Ask HN: To LinkedIn am I just collateral damage of a barely functioning system

For what it's worth, I think you're overestimating how important LinkedIn is today. I'm interviewing candidates this week and honestly haven't even noticed whether any of them had a LinkedIn profile in their resume, much less visited it. LinkedIn would love for all of us to think they're an essential part of the hiring process, but from my perspective on this side of it there's no value delivered, and pretty much everyone I talk to is sick of LinkedIn.

The only exception is that I know some companies use LinkedIn as essentially their job application process, but this isn't common—when I had to apply for hundreds of jobs after getting laid off at the end of 2022, I updated my LinkedIn profile but then never interacted with LinkedIn at all in the process of applying.

I half wonder if they're flagging behavior like yours as suspicious because most real humans have stopped interacting with their platform.

I would commend you for that. However, from past experiences, when you refuse to provide your LinkedIn profile, people often assume you are sketchy and have something to hide. But at this point, I have no choice but to figure out a way to work without LinkedIn

Our company requires you have a LinkedIn because we’ve been burned by multiple engineers who accepted our offer and (months later) never actually quit their previous job. The common thread between people who have had multiple jobs at once has been they hide their LinkedIn

Strange. It’s rather straightforward to create a (fake) linkedin profile with a couple of hundred of connections (I have one of such profiles, just for fun). I cannot understand companies that think having a linkedin profile makes you look more “legit”

The first time I heard about LinkedIn was when I was in university. A lot of students made profiles and would all “endorse” each other, even when they barely knew the other person. The whole thing seemed super silly to me and I didn’t bother to make a LinkedIn profile. Even after university I’ve stayed away from LinkedIn. The only time I see LinkedIn in my life is when people on Reddit are criticizing it. Of course, Reddit is an echo chamber of its own, so I’m not saying that this alone is reason to disregard LinkedIn.

I know that to some LinkedIn is very important. But to me, I’ve managed completely fine. Been able to get work and have jobs without ever having a LinkedIn profile.

When I apply for a job, I provide CV, cover letter and a link to my GitHub profile.

Maybe some of the places I’ve applied to in the past have passed on me for not having a LinkedIn profile included. I wouldn’t know. No one ever said anything about it to me. But they may have filtered out my application for it. Regardless, I have been able to get work and get jobs.

Up until a couple years ago in Germany (probably most of D/A/CH) many more people had an account on XING (ex OpenBC) and LinkedIn was relatively rare. I'd say 5-10% of my "business" contacts and endorsements are basically never used, even after 90% of the people switched to LinkedIn.

That said, I've also never been directly asked for such a profile, if it was a field in a form I don't remember it being mandatory and I don't even remember when I made my LI account, or when I actually started to input more than my name...

Just another counter-example, if it helps. I have never used LinkedIn once in 20 years in the industry, and I have never felt like I had a hard time finding, applying to, or getting good jobs that I was excited about.

If asked, I honestly said that I didn't want to associate myself with a site that made such heavy use of dark patterns and felt so very, very sketchy to use, and everyone respected that answer (at least to my face).

(I did have to create a LinkedIn account once, for the sake of a previous employer who wanted their small company to not look like it was just the founders who worked there, but I made it using the company email address and never updated it after creation, so I don't really count that as ME using LinkedIn, more my employer through me.)

What is your definition of a “good job”? Every single non solicited outreach I’ve gotten from the top paying companies in the industry came from LinkedIn.

Of the nearly 400 companies I've applied to over the past year, almost all of them have asked for my linkedin profile, and maybe 10 have actually had someone scope me out.

The LinkedIn profile is not for the hiring manager. Why would you look at it? It’s just a regurgitation of what’s on your resume.

The purpose of LinkedIn for most people is to keep their business contacts and to look for jobs. Of course some use it to appear to be a “thought leader”.

Do you think just because you don’t use LinkedIn to apply for jobs no one does?

This is like the old Slashdot meme “I haven’t owned a TV in over a decade. Do people still watch TV”?

> Do you think just because you don’t use LinkedIn to apply for jobs no one does?

I think that because I don't it's not essential (if it were essential I wouldn't be able to avoid it), and I think that treating a social media platform as an essential part of your livelihood is unhealthy for reasons like this.

