LinkedIn and Censorship in China | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn and Censorship in China

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74 pointstomkwok64 comments

I deleted my LinkedIn account months ago and it has had no negative impact whatsoever.

Just less emails telling me my mom has endorsed me for Javascript.

Same here, never gained anything by having an account, haven't lost anything after closing it.

I mean really, what do they do for me exactly? I have never heard of a friend that got a job through them or found any real value. Besides having a digital rolodex function, one that my email client does anyway, how do they help me? It just seems like a liability, one more thing that can mess up in my life or that I can inadvertently mess up.

Counter anecdote: I got my current job through LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out the first time, and I said I wasn't interested. A few weeks later I decided to test the waters and I put my resume on Dice.com. The same recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few hours later, saying he saw my resume on Dice and asked if anything had changed. It had, I interviewed, and I've been working here for a little over a year and a half.

For me it's a convenient way of having recruiters reach out without having my normal inbox completely spammed.

Not much additionally to add from the previous comment except that I thought a lot of the recruitment stuff I got from LinkedIn was fake until a friend got a pretty amazing job through a LinkedIn found recruiter.

I have replied to a few recruiters and while I haven't changed companies, it is the equivelent of head hunters for our generation and some of them have been very, very tempting offers.

LinkedIn is a great way for recruiters to reach you and offer you job opportunities from companies you've never heard of but might be super interesting to you. Easily 80%+ of the interview offers I've received in the last 5 years have been through LinkedIn (from small startups to tech giants such as Amazon, Netflix or other big companies such as Morgan Stanley).

It's also a pretty good platform to look for jobs out of your local network, say, if you're a foreigner looking to tap in that sweet sweet US tech job market.

I use LinkedIn to locate former coworkers but then I keep in touch with them through regular email.

I dont see LinkedIn as being able to do much that personal websites would not do better. I use LinkedIn because many people, even coders do not have websites.

Well, my experience with LinkedIn has been very different. To start, I don't have my mom in my LinkedIn! Not only I have found my current job from LinkedIn, I also regularly received interview invitation for positions from other companies (from large scale ones like Google, FB, Amazon, etc. to smaller companies).

But to me the best advantage of LinkedIn is it helps separate professional relationships/conversation separate from my personal life. My contact network at LinkedIn showing my professional connections is very different than my contact network in Facebook, and while I use both, I don't want them to be mixed.

Plus, it keeps my CV and I don't have to always look for my CV in bunch of doc files if I have to send it to someone.

Maybe you would have a different experience if you would spend more time on setting it up? (writing the CV, adding the right people. etc)

I'm interested in how you use it to handle communication. I would never try and contact anyone through LinkedIn unless there were no other alternatives. In my experience there is so many junk notification on LinkedIn that any attempt at real communication would drown out.

Honestly, I put a good amount of effort into LinkedIn before quitting. I even subscribe to the job seeker's tier for a month before realizing what a piece of junk it was (pure vanity metrics, little substantial information of use).

My problem was actually getting too many recruiters contacting me offering me jobs out of my interest and it ultimately felt like that email inbox you check once a month to wipe only out the spam.

While I understand some developers find use in LinkedIn, I still think that this might be biased if alternative ways of job seeking weren't also simultaneously pursued. I believe that having a good GitHub, releasing products, blogging, tweeting, and attending meetups can all be affective means of network building.

Everyone hates LinkedIn, yet most people keep using it (myself included). Where's the kickass LinkedIn competitor so we can all move on to ?

Just curious what are the things you hate about linkedin specifically.

The biggest complaint I hear about LinkedIn is the amount of email the company sends users (not mail generated by other users, but mail generated by LinkedIn itself). It also seems to rather consistently ask to access your email contacts ("who do you know on LinkedIn?").

They also maintain shadow profiles of people who don't use linkedin by scraping their users address books.

It's a really scummy company.

A really good way to deal with this is just mark all those mails as SPAM. Let them eat the negative SPAM feedback until all their mails end up in the trash.

