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The Absurdity of LinkedIn

803 points| darrennix | 12 years ago |blog.42floors.com | reply

336 comments

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[+] scrollaway|12 years ago|reply
I can't believe people still use LinkedIn.

And when I say that, I am talking about the HN crowd. It's one thing to say "I can't believe people use IE6", but this is tech-savvy people using a joke of a social media.

Guys, if you want to look professional, buy your own domain name. Something professional, like yourname.me, or clever like "yourna.me". Build your own web page with your own damn profile and don't leave control over a company on how you look on the web. Be in control of the first point of entry to your identity.

For god sake guys. LinkedIn has had so many security issues, so much scummy behaviour regarding spam, user retention etc... yet you are still blessing them with your presence. (Obviously this doesn't apply to those that don't)

PS: Use gandi.net as a registrar for your name. They offer a free ssl cert along with the domain (and support almost every tld) for added "professional-looking" value to your site. I am not affiliated with them, I just love Gandi.

Edit: I'm being called out for "living in my own bubble" it seems. Yet LinkedIn is the very definition of a bubble. I used to have a LinkedIn profile and from it all I got were the most awful recruiting experiences, and all of them through cold calls. Your own site with CV + portfolio + Github + contact details is a LOT better.

PS2: Downvote or not I don't care, but please reply if you disagree; I'd love to disagree even harder!

Edit 2: I'm starting to think there is correlation between finding LinkedIn useful and not having a Github profile. A lot of the points people are bringing up here are solved in a very similar way by Github (which is in many ways a social network). This does bring me back to my original point though, why use LinkedIn when you can use a company that isn't scummy and actually have your real work experience on there and a link back to your personal website with more portfolio etc?

[+] comlonq|12 years ago|reply
I can't believe people don't use Linkedin. I've been a software engineer and more recently a delivery lead within the professional service consulting space working with massive enterprise clients for a few years now.

Everybody I've ever spoken to (outside of small JS type devs) has got a linkedin profile and expected me to have one. So many recruiters (I contract now) have used linkedin to contact me based on searches they've done which I have converted into 6 separate projects now (and at £650 per day that's a lot of money).

Depending what circles you move in (I move in big enterprise software and services circles) it's just a given that you will have a linkedin. I have a domain name which directs to my blog and one page profile but even then people still ask for my linkedin.

I don't know what the smaller time software dev world is like but for me linkedin is essential..

Saying you can't believe why anybody in the HN crowd would use linkedin probably shows that you only know about the bubble that you operate in.

[+] seldo|12 years ago|reply
As a hiring manager, I expect candidates to have a LinkedIn profile that is up to date. A LinkedIn profile is a public copy of your resume; other people can see it and flag if you make inaccurate claims. I can also see how you're connected to me (it's a very rare web developer who isn't a few degrees away from me, mostly because of my time at Yahoo) and use those people to work out where you are in the industry, and get background information from them. Public recommendations are good (the skills endorsements list much less so).

If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good. [Edit: per comments below, you might have some deep principled reason for not using social networks. In this case my metric is wrong, but I'm okay with having a false negative once in a while.]

Expecting everyone to have and maintain their own domain probably isn't practical, but even for those that do, the discoverability of that domain is low: I don't search google to find developers, I search LinkedIn. That's what it's for, and it's really pretty good at it.

They do some really dumb UI stuff around privacy that is trivially worked around using Incognito. I wish they didn't, but it's not dumb enough to make me abandon the giant utility of the network as a whole.

[Update: I took this thread to Twitter and got a bunch of really cogent arguments, including that LinkedIn enables harrassment/stalking of marginalized groups. That's more than a few isolated people who don't like social networks or object to the dark pattern UI, that's a systemic flaw. So I'm going to change my hiring practices to take that into account. Thanks, everybody!]

[+] freshhawk|12 years ago|reply
You can't believe the HN crowd is on LinkedIn?

First of all I completely, absolutely agree with everything you are saying about scummy behaviour, spam, etc. And yet they are basically average in that regard among social networking sites. But they provide a service that's much more useful to me than a maximally addictive feed of trivia. It's one of the few social networks I actually use because it makes me money and it's easy to mitigate all the harm. It's a completely pragmatic decision, not affected by how bad their implementation is.

And yes, of course you have your own site with professional details on there. That's just a given isn't it? LinkedIn isn't my main presence on the internet, I agree that would be a sad state of affairs for a tech-savvy person.

