Quitting LinkedIn | Hacker News Reader

Quitting LinkedIn

blog.capwatkins.com

165 pointsnj97 comments

Oh boy. When has it become fashionable to quite X and announce it to the whole world?

LinkedIn is just a tool - it's usefulness depends on what your current needs are. It's useless today and useful tomorrow. Just like any other tool - i.e. take hammers for example.

Would it sound absurd for someone to announce that they quit hammers tomorrow? Does any of this make sense?

- Yeah, hammer was really useful to me when I hanged that picture on the wall last year. Not so much any more, I should quit it!

- I'm past hammers - electric drill with screws can do 90% of it does and for the 10% it does not I should really re-assess whether I'm doing the right thing in the first place.

- I tried to make a cereal with a hammer this morning, but it did not work! WTF???

- I watched this movie where someone was killed with a hammer. What an evil tool, I should quit it as it stains my karma!

- I don't use it any more, but every time I pass by the toolbox it reminds me that I still have it and I get this strong urge to get rid of it. It depresses me so much, that I want to throw away the whole box or move out of the house!

Don't mean to be harsh on Cap Watkins, I'm just tired of reading this kind of posts. Oh wait, I know - I should quit the Internet!

Your argument would carry more weight if your analogy were better. But the fact is that social networks are what Dijkstra would have called a "radical novelty":

"The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit.... It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name 'common sense', our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. This is the situation that is characteristic for the 'radical' novelty." (EWD 1036)

Hammers don't care if we use them or don't. There isn't one big Hammer.com that produces all of them. Hammers are not constantly acquiring new features. Hammers aren't useful or not on the basis of how many other people use them. Hammers do not even have significant overlap with other tools. Hammer.com doesn't need to convince anyone to try hammers. Companies that make hammers want you to buy their brand, but they don't bother with trying to convince people they need them.

Look at all the differences from social networks. Unlike a hammer, if nobody else is using LinkedIn, it's not useful to you anymore either. If everybody quits using LinkedIn but you, LinkedIn won't have any revenue, even though you're not paying to use the service. If everybody quit using hammers for stupid reasons, there wouldn't be anything stopping you from using them; in fact, any hammers you already own would continue to work. LinkedIn could just vanish despite your protests.

LinkedIn is pretty unlike a hammer, so I don't find your argument holds all that much water. It's a social network, so it's of interest and on-topic here when people decide to leave. It's interesting, because many people here are building their own startups and many of them are social networks. They survive or die on being used. If there were great insights in this article about how to retain users, it would be especially interesting, but knowing that there is a general malaise about this one is still information, and the article is still well-written and I still feel I got my nickel's worth from it.

LinkedIn and hammers have one thing in common: they are tools to get something else done, they are not the end game. In that they are similar, in everything else they are not.

This commonality (both being tools) is crucial to the reason that I chose hammers and not apple pies, "Dance Dance Revolution" games, Iron Man animated series or the Federal Reserve as examples for my analogy. These would not hold any kind of substance at all (liquid or otherwise).

Each tool has its own place and time. If there's a recession and Cap finds himself unemployed, then LinkedIn will be much more valuable to him despite the minor inconveniences that it might cause (i.e. spam). In fact these inconveniences might become a welcome and even desired feature of the product.

My point is that renouncing tool X when you can't find a use case for it has become a fashion of sorts that irks me.

Please note, that I don't deny anyone the right to follow this movement, but I also reserve the right to be annoyed by it and share my emotional state and receive validation that such state is shared by a large number of other people, at least according to the upvotes on my post.

I totally agree with you, but there's something here you're missing.

When I joined LinkedIn, I did so because I wanted to keep in touch with people I worked with, like you know, a curated Facebook - which works well, because the people I worked with aren't necessarily interested in pictures of my baby boy or of me getting drunk this Holiday season and this goes both ways.

Unfortunately LinkedIn failed and failed hard at being that kind of social network. Nowadays the only thing I receive in return for my membership is Spam from incompetent recruiters that don't even bother reading my profile, and no matter what I do I can't turn those emails off (a perk you get for paying them), which is why I simply flag all LinkedIn emails as Spam.

I feel like LinkedIn missed a great opportunity here and now it's too late, their role being filled in my life by Twitter, GitHub, Google Groups and even Facebook.

"which is why I simply flag all LinkedIn emails as Spam...."

