I think the threat's definitely there. Facebook wants to eat everyone's lunch, and they're basically knocking on doors in LinkedIn's neighborhood.
LinkedIn can be described at the 'Facebook for business', it doesn't feel like a stretch that faceboook might someday want to become the facebook for business.
FB for Work looks like a competitor for Yammer i.e. an internal social network for companies offering internal communication with notes, status updates, etc...
LinkedIn is primarily used to professional networking outside your company. Keeping in touch with ex-colleagues, recruiting, sharing industry-specific posts, etc.
Facebook at Work is aimed at internal networking, so communication among large teams, company news / communication, etc.
The established companies whose valuation was based on multiples of future growth are taking the hit, getting in line with more traditional multiples of current revenue.
Everyone is taking a hit right now, but especially companies priced on growth that have been unable to meet their numbers (LinkedIn just had a bad quarter and released lower guidance). It's a really bad time to not meet your numbers.
What we're seeing is a slow-mo burst. The outer balloon shell has given way and has left the inner water ball still, albeit briefly, intact. Only a matter of time before we all take a bath.
While I agree with you, I would say that bubble bursting is more synonymous with larger disasters like the housing crash in 08 or the Dotcom bust in 2000. In my opinion what's happening with overvalued companies is more of a market correction. To me it doesn't seem like people are in panic, people are just saying things along the lines of "well yeah, they were overvalued" and they move on.
Market topped in Oct 2007, and then there was a bunch of debate over whether we were or weren't in a recession through the first half of 2008. Bear Sterns went bust in March 2008, everybody was like "Well duh, they should have known it was coming", people thought it was the end of it, and the market recovered. AIG went bankrupt in Aug 2008, Lehman brothers in Sept 2008, and that's when everybody panicked. TARP passed in Q4 2008.
The dot-com bubble burst actually was pretty orderly - basically the starry-eyed buyers for tech stocks ran out, and companies couldn't get money on the public markets. Consequences were limited mostly to the people who had invested and the founders & employees of those companies. The road downward was actually more gradual than the road upward had been.
I think what Kin is saying before in 2008 and dot-com there were fundamental reasons for a bubble to burst which had an navigate reprecussions on the economy(recession/increased unemployment).
dotcom - shell companies, with no revenue or profits.
2008 - excessive/unsustainable leverage both by corporations and individuals.
This time around multiple QE cycles resulted in decreased treasury and bond yeilds. People\funds with captial went to invest other assets classes e.g. equity markets seeking high yeilds and as a result increased the price multiples/valuations while the intrinic businesses valuation and growth remained the same.
Now people are starting to realize that multiples(what you pay for a company and what its actually worth) are too high and started taking money out of equity markets. While the fundamentals of the business has stayed the same.
Hence this bubble bursting or "significant price correction" wont have the same impact on mainstreet as the other two bubbles because the business are still sustainable but the prices weren't.
Prices are not proxy for revenue/profits/growth or value. So unless someone can give actual facts that the fundamentals of the underlying businesses are/will be impacted on a systematic basis I agree with kin.
That's like saying the housing crash would have never happened because real estate always has inherent value.
A bubble's a bubble. This isn't a simple "correction". When your stock's PE is above 1000x, it's a bubble. Overvaluation IS the definition of a bubble, not a lack of "fundamentals".
Amazon and Yahoo had revenue in 2000 and still crashed.
No bubble burst this time, it will be a sequence of large corrections. Too many small time investors willing to invest for low returns to crash like 2k.
Have some perspective. It's been a 6 year bull market. This is hardly a correction let alone a crash. You might prove correct, but it's just a guess at this point.
Linkedin is a terrible company, I've always resisted making a profile there because I think that to support a company like that in name is to give them a free pass on their despicable behavior. No matter though, I still receive their spam on a daily basis, but that's nothing a filter rule can't take care of.
You could only get money if you managed to get your address book stolen and all your contacts spammed.
$10 is very little consolation for hundreds of people you know now thinking that you are, ehrm, not smart, for giving your address book to LinkedIn, or worse, thinking you're a spammer because each of your contacts got three annoying e-mails "from you" with no opt-out button.
If they had to pay even one dollar to each person they spammed, they'd probably be bankrupt.
After quitting my full-time job and going independent(ish, for now) last year, I've sometimes regretted deleting my LinkedIn profile, as it's so commonly used for networking and searching for leads for job candidates.
But I agree with you that it's a terrible, and it's why I deleted my profile. I didn't even know how creepy/skeevy their business model is then, but what I did see was that their product is just BAD in so many ways, yet they survive only because they hold an unassailably dominant market position.
If you hold a monopoly position, then please, please at least make your product great. I'm looking at you, too, Craigslist. For example.
I've literally never experienced any negative repercussions from not having a LinkedIn account. I deleted it years ago and switched jobs twice since. In all of my applications or interviews, I just say that I dislike the way LinkedIn captures personal data and everyone understands and doesn't care. I also offer to share my Stack Overflow Careers page with them and they are perfectly happy with it, in fact some have even commented about how much more useful that is.
I really don't understand what value regular users are getting (let alone people paying for Premium). Part of me believes people will realize this and delete accounts en masse, but then I remember how status obsessed everyone is and I have my doubts. LinkedIn is sort of like Zynga for career status, so I suspect there is a lot of user psychology they can manipulate.
I object to calling out Craigslist on this basis. Sure I am a web developer and designer and can quickly eviscerate the usability of Craigslist just as anyone else here can.
However... Craigslist for all its fault is driven by an egalitarian vision. The ideology which prevents Craigslist from improving their UI and providing an API (or supporting scraping) is the same ideology which prevents them from taking massive investment, becoming beholden to investors, monetizing at any cost, and selling out the users in the process.
It's very easy to sit here and split that hair and so, "but no, I want them to just improve the UI, but also not sell out." It's very easy to create a laundry list of the way we wish others would behave, but it's also childish and unrealistic to expect the world to conform to our ideals, especially when we are distant and ignorant of the actual choices in front of the stakeholders.
Given the nature of what is going on in the Valley right now—eg. Twitter considered a failure because they only have 1/5th the userbase of Facebook, and nary a drop of ink spilled on its contribution to global conversation, all because we need to see how many dollars this thing can actually generate before we decide on whether its successful despite whatever world-changing qualities it may have—I think Craigslist is a wonderful company that more should take as an example.
I have been seriously frustrated by the dominance of Craigslist re apt-hunting, but it's quite fair to note that, while I may object to their choices, it is obviously not greed that (primarily) motivates them/him. So it's definitely not right for me to group them with LinkedIn.
Honestly I am feeling a bit of joy watching LinkedIn take a hit. Not because I think their product is terrible but because of the endless spam emails I keep receiving from them, despite how many times I click unsubscribe.
If is. There are very granular controls to control which emails you get and then, separately, how often, including "No emails". Looks like I did all that a year or so ago, since I only get a message now and then for new connect request. Now those are random strangers maybe 30% of the time, but I do want the notifications.
I've noticed quite a lot of LinkedIn e-mail is actually spam and phishing attempts. We are blocking about 5 mails per day per employee that aren't real.