The most confusing thing to me about you being surprised is that of all the communities in the world, the one that has the biggest cross section of people responsible for social media having all that scummy behaviour you are complaining about might be HN. If you wanted to find the community with the largest number of that group combined with people who non-ironically refer to themselves as "hustlers" and spend a hell of a lot of time on LinkedIn then that is definitely HN. I'm not saying it's the majority or anything, but of all the "crowds" to expect to not be on LinkedIn ...

[+] sridharvembu|12 years ago|reply
LinkedIn seems to be changing, and I am not sure for the better.

Recently they stopped access to a whole bunch of CRM players to LinkedIn API. Only Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics are allowed now.

http://www.zdnet.com/linkedout-crm-companies-squawk-over-lin...

(Disclosure: Zoho CRM was one of the affected products - we offered to pay for their API access but no dice)

[+] krelian|12 years ago|reply
I'd rank LinkedIn number 2 after Godaddy in the list of Successful Shady Companies (list ranked by shadiness BTW). Their entire business model revolves around tricking the user into doing stuff that - if it was clearly explained - they would never want to do.
[+] frankdenbow|12 years ago|reply
Recruiters paying to have premium access to candidates (a large part of LinkedIn's revenue) does not appear to involve tricking anyone.
[+] matrix|12 years ago|reply
Their shadiness is not limited to usability dark patterns; I am fairly sure they're scraping people's contact lists from gmail and the like without consent via impersonation (have gmail open in one tab, linkedin in another...). Exactly how they're accomplishing that, I'd love to know -- Facebook is likely pulling the same trick.
[+] geekam|12 years ago|reply
Linkedin makes Facebook look like a real good deal.
[+] bps4484|12 years ago|reply
what sort of things do they do?

This is a serious question, I don't know and am curious.

[+] mjt0229|12 years ago|reply
Linked in is a very strange world; maybe it's good for job seekers or recruiters, but I find that the most frequent interactions I have there are either recruiters contacting me for ridiculous jobs that I would never be interested in (and sometimes am not qualified for). The second most frequent type of interactions I have there are where people endorse me for various skills.

Inevitably, I get endorsed by people who have no knowledge of said skills: I'm not sure why a technology-phobic college admissions officer would endorse my skills in distributed software engineering, and what would be the value of such an endorsement?

[+] artmageddon|12 years ago|reply
> Inevitably, I get endorsed by people who have no knowledge of said skills: I'm not sure why a technology-phobic college admissions officer would endorse my skills in distributed software engineering, and what would be the value of such an endorsement?

I have to agree. I've gotten so many endorsements from non-software engineers who I've never worked with for my apparent XML abilities. I literally don't know what to think about that.

[+] Ryel|12 years ago|reply
It's supposed to be a "I helped you, now you help me" WINK WINK kind of a thing.

I can't wait for the day LinkedIn goes the way of the Myspace. The only thing people will be wondering is how it took so long. That being said, I'm looking for a job now and couldn't imagine not using LinkedIn. Everyone asks for it.

[+] leorocky|12 years ago|reply
This absurdity is found all over the internet and it's the result of Google's crawling policy. You can do the same kind of thing with nytimes.com articles and other websites that want their context indexed by Google but at the same time restrict access to it. These absurdities are made and work because most people do not understand how to use the software they have.
[+] what_ever|12 years ago|reply
Yup. They need to show all the information to the Google bot in order to rank higher on the SERP. If they did not show the full name to the bot, this would not be possible. But they need to have the same behavior to any one visiting their site from Google search results.

I just use a incognito browser when I need to lookup someone on LinkedIn unless I want them to know that I visited their profile.

I think Quora changed their behavior a little since the earlier days? They now always have the first answer visible to everyone.

[+] retube|12 years ago|reply
I thought Google heavily penalised sites that made content available to the Google bot but firewalled content for everybody else?
[+] dmbass|12 years ago|reply
This is subtly different for Linkedin. They DO show the same thing to Googlebot as logged out users. Registered users end up seeing a different page which Google bot has no way of accessing because it does not have an account.
[+] willu|12 years ago|reply
So GoogleBot can't scrape more than 10 NYT articles per month, right?
[+] baddox|12 years ago|reply
LinkedIn is probably my least favorite tech company. I have deleted my account (or whatever is the closest thing they allow, it might be called something like "unlink account") three times now over about two years. This was after attempting to unsubscribe from all emails but continuing to receive them.

The first two times I deleted my account, my account magically resurrected itself after I accidentally clicked a link to a LinkedIn page and my password manager automatically logged me in. Apparently logging in resurrects deleted accounts, no questions asked. After the second time, I wisened up and removed all my LinkedIn cookies and disabled my password manager for the domain, then deleted my account for the third time.

