You are currently viewing How I Hate LinkedIn – Let Me Count the Ways

How I Hate LinkedIn – Let Me Count the Ways

LinkedIn sure doesn’t get the bad press that Facebook seems to always get, but why not?  Below are a few reasons why I hate LinkedIn and I will continue to update this post as policies change and I find new things (please contribute if I missed something).

Contents:

Upgrade to Premium to See Who’s Viewed Your Profile and Remain Anonymous

This needs no explanation.  Selling our privacy to each other as simple as that.

LinkedIN Spam Notifications (& Emails Too!) to All of Your Contacts About Any Updates

I did some routine maintenance on my account and the next thing you know a flood of messages comes in from people who apparently clicked the “congratulate Michael….” button.

At first I thought the messages were sincerely and carefully created by my acquaintances and there responded to them in kind. But after about 10 or so messages with the identical text:

Congrats on the new role! Hope you’re doing well

I got hip to the fact the person probably merely had to click a button in their feed.

🎤🎸🎸Every Breath You Take, We'll Be Watching You! 
🎤🎤🎤Every Breath You Take, We’ll Be Watching You🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Of course, if getting notified through LinkedIn’s activity feed multiple times didn’t do the trick, then quite likely the email digest they send to the rest of your network hopefully filled in all the gaps. God forbid LinnedIn miss an opportunity to instigate awkward encounters with the most distant ghosts of your professional past.

LinkedIn, the most grievous offender of deceptively spamming all of your contacts  in the history of the internet, is literally training the global workforce to  spam each other by allowing for a one click email message to be sent.  It’s so gross!!

Do People Know I Read Their Message on LinkedIN?

Yes they do! The sender will be notified that you have read the message and they will also be notified if you are typing (awesome privacy, thanks LinkedIn).  I do not know if there is a way to opt out of allowing this feature, I pray there is.

LinkedIn Notifying Us of Colleagues’ Work Anniversary


Really, it’s a former schoolmates’ 1 year work anniversary!?  You’ve got to be kidding? I’m going to call FTD right now and order some flowers.  Not really, I couldn’t give less of a shit about this LinkedIn. Eff you LLinkedIn “Premium” Services = Bribery to Violate the Privacy of Others

Ahh, struggling a bit to justify InMail’s existence?

Want to contact someone who isn’t a “first degree” contact? You have to pay LinkedIn to send an “InMail.” Presumably, the reason you can’t email them to begin with is to protect the person’s privacy – which obviously is a lower priority than LinkedIn making some money.

Want to see who’s viewed your profile?  Then pay for LinkedIn Premium. This feature is actually available to “non premium” users as well, but “premium” allows you to see a detailed history instead of  just a recent few.

LinkedIn Privacy “Must”

 

 

Uh oh, you didn’t realize that anyone on LinkedIn can see when you visit their profile? Perhaps you just googled the cute girl who interviewed for an accounting position at your company? Then you need to follow this LinkedIn Privacy “Must:” You can set your browsing to “anonymous” by Clicking here to change this privacy setting.

PS, “eff you” LinkedIn for making the default setting “show everyone exactly who visited their profile.

Update on this Issue (Warning): LinkedIn Dialog Very Misleading

This is prompt I’ve gotten on LinkedIn.  Do you think it’s worded in a misleading way (ie. hiding the fact that you will now have your identity revealed to every person you view on LinkedIn)??

I feel this is misleading

“So and So” Endorsed Your Skills  (equals “You Better Login and Return the Favor…”)

Thank you, guy I haven’t talked to in five years. I am glad you think I’m good at SEO.  Do you even know what it is?   I guess I should now login to LinkedIn and pretend that I have an opinion on your skill set as well.  This is just a thinly veiled excuse for LinkedIn to try and get people back on their site and engage with each other (and hopefully, sign up for “LinkedIn” premium).

The whole “recommendations” and “soliciting recommendations” thing sucks too, for obvious reasons (ie. hmm, how do I tactfully not “recommend” this person who has explicitly asked me to do so… ah yes, there is no way to do this).

No Way to “Block” People You Don’t Like on LinkedIn


Remember that kook who got all belligerent when you were working on a project together several years ago? Or perhaps the tea party in-law (who incidentally vastly inflates their job title on LinkedIn). You don’t want to be connected to them at all and in fact, you don’t even want to see their faces but there they are, constantly being “suggested” to you as a connection (due to mutual connections you share).

Heck they don’t want to be connected to you either, but you can be sure that your profile is being “suggested” to them as well. Why can’t you proactively “block” people on LinkedIn? It works great on Facebook.

“Join 224 other Contacts and Give us the Keys to your Email Contacts”

“Here are the people you should not trust because they already betrayed you to us.”

Not only does LinkedIn “out” other people in your network who’ve cluelessly allowed them to “mine” their email contact lists (by showing you their pictures), if you fall for this ruse, then everyone in your email address book will get emails using your identity to prompt them to join LinkedIn.

The worst part is, that if you already are a member of LinkedIn and have multiple emails (that your contacts have used), it spams your other emails endlessly as though you were a person who never joined LinkedIn… if you (like me) have 10+ email identities you’ve accumulated this can lead to hundreds of SPAM emails when someone you know unwittingly falls for this feature.

By far my worst pet peeve:

LinkedIn e-mail service requiring login after typing and “sending” your message.

This one is unforgivable. You get an email (in your gmail inbox) and click to type out your lengthy reply (you are taken to LinkedIn’s website). You click “send” and move on with your life… but wait, the email didn’t send –  you are taken to a login screen… I hope you didn’t walk away from your computer for a moment (or move onto another project) because if you wait a couple minutes to login then your message is GONE.

Why do they include this “security feature?” I clicked reply from the message that LinkedIn sent to my personal email, then it took me to a screen where I appear to be logged in (and can see the identity of the person I am responding to and the message they wrote to me). Because I can see the identity and profile of the person who sent the message (and also read the message itself) it seems as though I am  logged in at this point (and if someone is hacking my email, they already have violated my privacy at this point).  Why would they require another login after you’ve spent the time crafting your email? Or, more specifically, why isn’t there something in place to prevent the loss of the message I created before I clicked “send?”

