LinkedIn is a Virus | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is a Virus

a.wholelottanothing.org

268 pointsmarban109 comments

Open articleView on HN

My version: I was on the iPad, somehow hit a link to send invites to everyone on my "you might know" list.

Much embarassment ensued.

Surprisingly, about 75% of people who I've never met (online or IRL) accepted the invite.

I'm not exactly sure why Linkedin is worth a damn anymore.

LinkedIn was designed to clone myspace, but for grownups instead of high school kids.

It's essentially myspace for realtors.

I've found linkedin to be massively useful when looking for new contracts. I'm a contractor based in the UK.

any tips you could give?

Cultivate connections with people you know and trust, rely on their connections instead of trying to force connections with people you don't know.

The power of linked in isn't building a giant list of everyone who is related to you, it's building a tiny list of really awesome people who have a tiny list of really awesome people who have a tiny list of really awesome people...

TL;DR: If you curate content, don't be surprised if the quality rises.

EDIT: This is the perspective of a more introverted type who tries to build fewer strong connections instead of many weak connections. If you can build and maintain many weak connections effectively, go ahead! I just know that I absolutely cannot maintain those well, and prefer to network with those who can and rely on them to maintain those connections.

Your suggestion is the way that linked in used to work. Where your links were ideally strong connections that could vouche for you or make an introduction.

But now that linked in is trying to monetize their platform and restricts you from seeing people outside of your immediate network it has become a connect to everyone network.

It has been interesting to watch how linked in's efforts to make money has been leading to the weakening of their platform.

I generally only add people in Linkedin that I have a personal or professional interest in. I try and make sure that I actually meet, in person, the most important contacts on my Linkedin. I try and add people who are high up in the companies I want to work for WHERE they are also connected to people that I personally know.

You need to get out there and grow your network in person as well as online. Online should supplement what you do in real life.

I also only add recruiters that work in the specific technologies that I use, I also try and call these recruiters for a casual chat about the state of the market. Only recruiters that I get a good vibe from remain on my list.

This has resulted in me never being out of contract work for a few years now and my network now includes CEO's and MD's at very good companies who I have personally developed relationships with.

Thanks for changing the perspective on this story.

Look, I know linkedin's reputation so when I finally signed up, to keep in touch for jobs btw, I made sure not to click things without reading first. It's as simple as that. :)

That explains why $random people I've never met send me connect invites. I normally ignore them, but still waste time trying to figure out if its important or not. -.-.

Can one safely ignore all these "Business" networks? Wonder what people get out of it.

Mostly the random invites I get are from recruiters or the like, who want a big list of people to try and recruit/spam.

I have a help button in my iOs apps, so that people can send me emails if they have a problem or a question. This email account gets a couple of linked in invites a day.

I'll connect with someone in my field and location, because those are the connections I hope to foster with LinkedIn.

One of the weirder things I've experience is people "endorsing" my skills. Many of which are skills they've certainly never seen me use. I assume they were doing it for some sort of reciprocal endorsement, but I don't want my name attached to someone's skills that I know nothing about.

> but I don't want my name attached to someone's skills that I know nothing about.

The endorsements are a particularly bad move by linkedin. I've been endorsed for all sorts of things; Knowing what I've been endorsed for, I don't know why anyone would assign any credibility to those items on their website.

My mortgage broker endorsed my jQuery skills. While they are excellent - I doubt she knows what jQuery is.

Yes, I accepted a request from someone today (first time being there in quite some time) and it immediately suggested I endorse him for a slew of skills. I presume some people just click the button, thus I largely ignore it, I assumed other techies did as well (I.e. Put no faith in someone's endorsements).

LinkedIn started being worthless to me when the people started contact whoring. Now it serves little more than a place to dump a resume, but really, we don't need linkedin for that.

It's exceptionally useful for getting a quick background on people I've spoken to (or will speak to) in a commercial context

Surprisingly, about 75% of people who I've never met (online or IRL) accepted the invite.

On LinkedIn, I accept all invites. It's my business contact data and if someone wants to get my business contact data in his LinkedIn address book, I am glad to provide them.

On other platforms, I am more restrictive. On Facebook for example, I only accept friend request from persons I know in some way or another.

All of social networking is a virus.

They all rely on viral growth, viral "features" are often pushed despite no one liking them (see everything Facebook ever did). And most disturbingly if they succeed in growing big enough (Facebook again) then not having one can become a bit of problem in real life.

