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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn did some really dodgy shit before MS took over and started cleaning it up. Slowly.

They tricked you into giving them access to your email. They used endorsements to trick you into logging back in (and hitting the previous trick login...). The marketing bods who came up with that shit will occupy a special place in hell along with every other growth hacker.

The content is about as low value as on any other social network but compared to the toxic waste Twitter and FB spew out, the worst you'll see on LinkedIn is an annoying writing style where everyone seems to be drafting a motivational seminar or self help book.

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Wasn’t downloading contacts from gmail standard for bootstrapping social networks? I know Facebook did that and I’m fairly certain Snapchat and Twitter did too. This doesn’t excuse it, but I generally recall this as being sort of a standard onboarding process in ‘07 or so.

LinkedIn was much worse as they used dark UX patterns to trick you into letting them spam all your contacts with invitations to “connect”.

Correct. Pretty much each time you logged in it tried to do it. Scummy in the extreme

And that's how they got $26 billion

Yup. They used to (or maybe still do) have 5 pages of "Do you know these people? What about these?" each time I logged in, and in one of the pages it would ask to connect to your contacts. I don't know how but they actually tricked me into do it that, and all my gmail "contacts" (read: anyone i ever sent an e-mail to) received an invite to connect to me. I received hundreds on new connections over the following days.

I closed LinkedIn last year when I realized I never got anything remotely good out of it. It's a terrible place to find jobs. There is no lack of websites that do the same, but better.

I deleted my LinkedIn years ago because of their shady practices. Last time I went job hunting, Dice provided such a better experience.

Not just _from_ Gmail, also to it: Google+ onboarding asked me for my email credentials when I went through it for a throwaway account.

I only started using LinkedIn a year ago, because for the longest time I had an extremely low opinion of it. I had SMTP-level filtering rules to keep the LinkedIn spam out.

It's not so bad now. The nice thing is re-connecting with people you haven't seen in 20+ years. It helped land my current job.

I joined it way back when, somehow they send out mass emails to everyone on my gmail list about how I wanted them to join.

Needless to say I have not used linkedin since.

Just more MBA BS

Those changes started happening years before Microsoft and have nothing to do with the acquisition.

I think ljm agrees with you...?

I didn’t appear so, at least from my interpretation.

As I read it, the comment implied Microsoft had something to do with cleaning it up and/or that work started post-acquisition. Neither of which reflects the reality.

> a special place in hell along with every other growth hacker

I beg to disagree. Growth hacking is a general term. You can use morally neutral or negative techniques. The fact is people prefer to hide behind terms such as "growth hacking" when what they really do is abusing gullible people. They muddy the waters as it benefits them. I do growth hacking too, most startups needs it - but I use only ethically neutral methods. We really need to make a radical distinction between these two.

The use of the word "hacking" in "growth hacking" clearly shows that something "extra" needs to be put in that mix.

Otherwise it is "organic/natural growth".

I see your point, but I disagree. Ogranic/natural growth for new products doesn't exist these days. Nobody cares about a new product/service. You need some creative ideas in order to get noticed. Not all of these ideas are morally wrong.

Could you share these methods? will be helpful. thanks!

Just a simple example. Years ago you would use social media channels such as Facebook to promote your project. But at some point Facebook realized they can monetize this and decided to drastically filter your posts unless you decide to pay them. However, people noticed that the filters on FB groups are much less strict so they started to create groups around topics related to the project. In this way they attract people who could potentially be interested in their project because they show they're interested, and not because someone tries to convice them or spams them etc. This is a simple example of ethical growth hacking. Ethical, because nobody gets hurt, and hacking, because at the beginning it was a bit nonstandard (I believe it's mainstream these days).

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