Today I Deleted My LinkedIn Account; You Probably Should Too
moshebildner.wordpress.com
moshebildner.wordpress.com
So I'm sorry that you don't like the site, but I politely decline your recommendation to delete my account.
I don't like the site, and I don't like the company. That said, I've had on-site interviews at Google, Facebook, and the like not via my StackOverflow profile (which is pretty good, 20k+), or my blog, but directly through being hit up on LinkedIn.
I'm about to start a dream job next week, again after being contacted first on LinkedIn by my new employer.
Perhaps it's alright if you can post online about all the great work you do, or you have a name for yourself in the industry, or you make lots of OSS contributions on GitHub. Unfortunately I don't have any of those (yet!). But I do have a LinkedIn profile, and that's what got me on the one-way flight from London to SF next week.
I'm not defending LinkedIn as a company: I think they're pretty scummy. But if I didn't have my account, maybe I wouldn't have got this job.
Its features don't really acknowledge an individual’s skill set, and are flawed. For example the `endorsing feature` of linkedin allows people who haven't even worked with technology X, to endorse people for the same technology.
In short, I don't see linkedin adds any value, but at the same time since recruiters are on it and we are forced to accept it.
It has never really benefitted me in any way (I haven't been actively job-hunting this century), but since I don't care for social networks and if I did, I wouldn't want professional contacts in the same circle as my friends and family and barely-acquaintances, it is a fantastic way to keep in contact with colleagues throughout my career, on my own terms and segregated from the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, it has become more of a nuisance in the last year. News feeds, streams full of discussions, streams full of people posting links, advertisements. That doesn't even take into account the constant spam email from LinkedIn. I'm an engineer. I know how to make sure I hit the right buttons --- and yet just when I think I have unsubscribed from nearly everything I want to be unsubscribed from, I get more spam. So and so has joined! You should join these groups! These groups might interest you! Here's what went on today! Here's what went on this week! Here's some articles from people in the industry! You should add your email accounts so we can reach out to your contacts! So and so has a new job!
It's really the only service of its kind with this sort of reach, but I'm concerned that they're going to slit the throat of their golden goose by engaging in the sort of behavior you'd expect from traditional social networks (or worse).
The first thing I hear when I tell someone I work at LinkedIn is: "You guys spam too much." I can't blame them because even I get frustrated with the volume of email I get from LinkedIn each day. For the most part, each product team is responsible for the frequency of their emails. Our team tries to cut down on spam wherever possible. Unfortunately, there are differing philosophies within the company (and within the industry) regarding what constitutes spam.
My big gripe is that clicking through emails on mobile is usually a bad experience. Mostly it either wants me to log in for something I normally would not have to on a normal desktop and it always, always nags me about opening in the app first which is annoying after the 50th time.
I also think the updated recommendations feature is not useful since 1) the UI can take away from the rest of your profile by taking up too much room and 2) people not qualified to give a recommendation for a given skill do so. Your Uncle bob may be qualified to say you are an awesome programmer but mine is sure not.
Now get to work adding that feature!
Okay, at the risk of sounding arrogant, you have no rights to complain if you give out permission to 50 different websites without knowing what they do. You cannot complain that you are being exploited, when you allow yourself to be exploited. My google account is linked to fifteen different sites which I know what they are all for.
> go check your inbox for an “Invitation to connect on LinkedIn”. They don’t come from @linkedin.com, which THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD
Again, you gave them the permission to do so. And to play the devil's advocate, would you be less* likely to accept an invitation from your friend if he sent you an e-mail from some foreign account, or his account of which you are familiar? Again, you gave them the permission. If you don't like it, just make a linkedIn account without a connection to Google account. You've not done so because connecting to Google is convenient. You are paying a fair price.
I get minimal number of e-mails from linkedIn because I didn't give them permission to send me every gritty details of other people. It does exactly what I told it to. Maybe you should as well.
I love the internets, technology and how we've progressed at an amazing rate. I also like how everyone has a voice, but at the same time...that part isn't always as shiny. I agree with your post 100%!
Not true. I just checked the headers on a recent email and LinkedIn is definitely setting the From correctly:
From: [redacted] via LinkedIn <member@linkedin.com>
The Reply-To is the one of the user however.
Even if the from address was that of the user who sent the message, it's kind of hard to ignore the huge LinkedIn branding the message resides in. You'd have to be a fool to miss it, because I'm pretty sure even a blind person's screen reader would pick up on this.
For the end user that isn't a member, they seem to not want to let you opt out of their emails.
Sometimes they get around filters by sending from different emails, that's really annoying. I should probably quit Gmail and go back to Cerberus which has awesome filtering!
Other networks (I'm looking at you, Facebook), instead trap you in using their interfaces to communicate with someone.
I think Linked-in is actually really protecting privacy in this respect.
Also, if the user grants you permission, you can see their email address within linked-in and avoid sending any communication through linked-in itself.
This smells like just another hipster anti-culture movement. "LinkedIn is popular, down with LinkedIn!"
Occasionally I log in and check my messages and update my profile, especially when I need to look someone up or figure out how to get an introduction to someone, but generally I find LinkedIn to be pretty unobtrusive. I'm not sure lack of using it constantly is really a good rationale for closing an account though. Seems a bit short-sighted based on the value of having your second degree network so easily identifiable.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/settings/email-frequency?goback=.na...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/settings/partner-inmail?goback=%2En...
