Fizzbatter, what nikhil said above. The other thing to note is - the ASK feature is part of our early effort to increase "engagement". LI's problem is that it became about blindly "connecting" and zero engagement. And the more people you connected with, the less useful it became.

In the immediate future, we will be releasing and validating some ideas around professional "give-and-take” as we call it: i.e. stuff around crowd-sourcing for professional help, expertise, leads, etc. And also trying to get better at intelligence and targeting.

Do give it a chance, and give us your feedback.