I really dislike their aggressive attempts to get new members to send out join requests to every person they've ever corresponded with on gmail. I've gotten many invitations from people whom I'm pretty sure had no idea that LinkedIn was going to scrape their contacts and spam everyone. This happens a couple times a year ever since like 2010? I haven't seen any other tech company do something similar. There is a lot of value in their network, but this is pretty obnoxious and basically dominates my impression of the tradeoffs they're willing to make

My wife received an sms text from the ceo at my old company inviting her to link in - crazy as they had never even met and I am 100% sure he is just an idiot and accepted everything the app asked him

I hate their usage of dark patterns to trick users into giving them access to their email contacts. I consider myself a fairly savvy user of the internet, and apparently I fell for it. (When I checked a while back, LinkedIn had access to my Gmail contacts despite my never intentionally giving them such.)

And as others mentioned, they send out emails that purposely look like some LinkedIn user has sent something to you specifically.

I think they're utter scumbags.

Where is this setting located? I'm looking for it to see if I've done that and can't seem to find anything about access to Gmail contacts.

If you hover over "Connections", select "Add Connections", and then "Manage imported contacts" in the top right corner. I had to hunt around to find it.

Sometimes they get access to your connections because they shared their inbox, intentionally or otherwise. I get suggested contacts to all sorts of people that once sent me an email.

Many aspects of their site are ridiculous. They hype up 'profile views' to try to get your to pay them to see a little more info about who viewed your profile. They encourage ridiculous endorsements that are completely meaningless. Etc.

The completely pointless 'skills' sections, where anyone can add whatever skills they like to their profile. Oh, you're skilled in 'Data Center'? How utterly meaningless.

To be fair, resumes have the same problem. You can list whatever "skills" you want.

And in both cases you can ask the candidate to speak to their "skillset".

Interesting. I find the skills sections to be really helpful. I understand that the signal is not official and not a certification of any type, but the endorsements give me a sense for the extent to which someone is known by their peers and colleagues for a certain expertise. That's useful when I need to get up to speed on someone very quickly (e.g., when they got CCed onto a call with me and I don't know who they are).

I know someone with multiple endorsements for "General Awesomeness". To be fair, he actually deserves those. But yes, not exactly a "skill".

A few things off the top of my head.

The first thing that really put me off was when LinkedIn asked me to give them access to my Gmail account.

I don’t like their endorsement system. It asks my network to endorse me in things I’ve never mentioned I know. So the guy on your network thinks that he ought to endorse you out of courtesy and you end up with a list of a couple dozen things you are totally unaware of. How does this helps with anything?

Then there is the fact that pretty much everyone in there lies about their experience or their job titles. And I mean everyone, or at least everyone I happen to know. I get it, most people want to be perceived as more important than they are. But to me this whole situation seems ridiculous. And that leads to another problem. You can’t find any really interesting and engaging discussion because everyone is careful not to overstep any boundaries that might make them look unprofessional. Bottom line there is no community in there which makes the whole site much less useful.

I don't know if this is still the case, but around the time they IPO'd, I deleted my account as it had been worse than useless, but people I know mentioned I continued to show up as if I was still on the site.

Tons of recruiter spam and so on, not to mention the email dark patterns.

All "x site is the new resume" approaches are flawed, but at least GitHub-as-resume encourages publishing code and evaluating people by the code they've written and how they interact with open source projects. LinkedIn is good for cronyism and pretending that "n years at Company Inc." is particularly meaningful.

It seems to me that monetizing a LinkedIn competitor would mainly be accomplished by selling advertising of some kind:

-engagement ads of some kind (exposure to your business in general, banners, etc.)

-leads for job ads and contracts

-general job ads searchable by candidates

But for a potential direct replacement (and selling the related ads), I think it's hard to justify building out a social networking platform when there are so many robust options already available. Unless you're going to really bring something new to the table there, why rewrite FB/LI/etc?

In terms of selling access to candidates and job ads, lots of companies are starting to get this right in their particular vertical without having to include a social component (in software, see Angel.co, SO Careers, Hired.com, etc.).

Just my 0.02 dollars, certainly not an expert here.

Why do you need LinkedIn at all? I never saw the value in it.

LinkedIn is a giant digital rolodex and works exactly because it allow me to keep my business network separate from my personal network.