Will continue to update this article as new issues present themselves…

 

by Michael Hurst

This Post Has 86 Comments

  1. Quentin

    Great post Mike! I love it. I really like the recommendation for changing your profile to ananymous so your not that creepy stalker guy checking out other people’s profile.

    1. BB

      I want to know if anyone has got as job or client from linked-in.

      I’ve been doing it for 4 years, links on my web site, etc and not one penny can I attribute to linked in in any way.

      Its got to be the most overrated thing to do for business. Its a bragging box just like Facebook is for teens and women who try to impress each other.

      1. irfan

        You nailed it ! The most overrated social Platform …..

      2. chazzzy

        It is a good way to meet women though… kinda like mingling at a professional mixer. Hard to tell who is married but it’s always been that way.

      3. JD

        I totally agree with you Linked is totally overrated. I tried for the last few years
        to find a job and nothing. There is at least thousands of reasons why it sucks.

      4. chazzzy

        LinkedIn is a greeaaaat dating site. I’ve met lots of attractive women on there, not loser chicks. Most the of the job recruiters in my field are at least a 7, and many of them are smokin hot! Lots of 9s, no kidding. So yeah, they will even buy you lunch, so you can meet a lot of them and only pay for gas. I’ve been engaged with a few women on there just this month…

      5. doesn't matter

        lol lets be real if you are using linkedin to find women thats sad and you said not loser chicks meaning like on other dating sites so if you are using dating sites and linkedin to try and get some ass you’re desperate and you say 9’s lol the rating scale lol which means you are a 3 and can’t just pick a woman like a normal person there are alot of buisness women that walk around why not say hello then use a website lmao!

      6. kim jackson

        Agreed, I can not account one penny to Linkedin, ever. Insult to injury, I was hacked at 3:00am Wednesday (10/17/18). At that time, Linkedin sent me the notice of a third party trying to log in. By the time I woke up at 5:30a, said hacker had gained access, changed my password and locked me out, followed closely by spamming my entire contact list. I have gone through the “proper” channels and not heard anything in 4 days. All I want to do is cancel my account, but when I try, it sends me down an endless rabbit hole of “are you a robot, click the cars” over and over and over. And when I try to log in, it tells me there is no account associated with that email. Frustrating is a understatement, for a “service” that has never helped, always wasted my time, and now, gives me a bad name with my contacts, and zero support to right it.

  2. bearpupuk

    An interesting article though I must disagree absolutely about linkedin showing exactly who has visited my profile (or visited the profile of the cute girl who applied for a job in accounts!).

    It’s my profile, my information, it’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to see who viewed it is it?

    Also I have to say it sounds like a bit of a stalker’s charter, “I want to be able to track people in LinkedIn without them knowing I’m doing it” doesn’t sound too great to me.

    And I’m sorry Quentin but setting your profile to anonymous before viewing profiles exactly makes you the creepy stalker guy checking other peoples profiles from my point of view. At least if you leave a track I know you’ve been there.

    I do agree about endorsements though, they’re pretty much worthless and just a mechanism for persuading users to go back to the website.

    I’d also like a block facility, that way if I do spot a stalker I can lock them out.

    1. Horatio

      Hey bearpupuk,

      Please explain to me how a person who checks out someone (anyone) on a PUBLIC profile on a PUBLIC DOMAIN is a stalker? If you don’t want to be stalked, then you shouldnt put your information in a PUBLIC DOMAIN for all to see! It’s simple.

      If I send you unwanted e-mails, make unwanted calls to you, make unwanted visits to your house or place of employment, or dig through your trash can to get information about you, the THAT IS STALKING!

      Just because I am curious about someone (or anyone), and nothing more, does not make me a stalker!

      LOLLLLLL!

    2. BB

      I hate getting notifications about people who looked at my profile.

      I STOPPED looking at anyone’s profile.

      I don’t want them wondering why is he looking at my info. Its creepy!

  3. alt-f4

    Couldn’t agree with you more. I was on linked in for about three days before I saw what a blatant rip-off it is. simply playing on the fears of the middle-class to fleece them.

    The scary thing is that our so-called thought-leaders and managers are so easily fooled by a few slick screens and a sense of “cool”.

    No surprise the economy is in such a mess if it’s being run by linkedin members.

  4. Douje

    That is hilarious and right on. I’ve always hated LinkedIn but didn’t know why. Now I do.

    1. Xenia

      right!!! I never felt good about it either!! and now I also know exactly why… Just before finding this article I found out that people who i have looked up in the past have seen that i looked them up!!! Way to go Linkedin… This is a great article, thank you!… typed in “linkedin sucks” and your article came up… 🙂 I am going over there right now and quitting it!! It is also badly deigned, bloated, time consuming and basically has been a waste of time from start to finish…

  5. Rick

    Could not agree more. When people are giving me endorsements for things I know nothing about and people who know nothing about the industry getting endorsements for skills they do not have, Time to leave. I have had an account for 5 years and all it has brought pain. Just closed my account leaving the 394 people in my network behind. They were all useless.

  6. Frank

    Linkedin Spam Invitations suck big time.

    I finally set up an autoresponder and each email with “Linkedin” in Header or Body Text gets this:

    LinkedIn Corporation (LNKD) listed on NYSE – SHORT this stock – completely overvalued, I hate this site and hope it will drop to 20$ which is its fair value.
    Linkedin is a SPAM site.
    Currently 22 billion marketcap and only 1.2 billion revenue (and a lousy 1$/share) profit do not justify 200$ share price. SHORT this crap. Linkedin unwanted invitations suck.

    Linkedin SPAMS. Spam is classified as sending unsolicited messages to unknown strangers.
    And they are doing just that with their invitations.

    Anyway – how much customers did you get off Linkedin ?
    Oh – I know – 0 – niente, nada, nichts, rien de rien. Voila.

  7. Will

    Thanks for the site. Just canceled my account after . . . many years. All of a sudden, everyone I’ve ever ever had the slightest dealings with were sending me invites. Wrong. People I have hated were now all around me. Wrong. I never on purpose agreed to let LinkedIn harvest my entire address book.

    P.S. Didn’t really appreciate your negative “Tea Party” reference.

  8. Cedrick Dunn

    I hate Linkedin with a passion for several reason but mainly because they continue to block my account. I find it strange that the features that Linkedin has recently implemented came from my site, however nobody seems to give us the credit where it is deserved. It doesn’t matter anyway because Linkedin is a piece of shit anyway.