So much this. I revel in every bad result for LinkedIn, because they've built a wasteland of growth hacking dark patterns and practically demand I participate in it.
I have literally several hundred request from random people to become a contact. Linkedin (years ago) lost what it had which originally attracted me to the service. That was some kind of real and exclusive way to have contacts that you either knew or you felt would be beneficial in some way.
The biggest joke is the entire concept they have of using a connection to connect you to someone else who they know. Which of course depends on the definition of "know" which with linkedin means literally nothing.
They have also made it over time exceptionally hard to deny a connection request. It used to be in the e-mail notification, then it wasn't and on the profile page, now it seems to only be in the event/notification drop down from your home page.
Eh? Just ignore them. No need to actively deny anything. My attitude; it's just LinkedIn. Accept everyone, you never know when someone will be useful in finding you a job, which is all I use LinkedIn for. Turn off all email notifications and just add to spam any you do get. I get emails from recruiters all the time and they're in my spam folder too. I'll take them out/search spam when I next need a new job.
They used to give guidance about what 'know' meant and I still adhere to the 'I will only link with you if I have properly worked with you' line. The fact that few other people do have devalued its use.
At some point, LinkedIn changed its mind and decided that you should connect to anyone you're barely acquainted with and/or have exchanged an email with. They're actively encouraging forming these "devalued" links. They even use shady practices like borderline forgery of invitations.
In gmail, everyone you've ever emailed is in automatically added your address book. LinkedIn provides an easy (maybe too easy) way to upload your address book to LinkedIn.
> LinkedIn changed its mind and decided that you should connect to anyone you're barely acquainted with
This was all in the interest of keeping the numbers going up which is obvious. And that's fine if that is your business model. But the business model here seems to be showing growth for the sake of wall street as opposed to growing the business in a meaningful manner.
Linkedin does serve a purpose it allows people to humble brag which is helpful even if they aren't looking for a job and don't need the connections because, say they own a business (and I don't mean a startup but it could be that as well). It's become an acceptable way to show where you went to school, what you have done in the past, and where you work or what you are the owner of. There really aren't that many other ways you can do that w/o appearing to be actually bragging and trying to impress someone (meaning it's not the same as having a personal website or even pointing people to a link "about me" page on your business website or a wikipedia page.
What's amazing is that they apparently don't want to filter the bogus requests as opposed to merely the requests that are from legitimate people (not bots) and simply trying to build what appears to be a network.
For this reason, I'm somewhat lenient in adding LinkedIn connections, as long as I at least have some idea who the people are. Unfortunately, many connection requests are from people I've never met before.
At Linkedin you are the product. Don't ever think otherwise. They are mercenaries about building up the social graph because it is how they build up the data they need to sell to the job spammers. The biggest "secret" of LI is that you get a score based on the "quality" of the people you are linked to. Know lots of ivy leaguers and fancy MBAs? You get a +10 bonus. Rockstar talent with no high rated buddies to link to? -10 for you.
Or how about the phony "people you may know". They suggested I may know my 4 year old Niece because somebody uploaded the email address created for her into their system. She definitely doesn't have a LinkedIn account, but they portray a profile-photoless "shadow profile" as-if she does.
That happens to me too. But you know who is a thousand times worse than Linkedin when it comes to these things? Facebook.
At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.
It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like you would refuse to do this on principle). I never receive emails from Facebook.
I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"
I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)
It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top)
> I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)
It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
I don't get any emails from Facebook. Have you not set up the account the way you like it? Do you still have stock wallpaper, ringtones etc on your devices? I find out about events in Facebook at the right time; when I'm using Facebook.
You made me feel ashamed for being angry for a really petty reason. :-)
L-in bought Pulse for my iPad and closed it down to replace it with something else.
If they instead had extended the app with their social network, I'd have grumbled but started to use it. I'm hardly alone, so they shot their own foot, too.
I can think of many things waste more of my time than having to delete promotional emails here and there. I get that it's annoying, but let's have some perspective...
Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.
This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time.
That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale.
135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
It's not a fallacy. We really could solve those big problems. It's better than thinking about the huge problem and your tiny ego. It puts things in perspective. Facebook really wastes the equivalent of 135 lives. That's the reverse operation. It takes the relatively trivial 5 minutes from your life and puts it in global perspective. When you're that big and you annoy people in a systematic way you deserve this characterization.
Facebook is not wasting emails on 1 billion people. Honestly I'm an active user and dont get a single email. It's a few clicks to turn off all email notifications. If you're not a user then you should get nothing unless someone else is trying to invite you, which is the fault of that person, not the service.
Anything from a Facebook domain hitting my mail server is bounces them back to Facebook's abuse and postmaster addresses. I know categorically that it is abuse, because I am the sole user of my mail server and do not now and have never had a Facebook account, and have repeatedly asked them in various ways to stop spamming me.
Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.
Thereby resulting in facebook being a worse software for the average user due to their abuse of this one user. Win win for someone who doesn't like facebook.
You'd probably have more luck marking them as spam in your client. If you're using a webmail service of any note, you're helping to train the filters used by others, and as a bonus, your own profile means you're less likely to get them in the inbox in the future.
Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC.
You appear to have missed the part about this being my own mail server.
And I don't need any more luck; my initial problem is solved (I no longer see spam from Facebook, and I am taking steps to ensure they are aware of their problem, in case they weren't).
The problem was worth the time I spent on the config; it is manifestly a waste for me to involve the FTC, since I don't have to worry about Facebook's spam anymore and am willing to eat the tiny amount of bandwidth involved.
For what it's worth I have a Facebook account and have all the email notification settings off and can't remember seeing an email from Facebook in over a year.
I noticed that when I stopped checking my Facebook account, Facebook started sending me FOMO messages ("Hey! You have messages! People are saying things! Please come look!")
I noticed them doing that as well, and did what I usually do with companies that get too chatty: First, turn off the notifications, unsubscribe, etc. Then, if they ignore my preferences or keep adding new categories of notification that are enabled by default, I add a client-side rule to throw away everything they send. This way they get to keep thinking that I receive their spam, and I don't have to see it, which is a win-win (though a sad loss for email in general as an obsessively reliable communication system).
This worked out fine for Facebook: I visit their webpage when I want to know what's going on over there, and they never send me email.
Yes, but it also stops sending you normal e-mail notifications, which is IMHO only annoying because I prefer to use my e-mail client to read messages, invites, etc.
Facebook's email messages used to be pretty useful; they used to contain the actual content of posts. That means if you also turn off remote images, you can actually read Facebook posts without Facebook having realized that you've read it. I've always done this for privacy, until they stopped putting the actual post in their emails.
The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn
The difference is that sending a request to someone within the social network to form a connection in that social network is different than sending an invite to someone's separate social network (email), which encourages them to join a whole new social network are two separate actions, and to represent one while doing the other is a bait-and-switch. This is a problem because they have separate social and cultural expectations, so you may feel comfortable doing one and not the other.
