Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This | Hacker News Reader

Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This

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I don't even have to read this article to say that no, Linkedin is not better than this, whatever this is.

Yeah, I can't get the article to load, but my reaction was pretty much the same.

It's about their "Invite people to LinkedIn" scheme and how they make it very easy to spam everyone you've ever communicated with. Or in the case of addresses like iTunesConnect, everything you've ever communicated with.

I remember my first day on the internet as well. Complaining about linkedin has become as passe as getting upset when paypal freeze your account.

The CEO of a company I worked for did this by accident: Invited all of his contact. Let me tell you, all the underlings and vendors were so excited to get an invitation from the CEO. His linked in profile exploded. I was tasked with trying to uninvite the 500 or so people that hadn't accepted in the first few hours! I eventually told him it was no big deal. LinkedIn isn't very personal, it's mostly image.

That's kind of interesting. Why were they so excited to get his invite and why was he so worried about managing his connections? (Ie uninviting people.) Curious to understand the behavior.

All those people apparently felt some sort of personal connection by the act, it was a very strange phenomenon. He had not cleared out his contacts in a decade! He had "reached out" to many past vendors, former colleagues, etc. They all want to "reconnect" and were emailing, messaging, etc. It was literally (in the correct use of the word), taking up a lot of his time with all the influx of emails and calls.

For me it is personal. I mainly use it as my contact database. If I ever want to get in touch with an old colleague, I can find their address there (kept up to data by them). Plus, I know what they are up to (status updates when they switch jobs etc). Plus, if I check out a company, I can easily see who I know that works there. All good things. That's why I don't want random people as my contacts - it messes all of the above up. I wrote a bit more on the pros and cons of LinkedIn as I see it: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/

Why give them access to your account at all?

I did this with Facebook eons ago and they just kept the data and it haunted me for years. No, I don't want to add people I removed from my address book years ago.

LinkedIn is at the very bottom of the list when it comes to stuff like this. If you don't expect the worst from them you've not been paying attention.

Everyone does this. By now, I consider it an industry "best practice" and no one should be surprised.

Is it still reprehensible? Sure, but then again, every startup that has ever grown their user base has used some variation of this "growth hack".

I wish that I had the ability to downvote people because of comments like this. There is no justification for that kind of behavior -- and calling it a "best practice" speaks volumes about your lack of integrity.

I think the quotes around "best practices" served to convey a sense of mocking. The second paragraph is evidence of that.

Where's the app that properly conveys snarkiness in text? Thanks Pandler for your clarification.

Huh, I didn't read any snarkiness in that... Sorry, then!

Twitter also does this:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/d88e4751-964e-464b-aef...

I have never had a LinkedIn and I just counted 213 LinkedIn messages in my gmail account (yes, I am horrible at deleting emails). Their email spamming has turned me off to ever trying LinkedIn.

Do people actually find LinkedIn useful anyway? Everyone I know has an account, but I have never actually met a person who has found a job through using the site.

>Do people actually find LinkedIn useful anyway?

It's great for finding out when people you know are looking for a job. You start receiving recommendation/endorsement requests.

I actually find it pretty useful. I've used it to cold call people in different companies and functional roles just to pick their brains, people are surprisingly open to it.

Also, it's helpful as a contact database when a former colleague changes their email address/phone number.

The "request an intro" is pretty good to just to see how you're connected. If you know someone in common with a person it tends to lower the barrier of a cold call.

Note: by cold call I don't mean selling, just getting a chance to talk to someone interesting; i.e. you see an interesting role and want to get the real deal about a company

I find LinkedIn to be super-aggressive on the email marketing front; both with trying to recruit new members through existing members and in trying to keep existing members coming back.

possible signs of desperation... when wall street says you're gold, you better keep digging wherever you can to keep up.

FIFY: I find LinkedIn to be super-aggressive on growth hacking.

Maybe their aggressiveness shows that they've reached market saturation?

I remember exactly when I accidentally hit invite button after I successfully linked my gmail account with LinkedIn. After I did this I noticed that the scrollbars were hidden by OS X and later I realized that I spammed every single person that I received email from with my linkedin invitation. I felt so ashamed by myself and even until today I receive messages such as : "you are now connected to Person X", who personally I even don't remember.

Shame for LinkedIn that they do their social linking in such a bad and confusing way. Cheers for the author.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiaEc_C...

Whoa thats a lot of traffic. I just beefed up the server! Sorry for the 500 errors!

Your server would have handled it fine if your WordPress install had some basic performance tuning.

Read http://browserdiet.com/ or http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/02/07/web-performance-optimiza...

Go to this link to discover if Linkedin ripped all your contacts: http://www.linkedin.com/people/contacts?sortAction=lastName&...

PS: I saw this link in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426733

> its probably my favorite social network

I pretty much tuned out at this point. I don't believe it is (nor should it be) a social network. I have a couple connections that use LinkedIn like others use Facebook. I don't want my LinkedIn connections telling me they had oatmeal for breakfast. That is what Facebook is for.

The moment a service linked Linkedin or Facebook tries to connect to your Google or Yahoo account, there should be a big glaring red pop-up listing the horrors in store ... and how some of the damage is irreversible. It'll haunt you for ages as someone else said in another comment.

Cached copy here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

This sleazy behavior is exactly why I refuse to use LinkedIn.

It's called monetizing.

Eventually all the free services do it.

No, it's called being viral. Monetizing is when you get spam from people you're not connected to (a.k.a. InMail)...

No, it's called being sleazy.

Contact scraping is the only thing keeping social media going. I say let it die.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com