I just have 2 FB accounts. One for friends, one for work and volunteer stuff.

yeah but I don't have business connections looking me up on facebook. People have very different usage of Facebok.

They look me up on Linkedin and I can see who they are and what they have done and who they know and search for relevant stuff.

I meet a lot of investors and in general people from all over the world and have been very happy with LinkedIn personally. It's the least intrusive social network I know off.

This is against Facebook's terms of service:

"You will not create more than one personal account."

https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

LinkedIn is or has the potential to be the best place to post/search quality job ads (maybe not very specific IT jobs - stackoverflow is great for that).

I know a lot of people that don't look for jobs anywhere else already - spam ads are very rare.

I got two job offers through linkedin - anecdotal I know but it was pretty good. Job offers from companies, I mean, not just mindless recruitment agency spam.

Well done, and I appreciate that this is valuable to you. However, I am not looking for a job so it is not relevant to me.

I don't know a recruiter or hiring manager that doesn't use it. That's the sole reason I use it for when applying to new companies they can vet my experience and work history.

If you can't see value in LinkedIn you're either not looking or not in business. A global database of resumes/CVs is obviously extremely valuable.

I see the value from LinkedIn's perspective. I just don't see the value from mine. All they're really offering me is an opportunity to be spammed by even more recruiters.

And, yes, I am in business.

Hey phowat, oneplusone and I are currently working on just that! I'm not sure exactly when we are coming out of private beta but the idea is that the application will ultimately be a multi-lingual, open source, professional social network, largely targeting workers that use computers in some way (designers, developers, electronic engineers, project managers, investors, etc).

Companies and recruiters will not be welcome (at least initially) and there will never be advertising or a pay-for-spam model or any other super skeezy business model like individual information or making custom tools for government censors.

We're hoping to not even have Google Analytics or any other 3rd party tracking site once we get out of open beta. Also, no spamming our own users ala LinkedIn. This is the notify me on open beta link:

http://www.bonjour.is/

(Note the POST to the server is HTTPS, we just haven't bothered setting up the certs for the Ember App hoster yet.)

Feel free to sign up to get notified if you want. Or don't. We'll post it here once we open up the beta anyway :)

> professional social network, largely targeting workers that use computers in some way (designers, developers, electronic engineers, project managers, investors, etc).

... and...

> Companies and recruiters will not be welcome (at least initially

So it's not a LinkedIn competitor, then.

It might very well turn out you're onto something great and I'm not saying this as criticism, but from description you're trying to become something fundamentally different from what LinkedIn is. Don't try to sell yourself as a LinkedIn alternative.

LinkedIn is where I go when I want to find someone important in company X that I wouldn't normally have access to, typically in functions that are usually outside of my normal circle. E.g. I got two separate SVP's at DHL to personally interfere to get a package I was waiting for redirected when their local customer service was being useless once.

It's where I go when I want to find recruiters with contacts in the right companies, whether to hire or to be hired.

It's where I go when I want to research companies to see if they're a good fit to work at, or a good fit to partner with etc.

It's where I go when I want to contact someone I've worked with in the past but not closely enough to e.g. have them on facebook or have their current phone number or e-mail. This last one appears to be pretty much the only one that fits your model, except I often want people outside of the techies.

This is why I'm reasonably active (couple of times a month) on LinkedIn, and not at all (once a year at most) on Facebook. For me, you'd fall closer to the Facebook end of the spectrum based on your homepage. That's not necessarily bad (clearly my Facebook usage is crazily atypical), but it's a different niche.

So I understand where you are coming from, but I think we're thinking of different things.

When I say "no recruiters" I don't mean "no recruitment". What I mean is that there shouldn't be these people that spam your inbox with messages like this:

https://imgur.com/ajnxsQ6

The problem with recruiters is that to them its a numbers game. They don't care if they waste a minute of your time, they aren't really there to help you. They actively try to prevent you from even finding out who the company is so you don't go around them.

A site that helps people find better places to work is a good thing. The way recruiters and companies do it (by spamming people) is not. Ultimately we'll have to have a company profile page, but we want to make sure it is done right.

As for finding companies worth working with, that is something we'd like to tackle, but we're a professional social network for people before we're one for companies. But I agree that it is important to at least present information on a company, even if there isn't company-wide accounts (which we're still thinking about).