That's really not what the "spam" button is for, and you probably know that. You most certainly could turn those emails off - just go to email settings and click "introductions only". There's even a link at the bottom of each email to adjust your settings.

Don't make it more likely that my LinkedIn messages get marked as spam through Spamhaus or gmail algorithms just because you don't want to click twice to unsubscribe or prove some kind of hate-point.

(source: used to take care of an opt-in service's email spam rankings and had tons of people not use the "easy unsubscribe", and others angry they couldn't get their expected/important notifications sometimes when it got sent to a spam folder)

The problem is that they keep expanding the list of emails and auto-subscribing everyone to each new one. So LinkedIn really is behaving like a bad-faith spammer. And when I click the "unsubscribe" link in the email, I don't get one-click unsubscribed, but instead it just dumps me on the "user preferences" page, then I have to hunt for the email settings and the specific box to uncheck.

The thing that infuriates me the most is when they send me a "reminder" email about an invitation I've already ignored. It's like they expect me to immediately log in and immediately respond to every piece of recruiter spam and "connection request" from people I don't know.

Dear LinkedIn: If I'm ignoring an "invitation", it's because I don't care about it, and I'll just click the "decline" button the next time I happen to log in. I don't want the "invitation reminder" emails, and there is no setting that I can find to unsubscribe from the "reminders".

I don't know if it's still like this, but I actually went through a ton of trouble trying to unsubscribe from LinkedIn emails. I dug through all the preferences and unchecked all the email notification boxes, but the LinkedIn emails kept coming. After googling I found that I wasn't alone in having this problem, as if it were some kind of bug or something.

At this point, I gave up and started marking all LinkedIn emails as spam.

This all happened a while ago, so they may have fixed it by now. But quite frankly, I don't care. I would delete my account, but many legitimate companies I've interviewed with specifically ask for my LinkedIn profile to keep in touch. It's kind of annoying.

I've been using careers.stackoverflow.com as an alternative for an online resume, but it's unexpected to potential employers.

I still get their invitations to join a year after closing the account. I don't remember how many times I clicked the leave-me-alone button.

Any email that violates the CAN-SPAM act - as LinkedIn's messaging does - I mark as spam. When I can unsubscribe from their emails with one click and no login-wall as they're legally required to allow, I will stop doing this.

I'm sorry if it hurts your experience, but they absolutely deserved to be punished for their flagrant disregard of the law. When they realize that their abusive email tactics actually hurt their users, maybe they'll stop - and then we'll all be better off.

Give all the discussion regarding usability and user experience on HN I find this post baffling.

Why would anyone go through 5 steps and 15 clicks when 1 click achieves the same goal? Do you really expect users to consider and care about the side effect?

> Do you really expect users to consider and care about the side effect?

And then there are people who consider this side effect and completely don't mind it, or even find it desirable.

I'm in that boat.

There is a reason PG has talked about e-mail being broken, this is a perfect example.

"I wanted to keep in touch with people I worked with, like you know, a curated Facebook "

I have used linkedin since its early days (06-07ish) along with facebook. I learnt that "keeping in touch with ppl" is quite different b/w fb which is personal vs. linkedin which is professional. fb is more engaging where u can share pictures, stories, wall posts, fun stuff whatever. But it is extremely difficult to keep oneself engaged on linkedin just to keep in touch. Other than sharing a status update and checking linked profiles, what else can you really do on linkedin actively? Thats why, if you try and use linkedin thinking along lines of facebook, you will fail.

In my opinion and experience, linkedin is more effective about keeping track of who is who in the industry specfiically in industries/domains you are interested in. Lets say you found a job listing for a company somewhere. You can actually go to linkedin and try a search "Company xxx recruiter" or "company xxx talent aquisition" etc. You can probably get a result of actual recruiters who are on linkedin for that company. You can then try and reach out to them directly (through linkedin or whatever). Btw, I did this successfully once for a job posting that I was interested in and this possting was on the company's direct careers section. Insteaed of filling out "Apply now" crap, I found a direct recruiting contact in the division through some search skills on linkedin and called the guy directly. He was happy to talk to me since I was a good fit for the role. He said that the online application portal is probably going to reject me auto (dont ask why) and hence it was a good idea to find him.

Have you tried Coderwall for connecting professionally? you actually get relevant technical tips from people you connect with so you are technically connected and learn from each other. There is Pitchbox (trypitchbox) for replacing recruiter spam with more meaningful career opportunity stream.