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/settings/research-invitations?gobac...
The cracking-open-your-email that LinkedIn does, however, is really aggravating. I've never let linkedin access my email account to search for contacts.
This article was useful, however, as it reminded me that I've been meaning to delete my Path account. That I did delete today.
In the developer world, LinkedIn is seen as marginal at best, and uncool at worst. Other industries? I don't know. I had someone tell me they get a lot of B2B value out of it in the bio med space.
At any rate, I don't miss it for a second. I had to create a quick test account for a portal I was using and the signup process was just awfully deceptive. I deleted that one as well.
A few days ago, I received an email from LinkedIn displaying an old friend who wanted to connect. I was excited to see an old familiar face, so I logged in and eventually found a way to connect with him. Today, I received an email again for the same person, saying my invitation to connect was still standing. I clicked through the links in the email this time, and was walked through a multi-step tutorial, that tricked me into sending 16 invites to random people I have never met before. They had a list of potential connections, only one of which I wanted to make, so I took the time to uncheck all the other boxes beside strangers. When I hit their continue button, it told me I had sent 16 invitations ... apparently the list I had just seen was actually scrollable, but by design, it was very difficult to tell that there were 16 hidden users I had to scroll down to see. Very frustrating.
I guess it depends on how you use LinkedIn, but for me, it's a marketing & promotion channel (via LI groups mainly), a constantly updated Rolodex, an expertise locator, and a source of information for market research, competitive intelligence and general industry awareness.
Now, to be fair, I am a startup founder, where said startup is in the B2B space. Maybe that makes LinkedIn uniquely useful for me, compared to other folks who aren't in this position. I don't know, I just know that LinkedIn is wildly useful for me. shrug
Create such an awesome experience, that everyone is compelled to use it. Absolutely no paywalls for individual users.
Design an awesome interface for companies to search through resumes. Implement algorithms for automated job-matching. Monetize on subscriptions to this, and on job postings, a la StackOverflow Careers.
Watch LinkedIn crumble.
LinkedIn is not an email provider, they have no obligation to that user to send me a message.
On March 14, Person X wrote:
> To: bhelx [bhelx@example.com] > From: Person X [personx@example.com] > Subject: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
> bhelx, > > I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. > > - PersonX
The worst thing is I would get follow up emails "Reminder about your invitation from Person X" pretty regularly. I would unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email but I found that it was only unsubscribing me from receiving the follow up "reminder" emails from each person I unsubscribed from. It was really frustrating. I assume Linked In was explicitly requesting permission to do this.
I'm glad I'm still a loyal LinkedIn user.
Regardless, I wish you best of luck.
I'll definitely sign up with whoever can do it better.
Anyway, I'm so pissed off at linkedin that I've spent the last couple of weeks developing my own lightweight, less evil alternative. Once it's complete I'm just going to update my linked profile to say something like 'see my full profile on ...'. If other people find it useful then they can use it too.
I don't agree with this. Google may be the locker in which you put your information, but you hold the key to it. If you decide to give the key to 3rd parties that's your responsibility.
People need to educate themselves about how their information can be used and abused. Perhaps someone needs to drive this education and perhaps Google can/should be a part of that, but they are in no way implicitly obliged.
If you write your password down on a post-it and stick it to your computer screen, is that Google's responsibility?
Instead of giving users the default "I'd like to add you to my professional network" placeholder text, LinkedIn should require users to explain how and why they want to connect with other professionals.
Would this make it a bit harder to grow your network? Yes, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It would put quality over quantity, making your connections more meaningful and requiring users to stop and think before sending someone a connect request (therefore cutting down on email spam).
The former is basic spoofing; the same thing spammers do to make it look like "you" sent that C!alis email. Any mail server can put whatever they want in email fields, no special access required.
The latter means that LinkedIn can actually harvest your list of contacts in Gmail for marketing. Way worse IMO and I encourage people to be very careful about what apps they authorize into their personal accounts like Google.
On one hand, I hate it for all the reasons everyone has already mentioned.
On the other, I wouldn't have my current job (which I love) if not for LinkedIn. And since that job has paid me something in the neighborhood of a quarter-million dollars over the last several years, that makes LinkedIn about a quarter-million dollars more valuable to me than all other social networks put together.
I can't quit you, LinkedIn.
But I have missed exactly zero content of worth. All I ever got were endless spammy e-mails from recruiters.
It really pays to observe what permissions are being asked for. When a flashlight app asks for your GPS, and network communication, you know something's amiss.
Not to mention their dubious approach to password management, of course.
Uh... ok....let me get right on that
Then I decided that LinkedIn was useless to me so I deleted my account. For two weeks, I still continued to get daily email updates even though I no longer had an account. After another support ticket, the emails stopped.
All I get from this is "author is angry".
Anyhow, assuming these are anomalous, and that LinkedIn has generally moved to sending emails properly, I still stand by my decision to close down my account. I haven't gotten anything useful out of it and I have been consistently annoyed by it. Not devastating, but like I said, annoying. If you use it and love it then great! I hope LinkedIn keeps on improving and becomes/stays (your option) a great company. But if you're not getting anything out of it, then I think it would behoove you to think twice about why you maintain the account, and if it's nothing but annoying then at least consider getting rid of it.