LinkedIn’s Bad Terms of Service | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn’s Bad Terms of Service

fullcontact.com

40 pointslloyddobbler19 comments

When will you bloggers learn that full page popups that ask me to join your newsletter after reading an article for 2 minutes = instant page close + never coming back. Please, say no to full page popups.

Decision like this usually comes from CEO of company because he's stupid and doesn't know that this is counter-productive.

As a webdev I had to do at least 3 of these things and the person ordering the site disregarded my warnings that it's very, very bad idea.

What popups?

Oh… http://noscript.net/

It's a classic form of metrics dementia. They see that putting the popup increases their signups. 'Objectively,' this was the correct decision, and may have been arrived at by testing.

What they may not see is that it turns off many people who may have signed up later after getting more value out of the content. It's easy to measure e-mail signups and harder to measure sentiment.

It's pretty easy to measure bounce rate though. If you see a correlation between increased signups and decreased bounce rate, that can tell you something. Also, you should be measuring newsletter signups from the pop-up and newsletter signups through other metrics. If the other metrics drop, you might not be getting users who are actually invested and will stay long-term.

Hopefully they measure unsubscribes as well and will see a lack of long-term engagement.

Edit: I got the pop-up when I was halfway through the article (or seemed like I was halfway through, I might have been almost done) when the pop-up covered the entire screen. It was so obnoxious that I closed it instantly. I don't even know what the end point of the article was or where they were going with it. One moment I was reading something about what data is in LinkedIn CSV files, and the next boom and the window was closed.

Unsubs, open rate, bounces, - yes.

I would be more concerned by people who do not bounce, read, sub or press the 'x', lose affinity, return to the site again later, get the popup again, lose affinity even more, and then bounce, never come back, and get an unpleasant feeling whenever they see my links show up some place else. That's the pattern that I would expect. Or people who sub and then stop opening the emails.

Because these popups are mostly going after a b2b type customer base I would expect them, like me, to mash the upper right corner of those boxes (which look awful on phones) before it finishes loading. Anything non-interruptive is a better experience, because the ultimate goal is not to get them to surrender their email but to get them to become a customer and recommend the products and services.

So, here is my use case. (I'm about to start a blog.)

I think I have interesting information, but it's infrequent. I would like to connect with people who also find what I'm writing about interesting, but I don't expect them to continually look.

While I know that some have RSS readers, not everyone does.

How would you like me to let you know that I'd like to continue this interaction in an asynchronous way?

My goal is to have good information that people read without being dependent on the whims of the aggrigators, because the first five people to vote may just not be my target audience.

The answers seem to be email and linkbait, and linkbait doesn't connect me to the people I want.

Email seems like the right answer, but can you not put it in a sidebar, at the top of the page or probably best at the bottom of the content with a relevant CTA linking the article to your list?

Unfortunately I'm guessing huge popups convert better, although I'm not convinced that's true if your audience are similar to this community.

At the bottom of your posts (or whatever), have a blurb saying 'if you'd like to see more content like this, consider signing up to…' etc.

If I visit your site and I only get halfway through the first paragraph before something pops up blocking my view, then best case I close the pop-up without reading it, and typical case I close the window entirely and go read something else.

It's much faster for me to hit Cmd-W than it is for me to interact with your pop-up/lightbox at all.

I used to despise the full page ads that would appear before the articles contents were displayed, and would close the page and never come back. Now, I just close the ad and read the article, pretending the ad was never there. Maybe it's just a matter of forced acceptance, because I no longer find it a distraction. However, if you pop something up over the content that I am actively reading, I, like you, am sure to close the page and never come back.

I hear everything this poster is complaining about. In fact, our shop self-restricts our use of LinkedIn's API because we fear that if we or our customers became too reliant upon it, either a. we'd be cut off (for some nonsense reason we'd be told we were not compliant with the API TOS) or b. (like the OP) we would not be allowed to join the LinkedIn Partner Program.

On a cynical level, I wonder if companies who advertise on LinkedIn have better luck joining the LinkedIn Partner Program. Does anyone have data points on this?

I don't know about making it easier for some of the programs, but you can see the current partners here: http://developer.linkedin.com/partner.

The CRM Partner Program is what's relevant to Nutshell, FullContact, and probably anyone else who wants to use this data; Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce are the only current partners.

People cry about lack of privacy, then people cry about too much privacy... I guess it gives people something to write about no matter what.

And if you can plug your company as one of the Good Guys(tm) at the end I guess that gives you even more incentive to write about it.

Privacy is a line that will always move, and it's different for every person. One of the biggest challenges that we face is finding a line that works well for everyone, while allowing them to control where that line sits.

As to your second point, sure, we'd love to have people use FullContact. But the post points to many more options than just our own:

"If that’s iCloud, Google Contacts, Outlook.com or heck, even FullContact, great."

As I said in the post, we just want people to use a safe system that makes sense to them. It's our job to make sure that FullContact is the logical choice.

The article did a good job IMO of pointing out the absurdity of LinkedIn's position (but I didn't need any convincing; I work at Nutshell, and contributed to the blog post you linked).

At this point in the pipe, it's not about privacy concerns; this is data available via the end user's use of LinkedIn. The salient question to me is, what the hell can we do with the LinkedIn API? Why even have developer.linkedin.com if your partner program is designed to exclude everyone but two companies? (A simplification that focuses on the CRM program, but I don't know what the purpose of their other Partner Programs are.)

>As I said in the post, we just want people to use a safe system that makes sense to them.

So going from a platform where random developers don't have access to _all_ of my contact info to one where they do is safer, in your opinion?

I get that you are trying to produce a better developer API, but I don't think users have any more control over their data with your product than they do with LinkedIn. Now they're just at the mercy of a different company's business decisions, which is how it will be in the majority of cases, as I see it.

"Collect them all where it makes the most sense. If that’s iCloud, Google Contacts, Outlook.com or heck, even FullContact, great"

Completely discredit your post why don't yah?

That's quoted out of context - you left off the next sentence:

"Obviously we’d prefer that you use us, but the main thing is to make sure that you get them in a place where the data belongs to you and not someone who wants to keep it under lockdown."

Sure there's a marketing message there but it's buried at the bottom of a long quite involved post, and fully disclosed. Hardly discredits the article just because he's an interested party, IMO.

The post was hardly worth writing in the first place. This is extremely standard social network (or internet company) practice. The privacy concerns of just giving a massive dump of all that data are very complex.

Given that, it's incredibly obvious the post was written as a self plug, and burying it was disingenuous. If that author had begun with, "this is an issue and we have a solution for you", it would have been much more honest.

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