If you read the button it's not an CTA to connect with her but a CTA to invite her to LinkedIn. She would then get an email basically saying "Uncle Uptown would like you to join LinkedIn!"
Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.
This is on mobile. It shows her name, her email address, and a circular button with a human silhouette and a plus symbol on it. All in a section titled "People you may know". The implication is absolutely that she is a user of the site.
IIRC there was one very subtle difference on mobile to differentiate users vs. non-users, but it was something easily overlooked. On desktop it's slightly more obvious, but still misleading IMO.
The fact that they intermingle "add this person to my network" with "invite this person to LinkedIn" on that page drives me insane.
I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses.
Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"
When I signed up, I made the mistake of giving LinkedIn access to my Gmail address book. Somehow this meant they actually had access to a list of every person I had ever e-mailed, even if only once.
So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.
Hopefully you've learned something important about not giving your login credentials for any service, to another service. ;)
[And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]
I signed up with an email alias specifically created for LinkedIn, and it still managed to associate my Facebook friends as possible connections. What the frick.
I see newer social networks that are taking the LinkedIn playbook and making it even worse.
As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services.
How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.
ResearchGate seemed nice for a week. It showed every time a paper quoted one of mine, so it was a small confidence boost to know my older stuff is being read.
Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation.
It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.
Linkedin also wanted to connect me with my dead grandfather a few weeks after he died. I'm pretty sure he never had an account there.
Felt a bit weird to have that email pop up suddenly.
LinkedIn's "shadow profiles" are absolutely horrific.
I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous.
I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.
I scraped my 'people you may know' page over 30 days to make sure LinkedIn removed 2000 of my 'stolen contacts' from it. Once they did, 99% of them never appeared again. http://009co.com/?p=9
Just curious - why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact. I've just manually connected with people I know. Whenever a service asks for my contacts, I know it's because they want to spam them.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Don't you have to give them your gmail password or some other Google auth? That doesn't seem easy to do accidentally.
Yes they need your password but they mix things in the UI making things close to each other, things pop in and out. Its basically a big trap trying to fish as much as they can from you. I don't even install their phone app knowing they will get access to my contacts.
Many people are literally tricked into uploading their contacts. Example with screenshots.[1] The UI/UX practice is called "dark patterns".
On a monthly basis, I get LinkedIn "invites" from friends who simply didn't understand LinkedIn's hostile and deceptive user interface. They think they're just importing their contacts to conveniently++ find existing profiles but in reality, they're unwittingly giving permission to LinkenIn to spam their address book to recruit new members.
You may be good at defensive web surfing to keep your contacts private but most others are not.
Nice link! I'm glad I haven't signed up yet.
But then again, I don't use gmail either so importing the address book would be considerably more difficult.
I wonder if you can prevent them from stealing the address book if you install their Android app?
If people have my contacts details that's not really a problem for me. A friend once said he wasn't going to get a gmail account because he didn't want Google knowing all his contacts but Google already had them because they all had gmail accounts. The value of keeping other people's email addresses secret is overrated. Spam is a fraction of the problem it was 10 years ago and there's always filters.
I'm not saying gmail (google) spam people; i'm saying that not using gmail because you don't want google to know your contacts is silly. it doesn't matter if google knows that you, for instance, are in my contact list. they're not going to spam you. i'm not going to not use linkedin because i'm concerned you're going to get an email from them; that's your problem, and not really a problem at that. You just mark as spam and move on. It's hard to imagine a single person has even decided to not share their contact list with an app or service because they're concerned one of their contacts might get contacted by them.
> It's hard to imagine a single person has even decided to not share their contact list with an app or service because they're concerned one of their contacts might get contacted by them.
You seem to be a little out of touch here. There are several examples of people withholding their contacts list from services like LinkedIn right here in this thread. It's not hard to imagine at all -- just read the posts.
In fact, right above your post that you responded to, the hn user vitd wrote, "why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact."
Lastly, you're trivializing the situation by suggesting that recipients just mark it as spam and move on. The issue is that LinkedIn deliberately crafted the emails with header "FROM: YOU" and your photo in the message body to make it look like you explicitly sent the email inviting them to join. It's clever social engineering so that the recipients harvested from your contacts list do not treat it as spam. Some recipients know the disguised nature of LinkedIn spam and know you didn't actually send it but many do not (especially older executives). In those cases, they think that you are one of those clueless flakes that signs people up for multi-level-marketing vitamins and vacation timeshares. People genuinely got embarrassed by LinkedIn's spam practices.
I think this is actually dangerous for any older and/or not web saavy person. It's a point of entry for identity theft the reason I don't even want my mother to do online banking actually. I can't police her desktop to my liking and I am afraid that somehow someway her having online access could result in countless problems.
I find doing anything on linkedin via mobile to be the worst experience.
I am pretty surprised that in SV, they have one of the worst performing mobile experiences. It is always super slow, lags, unclicks, takes me back to an entirely previous page when hitting back, as opposed to the screen I was looking at before I read that profile... etc...
I also couldn't be happier watching linkedin fall. I recently deleted my account because of all the spam and creepy things linkedin does and they still send me emails!
At our company we kept getting emails from them on email addresses that are only used to send data to our service. This was starting to become a problem, so we called them up and asked them to block that domain. They said no. Eventually they said they'd blacklist the email addresses individually. Our response was "OK so we're going to send about 20,000 email addresses for you to blacklist, and probably about 1,000 more every 2 months or so". They blacklisted our domain.
I have an account, turned off all email-based notifications, and stop by every half-year or so to see what's in my inbox. It's usually full of messages, but I never get any emails from them.
Same here. I get an email when someone asks to connect but nothing else, and I get that because I want it. They have pretty explicit settings. Just checked and "Introductions and InMail" are only thing enabled. You can also adjust frequency for individual types of messages so you get batch updates.
LinkedIn is generally crappy at what is supposed to be its primary purposes, and they do shady UX stuff. But they have very granular controls for email and push notifications.
I get zero spam to the email I have a LinkedIn account on. I get a shit ton to my gmail, no matter how often I click unsubscribe, send to spam and whatever else.
So both your experience and the grandparent's are possible - they respect you, once you've signed up.
Interesting. That could explain the disparity of experiences being discussed here. I have all my emails in LinkedIn to be discoverable by colleagues, so that means LinkedIn also knows they are specifically me and I'm signed up.
I am completely happy with this. LinkedIn is showing off as a site to facilitate businesses while indeed is a service for recruiters. Some examples, posting original stuff to groups with thousands of members and not receiving a single comment or click to some link. Very basic bugs in their mobile offering that makes you think nobody cares about developing a good one or it was developed by a freelancer on vacation. The worst is not innovating (yes, like Tinder!) to match businesses: if after years all they have to offer is sending an In-Mail or contact someone through a middleman we are lost.
And... I can't forget the fake invitations I receive every week with fake photos that I detect searching on Google images by an image.
For me, this is the most surprising missed opportunity:
"posting original stuff to groups with thousands of members and not receiving a single comment or click to some link"
LinkedIn had the chance to build some amazing forums. LinkedIn should be the place that you think about when you want to have a conversation about business. They clearly have the traffic. They could have done something amazing with their groups and discussions. They have wasted all of their chances.