Of course LinkedIn is a virus. It's what works.

true. the paradox is in the fact that without these crazy tactics the network won't grow. And once it does the network gains massive power.

Facebook did this. Guess why it worked out? Now that it's big enough nobody looks at how it got there and says "well its evil in it's marketing so we'll abandon it"

"Viral" and "virus" often have different meanings in a technological / web context.

Compare: "Cute cat video goes viral" vs. "Cute cat download contains a virus"

Then compare: "Linked grows with viral features" vs. "LinkedIn is a Virus" (with capital V).

Your comparisons are not parallel. The article isn't saying LinkedIn contains a virus. The constructs "Linked grows with viral features" and "LinkedIn is a Virus" are much closer than you suggest.

I don't think the article meant that linkedin grows virally though. I think it was trying to compare linkedin to a virus that spreads by hijacking your address book.

At least that's how I read it.

The comparisons are not meant to be parallel. Try looking in context of the parent comment.

App.Net isn't like that.

Sort of. One the one hand theoretically enough people will pay for it to keep it running so they don't need to resort to spammy tactics to acquire users at all costs. On the other hand they are 100% in the business of acquiring more users as proved by the addition of free accounts. The invite process for getting new people into free accounts is pretty darn viral and the number of people using App.net has increased by over 75% in the past 3 weeks.

Of course it is, there's a reason why they started giving out free invites.

Rule 1: Make sure your linkedin password is not the same as your gmail password. I've tried to login to linkedin a couple of times in too much of a hurry, thinking I was logging into linkedin from some request and not reading the actual page. Luckily my passwords are different.

I'd have to say I'm not sure how someone who is tech savvy can knowingly give a company their gmail account info and expect nothing bad to happen. I only connect with people I know on Linkedin (and generally on g+), so I've never wanted to let them use my gmail info. If you willingly let Linkedin scan your gmail, I'm not sure what you would expect to happen, other than it inviting everyone on your contacts list, just like it says it will.

I'm not exactly a fan of Linkedin, but handing out any credentials to a website you aren't absolutely certain about seems a little naive. Also he admits he pushed the 'connect' button, which is clearly going to connect you to someone. I can see asking Linkedin to put a bigger warning or something, but knowingly giving them your info and hitting connect without scrolling down isn't the act of innocence professed here.

Post should be titled "Be careful giving information to websites".

A lot of those websites scan your address book and show you people that are already on the site and then ask you to send emails to people who aren't. It's reasonable to not know that 11,000 people would be on linked in. Also Linkedin isn't exactly a website that he "wasn't sure about". Everyone knows what the site is and does. Also your Rule 1 is kinda silly. I guess as long as I keep the passwords to those to sites different then I should be safe?

No, you won't be safe, but you won't accidentally log into your gmail account from Linkedin. This is specifically about Linkedin, because it's asking for your gmail credentials and if in a hurry, as I often am and don't go to linkedin that often, I mistakenly enter my linkedin password thinking it's telling me I am not logged in.

I agree that letting linkedin in scan your 11,000 contacts is going to be faster, but seriously, how many contacts are useful? I have less than 100, and some of those are kind of iffy. Unless you are a recruiter that has a use for perusing random resumes, it seems unlikely to get much value from having 10k profiles linked.

I think some people see it as a measure of their value as a professional. If you have 500+ connections, then you've obviously been around and know everyone. This impression can increase your commercial value when you're looking for executive or sales positions. Business is fundamentally social, and if you can leverage a large network in favor of your employer, you become much more valuable than a smooth talker with no connections.

It does kind of ruin the "introduce me" featureset when everyone you contact is going to say "Actually, err, I can't introduce you guys because I don't actually know him", though.

LinkedIn should mitigate this by minimizing or not even displaying the "number of connections" on profiles and emphasizing other value measurements that don't cause misaligned incentives.

Believe it or not, I blame this entire incident on Google, not LinkedIn.

Reasons?

a) you sign in using google. That is actually a REALLY GOOD PRACTICE because it gives you lots of benefits of oauth (I can de-authorize an account).

b) you only have the one password to remember, which is good for most people.

Why it's bad? Because when signing in, the other side can ask for details from your account and the best you can do is say "yes" or "no" and if you accidentally said yes, it's plowing though user preferences (something most people can't do) at google.

What should happen instead? An intentionally slow experience.

a) user clicks the sign in with google+ or whatever.

b) user is presented with option "allow/deny access for XXXX domain to log in with your credentials"

c) user is now presented with (all default off) options to allow sharing of data. There is a big message up top saying "these options are not required for you to log in with your google account. You may lose some functionality, but will not share any extra data with the 3rd party"

Vuala. Everyone is better off.