I'm not excusing LinkedIn from culpability here, just offering hope that there is life after LinkedIn.

I’m pointing out an extreme lack of self awareness that because you don’t use LinkedIn no one does. Every single non solicited outreach I’ve had has come from LinkedIn - including from most of the major BigTech companies (where I worked until the year before last) and the job I have now.

I’ve had 8 jobs since I’ve had a LinkedIn profile in 2012. Three have come from reaching out to companies on LinkedIn and 2 from companies reaching out to me. I

@scarface_74 and @demosthanos, please let us not drag this further. Both of you are trying to help and I sincerely appreciate your contribution. I would find a way to exist without LinkedIn. Thanks guys.

In the modern job market - you can’t. You can build a personal network without LinkedIn. But you won’t get the non solicited outreach without LinkedIn unless you are really good at building a “brand” and becoming a “thought leader”. Spoiler: you won’t

For me, SWE consultant, LinkedIn profile is a bait for recruiters. With proper SEO I can get steady inflow of roles. What other world-wide platform would work in such passive way?

That’s what exactly one marketing guy thought me: never use your real account to launch any ad campaign. Create individual account somewhere for each campaign. Because automated systems are out of control and can ban you anytime without a clear reason. Even for legit food or cosmetics ads it happens sometimes. So it’s time for you to create another account and expect to get control of your old one in the future.

Actually I once tried to create a backup account. It was restricted immediately. But If I knew using the ad campaign would have triggered this, I would have avoided it entirely.

Same goes with being a developer.

I know a guy who developed for a company who over time "became" a little shady. At one point they were simple apps and this dev was working for them on contract so he put out some one time apps, his personal account was associated for a while (bad choice).

Anyway he leaves and joins another company and suddenly that company is banned from the Play Store. Took awhile to figure out that his previous employer (and some mysterious sub companies) were banned at the same time and presumably associated through this guy who again at his new employer had his personal account tied in some way.

And in fairness his new employer very much could have looked like a shadow company created by the first.

Keep that stuff separated.

>Keep that stuff separated.

Which is what sketchy spam companies do...

It is, but also legitimately different companies and employees.

There are many best practices (such as using multifactor authentication) used by both legit and sketchy organizations.

Yeh, but we're not talking about "Hitler drank water, if you drink water you're a Nazi".

We're talking about a practice that is intended to avoid abuse detection. In the case of the non-sketchy parties, they're hoping to avoid false positives, but they're still doing the same thing. I'm not criticizing, I'm pointing out irony. When legitimate users have to do the same things as sketchy users, your abuse detection sucks.

>When legitimate users have to do the same things as sketchy users, your abuse detection sucks.

Great point and I fully agree.

Brand-new accounts running large ad campaigns get much higher scrutiny, though.

I have read so many case of "company XYZ locked me out of my account". In the majority of cases, the activity was not just as an everyday user but also as a developer, advertiser, etc.

There is by necessity far more scrutiny on this activity.

Don't risk your main account by running ads, uploading apps, etc. Get a dedicated account for that.

Upvoting for visibility, hopefully someone at LinkedIn sees this. In the meantime, I'd recommend:

* Go through LinkedIn Business support (https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/contact-us) instead of the consumer support chat

* Try the EU data rectification form (https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/TS-DRF)

* It sounds like other sites are showing captchas too, which might be a broader issue. I would try a different browser, clean your cookies etc., and potentially go to a coffee shop or VPN into a clean IP (not a commodity VPN provider). X and LinkedIn (or whoever LinkedIn uses for identity verification, and potentially Cloudflare) may have flagged your IP.

I might give it a try. But honestly, I am tired. When you type out paragraphs upon paragraphs, and all you get is a template response, that isn't encouraging.

LinkedIn is the eBay of social networks.

  1. captive audience due to early network effect - and no significant alternatives

  2. innovation halted years ago

  3. juice the profits: steady state OK growth forces deep cost cutting. The customer experience suffers first

I am really sad to see it play out like this, because I always liked the founder. That's probably the reason why I never saw a problem like this coming.