Every time they touch Groups, they make them that much worse.
They made a big (incomplete) UI overhaul which managed to make them less easy to use, and half the time fails to load posts (every 1-2 posts as you scroll down is loaded via script, fails a surprising amount of the time, or simply refuses to fire!).
I'm at a total loss as to why they hate Groups so much. Not enough page loads / ad impressions? We run a few groups - ranging from 10L to 90K in size, some of which are quite active. But discussions tend to engage ~.001% of users.
From my perspective, discussion groups at linkedIn fails to deliver because 99% of posts in the groups are shameless self-promotion. Posters and group creators are not seeking knowledge or discussion, but wish to promote their own new product, company. The same goes for nearly all posts on linkedin: the site is treated as an advertising channel by all involved.
I ended up deleting my LinkedIn account with hundreds of connections and recreating it with an email I use for spam. I haven't worried about linkedin emails since. Another recommendation I have: when you go on the job hunt, create an email just for that job hunt. Once you get the job, throw that email away. Next time you get a job, make a new email address. Your recruiter spam will stop.
My parents are always very sad and disappointed when I turn down a recruiter phone call. "This is a headhunter for you, son!" Jobs have somehow become a commodity, so massively available that spammy behaviours appeared.
this... I've refused to ever sign up for LinkedIn despite many peers asking me why not and acting like I should be on there.. I've thought their spam tactics were dispicable and harassing. I've unsubscribed but still get emails trying to get me to sign up. No one "has" to use LinkedIn or any other software for that matter...
One of my biggest technological accomplishments and one of my biggest improvements in quality of life is when I finally managed (after 2 years of regular attempts) to delete my LinkedIn account and halt all emails.
Their product IS terrible. Remember they actually charge users for this unlike other networks that monetize purely from advertising. LinkedIn can and should be far better but it's incredibly how bad it really is.
Not super surprising. The majority of their revenue comes from recruiters, and I expect the majority of paying recruiters are in tech. So any downswing in tech will be substantially felt. Especially for a firm whose earnings are negative, losing growth is bound to be a problem.
On a related note, how much of Facebook's mobile revenue is for mobile apps? Should we expect a similar decline as the economy declines further?
I'm not clear if we're in good or bad shape. Exporters are in trouble: strong dollar, failing overseas economies, etc. Declining S&P500, bonds prices rising, etc.
IBM, Intel, HP, etc are all declining, as well as retailers like Wal-Mart. Obviously the jobs report is welcome news, so maybe I just have an overly pessimistic outlook.
The US is currently adding jobs and adding jobs in tech, their issue is probably competition (LinkedIn is not the only game in town).
Mobile revenue was 80% of Facebook's revenue in Q4 2015.
Update: after looking at their revenues they might also have some currency troubles, they have far more international revenue than I would have guessed (~38%).
LinkedIn is the king of "dark patterns" UI - every part of their website is optimized to trick you into doing something you have no intention of doing.
I've been endorsed by very close friends, who absolutely know what the endorsements are for, for things that I don't actually have any experience in. There's no way they could have been doing the endorsement intentionally.
1.) Your good at gaming the system. In college, it wasn't unusual to see entire classes sit down, connect, and endorse for everything you had "skills" added for. Bam, hundred of endorsements.
2.) Your connected with people who are a combo of being a bit clueless and want to be nice. It prompts you to endorse people all the time. Like my sibling comment's anecdote, you often get endorsed for random things from random people who have no clue what the skill is, but want to be nice.
Regarding 1, it also want uncommon to hear advisers in my college giving students advice to the effect of, "You remember that 'Hello World!' code you wrote on MIPS? Now you can put x86 assembly language programming on your resume!" I just ignore lists of skills regardless of location.
And the sad thing about it is that (i) they have so much mindshare they don't need to do that shit any more, and (ii) it probably makes the average person that would consider subscribing to an online networking tool less likely to consider buying LinkedIn Premium...
It blows my mind that linkedin exists. I believe its Zero to One that talks about how Reid realized rather than try to replace recruiters he made a tool to help them do their job.
Non recruiter/sales people use it as some type on online resume and look at how great I am page while recruiters get access to everyone they could ever want.
LinkedIn does have some non-recruiter customers, though. Like everyone else in the game, has also realized they could make a few bucks off the supply side.
Having trouble getting a job? Just pay us $20/month and more people will see your res... er, profile! Too bad visibility is not the solution those people need. Just one that is trivially implemented and easy to sell.
I figured this out quite a few years ago. The first time they spammed me, I signed in and turned off anything that said they would send me email. The next time they spammed I deleted my account and black-holed the email address I used to sign up with them. I gather things continued to go downhill from there (e.g. spamming all your contacts).
I can't understand why people would continue to use a web site from such an obviously dishonest company.
And I absolutely hate that they track which profiles you view and then display that information in the side bar under "people who viewed this profile also viewed". Unless you're looking at high profile person with millions of views, the "also viewed" list becomes a list of friends and not people in the same field or similar job profiles. If I ever have to click on a LinkedIn link, I always go into incognito mode.
I created a dummy linkedin profile exactly because of this. I kept getting notifications that an ex from 5 years ago was constantly looking at my profile.
Just another reminder to never ever build your company for Wall street. In 2004, Netflix went from 40 to 2 in 6 months. Amazon from 89 to 5. There are entirely zero competitors to Linkedin right now (FB is nowwhere in the space). And while i agree the product has stagnated a bit - this in my view is another example of Wall Street's insanity. (and no, i don't own any shares :)
Imagine if I bought "stock" in your job. I monitored your performance and set expectations for your work. You fail to meet those expectations, so as the majority shareholder of your job, I have you fired and replaced with someone else. Or you underperform once and I use this threat every single review.
I'm not sure I agree with your "bought stock in your job" example.
A better analogy would be:
- your performance is great
- your boss tells you that you'll get a promotion next year if you keep it up
- your performance takes a turn for the worse
- your boss tells you your performance is worse and lets you know that the promotion next isn't a sure thing
The stock market is a market that allows people to buy and sell stock at the price they see fit. The market should reflect all available information. I don't see any reason why LinkedIn's stock shouldn't plummet if suddenly their growth prospects went from "spectacular" to "so-so".
It's more like if I decide to pay you $300k because I'm pretty sure you'll do great work. If you then turn in a performance no better than a guy I pay $150k, then I'm going to go "oh shit, I was wrong and should pay you a lot less".
The stock market is all about expected future performance. Nobody forces companies to be publicly traded. If you don't want to deal with the expectations game then don't sell shares of your company to outside parties who generally don't care about your actual business.
Or, worse, you have a Really Damn Good Year, but I ding you at your performance review. Even though you were the best you've ever been, and better than your peers, you weren't quite as good as I was hoping you to be, so ... sorry, no raise this year.
Maybe. It's really hard to set a fair baseline for a performance bonus; being given stock options struck at the current price is a very similar exercise.
