Shitty iOS 8 Widgets

You don't want X to be 0, so Y needs to change as well to keep people clicking.

If people are clicking your profile at least daily, yes. If you're not particularly "engaged" on Linkedin (I have an account but virtually never use it or update it) then not so much. It is the unengaged ones LinkedIn is targetting with this (because the engaged ones don't need to be tricked into going to the site).

As guptaneil said you don't want X to be 0. Also, by playing with Y even when X wouldn't be 0 you can trick people into thinking there is activity that doesn't exist:

Spam Email Day1: "3 people clicked your profile in the past 5 days!"

Spam Email Day2: "10 people clicked your profile in the past 15 days!"

Meanwhile there's been no change, 10 people have clicked your profile in the past 15 days and 3 people have clicked in the past 6 days, but the 10 number looks bigger thus maybe you'll click to see why the sudden uptick.

Exactly. A much better example would be to look at what James Thompson is doing with PCalc; the notification widget is a companion calculator to the main app. http://www.pcalc.com/iphone/index.html

Fair enough, but it seems limited even then given the visual space allotted to widgets (though I suppose that hardly Dropbox's fault).

Well since they're not enabled by default I don't think there is anything to worry really