Maybe if you read them more thoughtfully, you'll get more out of them?

Hammers are individual tools. LinkedIn is purely social. Most people only used it because other people were using it. If people are quitting it, then it might be good to announce that as well. Certainly that's the only significant way to pressure LinkedIn into improving things.

Of course, this being the internet, people do talk about which hammers they use: http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/1659

> Would it sound absurd for someone to announce that they quit hammers tomorrow?

If hammers were a very recent invention that had become a cornerstone of the modern workplace, then yes, it would be interesting to read a well-argued post about why someone was "quitting hammers."

The problem is that there is a ridiculously large, and ever-increasing number of tools available. So determining which ones provide you value and which ones you can do without has become a skill in itself.

This especially applies to our field where new websites, services, platforms, frameworks and even programming languages appear pretty much every single day.

The tool analogy breaks down in that most people don't can't won't own or use tools, and the popularity curve shows that although people with a basement full do exist, they're kind of rare and most people only use a couple.

A better analogy for social networking is watching a drama TV show. I don't at all, which is supposedly really weird. But of those who do, they follow a bell curve where most people only follow a couple TV shows. So they've gotta periodically swear one off cold turkey. Like these posts you claim to dislike.

Its much more like swearing off watching Survivor, than like giving up on the hammer.

I think the O/P is just doing it wrong. I have a 100% complete profile on my LinkedIn and I have 770 connections, but I don't get spam, I do get the occasional recruiter or app development company wanting to sell me their services, but not so much that I would notice. But I am not in marketing, I am just a senior R&D guy. I have that many connections because I go out, meet people and remember to add them to my LinkedIn connections, plus I do accept 'random' connections from people who have mutual business interests with me (but not just anyone).

The first thing to note is it isn't a social network like facebook, it is a business meeting place. It isn't just a recruitment tool it is a place to promote yourself and your organisation in a B2B context.

I know some programmers who sit in their cubicle and have no interest in promoting themselves, fair enough, but I find it a valuable tool for meeting my peers. If I want to contact someone in another company then I can see who of my connections is linked to that organisation. If I need to keep track of where one of my contacts is then LinkedIn is useful for seeing job movements. I even connect to those dreaded recruiters, but only the ones I find relevant and the first time they offer me something offensively irrelevant I shoot them down quickly.

Overall you get out what you put in to LinkedIn. It hasn't made me rich, but I am sure I get value from the time I put in.

Same here. 880+ connections and NO SPAM.

It's not just job seeking: LinkedIn is pretty valuable for sales. The reps in the enterprise sales team I work with use it extensively. With a premium account you can find out who occupies a given position at your target firm, then ask for them by name on the phone. It turns cold calling from truly freezing to some level of initial connection, eg "I see you're connected to my friend Brian on LinkedIn? Blah blah phi sigma kappa lacrosse MBA blah. Now how about you hear my pitch?" Works enough of the time to be their default tool.

"Blah blah phi sigma kappa"

really didn't expect to see my college frat in a comment on HN today, or any day really!

Is that a real frat?! Sorry if so, didn't mean to slight it :) Was just throwing out random greek letters. (Not sure why you've been DV'ed for that comment either.)

Yep - it is real. No worries though, I wasn't offended :)

Yes, that's the value of LinkedIn. Turning Cold prospects into warm ones. Its wroks very nicely in enterprise situations. When you know who your target entry point is (meaning, the person you are leveraging to sneek in your pitch) things go much smoother. Its just a matter of finding out more about them and easily creating a profile around their likes. You can't really fail at rapport if you know what the person likes. And rapport is how you open sales negotiations.

This is how I use LinkedIn:

When I'm scoping out a position/company, I see who's on the team that I'll be working with ie: Design. Then I hopefully, there's a link to the blog/portfolio/Dribbble/Twitter. This is to get a sense of their work and style, though it doesn't have to match the style of the company itself, but you can an idea of experience of those people.

Then I look at employee insights - which shows those who left the company recently. Again, I dig through till I find the ex designers. I also pay attention to the duration - ie: if the company are churning out alot of ex employees who stay no longer than 3 months, then I'd pay closer attention.

And I never initiate contact though LinkedIn. Twitter, email is the way to go for me, which you can easily find as you dig through their profile.