Not to detract from your point, just nitpicking for a moment. The word you're for at the end is voilà, of French origin.

Points for originality with "vuala", though. Usually it's just "viola" or "wallah"

"vuala" is actually pretty phonetic-esque without all those weird characters.

Also, I had to re-read it about 4 times before I stopped seeing "vulva" :)

>I've tried to login to linkedin a couple of times in too much of a hurry, thinking I was logging into linkedin from some request and not reading the actual page. Luckily my passwords are different.

Believe it or not, this had happened to me. I mistakenly typed in my Gmail password. When I realized this I started hating LinkedIn with a passion. They're a spam company.

That incident made me stop using easy to remember passwords and move to using KeePass to manage all my accounts.

Time to use 2-step verification.

This is the only way to keep LinkedIn out of your inbox short of using GMail filters. My highest-voted comment ever (27 upvotes) from a few months back:

"Linked-In has the spammiest email protocol out of any service I have ever used. Even after signing-in there is no one-click-to-unsubscribe button (they split it into about 12 scattered categories), and they create new categories periodically and opt you in to them. This is downright deceitful. Pro tip: change your email to one that you never use. It literally came down to doing this or deleting my Linked-in account--unfathomable to me. Also: no more f@#$!ng emails at 4 in the morning. This seems like a jackpot CAN-SPAM class action suit." link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4930040

> Also: no more f@#$!ng emails at 4 in the morning

Or just set your phone to not vibrate or beep from unimportant emails. Do you _really_ want to be notified dozens of times a day when you get non-urgent or unimportant emails?

> Rule 1: Make sure your linkedin password is not the same as your gmail password.

Rule 0: Your email password should be unique and not used anywhere else.

The exact same thing happened to me with http://viadeo.com/, a linkedin clone pretty popular in France.

The way it was worded hinted that I could chose from contacts who were on both my gmail contacts and viadeo users to connect with them. Not send an add to subscribe to viadeo to my entire contact list (who would ever want to do that??).

It's such a horrible feeling when you realize what just happened.

It emailed my grandmother, who had no idea what that was, it emailed past companies HR, ex-girlfriends, CEOs... This is unacceptable. I don't know how gmail could prevent applications from doing that, but they should not even TRY to do that in the first place.

ex-girlfriends, ouch. I initially thought this feature, while annoying, wasn't that big a deal. I've changed my mind.

LinkedIn does a real number on this one. A few weeks ago, I got a "Do you know so-and-so" email from LinkedIn. Most of the people they suggested that I knew were people in my general social circle, and I presume that LinkedIn was just saying, "Person X is a connection of persons Y, Z, Alpha, and Beta, as are you. Perhaps you know person X?"

But one was an ex-girlfriend.

Which was weird, because we hadn't dated long and had, to my knowledge, no social overlap before, during, or since the time that we dated (we met using a dating site). So, I thought, "How does LinkedIn know that I know her?"

And the conclusion I came to is that she had at some point recently uploaded her address book, and deliberately not chosen me as a contact, and then LinkedIn decided to try to nag me into initiating the contact that it knew we probably had.

Which is, to my mind, pretty evil. She didn't choose to contact me. LinkedIn basically used information out of her address book without her permission or knowledge. In an admittedly very minor way, LinkedIn decided to cyber-stalk her on my "behalf," without either of our permission.

(As it happens, we broke up amicably and no harm was done. But still, it was kind of gross.)

There is surprise when an address book with over 1000 entries is voluntarily connected to a commercial service designed to link people together?

Surprise when closing a browser tab does not stop the request from running at LinkedIn?

Calling it a virus is disingenuous at best.

Edit: ... or a way to get page views.

This, this. Much of our Western culture is centered around the individual and their ideas which must be respected, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, if it's someone wearing hipster glasses.

This, wait... no, sorry, not this. Joking aside; the first button is one that deselects all contacts and they mention the numbers of connections to be created right in the top. Here it is: http://i.imgur.com/3qiT140.jpg

I do hate LinkedIn but for very different reasons, like pretending is a safety measure to not connect with strangers and then charging you for a premium service for direct-emailing anyone you want.

Is "Add connections" the final step?

Granted it does allow you to deselect contacts and does (discreetly) indicate the interface is obscuring ~100 people it's defaulting sending invites to when you go to the next step, but you can understand why Joe VP might not expect clicking the blue button to send invitations to the mistress, disgruntled former employee and rival contractors who are hidden away somewhere near the bottom of the list.