Every publicly traded company is subject to the other side of the coin too: their stock price rises based on exceeding analysts' expectations. If you want to be publicly traded, then you have to deal with your performance relative to the public's expectation.
From what I can tell it has, but I'm not a financial expert.
It wasn't that the Q4 earnings weren't up to snuff, they were, they exceeded expectations. It's that LinkedIn lowered it's predictions for next year.
The job networking site said that revenue for first quarter of 2016 is expected to be $820 million and adjusted earnings per share will be 55 cents. For the full year, revenue is forecasted to be about $3.6 billion. Investors were discouraged by these numbers, because they were expecting $867 million in revenue for the current quarter and $3.9 billion for the full year.
By all metrics the business is doing great, but stock holders demand more growth and act irrationally over "sentiments". This is not reasonable or sustainable.
No. I think it's other way around. They were priced so high in the first place because they were expected to grow at a very high pace. They have mostly matching those until 15Q4 but the expectations for the next year are drastically lower so they get priced lower. What's so difficult to understand about it.
If you feel LNKD is cheap at this price, it's time for you to go make some money. Buy stock, calls.
Try to avoid concepts like "fair" and "unfair" when dealing with the market. I think this correction is an over-reaction to the guidance and the stock looks like a good buy to me right now.
The other way to look at it is that the shares were vastly overvalued to begin with, and the latest financial statement has caused investors to overvalue them by a bit less.
I still think the value is insane, but the insanity is in the opposite direction to you :)
The problem is that their business model is probably more sensitive to overall economic health than most. Premium services that are nice to have for recruiting might be some of the first things to get cut from customers' budgets in a downturn when they're not hiring as much. I suspect that investors are jittery about the economy overall and think LinkedIn might be in for a slow couple of years if the economy stagnates. They're repricing the stock to reflect a slower growth trajectory.
>Premium services that are nice to have for recruiting might be some of the first things to get cut from customers' budgets in a downturn when they're not hiring as much.
I agree.
The binge on linkedin spending can't increase dramatically forever it eventually will follow the macro trends.
LinkedIn is full of people trying to get people to pay attention to them... but the people they are trying to impress aren't really on LinkedIn (they have a profile but that's it... they don't use it as an actual social platform).
Annoyingly, they removed the most useful bit (for me) several years ago in terms of getting work.
LinkedIn Answers was a bit crappy, but I used to spend quite a lot of time giving good detailed answers to people. That ended up with a few short consulting gigs that we quite fun "Could you come and sort this out for me".
They never built on LinkedIn Answers, let it stagnate and then killed it. It was much better than the stupid Groups system.
Mid-level executives in IT/Tech/Consulting globally are practically on LinkedIn, it is a giant job board. A self-updating and self-cleaning CV database and rolodex.
The biggest CRM system on earth. And it has gotten better recently, the product team has given up on moving into Twitter/Facebook crap features and is re-focusing on the job at hand.
If they'd add hierarchies and reporting structures, they'd be even more valuable (and dangerous). B2B sales people live in LinkedIn. HR ditto.
Yes, developers don't get the value - but it is not for you. Directors, VPs, MBAs,...more so.
To me it looks like a wasteland of recruiters. I used to think it was neat when some recruiter would contact me about a job, but now I realize they are just spamming everyone with (your framework here) listed in their skills. The over-saturation of recruiters, connections with everyone you even slightly know, and people endorsing you for skills they don't know you have has made it all meaningless.
Not really. I've been in that situation, and spammy recruiters are just looking at "Oh, he's got $buzzword in his profile, and $company needs $buzzword!" If $buzzword = bash, that's not really useful. It's used everywhere, and isn't really an exclusive skillset. They don't pay attention to company culture, pay, or even location.
Obviously YMMV, but IME, they pretty much just throw everything against the wall, to see what sticks.
There is no etiquette. Recruiters just spam random people for connections. Users share stupid things that belongs on Facebook. Groups are almost unusable. I'm not even getting into all the dark patterns to crawl users' mailbox and contact list, deceiving "connect" links that actually invite a person who is not even on LinkedIn, etc.
I don't think I ever got a single job through LinkedIn.
Years ago after reading this I was so disgusted at LinkedIn I closed my account.
They have a pay for placement scheme with both employees and employers. They tell employers, "hey pay money and we'll give you top candidates", then serve candidates who have themselves paid for placement.
Lots of angry sentiment towards this company here. I understand it doesn't necessarily bring this demographic as much value since most here are probably happily employed and don't need it. There's plenty of others who count on a service like LinkedIn, which doesn't have a good comparison (e.g. Twitter to Facebook).
Personally, I've found value in it from the potential clients I've received (I'm a contractor) and the ability to look up just about anyone I may need to do business with. I use it professionally to get an overview of others like I use Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic.
I do know they have room to improve. I've been using the service since 2006 and have seen all manner of their silly practices. But as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.
The angry sentiment isn't because people don't see potential value. It's because they do see the value - and how the company keeps spoiling what could be a good user experience.
Would the situation have turned out differently if users gave LinkedIn money in recognition of the referrals LinkedIn facilitated?
People like to hate linkedIn for being exploitative, while happily advancing their careers/businesses without paying LinkedIn for building the network infrastructure.
My speculation is that without any comparable competitors, there's nothing to force LinkedIn to change the negative aspects of their service. If there were two competing services, we would see users gravitating towards the service they prefer and the other service desperately trying to correct itself. For example, when Yahoo introduced suggested searches, Google noticed and picked up the feature too. Alternatively, when IE6 was king, they let it stagnate and look at what happened.
So from that standpoint, I hope that LinkedIn doesn't fail, but rather a competing service nurtures an environment where LinkedIn has to compete. Then hopefully we can see improvements towards what users really want.
The reason a LinkedIn competitor hasn't emerged is the same reason a viable Facebook competitor hasn't emerged: at this point the network effects are too strong, and it's extremely difficult to beat incumbents because of that.
Besides, think about how much flak some HN submissions get for being "just another social network." I think the whole social network market has fully saturated and there will be additional difficulty in convincing people there is room for more social networks (aside from certain niche differentiators such as centralized vs distributed, which 99% of users don't care about).
> The reason a LinkedIn competitor hasn't emerged is the same reason a viable Facebook competitor hasn't emerged: at this point the network effects are too strong, and it's extremely difficult to beat incumbents because of that.
I'd say LinkedIn actually has stronger network effects than Facebook, or other consumer social networks. Consumer social networks are used more casually, so it's easier to get users to sign up than it would be for a professional social network, where users tend to adopt a more conservative mindset. And we've seen several consumer social networks rise in the post-Facebook era - Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
The only social network I can reliably guess that someone is on, regardless of job type, is, alas, LinkedIn.
My friend who is a biologist doesn't have a Twitter since nobody in her field uses it, but she has a LinkedIn.
My software developer friends have Twitter, so that's my go-to... but then it's a mishmash of business and personal. Or sometimes only personal, so it feels weird to talk business over it. So then... email, since soft devs - rightfully so - dislike LinkedIn.
I don't know the solution, but it's clear one should be built. Does LinkedIn have an easy "export my social graph" option to at least jump start w competitor?
