LinkedIn's Most Glaring Deficiencies

The most laughable 'feature' used to prompt users to upgrade to a premium profile is the attempted obfuscation of 3rd party connections.

Step 1: Find a 3rd party connection whose name is displayed as First Name + Surname Initial (eg. Steve B.). You'll find that none of their work history is displayed.

Step 2: On the right you will see a list of "People who viewed this profile also viewed..." Click on someone who works for the same company or has a similar job title.

Step 3. On this new profile take another look at the "People who viewed this profile also viewed..." list and 99% of the time you will see the original obfuscated profile with the full name on display. Go ahead and click on their name.

Step 4: View their full name & profile without any need for upgrading.

How is it even to their benefit to remove the 'Mark as Spam' button? Makes me so angry. YOu'd thought they'd be fed up with this sort of coverage by now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5680680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357427

my main problems with LinkedIn are:

- LinkedIn is not designed for self employed, startup owners or freelancers. They provide no way to opt out of job advertisements, like "Foobar posted a job you might be interested in:", or "Jobs You May Be Interested In", "Get hired faster with Job Seeker Premium" and many more.

- LinkedIn traps people to give it their IMAP password, so they download the mail contacts and SPAM everyone. And by SPAM I mean, they put this mail contact into the From: header, so it looks first like a real mail from your contact. ( Both are in illegal in Germany, so I wonder that nobody send them (LinkedIn Germany GmbH, Maximillian str. 35a, 80539 München), a cease and desist. And when we talk about a cease and desist, they do not show their German postal and contact address to their German customers, as Impressum/Imprint.

- Nothing happens, if you flag a group posting as inappropriate. But lol a group posting goes away completely, if you flag it as job.

"The thing I hate most is that LinkedIn comes across as very desperate"

Absolutely. There are also many users desperate for visibility, clogging their tech boards with low-quality posts. I became so fed up with the atmosphere there that I closed my account.

I hope that I never need a platform like that to market myself.

The thing that has continually bothered me is that the "publications" section still won't allow you to create papers on which you're anything but first author. No one there must have ever worked in academia at all, since typically you include papers on your resume even if you weren't first author.

I literally spent 45 minutes one time trying to figure out how to un-friend someone on LinkedIn.