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LinkedIn is Evil

60 points| smock | 18 years ago | reply

I just spent the last half hour trying to downgrade my account from business to personal, after discovering a recurring charge which I hadn't realized was going to be recurring. There are plenty of buttons and obvious links for how I can upgrade my account - but not a single one for downgrading. I considered canceling, but now that I'm in the system it will be awkward to leave. Basically they have me boxed in.

From their FAQ, it appears that the only way to downgrade is to E-MAIL THEM! Even though I find this unacceptable, I went ahead and composed an e-mail using their link - only to get a 'Page Load Error' upon submission.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with LinkedIn, or am I just missing something obvious?

57 comments

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[+] sam|18 years ago|reply
The same thing is happening for me. I just noticed that they are billing me $20/month and I'm also getting an error when I try to send them a message via their form. Not being able to downgrade in a simple way is Evil. It reminds me of AOL in the bad old days.
[+] Harkins|18 years ago|reply
You're missing that you should just start contesting the charges. You made a good faith effort to downgrade. Chargebacks sound like the only way to get their attention.
[+] smock|18 years ago|reply
I'm a little wary of doing that - presumably they'll start pushing back and getting on credit card shit lists is something that makes me feel even more helpless than not being able to cancel something.
[+] Kaizyn|18 years ago|reply
You know, a person can always CALL on a 'telephone' and speak to someone from LinkedIn in person. After dealing with a short wait period, you will get to talk to someone who will help you, thus avoiding the nastiness in court.
[+] aneesh|18 years ago|reply
Yeah, your credit card company can take care of it for you. They'll send LinkedIn a chargeback if you contest the charge, and then someone at LinkedIn will probably take a look, since their money is on the line.
[+] brk|18 years ago|reply
Odd, I've gone from free-paid-free-paid-free a few times now by following whatever the process was at the time.

One thing I suggest for any sites like this is to get one of those "disposable" credit card numbers with a configurable time/balance limit. Login to your online card balance viewer portal and there is usually an option for this. Eliminates a lot of "please please cancel my account" debates...

[+] smock|18 years ago|reply
That is a really good idea - I had the same issue with a wireless provider I signed up for (Deep Blue Wireless, if anyone has ever used them) previously.

Regardless, I think it is a pretty shady business practice to obfuscate the process of removing charges which were signed up for. It can be done really well - Netflix has made it really easy, and because of it I am willing to go back and forth as a subscriber. At this point I will never sign up again for a LinkedIn business account.

[+] deepster|18 years ago|reply
Any recommendations on 'disposable' credit cards?
[+] rplevy|18 years ago|reply
LinkedIn seems to be an all-around stubborn and inconvenient site. I had the same experience, but in my case it was in deleting my account. The deletion process was unnecessarily difficult, so I deleted all my contacts (I think the account ultimately did get deleted though). The reason I wanted to delete my account in the first place had to do with the fact that it was overly restrictive in managing, showing, deleting my own content. The last straw was that I had posted a question in the public Q/A section and there was no way to delete the question permanently when I did not want it to be shown.
[+] apu|18 years ago|reply
I've had problems with their email notifications. Despite repeated requests to be removed from all emails, I still keep getting some. I've written to them about this as well, with no response.

In general they appear to not really pay attention to user requests.

[+] bfioca|18 years ago|reply
Maybe downgrading is considered an edge case.
[+] sam|18 years ago|reply
This is a joke, right?
[+] j2d2|18 years ago|reply
Agreed. Considering a company evil is a bit much...
[+] adityakothadiya|18 years ago|reply
Yes, I had similar experience while closing my account on LinkedIn. I had to email them, to which they replied with asking reasons. But why should I bother giving them reasons about why I want to close.

They really made sure that I don't have any option to close the account in one-click (ok, 2 clicks max. for confirmation!)

[+] bayareaguy|18 years ago|reply
Sounds like a good YC business: a service that will take care of the hassle of canceling you from other services.
[+] DanielBMarkham|18 years ago|reply
Could call it CancelMe -- For $5 you could cancel any one of a dozen major evil fee spammers.

I like it. Somebody contact me (info in profile) if they would like to explore this further.

[+] ampradhan|18 years ago|reply
Oh man...this sounds similar to turbo tax online...when I filed my taxes for last year, at the end of the process I upgraded to the next level which was of course more expensive. Then the upgrade did not really help with the return and I decided to downgrade back to the standard personal level...but..oh no...I could not downgrade at all..WTF...and their site says once you upgrade you cannot downgrade...that's a boat load of whatever...but I would never imagine LinkedIn doing something similar...the error is probably temporary..
[+] Bluem00|18 years ago|reply
I had almost exactly the same experience, through the error message when I submitted my comment to their "customer service" people. The message still went through and they did cancel my unintentional "subscription". My error occured because the system somehow decided that I wanted to create an account at the same time as I submitted my message, but an account with my email address already exists (for obvious reasons).

Hope your email goes through as well.

[+] tptacek|18 years ago|reply
I really like LinkedIn. It's been useful to my business a bunch of times. But I've never been tempted to pay for it. What prompted you to upgrade your account?
[+] sam|18 years ago|reply
I signed up in order to send a message to someone outside of my network.
[+] Mystalic|18 years ago|reply
I've downgraded from them. Yes, they only do it by email, but they did it like they said.

They need to fix it though.

[+] bluelu|18 years ago|reply
Xing isn't any better.

When you register, you get all the features. After a month, when you don't upgrade your account, you only see who was on your profile (picture) but can't click on them. You can't even send messages to your friends anymore. You can't search for people, etc...

[+] babul|18 years ago|reply
Although many people use LinkedIN, I don't as there are many things in thier T&C I am not happy with regarding the sharing of my personal information and those in my network.
[+] tptacek|18 years ago|reply
It's basically my resume; I'm OK with people circulating it. =)
[+] babul|18 years ago|reply
I mean in that it can sold on to third parties.
[+] t0pj|18 years ago|reply
Is that opportunity I hear knocking at the market's door?
[+] danhalen|18 years ago|reply
Yes, I had to write them too. I spent a bunch of time discovering that. It's piss poor customer service. I'm over it.