There's an export contacts feature, which was restored after removing it resulted in a user backlash (http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/25/linkedin-brings-back-tool-...). But if a competitor tried to create a one-click feature for programatically exporting contacts from LinkedIn and importing them into their own database, they would probably get banned. And for the vast majority of users, explaining how to export/import a CSV manually is not viable.
You said exactly what I had surmised. I don't use LinkedIn, and don't even really get spammed by it...but it's the one service that I don't use that I completely believe has a viable and valuable product. That it is facing such uncertainty is just baffling to me.
Same. LinkedIn has helped me find 2 fantastic jobs now (and leads to many other potential ones). Granted, it was through one recruiter of the many that spammed my inbox. But still, that clutter stays on LinkedIn and I only deal with it when I need it.
In another use case I've also used LinkedIn to find service providers. Instead of relying on word of mouth I can vet someone from their work history, endorsements, and recommendations.
So yeah, they have bad practices, but they're not all bad. I do have to say that what they do provide of value is easily replicable and this is probably a great opportunity for anyone who wants to start something.
The potential usefulness of LinkedIn only adds to the disappointment and resentment. It is sometimes useful. It could be good. Why does it have to be so intrusive and underhanded that I won't let the app on my phone?
It does have a lot of value. My partner found some awesome contractors by doing searches on LinkedIn for the relevant keywords (it helped that they were unknown technologies with less than a dozen profiles listing them)
I too (as a freelancer) find quite a bit of value out of LinkedIn, but that's orthogonal to the fact that they are a scummy company with even lower ethical standards than Facebook. That they don't have a rivaling alternative to provide competition only adds to the tragedy.
LinkedIn lucked out and rode the network effect to its current size. Note that the only thing you like about it is its network effect, which is more a question of timing than open competition at this point.
If other websites like Facebook, Yelp, Google, etc. dumped so much crap on the user while offering so little the internet would be almost unusable. LinkedIn should rot, I'd love to see it, because then everyone would migrate to a better alternative.
>but as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.
That's their only advantage, that they are big and almost everyone is already there but it always feels to me like they are some sort of myspace waiting for their a Facebook to come and do it right.
What does this mean for Connectifier, the company LinkedIn acquired hours before markets closed yesterday (and before after-hours trading caused LNKD to slide 40%)?
Depends on the term of the merger agreement. But if the price was paid in stock and the exchange rate was fixed before today (which would be typical), then yes, they would have taken a big hit too.
At a 20 billion valuation that still seems quite high. I think to justify the valuation they would at some point need to generate $1.5-$2 billion in FCF and at the current growth rate that isn't happening.
Yeah, I would like to see someone justify the market value of LinkedIn. They seem to be losing money, and they have over 9000 employees (doing what exactly?).
That depends on your definition of "losing". Ignoring stock based compensation (almost 20% of revenue if properly accounted for using GAAP) helps to get the "adjusted" net income into positive territory.
They have posted a small loss ($8mn) in the fourth quarter.
But if you ignore a number of costs you can easily convert a $166 million loss into a $373 million gain. See the last table in the press release:
Hoping to also receive 40% less spam from them too. LinkedIn's an ugly company who's primary business model is social engineering and active exploitation of their user base - sharing the bottom rung on the social ladder with recruiters (aka Customers) and their widespread indiscriminate spam and phishing attempts.
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LinkedIn can be described at the 'Facebook for business', it doesn't feel like a stretch that faceboook might someday want to become the facebook for business.
Facebook at Work is aimed at internal networking, so communication among large teams, company news / communication, etc.
- The growth is slowing down
- Every product attempts to expand until it has API. Those products which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Linked closed the API.
That's why $FB stock is -5% down.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=FB+Interactive#{"lineColo...
The established companies whose valuation was based on multiples of future growth are taking the hit, getting in line with more traditional multiples of current revenue.
http://etfdb.com/etfdb-category/technology-equities/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/18/there-are-now-229-unicorn-...
http://www.bloomberg.com/research/sectorandindustry/industri...
http://www.bloomberg.com/research/sectorandindustry/industri...
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
Market topped in Oct 2007, and then there was a bunch of debate over whether we were or weren't in a recession through the first half of 2008. Bear Sterns went bust in March 2008, everybody was like "Well duh, they should have known it was coming", people thought it was the end of it, and the market recovered. AIG went bankrupt in Aug 2008, Lehman brothers in Sept 2008, and that's when everybody panicked. TARP passed in Q4 2008.
The dot-com bubble burst actually was pretty orderly - basically the starry-eyed buyers for tech stocks ran out, and companies couldn't get money on the public markets. Consequences were limited mostly to the people who had invested and the founders & employees of those companies. The road downward was actually more gradual than the road upward had been.
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
dotcom - shell companies, with no revenue or profits. 2008 - excessive/unsustainable leverage both by corporations and individuals.
This time around multiple QE cycles resulted in decreased treasury and bond yeilds. People\funds with captial went to invest other assets classes e.g. equity markets seeking high yeilds and as a result increased the price multiples/valuations while the intrinic businesses valuation and growth remained the same.
Now people are starting to realize that multiples(what you pay for a company and what its actually worth) are too high and started taking money out of equity markets. While the fundamentals of the business has stayed the same.
Hence this bubble bursting or "significant price correction" wont have the same impact on mainstreet as the other two bubbles because the business are still sustainable but the prices weren't.
Prices are not proxy for revenue/profits/growth or value. So unless someone can give actual facts that the fundamentals of the underlying businesses are/will be impacted on a systematic basis I agree with kin.
A bubble's a bubble. This isn't a simple "correction". When your stock's PE is above 1000x, it's a bubble. Overvaluation IS the definition of a bubble, not a lack of "fundamentals".
Amazon and Yahoo had revenue in 2000 and still crashed.
Likelier, there isn't much of a bubble at all, and companies tend to be properly valued.
$10 is very little consolation for hundreds of people you know now thinking that you are, ehrm, not smart, for giving your address book to LinkedIn, or worse, thinking you're a spammer because each of your contacts got three annoying e-mails "from you" with no opt-out button.
If they had to pay even one dollar to each person they spammed, they'd probably be bankrupt.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/6-5-million-linkedin-passwo...
They have also been sued for stealing users' e-mail address books and spamming all their contacts with invites:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/23/linkedin-sued...
But I agree with you that it's a terrible, and it's why I deleted my profile. I didn't even know how creepy/skeevy their business model is then, but what I did see was that their product is just BAD in so many ways, yet they survive only because they hold an unassailably dominant market position.
If you hold a monopoly position, then please, please at least make your product great. I'm looking at you, too, Craigslist. For example.
I really don't understand what value regular users are getting (let alone people paying for Premium). Part of me believes people will realize this and delete accounts en masse, but then I remember how status obsessed everyone is and I have my doubts. LinkedIn is sort of like Zynga for career status, so I suspect there is a lot of user psychology they can manipulate.
However... Craigslist for all its fault is driven by an egalitarian vision. The ideology which prevents Craigslist from improving their UI and providing an API (or supporting scraping) is the same ideology which prevents them from taking massive investment, becoming beholden to investors, monetizing at any cost, and selling out the users in the process.