In short, I don't use LinkedIn to find jobs. I use it to find out more about the company, somewhat culture and its people.

Also I do it all when I'm not logged in - it gives you more info when you're not logged vs logged in (they'll put up upgrade/pay walls). Really, really dumb.

In short, I don't use LinkedIn to find jobs. I use it to find out more about the company, somewhat culture and its people.

Spot on. I use LinkedIn just like Twitter: 99% of the time I'm in read-only mode and with the privacy settings as locked down as possible.

Also, in the iOS app, it shows you "Who's View You". Better log out before snooping around in those profiles.

I believe paid accounts can also see who's scoped you out.

Just to recap over the past few months. We should quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This effectively covers the top 4 social networks. I'm wondering what this says about us more than these companies. Maybe we are just burnt out with social networks in general?

The author makes some valid points. I mainly use LinkedIn to get an overview about the person who is emailing me or just followed me on twitter. I find that to be pretty useful.

As far as the recruiting emails. The more successful you are the more cold emails you get.

Just to recap over the past few months. We should quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Don't forget quitting Google (that was front page yesterday). And of course caffeine, carbs, 8-hour sleeps, email, fructose, the office, the home, and on and on.

While some of the "my silver bullet" posts seem to hold interesting perspectives, recently such pretense is gone and it is simply people clucking along.

I've never found any real use for linkedin. Never gotten any references to hires that were worth it. Never gotten any work through it.

About all it's useful for is knowing when some people are dissatisfied with their current job and looking for new employment... their linkedin activity goes way up and you hear from them through the service.

> About all it's useful for is knowing when some people are dissatisfied with their current job and looking for new employment...

Also, it's useful for knowing who just lost their job because that's about the only time I see anyone update their page.

> Also, it's useful for knowing who just lost their job

I mostly see people updating LinkedIn prior to fusions or other big changes, or when they're just fed up with their position.

I agree with you, but now that I'm searching for a job, I'm seeing a lot of integration with linkedin where you can apply by clicking just one button, what is better than complete a huge form for every job offer.

That is either sarcasm which needs to be marked, or you are in trouble. "[B]y clicking just one button [you can] complete a huge form for every job offer" is the definition of how to produce spam.

All "how to write an effective job application" articles emphasize writing cover letters/emails that show you've read and understood the job requirements and demonstrate how you can fill the position, including a resume with applicable information.

Yes, but tools such as Taleo does not help the user, as it is likely the user will be typing the same information many times. This free the user to write better cover letters and emails. Thinking from a HR perspective, maybe linkedin API can help automate the search for a fit and avoid spams. Spams may occurs because they don't have the right tools.

LinkedIn is my least favorite social network. Unless you're looking for a job or are recruiting it's pretty worthless. Their spam controls are terrible. Recruiter spam is rampant. Groups are full of spam and self promotors with no easy way for non-admin users to stop it.

> Unless you're looking for a job or are recruiting it's pretty worthless.

But if you're looking for a job or are recruiting it can pretty valuable. It has its purpose - one it solves reasonably well. It answers questions like: "Do I know anyone who can make SuperWidgets using MagicTechnology?" "I'm interested in working at ABC Corp - did I used to work with someone who can get me a foot in the door?"

I'm definitely with you on the groups. When they introduced groups I joined a couple of relevant ones and the signal/noise ratio dove like a fishing pelican. I tried fighting it, but made barely a dent in all the self-promotional BS.

For me, LinkedIn is immensely useful and worth the $50/mo premium subscription for InMail. I don't spam people, but when I want to reach a C_O or the Founder of [Insert Company], I find that nearly all of my InMails are answered - much higher than the rate of directly emailing that person.

It's actually quite difficult in most industries to Google someone's email address, and if there's no profile/background attached to a simple Gmail like there is in LinkedIn, your message gets dumped that much faster.

Who cares? Turn all e-mails off, use it as a self-updating business contact list. Works great.

btw, am I the only one who get's confused by these "I quit xxx" thinking it's a post by a former employee?

You're not the only one - I also initially thought this was going to be about a LinkedIn employee quitting.

That's basically what I use LinkedIn for. Well, that, and occasionally looking up where someone or other works. I know it's "supposed" to be good for a whole lot more but my use is pretty limited. And, yes, I get mail I don't care about from LinkedIn. I could probably turn a lot of it off but I'm pretty good at ignoring lots of routine emails I get from lots of places.