They did the most spam-forward and deceptive growth-hack campaign of all the social networks that I have been forced to join. Straight up lying to everyone’s contacts: “person with hiring authority asked you to join today”, “Person you know professionally is waiting for your response to join”, “why are you keeping person with power over your professional life waiting?”. It was one of the largest misinformation campaigns ever created to bootstrap this obnoxious social network for grandstanding about work accomplishments. They hijacked everyone’s contact lists to spam their colleagues with emails that blatantly misrepresented things, with vague professional setbacks implied for not complying. Screw the jerk who presided over this deception.

*Edit, just looked back on these and it really was outright deception. They would spam messages by your contacts written in the first person "I would like to connect", "I'd like to add you to my professional network." signed by them. Impersonating people for profit is definitely on the wire fraud spectrum. Screw that guy.

This.

This early behaviour made LinkedIn utterly toxic amongst the tech community in the early days. Nobody using them would be offered a job, as any applicant using LinkedIn would be demonstrating they are clueless (or worse, endorsed this behaviour).

Quite how LinkedIn managed to overcome this and have people trust them (!) I will never be able to understand.

It was so bad that it turned off many people (even outside of tech) from joining social media sites altogether.

I held off from joining LI for years after that.

Sorry that happened. There are two things every technology user should understand:

1) If you do not own the hardware your data lives on and the entire software stack to access and use your data, then you do not have control of your data and you may lose it at any time.

2) There is no such thing as computer security. If your data is on a networked computer, it should be considered semi-public.

Closed-source and for-profit companies are constantly trying to take control of your data away from you and reassure that it is safe and secure, but it is not. You must be prepared for your data stored in someone else's services to be destroyed or made public at any time. I'm sorry you learned this one the hard way :(

If it's any consolation, a LinkedIn account is not required for getting a job. I've never had one and I have a career I'm very happy with. I can't speak to getting funding or payment processor stuff, but I have a hard time believing it's a hard requirement there, either.

Oh, I have learnt the hard way. Life is already tough for a founder. And things like this only make you reluctant to get up in the morning.

What happened to you is the exact reason why I keep all Linkedin contacts on my local excel spreadsheet. Sure, if Linkedin decides to get rid of me will feel bad at first, but I won't feel powerless.

I have always been agnostic of closed platforms. But for whatever reason, LinkedIn never came to my mind as a platform to also hedge against. LinkedIn just never crossed my mind in that respect. But right now, it has happened, and its too late.

Do NOT grow a business based on some single closed single ecosystem. That's especially true for Facebook (Do NOT host your company "webpage" on Facebook only, for example) and LinkedIn.

The final nail in the coffin for Linked in must surely be LLMs, since at least my picture of LinkedIn is that it's filled with people who post barely sentient text about how they are excited about random uninteresting things.

I believe that. I have always felt that way about Facebook and X. But for whatever reason, I just never saw LinkedIn in that light. I guess I have been too comfortable with LinkedIn and never had a wake up call until now.

You can either be dogmatic or go where your potential customers are.

You can still use Facebook or whatever. But not having all eggs in one basket is always a good idea.

I have a friend who is a singer in a band. He is on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Does it matter if he is everywhere if most of his followers are on TikTok?

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has a very popular website and he said a couple of weeks ago that his traffic still hasn’t recovered from when Google shut down Reader.

In other words, even if you do have a website, no one will organically go to it instead of using one of the “aggregators”

> In a world today, where your a LinkedIn profile is literally essential to your means of livelihood

Several years ago I removed nearly all content from my LinkedIn profile and set it to private. Lo and behold my career has been doing just fine. The rate at which recruiters are reaching out to me hasn't changed one bit. I've also interviewed and gotten offers.

I've always resisted normalizing having any kind of social media account. Whenever there was something going on that "required" a Facebook account, I simply wouldn't participate, and I'd let whoever needs to hear it know that I'm not participating because I don't use Facebook. Whenever I'm at a conference and people ask me for my LinkedIn info, I simply reply that I'm not on LinkedIn, and if they want to get in touch with me they can try sending me an email. Sometimes they stare at me like I just walked out of a space ship, which is fine. If you can't grok that I'm not on LinkedIn, I probably don't have any interest in whoever you are or whatever you're selling.

It's a wake up call for me, albeit a bitter wake up call

I am sorry to hear that it happened.

There's a possibility that there might be a "network effect" going on, where activities in other contexts are being used to score the LinkedIn context. I have no idea what might be going on in other venues, but they may affect/be affected by the LinkedIn stuff.

