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Comment by stmchn | Hacker News Reader

Endorsements have lost all meaning whatsoever. 3 people have endorsed me for OS X for some reason even though I don't have it listed in my skills. I've never owned an Apple product in my life except for an iPhone so my skills with OS X are average at best.

My boyfriend's dad, who is not technical whatsoever, endorsed me for git. I'm pretty sure he just saw the word git and thought, "Hehe, she's a git!"

I think the problem too is that LinkedIn offers people the path of least resistance to endorse people. Occasionally I'll see a message at the top of my profile saying, "Endorse X for Y & Z" and a button to approve it. I'm sure more times than not, people just approve endorsements without giving it a second thought.

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Why are you a professional connection with your boyfriend's dad?

Because LinkedIn is a social network just as much as a professional.

Then you're using it wrong. Your connections on LinkedIn should only be colleagues, former colleagues, or people who can potentially advance your career. If her boyfriend's dad was Charles Bronson, that would be a meaningful connection.

The point of Linkedin is leveraging extended networks. It isn't a collection pen for people you think you can use at some point in the future. The dad likely has professionals in his network who have professionals in their network who have ... and so on, all of whom you can connect with through the dad. It would be really dumb to _not_ take advantage of that.

Good luck explaining to the boyfriend's dad why you rejected his invitation to connect on LinkedIn.

I'm not using it wrong, but it seems that everyone else is, and LinkedIn's more than happy to encourage that usage in the interest of a larger, more interact-y userbase.

Are you telling me that you only get "meaningful" add requests? My friends don't often bother (the feeling is mutual), but the more desperate acquaintances seem to seek me out nonstop.

No, I don't only get meaningful requests. From a ratio perspective, I probably get 1 meaningful request for every 10 non-meaningful requests.

I'm probably in the minority when it comes to how I use the network, but I've also found that I get a lot less noise from it than most people. I can't say if these two factors are correlated at all, but it stands to reason that they would be.

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