  9. eric walters

    I will not pay for linkedin. It would be like paying for facebook. LinkedIn is doing everything they can to get people to pay for linkedin regardless of how little you use it. Now if someone is more than 2 people away from you, you will not see them when you do a search. I wanted to find out about someone I am meeting. I know his first and last name and know the city. I put the info into advanced search and he does not show up. A friend is linked to him so he can see his info. If I have to pay to occasionally see info regarding people who a re friends of friend I will never ever use it. We need to boycott and find another system. What they are doing is no different than facebook charging users to use the system. I used to be able to see people who are 4 and 5 degrees separated. And then it was 3. If they take away three (which they have done) I am done with LinkedIn. Eff them in a big way. I hope they crash and burn!!! Please pass onto others.

  10. Joe

    just cancelled my Linkedin account… They are the masters of stalking, had 5 email adresses which – although being real – were not connected with my own. They were listed as being MY emails …. unbenown to me. No wonder I got so much crap into my inbox. What actually triggered my suspicion was the ‘you might know’ column when I accesed my account. It had all the people I know listed on top – none of the first 30 lisings being a member of Linkedin – most of them just from email or Skype communications. How can that happen? Malicious software deployed on my computer??? How low can you go??? The rest of the ‘suggested contacts’ – hundreds of them – were jst picked from third party connections. Who is going to stop that ratchet internet fraud? Count me in, if you do…

  11. Matt Hobbs

    Here is my rant!!

    I think LinkedIn Does not cut it. I was looking for a job for the last couple of years in the Phoenix area.
    I have a very vast design background. I have posted very many time to Phoenix area groups.
    Many times not getting one comment. I see others posting and they have very many comments.
    Is it just me. I’m not a paying member. I seem to not genate any leads using this service.

    Good news though using Careerbuilder and Indeed. I have found a job. A very good job.

    This being said I’m on my way out of LinkedIn forever. I’m tired of getting all of the email overkill.

    To those people that have been nice enough to talk with me, Thank you. To all the rest of the people that have ignored me any every one else looking for employment. Shame on you.

    I also give LinkedIn about 5 Minutes to pull this post.

    So See Ya

    Matt Hobbs

    1. Jorge Maes

      Thanks for the post. I am starting to feel like you.

  12. Dana Nutter

    I agree StinkedIn is awful in so many ways, not just their depicable business model but the bloatware they call a website itself should be held as an example of how *not* to design a site with it’s poor navigation and lack of proper session management. If they hadn’t essentially racketeered the employment market, I wouldn’t think twice about removing my account. Given that I’ve had no responses to my posted profile and resume other than old colleagues saying “hello” after eons, I just may close it regardless, or maybe just so as I did with Fecesbook and turn it into an awareness shrine to alert other users.

  13. bilbito

    Linkedin sucks for all these reasons and it sucks as much as Fakebook for constant privacy violations.

    On top of it all: linkedin PUBLISH shamelessly FAKE JOB ADVERTS. All the jobs are either, outdated (few months only), incorrect (Global Account manager for a inside sales job), or fake. The company never posted such jobs officially.

    So before linkedin, HR, recruiters and crooks published fake jobs to build their CV database, now they do on linkedin to catch the same flies + create marketing opportunities for this company.

    IT’S CALLED SCREWING PEOPLE

  14. Pete

    Ain’t it the truth? …. I actually just posted this linked to Linkedin … “Ain’t it the truth? ” …. thanks Mike for putting this into true perspective …. another scam … sham …. to get personal information ….

  15. Nitin Kashyap

    I also have the same problem with LinkedIn Ads. They charged me wrongly and for not paying them wrong amount, they terminated my account, accounts of all employees of our firm, our group on LinkedIn,all for no reason. We have created a page on facebook, plz visit & like this page to support this cause- http://lnkd.in/b7cmGkw

    1. Mike

      Thanks for sharing, I will post this into the article.

  16. Joe Calahan and the 45

    You have spoken the truth from the depth of your heart and soul !

    I’ve created a profile on linkedin 15 days ago because an idiotic HR recruiter told me that 75% of recruiting was made through it in their company ( I didn’t get the job).

    And now, I regret it. Not only they scorn people privacy, but it’s heavy, slow, kind of bloated and no one is ever going to propose me a career except for the typical shit call centre jobs nobody really wants.

    No privacy there, you can’t block all the corporate ass…. you don’t like from spying on your personal and private information. You can’t stop parasites and hyenas like HR and staff firms recruiters from screening your connections instead of doing the job they are paid for.

    And of course, once you have one definite profile, except if you are connected 24/7, you can’t have the flexibility or freedom to adapt it to the position you apply as it should be the case.

    I have 3 trades in life, with 3 or 4 different job and career possibilities. If I put that on my profile, I am either seen as a liar, a not serious eccentric, or jack of all trade. What I am to do ? Create 3 or 4 different profiles under one name ?

    The thing is, linkedin is very popular with HR and staffing firms, as it simply allow them to pretend they have assess resumes while they have been just browsing the web.

    A good marketer but totally incompetent fellow will certainly attract more attention to his profile and maybe a job than the competent one with no time, interest or prostitute mentality to make his profile hot.

    So what do we have here ? An ego competition where all is about appearances, ready made predigested marketing formulas that idiots call “branding” as if we were toilet roll paper or tampax.

    As you mention, the dictatorship of the media and masses have made us prisoners of a false concept: we must at least pretend to be on linkedin to have a chance to get another job.

    This is like being obliged to have the party card in old USSR, otherwise you can still go to Siberia.

    1. Someone smarter than everyone on Linkedstupid

      awesome dude! Totally agree. I will never hire anyone off there. It’s funny to read the fake profiles with the bs credentials though. It’s really fun when I count my money and hang with my employees who aren’t on there and are the best I’ve ever found.

      Linkedstupid….

      Joe Solver
      occupation…MR. DR. Professor. magicman. engineer of everything. I can also fly. I worked for everyone I know everything. 30 ft penis. 472987429473 IQ. blah blah blah.

  17. Paul

    I signed up at the encouragement of a friend who wanted me to endorse him. I got rid of the account when someone pretended to be someone else. Never could stand that part where they send me an email and I think I am signed in but I am not. Yes it is small but still poorly planned.

