runtime (same problem different field). For the lack of better and popular alternative we have to stick with these. LinkedIn being on of the prime examples.

Twitter on the other hand has a different problem, solutions such as FriendFeed was a much better, almost by all means compared to Twitter (you could actually have a sensible conversation and while keeping almost all the benefits of Twitter) yet it didn't make people to switch from Twitter. Later acquired by Facebook, so I guess they succeeded.

twitter and whatsapp may have shortcomings but I wouldn't put them in the same category as Skype and LinkedIn which a madnessfest.

Skype on the Mac is pretty serene.

I looked at my coworker's Windows Skype and was amazed to find a blinking advertisement he couldn't remove - did it by moving that area of the window offscreen.

Whatsapp doesn't deserve to be in that group... yet. Whatsapp was actually very good three years ago (good as in, I could just text without the interface annoying the fuck out of me). The last few updates have made it noticeably worse though.

How so? It seems to work pretty well for texting.

Sometimes, you might want to call somebody, and instead of leaving the app and opening phone/contacts, I used to click on the little phone icon in Whatsapp. If I do that now, it'll initiate a WhatsApp call, which sometimes works, but most of the time doesn't. If there was at least an option to select mobile, or WhatsApp calls... Furthermore, the only way to initiate a new conservation is by adding a new contact. In order to do that, I need to also upload all my contacts to WhatsApp. If my teachers wouldn't rely on us having WhatsApp (!!!), I'd probably ditch it at once...

Absolutely agree with that, the call option is annoying as hell. And they are adding more and more pointless features that benefit maybe 0.001% of the users.

Best example is now the ability to send PDFs. Making this the first button on the sent menu will totally make me want to use Whatsapp for all my document handling activities.

0,001% of the users is probably not accurate. I've used it for long distance calls every now and then, and if both are on WiFi or LTE, it works well enough. In reality, however, I'm never on LTE (because it is way too expensive) and seldom on WiFi.

When you get a message, it used to show it right on the screen, you don't have to launch the app (like text message). Now they just show the notification. I am not sure if there is a way to get the old style back, I am too lazy to experiment.

This is similar to those stupid emails which would force users to click through, login and then read the message instead of just including the message itself in the email. Which to me is insane.

It's a devil's bargain. The value is in the network, so the real job of the tool is to be as frictionless and low overhead as possible. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a business model around that, so you get products that become bloated with overhead for the end user.

Hmm I'm in marketing/sales and spend a lot on LinkedIn. That's a simple business decision because it saves me time and makes way more than it costs. The more friction and anti-user crap they have, the weaker that business case becomes as it a) slows me down and b) hinders activity and growth of the network. They have great business models around very highly targeted ads, sales prospecting, market intelligence, and recruitment - each of which are highly monetizable in their own right. I don't really see how a killer app for any of those would be improved by bloat.

It might be the same reason why people are still using Yelp

I felt the same about ICQ in 2008.

Surely you mean 1998...

In fact, there was a pretty good recent article on this phenomenon of "social pressure" (and how Slack, Facebook, Whatsapp etc. leverage it): https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack-became-a-b...

How do we tangibly and realistically, consciously reverse the effect?

Usually an alternative comes along and over the course of a few years, everybody switches. Then that new one has its ten years.

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