I recently completely abandoned my Faecesbook account, because they flagged the third post I made as spam. The posts weren't spam. I was sharing new releases of my apps with my friends, but the bot saw App Store Link, and automatically assumed "spam."

I'm not going to keep trying, and I'm not going to appeal, because that may actually affect my accounts in other venues, that I care about. The only reason that I kept the FB account, was to provide Service to a group. They no longer need me, and I really couldn't care any less about FB, so ... asta la vista, baby.

Oh man. I am done. I'm current working on my startup, so hopefully, I dont have to worry about getting a job again. I am only worried about investors who ask for LinkedIn profile, that is where I might have a challenge and I have to figure how to address that.

> What is Favela Chic? Favela Chic is when you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you're still wired to the gills! And really big on Facebook. That's Favela Chic.

> MySpace is a favela. You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug.

> You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!

> You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum. It's a squelette.

— Bruce Sterling, Reeboot 11 Keynote[0]

0. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech...

I too had this experience last week, for suspicious account activity purposes; as someone running my own company it was a kind of frightening prospect. I assume that my account was targeted for failed login bombing due to being rather outspoken about a certain person's style of saluting.

The verification process failed once or twice for me, but I finally got it done, and my account was restored within 24 hours - and with no details about the actual "supicious activity" that triggered events.

Still, there was very little way to communicate with them about it; the r/LinkedIn community has a stickied post about it, with some links that do not require an active account.

It's worth noting that I'd also been flagged by Cloudflare for extra checks for a while; I also changed my browser's User Agent and it resolved that.

If someone tried breaking into my account, I don't think locking me out of my account permanently is the solution for them. I have tried different browsers. I have tried both my mobile phone and laptop. I have deleted my app and reinstalled, yet nothing.

If you are based out of the EU you can request "data rectification" here: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/TS-DRF

Or even better let a lawyer do it for you.

Oh man, I'm not within the EU. And even if I was, why should anyone have to get a lawyer over something like this.

> LinkedIn profile is literally essential to your means of livelihood

Well, it shouldn't be. You shouldn't tie your livelihood to a single unpaid account.

Well, it shouldn't be. You shouldn't tie your livelihood to a single unpaid account.

Lots of things "shouldn't" be, but are, thanks to the tech industry.

Unfortunately, your response amounts to little more than, "Simply go back in time and do things differently!" In other words, you're not helping him.

Maybe it too late for this person, but it is the right time to act for everyone else that feels the same level of lock-in.

>You shouldn't tie your livelihood to a single unpaid account.

Or a single paid account. Being a paying customer in these situations buys you nothing.

Normally I provide snark when HN is used in the past as a support forum for these large companies, because they should be doing this work themselves, not us.

However, it's been years and this trend doesn't reverse and only gets worse.

We just lost https://www.meetup.com/ottawa-rust-language-meetup/. We had a really interesting talk scheduled for this evening on Durable Execution that's going to have to be postponed.

We're learning our lesson and rebuilding around http://www.ottawa-rust.ca/ rather than being beholden to anybody.

Any suggestions on meetup alternatives we can harness without becoming dependent?

luma is the new hot meetup alternative, but I assume the same fate will ultimately befall it.

Ye it is bad. On many sites.

Try to make a pseudoanonymous account nowadays without phone number for 2FA or "security". You get banned on so many places. And even if you play ball they arbitrarily cut you off since some principal component analysis put you outside some parameter range.

>At times, I wonder if I'm just getting a response from robots or whether the support team just does not care about what I am going through right now.

I think they just pass or fail support tickets randomly due to pressure to close tickets.

If you can not equip your team with enough man power, why create problems that cause people to require help from your support.

This happened to me recently with verification to Coinbases's KYC system. I was repeatedly denied verification and after contacting their support on X (the only method of contacting support without logging in is social media) they gave me the same ring around that you've experienced. Ultimately I solved the issue by using my girlfriend's phone to take the pictures of my license.

The root of the issue in my case is probably caused by my camera's low quality pictures from a lack of AI post processing since I use Graphene OS. It sucks that you can no longer easily contact a human when you're really stuck.

>the only method of contacting support without logging in is social media)

But you logged in, into social media.