    1. Mike

      Thanks for agreeing with the part “they send me an email and I think I am signed in but I am not,” this is actually the thing that pisses me off the most, I’ve completely crafted emails on LInkedIn that are lost after the login prompt, unbelievable…

  18. Lucy Lju

    The strangest thing about their website is whenever I rant against the Capitalism under some article. My commentary is instantly deleted. This has happened two times now.

    What I find weird also about this website is that you never hear anything bad about it as if they were covering it up or something.

  19. Someone smarter than everyone on Linkedstupid

    Linkedin is the stupid shit ever. I know of hundreds of people on there with bullshit profiles who are complete morons. They also have zero of the qualifications they claim. How is this stupid site really usefull when it’s not accurate? WHat a joke. I can’t believe people even get on there. Personally I’d never hire ANYONE off there. Maybe that’s why most of them are poor and stupid and I’m not! YAY FOR ME! IF you’re on LINKEDSTUPID. YOU should drop it immediately and get jobs the normal way. Get a real network. Meet real people. Quit being a loser. Screw linkedout

    1. Guest

      I have a co-worker who’s seeking work because her contract is about to end and has listed two concurrent jobs on her LinkedIn profile. Both are in different countries, which is impossible unless she telecommutes. More likely one job is a shell post that would allow her to claim she was still employed in case her real post ends before she finds her next job.

      I can’t blame my co-worker for doing this, as employers now prefer to hire people who are still employed over the unemployed, but it appears LinkedIn doesn’t verify what its members put on their profiles and this compromises its reputation as a legitimate professional networking site.

  20. Jennifer

    Also- they update all of your contacts when you edit your job title. I corrected the wording on mine and got 75 “congratulations on your new job” things. Then started the “are you looking for a new job” questions, like why would I be polishing linkedin. Could be damaging! I know now that there are settings you can change to prevent those alerts from going out but jeez, that seems like bad design to me.

    1. Mike

      I’m going to expand my section about job update notifications, to include this angle, totally gross

  21. Ana

    Linked In’s group policy is horrid. Basically if ONE person (could be a competitor) flags any of your posts or comments, Linked In bans you across ALL of your groups so that now all of your comments & posts are “submitted for review”.

    In order to “undo” this, you have to contact each group leader (no clear instructions on how to do this) and request they un-flag you.

    And to top it off, for the group leader, the method for how to do this is unclear and hard to find.

    So basically, one person can prevent you from communicating EVERYWHERE. You don’t know who did it or why (totally arbitrary) and you have no recourse but to proactively contact all of your group leaders and request an unblocking.

    If the group leader runs the group then how can one person in some OTHER group make a determination like this for someone else’s group? And it’s automatic!

    VERY un-democratic. So much for free speech.

  22. Hannah

    I hardly ever look at my page on LinkedIn. I looked at it a week or so ago and saw “connections” – due to “area”. I clicked on one and it was my ex-husband’s wife. Today, a week later I get a message from her asking why I looked at her profile. I could not believe it. Is she insecure or what? She even went on to say in her message that if I wanted, she would share pictures with me. I sent an email to LinkedIn and asked if it was appropriate for people to send personal messages to others who they didn’t even know. I have not ever met her or know her but she looks as though she has the intelligence of a doorknob so to speak. Some people who go to college know nothing. I personally would not ever end a message such as this to anyone. I could not stop laughing after the initial shock. He was never able to speak for himself when I was married to him and evidently he still cannot. What sort of person uses a business based website to send such a childish message? Everyone looks at everyone’s profiles. I would not care if they looked at mine every day. Who cares? I can imagine this is rooted much deeper. Perhaps she is insecure in her relationship with him? Perhaps it is because I have recently published a story that involves him? Perhaps it is because have been involved in an annulment process for over a year? I have no idea. He is a good “actor” and, in my opinion, if she had a true brain – she would find out the truth about him. But in summary – she should not be allowed to send messages like this using a site such as LinkedIn and if they issue no reply to my email or say nothing that makes sense – it will just show what I already think. I think the site is worthless. I have received no business from it. I am only leaving my profile up so they can look at it as much as they want!

    1. Mike

      Thanks LinkedIn!

    1. Mike

      so true!

  23. theWorker

    heh. LinkedIn.

    People round here look at you like you’ve got an extra head if you’re not on LI.
    I was on for a while. The only “opportunities” I got were from their spambot, women I’d tried to forget and ex-school “friends” who I never liked when I was at school so god only knows why they think I’d like them now, 20 years later.

    Photos, biographies, names, ages, a list of former employers to target with social engineering techniques. Bloody excellent. No. Not for me.

    But returning to people who are on it. They seem to me to self-promoters. You know the sort. All cellphone and rolodex. Business business business. They use words like “ciao”. They inexplicbly have a job but nobody knows what it is. They are usually found “doing lunch” with other self-promoters that do nothing.

  24. Bill Spencer

    LinkedIn claims to be a “professional” website that can help you “connect” with other business. Kind of hard to “connect” when you’re suddenly blocked from every group you are a member in as a result of their SWAM policy.

    In addition, their terms and conditions prohibit inaccurate statements etc. see 10.2 of the USER AGREEMENT.
    https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement?trk=hb_ft_userag

    If the smartass on that white paper (website) are professionals, I’d hate to see what a bunch of arrogant jerks looks like.

    That safety group is a menace to personal safety with their post and blatant disregard for published OSHA standards.

    1. Bill Spencer

      PS the only response I got was my account suspended. I later heard that LinkedIn issued a new policy on 3-26-2014.

  25. Jennifer

    I despise linkedin. My fiance was killed in a car accident 4 years ago. Despite repeated attempts to close his account, including contact by lawyers and faxed copies of obituaries, linkedin REFUSES to close my fiance’s account. This leads to very unpleasant surprises when his connections receive “messages” from him (via stupid linkedin spam) and “you may also know” nonsense, and suddenly, the picture of a dead man is in your inbox. His 100’s of connections are having to “unfriend” him (or whatever it’s called on linkedin) one by one, usually after getting a startling message from a dead man. It’s cruel and awful and disrespectful and incredibly dishonest (we have millions and millions of members, some of them dead!!!) that linkedin refuses to close his account, 4 years after his death. Words cannot express how much I loathe and despise this company.