My problem was that everything you need on that page is along the left-hand side. The number of contacts pre-selected is pretty small, and off to the right. I was breezing through this, trying to find old friends (and it worked! The first contact suggested was someone I've known for ten years), and I just missed that little number line on the upper right.

Ideally, it should throw up a warning for trying to add anything over maybe 50-100 accounts, like a simple "Are you sure Y/N?" before allowing you to continue adding that many.

I think people have a right to expect "find contacts in your address book" not to mean "indiscriminately spam contacts in your address book", especially from a service marketing itself as being a professional network and whose user guidelines expressly forbid you from connecting with people you do not know. Its UI explicitly violates the guidelines it expects users to follow by defaulting to inviting people -thousands at once- and not asking you to confirm the nature of your relationship, never mind giving you the chance to personalise your email.

For that reason I've purposely avoided intentionally connecting my address book to LinkedIn (other than registering with a gmail contact address) and yet all its "suggested contacts" are clearly people I once shared gmail mailing lists with. It's clearly pretty aggressive about finding contacts in address books at one end or another.

It's not like the UI behaviour is consistent - sometimes clicking "connect" on an individual's profile allows you to edit a message before sending it, sometimes it sends the autoinvite email without further prompting (which is a great way to look like a dick to someone you haven't spoken with in three years). Sometimes if you choose not to edit an English message it decides to edit it for you, sending a user you've corresponded with elsewhere exclusively in English an invitation in German. Basically, if you designed a tool to help people piss off their business contacts, you'd probably come up with LinkedIn.

And yeah, some people don't know what browser tabs do. But it's not like LinkedIn has a visible "undo" feature...

Valid points, but they don't support the unnecessary flame bait in title. A virus is something completely different from an inconsistent UI.

And a viral pathogen is different from a computer virus, but that term has been adopted because it effectively used an existing term to clarify the behavior of an unfamiliar phenomenon. Like both, LinkedIn uses subterfuge to coerce a host into propagating it, often against the host's best interests.

The blogger and his intended audience likely know the dangers of biologic and technologic pathogens. I don't buy the "but I didn't know it was not a good idea to practice safe contact(s)".

There is a wider implication when people who should know better about safe practices don't apply a little common sense. Claiming "virus" in this case removes personal responsibility.

If someone savvy enough to blog about technology voluntarily exposes their contacts, how will the general public ever be expected to act in a safe manner and thus limit social engineered privacy and security breaches?

Here is an example of another LinkedIn Virus (or may Crunchbase-linkedin virus), that I experienced the other day and got really pissed.

1. Go to this page: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook

2. Click on the "In" Widget

3. It says X connections work at Facebook. with "X connections" hyperlinked. There is another link below that says "Follow Facebook"

4. Now you'd think that clicking on "X connections" will show you the connections.

Try it....

5. It actually makes you follow the company.

Now, its not bad to follow Facebook but the other day I was checking out a competitor company and realized it made me follow the company and NO WAY To unfollow from anywhere.

So SCREW you LinkedIn Virus!!

How to unfollow a company:

1. Go to this page: http://www.linkedin.com/companies?dspFllwed=&trk=hb_tab_...

2. Click 'Stop following' under the company you wish to stop following.

Thanks but I still have the status that "I'm following <My Competitor>" that I cannot remove

http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3003

This won't fix the past, but it's not a bad idea to go to: https://www.linkedin.com/settings/ and 'Turn off activity broadcasts'.

Which part of the page is the widget on? I stopped my tracking blockers but I can't see it.

I really despise LinkedIn. A while back I got sick of their emails, so I attempted to unsubscribe, which failed (I got more emails), so I attempted to cancel my account, which also failed. When the news came out about their encrypted passwords getting leaked (and cracked), I took another stab at canceling my account, and that time appeared to be successful because I now seem to be rid of them once and for all.

I'm willing to wager that the "ease" by which this "feature" is executed was not entirely by accident (supporting the headline's premise).

I tried LinkedIn Pro as a try free for 30 days. This required a credit card as it will bill you if you forget to cancel. After a week or so, I was unimpressed and canceled. Or I thought I did. $150 later and three months of not seeing the recurring transaction on my credit card I realized that I had not clicked the right buttons to cancel. I felt cheated by deceptive UI design.

Good ole' forced continuity[1]. BTW, what OP describes is also a dark pattern[2]. I guess they use darkpatterns.org as their handbook.