That had worked for a long time, until just a few days ago, when I received a random LinkedIn newsletter out of the blue. This was disturbing. I clicked the Unsubscribe link, which asked me to log in, but my login didn't work (which is nice, because apparently my account is slightly more deleted now). So I tweeted at LinkedIn, and they said they put my email address on their Do Not Contact list.

Hopefully the reign of terror is over, but I somehow doubt it.

[+] ktf|12 years ago|reply
I don't even have a LinkedIn account, I've never had an account, and I still receive their emails. It's mystifying...
[+] asenna|12 years ago|reply
> Apparently logging in resurrects deleted accounts, no questions asked.

I had the same experience with Facebook.

[+] josho|12 years ago|reply
This is the tension that is LinkedIn.

While they were growing, they allowed great amount of sharing. Now it seems they are transitioning from a growth based company to growing their revenue--I've personally been finding more and more examples of this increased friction.

So far that tension seems to still be 'ok', they still give away, for free, most of the value is in their huge user database. Their monetization strategy has been to tighten things up so it's still valuable for most people, with the exception of sales and recruiters. If you are one of them, then to get the value of the database you need to pay.

Given the network effects of their user database, I suspect over time what they give away will be less and less and we'll see more examples of this.

[+] yahelc|12 years ago|reply
I noticed this the other day -- while logged in, LinkedIn insisted I must upgrade to Premium in order to see the last name of the person whose profile I was looking at (which of course, was publicly once I logged out).
[+] hga|12 years ago|reply
Might you find some value from the person, and LinkedIn, knowing you looked at that profile?

I can't offhand think of any, but that's one difference between these two use cases.

[+] samstave|12 years ago|reply
I saw this recently to, where i had done a google search of the person: the google search result showed their full nam in the actual link to linkedin - after clickingto go to the linkedin page, from the full name link, it withheld the last name.

Idiocy.

[+] habosa|12 years ago|reply
LinkedIn really blew it. They were the one of the big social players (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Foursquare, Tumblr, LinkedIn) that had people who were happy to pay for premium features. Put another way, they were the only social player with a non-ad revenue play. The problem was that the people paying were recruiters, so they did a lot to make the recruiters happy. They forgot about those who the recruiters were targeting, however, and now people like us send LinkedIn straight to spam.

LinkedIn had a real opportunity to be the social network that added real value, but now (as evidenced by the comments below) people see them as a spammy, shady mess.

[+] untog|12 years ago|reply
"People" on HN see them as a spammy, shady mess. People I've talked to that work in different industries are mystified that I don't use LinkedIn. They love it.
[+] gergles|12 years ago|reply
HN hates LinkedIn because they don't understand it. Look at their financials - almost none (practically speaking) of their revenue comes from advertising.
[+] SeanDav|12 years ago|reply
I use LinkedIn, but it generates way, way too much email. Now I have a filter to send all LI mail straight to it's own folder. Next step is straight to spam.
[+] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
I've wondered about this too. They don't seem to have a coherent "value capture" strategy. There is always tension between the 'let the customer see the value' and 'give away the value' except they do seem to have it backwards. As a non-logged in user you should not see profiles but as a logged in user you should. That at least would keep some of the scraper bots away.
[+] tomkarlo|12 years ago|reply
The scraper bots are exactly why they're making the full information available to non-logged in users, so it shows up in Google's index. I believe it's considered a no-no to show the bot a different page from a non-logged-in human viewer, so they don't really have a choice.

Hiding it from users with login/session cookies, however, is just being annoying and depending on the fact that most people won't know enough to switch to an incognito window.

[+] fredgrott|12 years ago|reply
their value strategy is allow recruiters to find the linkedin profile via google and than up sell the recruiter.
[+] whiddershins|12 years ago|reply
Not directly related: I have a linkedin account, and once, I logged in and it recommended a connection which happened to be the guy who lives on my second floor. This guy was the roommate of the person who rents the second floor, I have never called, emailed, or texted this individual. He works in a completely unrelated business to me and we have no linkedin connections in common. No social media or any other sort of connections. I have no electronic connections with the other guy who lives in that apartment. I have a different mailing address. The only thing we have in common is that he sometimes hops on my wifi when his is on the fritz. LinkedIn insists they don't use ip addresses for connections. OK. This is incredibly hard for me to believe.

I feel they pump their numbers with questionable tactics and people mostly use it because of fear. Fear that if they don't use it, their career will suffer. Which plays on a general unease that you could one day end up living in a ditch. So, imo, LinkedIn isn't absurd, it is sinister.