  26. Eric

    All the professional networking sites’ profiles look so boring really, I do not know what to say. I suggest people to check YouJoin.com out, it seems to be much more smooth and clear. 😉

  27. BB

    I hate getting notifications about people who looked at my profile.

    I STOPPED looking at anyone’s profile.

    I don’t want them wondering why is he looking at my info. Its creepy!

  28. Roko

    Oh,I am smelling the third party website/company here:XING perhaps?Or a Facebook?Twitter?Which one You really work for guys?

    1. Mike

      LOL, I’m not nearly so sophisticated as even that, thank you for putting a smile on my face.

    2. Gaius Gracchus

      Roko – this post obviously is not a competitor. Come on – use your brain.

  29. Ali

    LinkedIn is supremely overrated, of little use to general public and radiates feeling of being in the mid of corporate &*ckstery

  30. AC

    Awesome article. I have also closed my account too. Not worth the effort and time, when you can create your own website blog, and concentate on your own asset. I left because it’s not sociable, no one engaging to say hello, and it’s all about taking.

    It’s dry, boring, and just not sociable. They all talk about engage, connect and all that but they don’t do it.

    A friend of mine build a site up, and created like a story, and added his skills, then used some advertising from Pay Per Click. Newspapers caught on cause they saw his advert “Die Hard Job Seeker” got their attention of companies. Told recruitment agencies to get lost. He was going right to the companies himself.

    2 weeks after his site was launched, he closed it because he got the job!

    Other friends heard about it, they did the same. They too got the job! I celebrated with them. Love these friends and was so happy, they got their job. They very talented and hard working and had hard time, so I was happy for them.

    So build your own blog website, show your passion, bang your skills, show them what you’re made of, put some money aside to get their attention using advert. Create a story, a visual name like my friend did. Look at some movie and twist it’s theme to yours then go to press with a story, a hook!

    Honestly, don’t waste your time with Linkedin but build your asset. Show you really want the job, demonstrate your passion on your OWN site. One page CV on linkedin? Nah, forget it. That’s what most people do. You got to be different like what my friends did.

    Seriously, if they were professionals, they should focus on their own website than being slaves, banging out content to help Linkedin. Most of them don’t have that.

    By the way, Love the endorsement part. That happened to me. Not my kind of people if that’s dishonet and unethical.

    But I left because they are not sociable, they creepy, aggressive, some are bullies and personally not a friendly environment. Most are fakers anyway, pretending to be someone they not.

  31. Jack

    Couldn’t agree more but there is worst than that.

    Who invented linkedin, who helped this originally small company to become bigger and impose itself as a quasi monopoly and what s the real goal behind it ?

    Let’s put it in other words. In term of spying on individuals, filing people, tracking every of our moves and destroying one by one all our rights and our freedom, linkedin plays it parts for the “world corporation”.

    facebook: to file your private life and spy on your private lives and connections
    twitter: to spy on your thoughts (political or not).
    linkedin: to complete the “circle”, to file and spy on your professional lives and connections.

    Ask yourselves, Who invented these “stuffs”, who helped these originally small companies to become bigger and impose themselves as a quasi monopolies and what is the real goal behind it ?

    Welcome to the brave brave new world.

    1. Jack

      Besides, if you think there are jobs on linkedin, just check who is posting always the same jobs at the same intervals and always in huge quantities.

      Most of the jobs there are fake, false advertising to collect profiles, resumes etc…

      Who again does this type of things ?

  32. RussianBull

    I constantly get notifications from people I don’t know or even heard of who want to join my network. The notifications sound urgent but phony and they are mostly from head-hunters and job recruiters.

  33. Anna

    I was attempting to use linkedin only for industry news. People in my industry tend to send some good content unfortunately through LinkedIn. Aside from all the great reasons posted above, I also hate linked in because it does NOT WORK. If I click on a piece of news from my industry that came through via linked in from my iPhone, the page just hangs, looking for a server with a blank screen. It’s a complete waste of time. I’ve got to figure out how to connect directly with these news sources.m, where possible. Argh!!!!

  34. Renita

    I would really like to agree with the poster who wrote about people posting fake qualifications on linkedin. I saw a profile of a former friend who is a huge liar and naturally her qualifications were fake as hell.

  35. Bob

    LinkBin really sucks. They even forbid their employees to have business cards. They hide their phone numbers or disable it.

    Great transparency for a firm that knows everything about its users and clients !

    linkBin : CIA, or NSA agency ?

    Phone numbers for linkBin:

    UK: 08455 19 15 23

    France: 08 99 87 48 73 and 01 56 39 37 37

    US: 1-650-687-3600 (type 2 for press services)

    1-650-687-3555 : supposedly customer service

  36. Henry

    Great article!
    I’d like to add that LinkedIn has become the number one website in the world for false advertising, an illegal and unethical practice punished by law!
    And who is putting all these fake jobs on this website ? The usual HR incompetent of big corporations who “have” to be on LinkeBin to promote their “image.

    Another thing is that, if you don’t conform to the “norm” imposed by the numerous spin doctors, consultant, influencers (what a joke), you’ll soon be ostracized and experience “technical issues” directly coming from LinkeBin.
    Thirdly, the goal of this now corporate multinational (in the evil sense) is to file everybody on the planet and make sure that you will pay one day or another just to have the possibility to do basic things like connecting to others.

    LinkeBin is a swindle and a tool of global surveillance for the corporatocraty and its stooges.

  37. Jeff

    In fact, Linkedin has been funded and founded by the NSA. They cam to me with this idea that people would jump on the idea to have a platform to connect and get jobs.
    Their goal has always been corporate and state surveillance, while it made a me a millionaire!

  38. Luke Latham

    And add to this great post and very good comments: Their dev team SUCKS. I reported an issue to them that was bothering me … an invitation from a friend wouldn’t let me connect accounts. Every time I would click to accept the invitation, it would accept but the next time I logged in, the invitation would pop back up. This issue was present back in November … I thought they knew about it and would get it fixed. I just contacted them about it on 3/31. Here is their response this morning:

    “Thanks for contacting us about this. What you’ve encountered is a known issue and I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. Our engineering team is working on it but there’s no estimate as to how long that might take. We’ll do our best to keep you posted.” Priyanka, LinkedIn Customer Experience Advocate

    “Known issue” … good grief! … “working on it” … for over FIVE months!!?? The LinkedIn dev team sucks. This is NOT a complicated engineering issue to resolve. It should take a dev ONE DAY to get this issue resolved, not over five months.