[1] http://darkpatterns.org/library/forced_continuity/

[2] http://darkpatterns.org/library/friend_spam/

Hope you got your $150 back. (You can probably get them to refund your money, or, failing that, issue a chargeback with your credit card)

I've found a lot of LinkedIn's UI to be unintuitive even in areas where they have no motivation to confuse you, even when it comes to upgrading to Pro - my conclusion was incompetence rather than malice.

Side note: happy LinkedIn Pro user here, well worth the cost at least in my case :)

This happens to 13.000 people for me! I kid you not, I wish I made a screenshot, but it said that on the browser, I also tried the "close the browser" thing. It was not my intention at all to invite people to Linkedin, just to invite like 30-40 people that I know well and were also using Linkedin.

Although I never received follow-up on this. Maybe everybody rejected my request and ignored the e-mails, or the invitations/e-mails were never sent.

I felt really bad when I saw that I just sent an invitation to 13.000 people... including ex-girlfriends, connections so long ago, I checked my e-mail box for the next 2-3 hours, but FORTUNATELY nothing came up.

Social networking sites in general only grow through this type of spamming. Facebook was one of the worst offenders in its early days - Hotmail even blocked their invite messages for a substantial period of time. It is no coincidence that many of the sites that use the contact-list/auto-invite feature most aggressively have grown the fastest. Although we might find it objectionable, apparently most users either don't object to it or don't realize that it even happened (my guess would be that hundreds of millions of FB/LI users fall into the latter category).

I use LinkedIn the same way I used to collect Business Cards in the pre-Internet darkness.

The folks you contact regularly go into my address book, the rest go into my desk drawer tied up by a big rubber band.

Outlook is the address book, LinkedIn is the rubber band.

This is wildly off topic, but I'm genuinely curious... What is with the profile pictures of people looking up and to the right, with usually a circular gradient solid color background? I see it a lot in the SV/tech industry, and am wondering if it's a particular "startup photographer", or some meme I don't know about. Any ideas?

I think it's just a spoof of your average high-school/glamour photo:

http://www.joblo.com/movie-wallpapers/step-brothers/9659/128...

https://twitter.com/ukpearlgirl/status/309009109540294656

That's the "Disruptor's Stare", founders deep in thought about the next industry they're gonna crush.

"Shoelaces! Yeah, I'm gonna disrupt the shit out that industry. I'll be the Warby Parker of shoelaces"

No offense to the blogger the OP referenced, I didn't even look at the image but knew exactly the what he was talking about :)

There was a study done that said that people not looking at the camera are found to be more attractive then those who look directly into the lens. Also, the left side of your face is more attractive than the right.[1]

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/21/face-left-side-more...

Now this is interesting. I'm not sure if this is the reason for what I'm talking about, but it's certainly good information to know!

I'd point a finger not at LNKD but at GOOG for not having better a better security impl in gmail. If anyone can send an email that requires just one click in it to peruse and use your contacts list, that is a bug. Any 3rd party should need to formally request access to resources like a contacts list, and the user should be clearly prompted by the GOOG platform to approve/deny the request.

It does require authorization. You have to connect your Google account to Linked In in order for this to happen and Google has a one-click authorization process with which to do that.

YES. This totally happened to me.

Now I'm connected to every apartment manager, recruiter, and random person I've ever emailed -__-

Same here, unfortunately :(

I'm surprised this point hasn't been made/stressed more in the comments here.

LinkedIn has essentially given recruiters another possible avenue for connecting with people; by enabling their random, direct emails to users to turn into leads.

I thought I was being kind in replying and saying "no thanks" only to suddenly start getting connected with people whom with that was my only interaction.

Am I the only one who read that and thought "perhaps you should have paid attention to what you were doing?" I know it sounds dickish, but seriously, why not own up to the fact that not every user interface is tailored to you, and that sometimes you are fallible?

I'd like to see screenshots of the interface before judging if its deception or user error. Also, sounds like it had a positive effect on your life - old friends happy to hear from you.

I wish I took screenshots, but honestly my memory is I only saw six invites to review and in tiny 10px text below the "connect now" button was a thing saying (and also 1,132 more).

For what it's worth, a designer that works on this feature tweeted an apology and said they should add a warning, as it was way more common than intended.

Linkedin is very motivated to design their interface in such a way to ensure that they collect as many members and connections as possible. In other words, I believe they specifically design their interface so as to make it more likely that this mistake will be made.

It's a form that is intended to trick people. You should have to check all the people you want to email rather than uncheck.

