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Comment by webbrahmin | Hacker News Reader

My experience with deleting my LinkedIn accounnt; Tried deleting. LinkedIn responded with a message saying I have active ads running and I am the creator of a LinkedIn group. I ran an ad campaign ages back and created a group long time back. I am stuck with LinkedIn because of this. Worse than dark pattern.

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Why not try a different approach, and start posting nonsense or content that breaches their T&Cs instead? Send annoying messages and make requests to lots of random LinkedIn employees. Embrace the fact that they want to keep your account open and keep shitposting until they decide to quit (by closing your account or banning you).

Have a friend of yours on LinkedIn report you as dead. I'm not joking, and this does work. Write something about how it hurts to look at your profile since you've passed, and to please take it down.

I've re-read your comment a few times. Now - it's early - but I'm missing something.

Is this a "Dark Pattern" (I'm not even going to try to parse how something can be darker than dark)? Or is it a safety feature (although maybe badly designed)?

Maybe all you have to do is shut down your ad campaign and your group. Then deactivate/delete your account. Would this not work?

It's a dark pattern if when creating those entities within LinkedIn if it's not clear that by doing that, you're removing the ability to ever close your account. But I agree with you -- deleting is definitely worth trying.

Perhaps you could try to transfer admin rights to another LinkedIn user before re-attempting to delete the group? My guess is that they require at least one user account to possess admin privileges for a group especially if it is non-empty.

Another approach would be to remove all users from the group before trying to delete the group.

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