  39. Kevin

    Excellent article. In fact there are other serious issues with linkedin:

    1. False advertising and fake job postings. Have you noticed that the same people from the same companies are always posting the same jobs weeks after weeks, months after months ?
    These are not the usual con artists (which are also posting on linkedin), no these are big international companies and their “hr” reps.

    Linkedin doesn’t control anything and so anyone can post anything there. Remember originally, the goal was to network to get better jobs!

    I’ve contacted several firms “advertising’ on linkedin, many said they never posted anything there and that linkedin was just re-posting old ads taken on third party websites or directly from companies career pages. Nice…..

    2. A lot of things are going in the background. I know someone working at linkedin and it’s smooth, nice and lovely. For users it translates that way: if you send invitations to people you know, some of them will eventually get blocked by linkedin people themselves because they don’t want you to have too many connections without paying for it first by upgrading to premium. So every excuse to avoid you to gain contacts and appraisals will be used.

    3. Linkedin is losing money at the moment, they aren’t that profitable and their business model is not exactly tip top. They have had initial strong successes in the US and UK and other subservient countries but they fail to gain market share when it comes to real business.
    Linkedin was interesting as a tool to network, find new job opportunities, expand job seekers and recruiters possibilities by creating real links between real people but it has become like any other ATS, a black hole, mainly due to hr people who reproduce their usual incompetent and arrogant way to deal with people on linkedin as well.

    4. And lastly, linkedin is just a spying tool, like facebook is. You have all these frustrated people out there to whom you wouldn’t tell anything worth about you and your life, but they now have a tool to spy on you, to pry on your private life with facebook and on your professional one with Linkedin. Disgusting…

    As you said there is no real way to block people you don’t like. Especially if they have premium accounts and loads of pricks seem to have premium accounts nowadays. It might be even the new way to recognize them 🙂

  40. Jess

    fakebook: monitor your friends & private life (if you really had friends and a life you wouldn’t use it anyway).
    twistter: monitor your thoughts (even the pathetic and very limited thoughts we find there).
    linkedBin: monitor your “professional” life (or what you pretend it to be).

    And remember dear potato faces, you have to “brand” yourself like a soup can or toilet paper. Every good prostitute knows how to brand her body after all.

    The more you’re online, the less you live in reality, it’s mathematical

  41. D Mayer

    Does anyone know how I can cancel my account at LinkedIn

    Someone hijacked my account and I have been closed out of my account while the hijacker sends out spam under my name

    This raises concerns about LinkedIn’s site–they let someone just add an email account to my account, and change all the settings–apparently with no effort whatsoever to verify that it was really me

    Even worse–I have been trying to reach LinkedIn to remedy the situation. They have no phone support. I have sent at least 30 emails asking them to contact me.

    But they don’t respond, and they obviously don’t care.

    I want no part of a site that is so loosely and callously managed and at this point I just want to close my account forever–and urge everyone I now to cancel their accounts.

  42. Charles

    LINKEDIN IS A FRAUD ITSELF.
    I am on the free Linkedin was going to see what the program “Premium Account” was all about and I made a bad choice JUST BY clicking one button they went into my bank Acct: and it did not have funds in it so they went into my Credit PayPal Acct: and found another place to charge ?575.00. What a low life way to make a living. I’am copying this and I will post this on many fraud listing sites.
    Changes will be effective on the billing expiration date of your current subscription, at the end of the monthly renewal date, and yearly. No refund Fn you.
    Well. TEN minutes and no Fn refund is all it took to lose $575.00. You LOW LIFE LINKEDin and your FN friend PayPal. IT Does Not Take them “Big Companies” Long to figure how to screw you. And all I wanted to do is Look.

  43. Luis

    This post (and subsequent comments) has convinced me to delete my Linkedin account (and a similar bullshit account on Viadeo), so count me in as a Linkedin hater 😀

    I don’t even remember who or when convinced me to make a useless profile on a platform I never open or use and amounts to nothing but the occasional spam. My contacts list was pretty small (less than 40 people), so I wasn’t particularly bothered by the amount of spam in general and just let it hanging for no reason.

    Another so-called “free” premium upgrade message bumped in today and I decided to finally take a little look into it, assuming it was probably a rip-off, which of course, it is. There should be no reason to give a legitimate free service to a terrible user such as myself, who visited the site a handful of times per year. I randomly ended finding this post, which helped me realize I hate all the same things such as bullshit endorsements, stupid work anniversaries and creepy tracking of who visits every profile.

    Fuck you Linkedin. Seriously, go to hell.

  44. John

    Linkedin like other tools of global fling, mass surveillance and thought control (egg facebook) has been put in place to lure people into something that simply doesn’t exists: a free lunch.

    Linkedin is the favourite tool of lazy people who don’t want to make efforts or spend time to put their resume online or to adapt it to the companies they apply to.

    Linkedin is the favourite tool of lazy HR people who don’t want to make efforts or spend time to do their job of assessing resume, finding candidates, interviewing them to find the right applicant.

    They love it, with Linkedin, they think they have a gigantic database of “talents” (the “newspeak” word for worker or employee) at their disposal. They mistakenly think that the all world is there (while only a minority of real pros are using this piece of crap).

    HR can go do what they do best thanks to Linkedin: avoid direct contact with Human beings, spend their days at the coffee machine on “social” media (youtube, etc..) or chating with their “friends, “working” from home, getting up late, not answering any emails or calls and pretending to be important by participating to meetings after meetings all ore useless than the others.

    Linkedin is the tool of choice for incompetent, lazy, arrogant, egocentric, inept HR employees.

    This is where they post their fake job ads to “enrich” their “talent” “pool”, not wondering why every candidate out there hate them for posting fake jobs and wasting their time.

    Besides the use made of Linkedin by these brave people, let’s not forget that:

    Linkedin “privacy” policy is a mock of privacy. I can get any information I want about anybody as long as they have made the mistake to join Linkedin (even those who set up their profile as the most private, i can still get the info).

