Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my LinkedIn profile years ago. The amount of spam I was getting from them was ridiculous (the owner of the pizza joint next door wants to add you, etc.). The final straw was when someone pointed out to me that unless you keep it up to date, it reflects poorly on you. And I had no interest in doing that.

View on HN

I deleted mine too, but recently I wanted to see someone else's page and was not allowed. Not even a detail shown without login.

Make a fake account using a throwaway email everytime you want to view a page.

If your referrer is from Google, they actually do allow you to see public detail.

So just override referrer header, and you'll see a lot more.

Doesn't work for me either, at least not with cURL.

Don't forget that you have to misspell Referer.

!!!

I'm having a really bad day with typos and overlooking them. You are correct; it does work with https://google.com as referrer. I'm updating the entry.

EDIT aaand it stopped working. It was either a glitch or it will lock you out after a few requests.

It definitely locks you out after a few requests. In the past I built a LinkedIn profile scraper, but they are really really good at locking down their data. If you even somewhat appear to be a bot, you’re blocked.

Can it differentiate between a bot and a human opening up a dozen links in tabs? I suspect the tumblr one can't, it appears to rate limit me for using there archive pages.

That's what the linked post is about, no? How a public profile isn't really public.

A hiring manager told me recently I need to work on “curating [my] linked in presence” in response to how I could position myself better for the job

Sad but true. Clients look me up on linkedin (I know because they mention it to me) and I'll bet if I didn't have a linkedin page they'd think that's weird.

It also, if you invest a little effort to produce an appealing profile, does a great deal to make up for weak face-to-face networking skills. The "LinkedIn, faugh, who needs it" attitude around here really doesn't do an introvert any favors, I think.

Why not host your own resume?

No reason not to do both. But if you only do one, LinkedIn has discovery benefits that are very hard to equal with self-hosting.

I do both.

Actually, that's a good point. If you don't want to do linked in, then host one on your own site, and make sure its on your resume.

I know I do. If you applied and you can't even keep up a decent LinkedIn, why should I interview you? Or better yet, trust you?

Same here, I unsubscribed about 10 years ago and never regretted, but although choosing not to receive anything anymore, they kept pestering me with unwanted invitations until I contacted again them in 2014 and finally got completely deleted from their lists (hopefully).

I've never had a LinkedIn account and I still get spam from them. The "so and so wants to connect with you on LinkedIn."

Technically this is because Linkedin asks to be given access to a user's contacts (phone, email or otherwise) and then displays the contacts as people possible to connect to, regardless of whether the contacts are members already or not. No doubt some manager with shady ethics thought this a very clever way to expand the number of users.

I used to just delete LinkedIn emails but started to hit unsubscribe on each email I got, one month after another. That lasted for 6 months before I flipped and said that this was the only warning I’d give that they’d be taken to court if they ever emailed me again. Not a single email since that point, so an internal blacklist must exist.

You can preemptively add yourself to their "do not contact" list:

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/426

I did it four years ago and they've honored it since.

The captcha on that page is broken in Chrome 63.

I did the same and still received spam from them for a couple months. After contacting them, it stopped, but I still get "networking requests" from real life friends and colleagues every so often. I assue those are just because I'm in these people's contact lists or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com