LinkedIn Prevents You from Deplatforming

[jeffkumar]

So I realized, I have a good set of contacts on LinkedIn that I want to be able to segment and reach out to this year. When I tried to download all my data, I realized that 95% of all the contacts did not have emails. So I then decided to go through each profile sequentially and look at the contact info and get the email and fill out my spreadsheet. After I spend an hour and got about 200 contacts, I got a warning that I was using an automation tool and that I needed to click to comply to not use an automation tool anymore. However, I never used an automation tool in the first place for this. I manually was extracting the emails available to me through my own contact list Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution?

[FistfulOfHaws]

Similar thing happened to me. Randomly one of my LinkedIn posts got a ton of likes, so I figured I would look through the list of people who liked and try to figure out where they were coming from/if they would be interesting to reach out to.

After viewing a 100 or so profiles, I was logged out of LinkedIn and when I tried to log back in my account was suspended. I was in LinkedIn jail for like a week, and when I was finally able to login again I got the automatic tool warning and had to agree that I wouldn’t use one again (even though I never had used one).

[convolvatron]

they did the same to me just by going through the job listings and x-ing out the ones that I wasn't interested in. of course for some reason that doesn't really work, the keep coming back, but wth, might as well try to keep down the noise.

you have been suspended for the use of automation

[Grimblewald]

Not using linked in is the solution. It's a cess pool and terrible at offering what it advertises. I have a profile where my bio starts with the fact you wont reach me on linked in and to email me instead. This works for me, but mileage my vary.

[raw_anon_1111]

I’m sure that recruiters are going to scour the Internet looking for you.

I created my LinkIn account in 2012. By then I had been a developer for 15 years in Atlanta and knew all of the local recruiters and had met some in person. For the next 8 years, LinkedIn really didn’t serve a purpose. When I looked for a job in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, I just reached out to my network and interviews and offers fell into my lap. Admittedly they were just regular old enterprise dev jobs in Atlanta.

But in 2020, things changed. AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the consulting department (ProServe full time with the standard four year package) and after that my last two jobs have been based on either targeted outreach on LinkedIn where I was an industry expert in a niche of AWS that most people don’t have (2023) or an internal recruiter reaching out to me on LinkedIn 2024.

[nerdsniper]

Can’t apply to YC without a LinkedIn profile, AIUI.

[muzani]

What does it offer? It's bad at jobs. But it's an alternative to business cards and Facebook.

[altairprime]

Record a video of yourself manually doing this, and then file a small claims lawsuit demanding they restore your access with the video submitted as proof, once they eventually lock you out. You don’t have to claim for money, you can simply claim for restoration of service, or you can indicate that if they fail to provide access to your data, that you seek damages equal to the business and personal value of your “Rolodex file” that they misappropriated from you. (If you’re not familiar, look it up, and be sure to use that term so that the court understands the gravity of the situation.) (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

[nerdsniper]

To be clear: there is no legal requirement for LinkedIn to restore service. They reserve the right to deny service to anyone for any or no reason.

But they might restore service even though the courts won’t “make” them.

[connor11528]

you can upload a csv of linkedin connections to a Clay table then use a data provider like FullEnrich to get emails and other profile info.

Could also use a tool like n8n instead of Clay or build your own system to read the csv and make api calls to enrichment service

[nusl]

What's Clay? Can't find the service you're referencing with a few quick searches

[jeffkumar]

This is interesting! What would you recommend first?

[add-sub-mul-div]

It seems they don't care about false positives when looking for "automation" because their real goal is to prevent you from getting too much data regardless of the method. It happened to me on a different site once, my solution was to cancel my subscription and stop using it after their customer service wouldn't help me.

[jeffkumar]

I think you are right. My intuition makes me think they are wanting to prevent you from getting too much of your own information where you can be independent. They want to keep you dependent.

[nacozarina]

You can delete a LI profile, create a new one, and ppl who are still relevant will find you again (and vice versa). True.

Your real colleague list is well under 100 ppl, stop adding mere acquaintances.

[NVHacker]

My real colleague list is well over 100ppl.

[CodingJeebus]

Interesting. As a lurker, LI tries to keep me logged in all the time/reduces friction to authenticating more so than most other platforms I use.

[snihalani]

I think they want you to use their linkedin recruiter product instead

[Quarondeau]

For the record, I totally agree that you should have this ability.

But they are likely orienting themselves with GDPR and similar laws around the world, under which data exports and portability only include your own data, and specifically exclude that of other "data subjects".

This is one of the few areas where I think that GDPR may be too strict.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Are you familiar with Cambridge Analytica? After a well-known 2018 scandal, we've decided as a society that we don't want social media platforms to allow this kind of large-scale extraction of other people's information. I'm sure you mean well, but you shouldn't build this list and Linkedin is right to prevent you from doing it.

[jeffkumar]

These are my first degree connections. I don't see what's wrong with getting a list of my own connections.

[bitfilped]

Are you going to reach out to 200 people? I imagine only 1-2 of them can actually significantly advance your career in any meaningful way. Wouldn't your time be better spent cultivating relationships with those 1-2 peole rather than collecting data on 200 people who you're realistically not going to see any return from?

[jeffkumar]

You would hope so, but it doesn't seem so in today's job market. Have you seen how many applicants are on open SWE job postings these days?

[raw_anon_1111]

I can just put “Open To Work” as my status on LinkedIn and my entire network of former coworkers abs recruiters know I’m looking.