It's very easy to sit here and split that hair and so, "but no, I want them to just improve the UI, but also not sell out." It's very easy to create a laundry list of the way we wish others would behave, but it's also childish and unrealistic to expect the world to conform to our ideals, especially when we are distant and ignorant of the actual choices in front of the stakeholders.
Given the nature of what is going on in the Valley right now—eg. Twitter considered a failure because they only have 1/5th the userbase of Facebook, and nary a drop of ink spilled on its contribution to global conversation, all because we need to see how many dollars this thing can actually generate before we decide on whether its successful despite whatever world-changing qualities it may have—I think Craigslist is a wonderful company that more should take as an example.
I have been seriously frustrated by the dominance of Craigslist re apt-hunting, but it's quite fair to note that, while I may object to their choices, it is obviously not greed that (primarily) motivates them/him. So it's definitely not right for me to group them with LinkedIn.
http://lifehacker.com/unsubscribe-from-all-linkedin-emails-w...
Not sure if this is still valid.
The biggest joke is the entire concept they have of using a connection to connect you to someone else who they know. Which of course depends on the definition of "know" which with linkedin means literally nothing.
This was all in the interest of keeping the numbers going up which is obvious. And that's fine if that is your business model. But the business model here seems to be showing growth for the sake of wall street as opposed to growing the business in a meaningful manner.
Linkedin does serve a purpose it allows people to humble brag which is helpful even if they aren't looking for a job and don't need the connections because, say they own a business (and I don't mean a startup but it could be that as well). It's become an acceptable way to show where you went to school, what you have done in the past, and where you work or what you are the owner of. There really aren't that many other ways you can do that w/o appearing to be actually bragging and trying to impress someone (meaning it's not the same as having a personal website or even pointing people to a link "about me" page on your business website or a wikipedia page.
What's amazing is that they apparently don't want to filter the bogus requests as opposed to merely the requests that are from legitimate people (not bots) and simply trying to build what appears to be a network.
Welcome to the world. Version 2.0. Codename: pointless.
For this reason, I'm somewhat lenient in adding LinkedIn connections, as long as I at least have some idea who the people are. Unfortunately, many connection requests are from people I've never met before.
My how things have changed.
You mean they scrapped it from your email account because you clicked on one of their links in your email.
At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.
I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"
It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...
I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top)
:(
It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
L-in bought Pulse for my iPad and closed it down to replace it with something else.
If they instead had extended the app with their social network, I'd have grumbled but started to use it. I'm hardly alone, so they shot their own foot, too.
Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.
That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
They're wasting 135 people's entire lives worth of time. Every single day. :(
That's close to the proportional death rate from air travel accidents (3.6 billion passengers/year, around 500 deaths).
Facebook takes---in Fermi numbers---about as many lives as plane crashes.
Why the hyperbole?
Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.
Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC.
If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam
And I don't need any more luck; my initial problem is solved (I no longer see spam from Facebook, and I am taking steps to ensure they are aware of their problem, in case they weren't).
The problem was worth the time I spent on the config; it is manifestly a waste for me to involve the FTC, since I don't have to worry about Facebook's spam anymore and am willing to eat the tiny amount of bandwidth involved.
This worked out fine for Facebook: I visit their webpage when I want to know what's going on over there, and they never send me email.
When I clicked connect, I thought I would invite her to my network, but it ended up with an invite to LinkedIn to her email.
The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn
Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.
I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses.
Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"
So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.
[And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]
As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services.
How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.
Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation.
It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.
I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous.
I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.
I turned off all email notifications and despise the fact that they email my contacts about my activity.
On a monthly basis, I get LinkedIn "invites" from friends who simply didn't understand LinkedIn's hostile and deceptive user interface. They think they're just importing their contacts to conveniently++ find existing profiles but in reality, they're unwittingly giving permission to LinkenIn to spam their address book to recruit new members.
You may be good at defensive web surfing to keep your contacts private but most others are not.
Btw, there was a previous discussion from Feb 2014 about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276032
[1]https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
++ (understandably because they don't want to manually retype each contact name into Linkedin. Ain't nobody got time for that.)
I wonder if you can prevent them from stealing the address book if you install their Android app?
If gmail started emailing your friends because you used gmail, that would be a good reason to not use gmail.
You seem to be a little out of touch here. There are several examples of people withholding their contacts list from services like LinkedIn right here in this thread. It's not hard to imagine at all -- just read the posts.
In fact, right above your post that you responded to, the hn user vitd wrote, "why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact."
Lastly, you're trivializing the situation by suggesting that recipients just mark it as spam and move on. The issue is that LinkedIn deliberately crafted the emails with header "FROM: YOU" and your photo in the message body to make it look like you explicitly sent the email inviting them to join. It's clever social engineering so that the recipients harvested from your contacts list do not treat it as spam. Some recipients know the disguised nature of LinkedIn spam and know you didn't actually send it but many do not (especially older executives). In those cases, they think that you are one of those clueless flakes that signs people up for multi-level-marketing vitamins and vacation timeshares. People genuinely got embarrassed by LinkedIn's spam practices.
Enough people were angry about spam being sent behind their back that they sued LinkedIn: http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-settles-class-action...
"I am on linkined now. What do I do?"
I am pretty surprised that in SV, they have one of the worst performing mobile experiences. It is always super slow, lags, unclicks, takes me back to an entirely previous page when hitting back, as opposed to the screen I was looking at before I read that profile... etc...
I have an account, turned off all email-based notifications, and stop by every half-year or so to see what's in my inbox. It's usually full of messages, but I never get any emails from them.
Am I just lucky? What's up?
LinkedIn is generally crappy at what is supposed to be its primary purposes, and they do shady UX stuff. But they have very granular controls for email and push notifications.
So both your experience and the grandparent's are possible - they respect you, once you've signed up.
It really is a poor product for what it looked like it might become.
And... I can't forget the fake invitations I receive every week with fake photos that I detect searching on Google images by an image.
"posting original stuff to groups with thousands of members and not receiving a single comment or click to some link"
LinkedIn had the chance to build some amazing forums. LinkedIn should be the place that you think about when you want to have a conversation about business. They clearly have the traffic. They could have done something amazing with their groups and discussions. They have wasted all of their chances.
They made a big (incomplete) UI overhaul which managed to make them less easy to use, and half the time fails to load posts (every 1-2 posts as you scroll down is loaded via script, fails a surprising amount of the time, or simply refuses to fire!).
I'm at a total loss as to why they hate Groups so much. Not enough page loads / ad impressions? We run a few groups - ranging from 10L to 90K in size, some of which are quite active. But discussions tend to engage ~.001% of users.
If anything, this will cause them to send even more emails!
On a related note, how much of Facebook's mobile revenue is for mobile apps? Should we expect a similar decline as the economy declines further?
Market prices are still overvalued, as well =( http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/
IBM, Intel, HP, etc are all declining, as well as retailers like Wal-Mart. Obviously the jobs report is welcome news, so maybe I just have an overly pessimistic outlook.
