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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

The main issue I have with LinkedIn is that it adds skills to your profile that you haven't mentioned. And then it goes and ask your network to "endorse" you on those skills. Then you end up with a couple dozen skills you never actually have and things get complicated without reason.

And it goes the other way too. Whenever I'm confronted with a list of skills for people in my network I don't know whether they put them there or it's the site's idea. So you don't know what to endorse and what not, you may end up looking a completely ass or just someone who endorses everything just to be on the good side.

It's like the whole damn site was build to fool people around and to promote lying.

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I turned the endorsements off. People can still endorse you, but those endorsements won't show up on your profile.

I really hope they'll redesign this feature, as it is freaking annoying.

> So you don't know what to endorse and what not

Surely that's the point of how endorsements should work? Do you know that this person is skilled in Fooing Bars? Then endorse them. Otherwise, don't.

If you don't know whether the site or the user added the skill, it suggests you don't know enough to endorse them for that particular skill.

> It's like the whole damn site was build to fool people around and to promote lying.

Agreed. I'm sure the whole endorsements system at least was built to generate spam and click-throughs. Fortunately, almost everyone recognises it for what it really is - a pointless click-fest with no real value in deciding which skills someone has.

> Surely that's the point of how endorsements should work? Do you know that this person is skilled in Fooing Bars? Then endorse them. Otherwise, don't.

It is easy to say that, yet the site is designed in such a way (and one has to assume this is purposefully so) that it is very easy to endorse people for random things by way of the 4-person grid in which one of the options is "endorse all".

Based on my own experience with being endorsed for random things, it seems to be pretty common for people to just keep banging that button to 'help' out their friends with a bent towards just giving them the benefit of the doubt that they must know whatever the topic is if linkedin is suggesting they do in the first place (and it is tangentially related to their industry).

I've asked people why they endorsed me for tech I don't know. The answer, every time, is "I know you, if you claim to be an skilled in .Net, you are".

Except I never claimed that I was skilled in .Net, LinkedIn suggested it.

It has the promise of being a "competences graph", where you being endorsed for "foo" is worth more if those endorsing you for it themselves are endorsed for "foo", on the premise that it "takes one to know one". This would then be useful metadata that qualifies the rather dimension-less "connection".

But yeah, the execution is so horrid that it reeks of malice.

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