Same/similar happened to me. I literally had to turn up in person at LinkedIn’s London office to get support to unlock my account. Based on their reaction, it did not seem like I was the first to do this.

You could try cmd+f their ToS to see if there is a legal appeals process. Do whatever it says to do when there is a dispute. If disputes must be resolved through arbitration, then demand arbitration. I've had this work with 2 different companies in the past. Legal teams seem to always be real humans who reply :)

> Legal teams seem to always be real humans who reply :)

Because there are actual negative consequences if they don't.

EU/GDPR had the right approach -- it's necessary to create negative consequences in order to force companies to invest sufficiently in support.

> Am I Just Collateral Damage of a Barely Functioning System

Yes, sorry :( I've heard of similar things happening with Facebook.

And (sadly in my case) Paypal.

In 2020/21 I was working from home like many people. I'd been lucky enough to get an RTX3080 for my new computer build and decided to experiment with mining ETH during downtime - it was winter and the office was cold anyway...

"Made" a few hundred bucks over the course of a couple of months and had it in Coinbase. They had a setup where you could sell for USD and deposit in a Paypal account, so I logged into mine - which I hadn't used in a few years - and deposited the funds.

Shortly after, my account was frozen for suspicious activity. I was told that there was no way to reverse this or obtain any further info or explanation. The funds were not returned to my Coinbase account.

In the end I just said screw it and chalked it up as a learning experience. I hadn't really created anything of value so I didn't feel as angry as if I'd been cheated out of actual work. Still, it pissed me off that as far as I can tell, Paypal essentially stole a few hundred dollars from me and there was nothing I could do about it.

I had figured that by using "legit" services and following along with all of their KYC/tax policies I would be safe. In retrospect I probably would've been better off cashing out via some questionable crypto exchange. Haven't messed with any of it since.

Can confirm. FB apparently launched some kind of widespread hunt with their triggers set to feather weight sensitivity and a ton of people are being locked out and subsequently deleted. I got locked out because of a non-existent IG account that they somehow tied to my FB account. Irony is that my only IG account is not compromised by their "special action". For now at least.

I'm also surprised this has been taken off the HN frontpage. Is this an attempt to cover for LinkedIn?

Off-topic, but I think I'm currently shadow-banned from recruiters. They spammed for a while, I didn't keep up replying… and I guess now my stats are bad. Any way to reset this?

Also, my feed is full of posts that are just past deadline. Guess I realize just how weird this platform is.

Can you post screenshots of the ad campaign you were running?

I would, but I can't even access my account. Also, the campaign I created was drafted with the aid of their AI assistant. I have never ran anything illegal in the past. All I was promoting was my startup. I also used my personal card. And as for billing, I was using the free credit offered by LinkedIn themselves.

I don't give my LinkedIn profile and, if it's required, just submit the main URL or one for Bill Gates.

F*ck LinkedIn. You don't need it to get a job. I'm living proof. My profile has barely anything on it now.

They're amongst many companies who hate to provide minimal service to their "product." (Google, I'm looking at you.)

As for your ID issues, I had similar trouble when I lost my common sense and agreed to take a selfie while applying for an apartment in a new area. Several attempts to land thru perfect photo of my ID that they said wasn't verifiable (not sure why, folks, since my ID photo was nearly a decade old) and I gave up.

I would never do the same for a social media profile, so i recommend fighting back. Protect your privacy, ng friend, it's the last remaining bit of leverage you have.

I could forget about the job aspect, since I'm not working on my startup. Hopefully, it takes off and I don't have to worry about job. But for investors, I'm not sure of how I would handled that. Regardless, I no choice but to find a way out.

> “You don't need it to get a job. I'm living proof. My profile has barely anything on it now.”

I work remotely and have since 2020, the only way that anyone from BigTech of my current company would have reached out to me was via LinkedIn.

I’m sure if I were still in Atlanta I could get a run of the mill enterprise CRUD job based on my local network.

Where do you live?

In the UK/EU, the GDPR gives protection against such automated decision making. i.e. You have the right (and the ability!) to appeal to a human to sort out cases like this.

More info here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

> In a world today, where your a LinkedIn profile is literally essential to your means of livelihood

These are the effects of unregulated capitalism: monopoly, walled gardens, no right to appeal

Yeah. I typed long messages every single time and all I got was the same template response.

What country are you in?