I like it with Outlook 2013 -- there's a built-in plugin that basically looks up people that you communicate with on Linkedin. I find it handy as I meet with alot of people, and I get a picture and brief bio, and I get you see who they've "linked to" recently.

Before that, I found it to be completely useless -- sort of like a grown-up version of baseball cards... you collect people for unknown reasons.

So they "copied" http://rapportive.com/ for Gmail?

If it's Xobni, it's been around since at least 2008, I wouldn't say the copied Rapportive

LinkedIn owns Rapportive.

I totally get what the author is talking about. However, to provide another perspective on the other side, I have successfully used linkedin more than once (3 times) to secure a new opportunity (both fulltime and contract) in the past. 2 of them were passive i.e. I was not really looking that hard but was open to it if it was the right fit for me.

Linkedin is just another tool like many others. You have to know how to use it to your advantage or usefulness. Yes there are countless and pointless groups/recruiters who just spam (I get a lot of them as well) but if you create a highly targeted profile, chances are that you also will get invites from good recruiters or professionals in general. The percentage is more like 95% crap, 5% good. I am happy with the 5% part.

This has been my experience as well. Obviously something else to consider is that the author has held roles at various well-known companies, and from that alone I'd wager the amount of noise he receives is greater than the average Joe.

I'll be interested in what the endorsements do in the long-term as well. In my circles, I've already seen a lot of people endorsed for skills they don't have, and it is only getting worse. Because of the way LinkedIn coerces people to endorse, lot of non-technical co-workers of mine have tried endorsing me for things they've never even heard of, assuming that LinkedIn is making this assumption based on something else I have written on my profile, which I think is a big part of the problem.

What worries me about endorsements the most is that there is no stopping someone from listing a bunch of the hottest skills, and then asking his friends to endorse him for it. At least with the people endorsement you have to write a small blurb about why you are endorsing the person, but with the skills endorsement I just need to click a link.

Totally agree, and I've seen completely unqualified people that I thought knew better do this and wished there was an (anonymous) opposite-of-endorsement.

Yea I totally agree about the endorsement feature. I think it is not working out well. But isn't the endorsement suggestion based on what you list in your profile ? For example, I get endorsements for things that I have listed in my skills keywords.

I believe initially it does, but I know one of my co-workers was endorsed for a framework he'd never even heard of before and that our co-worker "endorsed because it sounded techie!" I believe you can even add custom ones for other people, as someone tagged me as simply "Front-end", and as a woman that's a little awkward, if not vague in and of itself.

I almost wish there was a way for me to approve them, because depending on who the endorsement comes from (i.e. if they are someone I've never even worked with before or like the aforementioned scenario, I don't even work in the same department as that person), it means absolutely nothing and I'd expect smarter employers to pick up on that.

I'm already concerned that if it looks like I'm farming endorsements, I won't be taken seriously.

Michael O Church of HN fame was the reason that I decided to dump LinkedIn. He pointed out that a stupid mistake in entering information on a site like LinkedIn can band you as a liar (even if the mistake was inadvertent) and give you no ability to correct yourself.

It would be tantamount to sending out hundreds of resumes with a typo in your email address.

That's an inane reason to throw out something that MAY have value to you. You might as well as never send out a resume or CV because there may be a mistake. Or you could just double check your dates... it's not rocket science.

I think Michael O Church may have more complex reasons to avoid linkedin.

> When it started, LinkedIn was about connecting you and the people you know (and endorse) professionally. It was the answer to not wanting to add your boss on Facebook.

LI launched before FB and years before FB opened to the public.

I like LinkedIn . However I am getting annoyed by my contacts who are endorsing my skils without my asking them and who then expect me to do the same for them and get all sullen when I don't. The funniest instance of unsolicited endorsement was when people began endorsing my SOA skills ; anyone who has worked with on a project knows that I despise SOA from the bottom of my heart.

My top endorsement on LI is Salesforce.com. My first action at any employer where I had sufficient authority would be get rid of Salesforce.com. I hate the software.

And yet you listed it. No doubt you have it on your paper CV as well.

And when I ask you about it in a tech. interview, what then? Will you have the balls to tell me why it's all crap?

Actually, I do have the integrity and expertise to back up my assertions with reasonable arguments.

Every tool has its purpose and shall be used accordingly.

