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Comment by harkyns_castle | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand why anyone would be on LinkedIn, after their nefarious practices.

The last straw was the one where they requested your email login details, and proceeded to spam your contacts with join requests. What kind of a prick of a company does that?

I guess they factored in the people that'd pay attention to that kind of scumbaggery, and those that wouldn't and figured they'd end up on top. Guess they did too. You're a product, not a customer, when you're on LinkedIn, much the same as Facebook.

The nail in the coffin for me has been recruitment agencies stressing I should be on it - any advice from the vampires like that is a good sign you should be doing the polar opposite.

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> The last straw was the one where they requested your email login details

That last straw has been active for probably as long as they existed. I didn't fall for it, but a lot of people who know me did, and I used to get a lot of linkedin spam because of it. Either they've refined their practices, or people have wised up, or we've passed peak LinkedIn.

In any case, I ignore most email from LinkedIn, I don't play the endorsement game in either direction, and anyone who receives spam from LinkedIn related to me are themselves LinkedIn products, so they made the choice.

I've figured out how to exist peacefully with them, and other than this thread it doesn't take any time out of my day. :)

Most sensible companies ignore LinkedIn now from what I've gathered/listened to, although it has been a while.

Still quite a strong, what I would call, "shill" force out there though.

Something like half of the recruiter emails I've been getting lately have been to the email address I have posted on github. One of them actually appeared to have scraped my commit history which was mildly creepy.

Was it a scrape for technical evaluation, or to find other committers?

It seems that if two people communicate on the internet, a third person will be interested in it.

I have no idea what they were doing to get the email addresses, I just know that I got an email that had all (three) of the email addresses I'd ever used in github commits in the 'To' line.

As far as recruiter emails go, it was not very good. Just a generic "we are hiring developers".

This is all small in comparison to the enormous benefits it has as a career-building tool. I have gotten numerous interviews and 2 full time jobs in no small part because of LinkedIn.

If there was a viable alternative I'd jump on it, but for now it seems to serve its purpose very effectively.

Totally agree here. LinkedIn is both annoying and singular - there isn't another universally-used online professional profile out there that can fully replace LinkedIn. Even if you only use it for an online profile and PDF resume-generator, it's useful.

> Any advice from the vampires like that is a good sign you should be doing the polar opposite.

Not always. They are not all out for your blood.

you don't know how glad I feel reading this, i's exactly how I feel about linkedin, and I can't explain how a lot of people people like it, even my coworkers (Analytics team, pretty technical).

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