But fundamentally, you are right, we aren't a LinkedIn competitor the same way that Pepsi is a Coke competitor. We are building something different, and if you love LinkedIn then that is just fine with us.

Page is completely blank on Safari 9.0 on OS X 10.11.

Screenshot - http://i.imgur.com/FUOrylH.png

Ah, thanks. Looks like it doesn't parse the US English language out of the box (we're Canadian). We'll have a fix up shortly.

Edit: Should work now :)

Getting a blank page.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but since the author is in the US, I'd like to ask him: do you know why it took Al Jazeera so long to get into the US? Do you know what Al Jazeera had to create a separate entity, "Al Jazeera America" ?

Not that I don't think the Chinese government does evil things, and not that I think LinkedIn has any moral high ground on anything whatsoever, but is it an American company's job to solve Chinese political oppression?

I'm more concerned about the NSA and whatever shenanigans American corporations are capitulating to back home. That is something where I have the context, cultural awareness, and moral duty to try to effect change. But when it comes to the Chinese government, I don't see how western individuals or companies have any capacity to impose their moral compass. If you don't comply with local laws then you don't operate in that country. China will simply build their own LinkedIn and the world will be less connected. I don't see how that adds a modicum of pressure for the Chinese government to reform, change has to be demanded from within China.

Interesting opinion, but The stipulations to becoming an entity in China are not much different than in the U.S. and other countries. Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become clearer. I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt as the game is zero-sum.

The difference is that one has guns.

> Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become clearer

They are not even remotely the same thing. You can choose to ignore "social media outrage" and stay out of jail; try ignoring government demands in China and see how it works out.

Cultural pressure to conform may be strong, but as long as it's informal, it's relatively easy to survive. When it becomes formal, you have to deal with a lot of people legally allowed to physically hurt you.

There is censorship in the West (especially in the UK, where the police started jailing Twitter trolls and Facebook bullies, as well as censoring DNS calls), but it's nowhere near the scale of what you see in China... yet.

> I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt

Maybe LI is a bit morally-bankrupter than the average?

"In its heyday, Weibo employed 4000 censors in house"

I thought Weibo was still big in China, yet this implies that the service is on the wane?

I think WeChat started being more popular a year or two ago, due to less censorship (at the time). However, this is all based on vague impressions from reading sinocism.com and not by any hard data whatsoever.

"Technological and financial giants, but moral pygmies" (as HN edited the title) is better than the original which has an error. Heads up.

EDIT: Now HN has edited the title again to something completely unlike the original title.

Technology recycle - Slow Death !

Seriously China is a fucked up country when it comes to software,services and IT.

Your handle shows promises of honesty, but where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-encompassing banner of an pejorative qualifier such as "fucked up"? Come on.

> where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-encompassing banner

Yeah, well, the "country" has an all-encompassing government, which is pretty consistent in applying a uniform set of policies (at least when the policies benefit the government, anyway). In the context of an article about censorship and cooperating with authoritarian governments, it makes perfect sense.

Fair enough, I would tend to agree.

Just wanted to point out that many Chinese citizens are victims of the system you're describing and it would be unfair to them to use too broad a stroke when talking about a "country" (as opposed to "The Chinese government" or even "some factions of the Chinese government").

Which is obvious ? Do not paint them as victims because not all of them are.

They have the money to buy iPhones but not your average 0.99$ app ?

This is a substantive post, but the title is too baity for HN, so we've changed it to something neutral. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests a better one.

It's funny how quickly anti-China comments in this thread are being downvoted. Hey underpaid China censors+bots, are you there?

Try to say something about China that wasn't, isn't or won't be true for every other country. General Society and it's concept underlies circulation. It's just not well documented in some parts, but we're on relativising this fact and maybe in 100 Years there will be a generation willing to learn and shift this concept. Not change.

Right now, the only one I see that's been visibly downvoted is yours right here. Which I am about to downvote myself, because I have a general policy of downvoting complaints about downvoting (because they are boring) unless there's something more to them than "waaaaah, I'm (or my political/religious/social allies are) being downvoted and I don't like it".

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