LinkedIn - sold you to recruiters. OK, I got 1'000+ connections, most with the people I never met [80%?], but who heard about me, or we share connections, or work in similar fields [finance, multinational company, senior management, etc]. I mainly use LI as an extended address book and public CV. So any recruiter, who calls me, knows pretty much all about my skills / experience / etc. Got bunch of interviews through LI. Yep, quite often see some spammy stupid invitations to connect. So what? Just don't accept those. I login 2-3 times per month.

Facebook - FB is a timekiller, so I log in 2-3 times per month to kill some time, exchange with people I know.

Twitter - info flood, cutting access to API, sold you to advertisers, etc, etc. Sorry, never bothered to learn how to use it. Never made one tweet. Have no time for Twitter, since I am already using FB 2-3 times per month.

To sum it all up - just understand how the tool can be useful for your needs and use accordingly. No overlap, don't use the tool or build your own.

IMO if there's a single social network to worry about [going evil], it's LinkedIn. It's a phisher's wet dream right behind genealogy sites, and the data they have access to is worth magnitudes more than your run-of-the-mill "social" data.

Sure, you can better target me for a small-time sale because you saw that I "liked" some nuanced TV show on FB, but that's chump change compared to having pretty much unfettered access to 1000's of executives....execs who write checks on a monthly basis that are larger than what most households spend in a year.

There's also the worry that if they become a sort of de facto hiring platform, then we'll be forced to ante up for a premium membership in order to simply be considered for an interview.

Warranted fears or not, I don't trust them and never will.

Refer to the following handy graph of "how useful linkedin is" vs "how much people want to talk to you":

    _   |          _________
     \  |         /         \
      \ |        /           \
       \|_______/             \_______
    
      - 0 +

I deleted my LinkedIn account about 1.5 years ago. I was getting hammered by recruiters constantly, and I felt like I needed to politely decline them all. After a while it got to to be too much so I just pulled the plug.

That decision isn't without consequences. I've greatly reduced my possibilities for networking by doing this. If I had to do it over again, I probably would not have deleted my account.

But, on the other hand, when I now get contacted by recruiters they find me through StackOverflow, github or my website; and thus they have infinitely better opportunities for me and generally seem to be higher caliber recruiters to boot.

Chris, you've jumped from Zoosk, to Formspring, to Amazon, to Etsy all in the period of two to three years. Maybe you've proven yourself resourceful enough at this point to not need the value it gives?

(also, hi, former coworker!)

Yeah, the sign-in to unsubscribe junk is BS. Unsubscribe should be a simple direct link, nothing to fill out. I end up blocking domains instead of unsubscribing at that point.

LinkedIn is the best tool out there, as a software engineer, I was able to get all my recent jobs (last 5 years) only by LinkedIn and the premium membership is totally worth it. Make sure to have a good profile, good recommendations, and if you are not interested in job offers, mention it on your profile. LinkedIn is much more than a recruiting site. Prune useless connections (especially those who have LION 1000+ connections etc on their profile).

I deleted my account two years ago and haven't regretted it. In fact I get more legitimate (and nicer) job offers by having an email address in my account info here than I ever did on LinkedIn.

I had a lot of friends who insisted I would not be able to get a job in the future by not being on LinkedIn. I haven't looked since I quit, but I think being "hard to get" usually makes you more desirable rather than less.

It's fairly easy to control where and when you get email in LinkedIn. It's even easier to control in GMail (as the user states)

https://www.linkedin.com/settings/?trk=hb_acc

I know that's not the author's entire point, but the "tragedy of the commons" argument becomes less compelling without all the spamming complaints.

I often include a link to my profile in emails with the idea that if the person has or cares about it, they can see recommendations. If not, well, then hopefully it doesn't matter to them and it's not a negative. A few people have commented on it positively, not many. The vast majority seem oblivious. That's not overly surprising considering how many people in TV news seem to not be overly "techy".

Usually something small, like: Here is my LinkedIn profile, with recommendations from previous coworkers: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jwbridges

(I know, I need to re-write that summary pretty bad.) The only thing that leaves me scratching my head is that my profile is stuck at 90%. It asks me to fill in my current position, and describe my current position. I don't have one. You'd think a site focused around looking for jobs would have that as an option.