[+] ctdonath|12 years ago|reply
If you dig a little you can find several articles detailing LinkedIn's odd/scary ability to connect people having no discernible connection but a good reason to think there could/should be.
[+] HeavenFox|12 years ago|reply
This happened to me too. LinkedIn somehow recommended my airbnb host, despite I've never linked the two accounts. I can only imagine two possible reasons: either my host checked my profile frequently enough to trigger their algorithm, or they're doing IP-based recommendation.
[+] malandrew|12 years ago|reply
I would love it if Matt Cutts and the rest of the Google search team decided to seriously derank any resource that requires login to view. LinkedIn, Quora and Experts Exchange are prime offenders here.

There is absolutely no reason for google to index any information that the general public can't see without logging in.

[+] untog|12 years ago|reply
They do. LinkedIn allows you to view an anonymous version of the profile, so it doesn't technically break the rules.
[+] aendruk|12 years ago|reply
I had success in asking LinkedIn to blacklist my email address [1].

My reasoning behind the decision was simply that I found their continual attempts to socially manipulate me insulting, and that I'd prefer not to be walked all over by any company, let alone one as trashy as LinkedIn.

[1]: https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/

[+] thatthatis|12 years ago|reply
There are two things you can do with this information:

1) Balk at its seeming absurdity

2) Assume linkedin is a rational company and take the seeming absurdity as an insight into how to convert free users into premium users.

It is shocking how little it takes to convince some people to pull out their credit cards and sign up for an annual subscription.

[+] Kequc|12 years ago|reply
Number two has to assume Linkedin is not only a rational company but also a competent one. I deleted my Linkedin account almost a decade ago and I still get mail from them. When I try to unsubscribe from the spam they send me I am dragged through the sign in procedure, for an account I do not have. When I use the forgot password function to try and figure out what account they are talking about and I enter all of my addresses one by one eventually finding out I definitely do not have any account. I am by this time so frustrated that I want to kick my computer down the stairs.

Every single step that has anything to do with not giving them money by the way is met with Captcha. I've never filled out so many captchas as when I tried to unsubscribe from Linkedin spam.

My only remaining option was to mark all email from them as spam. Stop using Linkedin. I certainly won't think fondly of anyone who tries to add me there. People just put my email address into a box and I get an email from Linkedin on top of the spam the company still sends me.

[+] baggachipz|12 years ago|reply
Ah yes the tried-and-true "experts-exchange" model. How'd that work out for them, anyway?
[+] Netminder_EE|12 years ago|reply
DISCLAIMER: I'm Experts Exchange's senior volunteer administrator. That means, for the most part, that I've outlasted everyone else.

At the time EE imposed the cloaking / hard and fast paywall / masking / whatever you call it, we told them it was a bad idea. We understand why they did it -- it was to counteract the effects of a prior less-than-advisable decision -- but that didn't make it a good idea.

Long term, obviously, it resulted in 1) major penalties from Google and 2) a lot of competition EE didn't need to provoke.

New management has removed the paywall and redirects from external search results and links about two months ago; we expect that it will still be a few months longer before the penalties will be overcome.

[+] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
As I noted on Twitter recently, "LinkedIn, the place where you can get endorsed for skills you don't have by people you've never met, reaches 300 million users." https://twitter.com/danielbmarkham/status/457298482978512896

What can you say? The thing is growing. People use it. It's definitely no Facebook (e-gads, is that EVEN a compliment?) but they're a contender.

If I had to choose, I'd say I hate LinkedIn less than Facebook because at least they haven't mastered social manipulation to the degree that Facebook has. They're kind of rookie-league slimy. I guess that's something.

[+] coherentpony|12 years ago|reply
I don't have a LinkedIn account, and they still keep emailing me. Go away LinkedIn, I do not want your spam.
[+] GeneralMayhem|12 years ago|reply
I hate LinkedIn. It's a terrible, cluttered mess of a website. It's shady as all hell. Their mobile app is unusable.

And yet, just by having a profile that's even vaguely up to date, I get job offers left and right. Most of them are complete crap, but I was also contacted by a recruiter for one of the big four on there. I filter all the email to a separate folder where it can rot eternally, and I page through the messages on LinkedIn every few weeks to see if there's anything interesting.

[+] atldev|12 years ago|reply
Unrelated to this post, I was trying to downgrade my account from premium to free today. It was surprisingly hard to find the path. I had to google it. Btw, it's under "Privacy and Settings", not under "Account" where you'd expect.

I have nothing against LinkedIn and find it helpful. It just struck me as something that was discussed in a design meeting- "how can we make cancellation hard to do?"