    Linkedin is not a tool to find jobs:

    Linkedin is designed for HR, recruitment agencies and sales people to spam, bother, file, monitor, post fake ads, spy and check on your former colleagues.
    This is why millions of morons pay for “premium” accounts. Allowing them to violate a bit m ore the privacy of the other users.

    Linkedin is involved in heavy harassment and bullying of their users. They decide to avoid users to access their accounts, bare them from some functionalities if the user doesn’t comply to their political or corporate views. To bully users, Linkedin uses often the “bug” or “technical problem” trick with the message everyone knows:

    “There was an unexpected problem that prevented us from completing your request”. This not only illegal, this is ethically low.

    Linkedin screw their users when it comes to cancel payments on the people who made the mistake of signing for a premium account. Please read the thousands of complaints and rants on this subject on the web.

    Last but not least, like their totalitarian counterpart Facebook, Linkedin isn’t for free:

    ON Linkedin, PEOPLE THINK THEY ARE THE USERS OR CUSTOMERS WHILE IN FACT THEY ARE THE PRODUCT BEING SOLD

  45. Anton

    For all the victims of linkeBin, here are the phone numbers and emails where you can contact them directly.

    Starting with their boss: [email protected]

    Yellow pages in the USA should give you all the details you need: Example for NY:

    Linkedin Corporation
    Help Us Out
    350 5th Ave
    New York, NY zip code
    (212) 239-0254

    Some numbers found on the weB;

    LinkedIn phones
    Jose Mallabo (U.S.), 650-687-3560
    [email protected]

    1-650-687-3600

    1. No

      Thanks, I’m going to use this. LinkedIn is a scam. DOWN WITH LINKEDIN!

  46. Anton

    My main issues with Linkedin:

    1/ Why on earth do we suddenly need to be all on file, classified, in little boxes like cans, potatoes and carrots?

    2/ Why do we suddenly need to be on file all over the internet? Why do we have to spread our lives the world over?

    3/ Who benefits from Linkedin? Think twice about it before thinking you benefit from it as a job seeker.
    – To reformulate: Who’s making money by having your personal data on file, online?
    – Whose incompetent HR asshole benefits from having access to all your work details
    without even having to work for it or ask you in the first place?

    4/ Why do you think the same companies are advertising the same jobs all year round? Why the ads never get removed even when it’s obvious there is no real opening behind it?

    – What is traffic on a website?
    – How people like Linkedin monetize their “services”

    5/ Have you wondered why the professional level in companies is getting lower and lower since many years?
    – Who recruit who?
    – Where do they find these new “recruits”?
    – Why are they more HR people than sales people in large corporations nowadays?

    6/ In the past people used to apply by letter by post.
    Recruiters always had time to reply to candidates then, by post. They didn’t whine about having no time to reply. They did their jobs like real pros.

    – Today the HR girls (even if it’s a guy, he behaves like a girl) recruit on Linkedin. They can reply in seconds but they don’t have time. They have the fastest tools of communication ever (web, email, phone, so called “social media”) but they don’t communicate anymore. Actually they use tools like Linkedin as a way to hide…

    7/ So called “social media” or mass surveillance tools for over-narcissistic loners?

    8/ Are we soup cans that we have to “brand” ourselves? Cattle are branded, toilet paper rolls too, are human beings or objects without a brain?

  47. Avi

    Linkedin sucks in any way possible.
    The website is fucking annoying, UI from hell.
    Even from the beginning when I tried to create an account it didn’t accept my ZIP/Postal code, so I just changed the country to US and inserted 90210. later on it let me change in setting the postal and country to mine… So so fucking stupid.
    Their app is even more annoying. You open the damn thing and it takes you through shitty stuff until you can get to your shit.
    Some friends is celebrating one year or more at their stinky job, woopie fucking doo, congratulate them.
    I did it one time and some of them didn’t understand why the hell did I do that.
    I FUCKING HATE LinkedIn. HATE IT!!!
    And I don’t believe that Microsoft will make it any better…
    How come no one, not one fucking genius nerd has come yet with a better business social network?
    Come on people, this is your opportunity!
    I’m gone. Bye.

  48. Pete

    Brilliant article! Thanks for articulating the many problems with LinkedIn.

  49. Al

    My issue with LinkedIn is that its design is messy and difficult to use. It’s possible to get a hang of it over time, but the wording that they use is more confusing than the Java debugging I have to do on my worst days!So the process goes like this: I learn the features of the app so that I can use it and, ahem, try to market what I can do. Problem is, I get spammed by notifications on people I haven’t talked to in years, connection requests, some irrelevant posts on what so-and-so did, and so on. It gets really annoying. It’s just like Facebook: do I have time to “like” everything? If I am working on a project, why do I need to constantly update what is not worthy of updating, when it’s just the same thing, language, skill set, and such asset? Sure I can dye my hair. Will that make it better? No. All my contacts will get spammed on how I dyed my hair. Of course, I agree with the blocking part. Just like a program that can’t account for all errors or bugs and you find it useless, LinkedIn does not have the feature that you would love to have. Besides all that, the most important asset in communicating with people would be speed. You want to connect and communicate to people, but you want to do it privately without causing a social tsunami. The best way to do it is email or a computer-generated conference. How hard is it to get someone’s contact information? You shouldn’t have to go to LinkedIn to find it. I get it, many people caught the app bug, but I’m not going to enter my profile in there because I want to protect my privacy, and I don’t want any competitors to copy or embellish their profile based on mine, and because of all the secrecy, I wouldn’t be able to get to talk to an actual recruiter, whom I could meet somewhere else in the first place. I think some marketing and marketing skills can be taught, and your self esteem and well-being doesn’t have to be diluted by LinkedIn.

  50. blah blah

    My issue is that LinkedIn rewards people who game it, and not people that really want to use it to organize valueable contacts. Even the LinkedIn guru’s teach you to just game LinkedIn. Spam folks with contact requests to “grow your network”, b/c quantity apparently is better then quality in LinkedIn (b/c that’s LinkedIn’s agenda.. to have tons of folks connected to make data mining info on them easier). Toss up an article once a week with a quick comment to make it look like you’re staying abreast of news in your field. It’s just a bunch of people trying to find ways to use you. I get “friend” requests out of no where from people I don’t know doing the whole youtube “if I like your stuff and connect with you, will you like my stuff? We’ll mutually game the system!”