Then opt out. This happens on any social network in which you have a public profile that gets a lot of exposure. Hell, my brother who works at Google explicitly lists Google as his employer on his public G+ profile, and he's been added to thousands of peoples circles who he doesn't know. If you aren't interested, then there is an email preferences setting tab that you can easily customize what gets sent to your inbox (https://www.linkedin.com/settings/?trk=hb_acc). LinkedIn is the only social network that I've had and will continue to keep, since it's focused on one thing -- professional networking.

I'm kind of becoming tired of the argument that a service is bothersome with the amount of emails it's sending if there are ways to disable the emails. When I was seeking employment, I was getting multiple emails a day from the service, many of which were helpful (Alumni network postings, messages, connections). However, once I took an offer (One I happened to be recruited for on LinkedIn), I disabled all of those emails coming through. I still check the site fairly frequently but can still just use it for the way I like to use it, to keep a record of my professional journey.

That's not the problem. The problem is that the e-mails, by their very nature, are opt-out rather than opt-in. One reason people seem to complain is because they have to waste time logging into the site, finding the e-mail opt-out section, and disabling whatever "service" is responsible for the torrent of spam. And that only works until the site's next "user experience" update.

My use case for linked in is simple. I think I might want to work with place X. Who do I know, directly or indirectly, who works there? Let me talk to them directly.

You should expect this when you're part of a social network. First you join it free, you share your data which is ...then used to get bucks. What do you want? should not they earn money? I bet you will be doing same.

Instead of complaining and wastint a few hundred bytes and CPU cycles and more important..your energy, you could simply delete account and move on. Expecting something extra ordinary personalize from a social network is nothing but day dreaming.

As much as I find LinkedIn's web site overloaded and hard to follow, unsubscribing from the emails is trivial. It's not just that they have a convenient "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email, you can actually use that link even if 1) you're not currently logged in or 2) you are logged in as another user (I have several accounts).

I give them credit for that.

Yeah, lots of group spam, but today, I used LI to contact a scientist at a company whose thesis I'd read. I'd like to meet him in person, possibly to try to hire him, or possibly just to have the business relationship. I rarely use LI fruitfully but this is its value proposition, to me. Once a year or so, I can make a contact like this.

While I'm sure many people would be happy to have Cap's problem, this seems easily fixable from LinkedIn's side. Simply allow people to filter or dial down who can message them. While it might hurt their InMessage product, it seems better to nerf that than to force people like Cap off the platform.

Whilst I remain on LinkedIn, I have yet to get any value from it. Furthermore the new endorsements feature is utterly useless. I consider myself a back-end AND front-end developer but for some reason I am heavily endorsed in CSS, making it look as if I am not as skilled in back-end work.

Today I just launched a new app that acts as a portfolio/resume for programmers and other people who build things. If you are unsatisfied with linkedin, maybe it's worth checking out: http://www.mycelial.com

It looks good! I am not a huge fan of the name though.

Thanks! This is my first big rails application. I'm kind of bummed that my show hn announcement died so quickly.

discussion happening here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022075

LinkedIn is the only one really useful social network for me. I got several times excellent jobs thanks to LinkedIn, my professional blog got good promotion via LinkedIn connections and I get orders for my product because of networking effect in LinkedIn.

It's the first time I ever read or hear that somebody got something useful out of LinkedIn.

As a hiring manager, I also like to verify people's resumes against their Linkedin profiles. I generally find some kind of useful context (something they left out), recommendation or discrepancy on about 1 out of 10 resumes.

So it sounds like it'd be more likely to be used against me, then for me, if my app landed on your desk?

Only if it looks like you are trying to mislead me about your experience.

I'm another victim of linkedin's shameless mailing spam, I had disabled my account, but they still try to send me connect emails again and again, und you got no way to stop them...

Honestly, I don't know why LinkedIn is so "cool".There is nothing innovative there.I knew it from the beginning.But awesome advertising wins.

But if I quit LinkedIn, what will be my honeypot for professional interviewing or recruiters, and where will I keep my long-form resume ;-)?

Title of this post reminded me to checkout my linkedin account(after so long time).. :-)

This title confused the hell out of me. I thought he/she was leaving a job at LinkedIn.

I care so little about LinkedIn that I don't know why I'd bother quitting.

Here's my take on it (I didn't quit, and I don't get spam, but I think LinkedIn is taking the wrong approach:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i-wiped-m...

"Quitting LinkedIn"

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the sun will still rise tomorrow, just as it rose when people "quit Facebook" ...Google, Twitter, iPhones or whatever.

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