Another Linkedin Virus feature:

the default setting on group discussion is that whenever someone replies to a discussion, all the people who replied before get email notifications.

At one time, I thought Linkedin is nothing but a huge email spam machine.

I've been eyeing the gmail import tool with suspicion, and I'm glad I didn't give in to my curiosity. I'd be mortified if all the contacts in my address book got an email blast from a 3rd party website.

I've always hated LinkedIn but recently it seems to actually have people talking to each other in forum-style threads, which actually makes it a bit more useful.

This happened to me when I did something similar on Gowalla several years ago and I had a very similar experience. It was nice getting the random correspondence from someone I hadn't heard from in years but I was way more embarrassed than anything else.

I hope "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." applies here, but I just can't get the picture of the management over a LinkedIn laughing their asses off because this is exactly how they designed it.

Hanlon aside, I interviewed there in, oh October or so, and my sense of the general trajectory of LinkedIn in light of that experience is that they may have a terminal case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

I hated Linkedin since it started 10-ishyears ago because it managed to get to my private email because a friend invited me. Now I know how that happened.

People use it for jobs and so I'm loathe to delete it entirely, but I still loathe it.

Huh. Inconvenient I'm sure, but this actually sounds rather fun.

There are people I haven't talked to in a while. Maybe I should invite them to LinkedIn.

Well, that, or I could just send them an e-mail, but that doesn't sound nearly as interesting.

This same thing happened to me. Thought it was a "see if these people are on LinkedIn". Instead it emailed them. Somewhat mortifying, but fortunately I tested with a limited subset of my address book.

I hate that LinkedIn tricks you into endorsing others and accepting endorsements. It was embarrassing to get endorsed for my expertise on Excel from people I barely knew.

This a a case where the double confirmation would be a good design decision. "Are you sure?" "Click yes to invite 1000 people to connect."

I wonder how many of the 1,138 accepted the request?

Last I checked, about 400-500 had accepted. I put the blame squarely on me for not reading carefully, but also on LinkedIn for not warning me, but Google as well. Turns out Google has a group in your contacts for everyone you've ever emailed and it's at something like 6,000 for me, so I guess about 1/5th of those were on LinkedIn, who got invites.

Some of the invites went to people I'd banned from my sites for spamming, an old accountant I haven't talked to in ten years, and PR flacks I had arguments with over sending me press releases I didn't want. My LinkedIn account used to be a pretty well-curated list of people I'd actually interacted with in person before and done some business with, and now it's just a random hodge-podge of a bunch of internet strangers I crossed paths with at some point.

Supposedly LinkedIn has a karma system where you will be punished for anyone not accepting your requests.

You may end up banned from making future requests, although that might come as a relief and it sounds like LinkedIn might be BSing there given that combine that with support for mailing >1k people at once.

For whatever it's worth, I was one of the 1,138 – but, of course had no clue that I was x of N requests at the time rather than 1 of 1 or 2... but it seemed odd.

I've been on Metafilter for about a decade and I've interacted with Matt enough to know who he is – but also little enough to be completely surprised by the request.

I accepted it and then followed it up a shortly after with a note asking if we'd interacted more than I was aware of or if there was some other story to the request. It always seems better to be receptive but questioning to me – who knows what the story is behind all sorts of events in life..

Anyway, Matt was kind enough to respond and explain what happened. I thanked him and removed the connection at that point – I try only to keep connections with people I really interact with (or have interacted with) enough to want at least recall, but preferably sit down with and have coffee/beer/dinner, etc. if we were to cross paths.

There's only three types of folks that contact me on LinkedIn: bots, recruiters and prostitutes.

Correction, that's only two types...

Happened to me a few months ago, didn't delete my linked in account, but pretty much stopped using it.

Did the exact same thing over a year ago. I can't believe they haven't changed that workflow yet.

I did the exact same thing. Awkward.

glad i'm not the only one

I've got a feeling that just about everything in LinkedIn interface is made to be intentionally broken or deceptive, I think there's a lot of "discourage through bad ui", for example, here's a past tweet of mine, I've actually had to GOOGLE to find out how leave a group:

"http://t.co/RTAOpvTo 10 minutes to find how to leave a group on linkedin and need to follow step by step... discouraging through bad ux?"

How did this happen without giving them your password or using the same one?

So is Capitalism.

LinkedIn is a Scala shop. So if LinkedIn is a virus, I think that's a first for the Scala language. "Scala, good for viruses too!" :O

Reply on news.ycombinator.com