    Problem is LinkedIn has caught on as an industry trend.. b/c while employers are not allowed to ask for your Facebook page (and if you hide it they can’t find it easily), it’s perfectly acceptable for them to find and stalk you on LinkedIn and base all their opinions about you on a small window into your life. You’re introverted or value quality contacts over quantity? Well, obviously you don’t care about your career or something, otherwise you’d have the 250+ contacts REAL LinkedIn users have! No hire for you, pleeb.

    LinkedIn has all the worst attributes of youtube and facebook, but since it’s “business-oriented”, it’s seen as perfectly fine. And if you don’t LinkedIn or don’t keep up the ruse of giving a crap about your profile and others on it, you’re sort of ostracized from some companies or industries.

    It’s just sad.

    Real networks don’t hook up on LinkedIn. Your real contacts know you by phone # and call you. They don’t publish their connection to you on LinkedIn for all the world to see.

    LinkedIn is just basically a place where people can treat you like a whore, b/c you’re just a “network contact” to them. And they only care about you if you “add value” to their profile, network size, or can get them a job or something. OTherwise, they don’t care about you. People connect to you for purely selfish reasons, b/c that’s all LinkedIn is about.. pure selfishness. But, that’s what the businss world is about… pure selfishness.

    businesses want employees that think and act like them… but, psychologies that have psych profiled how businsses operate classify them as psychopathic. So, bueinsses are trying to push employees to be psychopathic.. selfish, anti-social (which means “being very social to simply get what you want from people, but otherwise not really caring about them”), and making decisions purely on what you can get from others and stepping all over them as long as you get ahead.

    LinkedIn is just a big ruse. It’s like how some folks go to church thinking it makes them a better person b/c they have “paid off” their sins for the week and have a social circle to hang out with… and they lose the real meaning of connecting and networking.

    A lot of folks are on LinkedIn and don’t seem to realize LinkedIn’s goal is to just data mine the crap out of network info. That’s why all privacy settins are set to “show me off to everyone I look at” and such. LinkedIn want sto track all your movement, and all your connetions etc, so they can mine the info and sell it to marketing companies or such.

    And they’re owned by MS now… who is also data mining your OS usage on Windows 10.. so with a little keying up of identities, they can not only see what you’re doing on your comuter, but what you’re doing in your business life as well (LinkedIn).

    Fantasitc. Everyone’s feeding the MS data mining machine.

    1. Gaius Gracchus

      Amen to this post.

  51. John

    So Mike I have another issue that you don’t mention above, but it’s the same issue…. violation of privacy. If you are in sales and your employer provides you with a Sales Navigator account, they can see EVERYTHING you do in Sales Navigator!!! This includes all InBox/OutBox emails from Sales Navigator. In many cases, if they have SFDC integration, those emails are loaded straight into SFDC. And did you know that you can’t EVER delete a Sales Navigator email? So even if your employer is not monitoring those emails while you are employed with them, they will almost certainly review them when you leave! And nobody is ever told this!!! You can still have privacy in LI (non Sales Navigator) if you have the right settings in place (which in itself is not intuitive, to your point), but when you toggle over to Sales Navigator you are giving up all privacy. So LinkedIn has not just sold out privacy of their network, they have sold the privacy of a company’s employees to their employer!!

    1. Mike

      John, let me get this onto the blog entry, great explanation.

  52. No

    I once made the mistake of signing up for LinkedIn, and now they have basically taken control of my LinkedIn identity. No matter how many times I try to delete my account it keeps coming back, they keep re-subscribing me to their bullshit spam and they keep sending messages ‘on my behalf’ to friends saying that I want to connect on LinkedIn. It is actually illegal and I wish someone would start a class action lawsuit.

  53. Alan

    I do have an account with LinkedIn. But when I installed the App on my Android phone this morning and tried to log in, I clicked that “I am not a Robot” and then I have to checked the boxes for Street Signs, Cars, and Storefronts 8 to 9 times and I still can’t get in. I am getting very angry with LinkedIn now. SOB! LinkedIn. MF!

  54. Paul

    LinkedIn when it first started had the correct way of thinking, business dealing with business direct. But unfortunately over time it has became a spam fest for recruiters and LinkedIn changed to cater for their needs.

    So yes when I first joined and got loads of connections from recruiters it felt good but then I realised it was just to make up the recruiters numbers. There is also a weird privacy rule that LinkedIn support wasn’t willing to give an answer to. It’s minor, but If I delete a connection (i.e recruiter) the total number doesn’t always change for my connections. Apparently they have to agree at their end and LinkedIn weren’t willing to help! There are also several other technical problems where numbers don’t match and they have never sorted them out to this day!

  55. Jo Ann Harris

    I think the sight is very snobbish. I go to the main page and like or comment on posts, no share. I always feel that I am less of a being when I go on there and have to be careful about what I say or how I say. I have posted articles there for entertainment and function but not much response. I have over 250 contacts and only get 1 or 2 responses. I worked in the “Corporate Hell World” for over 50 years and no one says hi or kiss my ass, or anything. Just weird. I post what I am doing now and new coursework, etc. I am retired, but really. I’m not invisible. I still have something to add to life. I can’t be that small and insignificant.

  56. Gaius Gracchus

    I am constantly amazed at the amount of information people happily post about themselves on the internet. I went to a seminar not long ago where one of these data mining companies talked about what they are collecting about us all and how they do it. It was really disturbing. You would be shocked to find out what these folks are doing.

    Regarding LinkedIn specifically, it may not be an issue for many people, but if anyone is looking for you that you don’t want tracking you, this is a way for them to find you. I don’t know that I want the entire world to know where I am working and who I report to, roughly how much I earn, etc. It only seems relevant to folks I want to share it with for hiring purposes or for my own networking. You can’t decide who sees it if it is available to anyone for any reason.

    No one cares about privacy anymore, apparently. And guess what – you don’t have any anymore.

  57. u help me i help u

    The “can’t block people you don’t like” doesn’t quite seem right anymore. There’s a way to “unfollow” as of Mar 2019. I came here looking for help with how to clean up the mess that is my LinkedIn feed. This page was the 2nd on google after the useless LinkedIn one.

Comments are closed.