Mobile revenue was 80% of Facebook's revenue in Q4 2015.
Update: after looking at their revenues they might also have some currency troubles, they have far more international revenue than I would have guessed (~38%).
No, auntie, I'm not celebrating my promotion tonight, but thanks for the congratulations.
1.) Your good at gaming the system. In college, it wasn't unusual to see entire classes sit down, connect, and endorse for everything you had "skills" added for. Bam, hundred of endorsements.
2.) Your connected with people who are a combo of being a bit clueless and want to be nice. It prompts you to endorse people all the time. Like my sibling comment's anecdote, you often get endorsed for random things from random people who have no clue what the skill is, but want to be nice.
It blows my mind that linkedin exists. I believe its Zero to One that talks about how Reid realized rather than try to replace recruiters he made a tool to help them do their job.
Non recruiter/sales people use it as some type on online resume and look at how great I am page while recruiters get access to everyone they could ever want.
Having trouble getting a job? Just pay us $20/month and more people will see your res... er, profile! Too bad visibility is not the solution those people need. Just one that is trivially implemented and easy to sell.
I can't understand why people would continue to use a web site from such an obviously dishonest company.
Linkedin is so scammy.
https://gist.github.com/chengyin/7021086
I was incorrect. Q4 earnings were great, it was the fact that LinkedIn released 2016 guidance that was far below market expectations.
[LinkedIn released their earnings and they were way below expectations, so the stock took a massive hit.]
Does that seem unfair to you?
That's how Wall Street ruins good business.
A better analogy would be: - your performance is great - your boss tells you that you'll get a promotion next year if you keep it up - your performance takes a turn for the worse - your boss tells you your performance is worse and lets you know that the promotion next isn't a sure thing
The stock market is a market that allows people to buy and sell stock at the price they see fit. The market should reflect all available information. I don't see any reason why LinkedIn's stock shouldn't plummet if suddenly their growth prospects went from "spectacular" to "so-so".
And if you feel that sentiment is wrong, there's your chance to make money! Start buying stock in that business at the low price the "fools" have set.
The stock market is all about expected future performance. Nobody forces companies to be publicly traded. If you don't want to deal with the expectations game then don't sell shares of your company to outside parties who generally don't care about your actual business.
It wasn't that the Q4 earnings weren't up to snuff, they were, they exceeded expectations. It's that LinkedIn lowered it's predictions for next year.
The job networking site said that revenue for first quarter of 2016 is expected to be $820 million and adjusted earnings per share will be 55 cents. For the full year, revenue is forecasted to be about $3.6 billion. Investors were discouraged by these numbers, because they were expecting $867 million in revenue for the current quarter and $3.9 billion for the full year.
If you feel LNKD is cheap at this price, it's time for you to go make some money. Buy stock, calls.
(and yes, you are dumb :)
I still think the value is insane, but the insanity is in the opposite direction to you :)
I agree.
The binge on linkedin spending can't increase dramatically forever it eventually will follow the macro trends.
In that sense LinkedIn is mostly a wasteland.
LinkedIn Answers was a bit crappy, but I used to spend quite a lot of time giving good detailed answers to people. That ended up with a few short consulting gigs that we quite fun "Could you come and sort this out for me".
They never built on LinkedIn Answers, let it stagnate and then killed it. It was much better than the stupid Groups system.
Mid-level executives in IT/Tech/Consulting globally are practically on LinkedIn, it is a giant job board. A self-updating and self-cleaning CV database and rolodex.
The biggest CRM system on earth. And it has gotten better recently, the product team has given up on moving into Twitter/Facebook crap features and is re-focusing on the job at hand.
If they'd add hierarchies and reporting structures, they'd be even more valuable (and dangerous). B2B sales people live in LinkedIn. HR ditto.
Yes, developers don't get the value - but it is not for you. Directors, VPs, MBAs,...more so.
Obviously YMMV, but IME, they pretty much just throw everything against the wall, to see what sticks.
There is no etiquette. Recruiters just spam random people for connections. Users share stupid things that belongs on Facebook. Groups are almost unusable. I'm not even getting into all the dark patterns to crawl users' mailbox and contact list, deceiving "connect" links that actually invite a person who is not even on LinkedIn, etc.
I don't think I ever got a single job through LinkedIn.
They have a pay for placement scheme with both employees and employers. They tell employers, "hey pay money and we'll give you top candidates", then serve candidates who have themselves paid for placement.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-the-headhunter-...
Personally, I've found value in it from the potential clients I've received (I'm a contractor) and the ability to look up just about anyone I may need to do business with. I use it professionally to get an overview of others like I use Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic.
I do know they have room to improve. I've been using the service since 2006 and have seen all manner of their silly practices. But as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.
People like to hate linkedIn for being exploitative, while happily advancing their careers/businesses without paying LinkedIn for building the network infrastructure.
So from that standpoint, I hope that LinkedIn doesn't fail, but rather a competing service nurtures an environment where LinkedIn has to compete. Then hopefully we can see improvements towards what users really want.
Besides, think about how much flak some HN submissions get for being "just another social network." I think the whole social network market has fully saturated and there will be additional difficulty in convincing people there is room for more social networks (aside from certain niche differentiators such as centralized vs distributed, which 99% of users don't care about).
I'd say LinkedIn actually has stronger network effects than Facebook, or other consumer social networks. Consumer social networks are used more casually, so it's easier to get users to sign up than it would be for a professional social network, where users tend to adopt a more conservative mindset. And we've seen several consumer social networks rise in the post-Facebook era - Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
My friend who is a biologist doesn't have a Twitter since nobody in her field uses it, but she has a LinkedIn.
My software developer friends have Twitter, so that's my go-to... but then it's a mishmash of business and personal. Or sometimes only personal, so it feels weird to talk business over it. So then... email, since soft devs - rightfully so - dislike LinkedIn.
I don't know the solution, but it's clear one should be built. Does LinkedIn have an easy "export my social graph" option to at least jump start w competitor?
Unlike the old export feature, it's also frequently missing your latest connections (30-60 days worth, I think).
Yeah there is: a $10 billion drop in their stock valuation.
In another use case I've also used LinkedIn to find service providers. Instead of relying on word of mouth I can vet someone from their work history, endorsements, and recommendations.
So yeah, they have bad practices, but they're not all bad. I do have to say that what they do provide of value is easily replicable and this is probably a great opportunity for anyone who wants to start something.
If other websites like Facebook, Yelp, Google, etc. dumped so much crap on the user while offering so little the internet would be almost unusable. LinkedIn should rot, I'd love to see it, because then everyone would migrate to a better alternative.
That's their only advantage, that they are big and almost everyone is already there but it always feels to me like they are some sort of myspace waiting for their a Facebook to come and do it right.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/business/high-tech-fantasy...
They would need to make a pretty good profit the last three month of 2015 to make up for it.
Again I might just not know how to read financial statements, but adding up all the "Net incomes" gives you around $108 million in lose.
http://investors.linkedin.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=95...
HN Discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042482
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earningsseason.asp