Ask HN: To LinkedIn am I just collateral damage of a barely functioning system
On Sunday, shortly after creating a new ad campaign, using the free ads credit provided by LinkedIn, I was refreshing the browser to see how the ads was progressing. Suddenly, I was logged out of my account, to verify my identity. I have taken a live picture, as instructed by the app, and also uploaded a scanned copy of my original national ID card. I have used my ID card for every form of verification I have encountered and never had a single problem. My ID is valid and my picture is what's on my LinkedIn profile. Despite all this, the LinkedIn identity verification page kept telling me "Couldn't verify photos".
I have contacted the LinkedIn support team. There has literally been 14 messages back and forth, and all I have gotten every single time is the same template message referring me to the same ID verification page that does not work. At times, I wonder if I'm just getting a response from robots or whether the support team just does not care about what I am going through right now.
In a world today, where your a LinkedIn profile is literally essential to your means of livelihood, I am dumbfounded that (1) LinkedIn would suspended an account over false positives; and (2) no one at LinkedIn cares enough to ensure no ones professional career is threatened by errors that may arise from their system. If you are trying to raise capital, investors would literally ask about your LinkedIn profile and company LinkedIn page. If you are trying to get a job, you would be asked for a LinkedIn profile. If you are trying to set up an account with a payment processor, you would be asked for your LinkedIn page. Despite how essential LinkedIn has become, LinkedIn felt it was okay to leave people's means of livelihood at the mercy of a bot which would fail from time to time. I assume to them for those of us who have issues, we are just collateral damage of a barely functioning system.
I have googled this problem already. I saw articles asking me to reach their support on X and Reddit. I tried X, by sending LinkedIn a DM. But X logged me out and ask me to solve a captcha. After solving the captcha, X literally warned me not to repeat my last action. As for reddit, I only read posts, I hardly ever post. In other words, I have very low karma. Which means, whenever I post, it is automatically removed.
Right now, I am stuck here, freaking out. All my connections gone. Account gone. Startup page gone. Where do I begin? Where do I really begin??? It is unbelievable. What happens when the investors I have reached out to start checking out my profile and can not find my profile. What am I supposed to do right now? Start all over. Everything I have built on LinkedIn over the past 8+ years gone in the blink of an eye???
For me I think I am finally done with LinkedIn and never coming back. And this would be my official public reference of when and why I no longer use LinkedIn. If an investor or anyone asks me about LinkedIn, I would tell them I am not on LinkedIn and have no intentions of creating an account now or ever again. It is going to be though, but I would find other ways to exist without a platform that does not care about how much effort you could have invested in building your account and page.
82 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread*Edit, just looked back on these and it really was outright deception. They would spam messages by your contacts written in the first person "I would like to connect", "I'd like to add you to my professional network." signed by them. Impersonating people for profit is definitely on the wire fraud spectrum. Screw that guy.
This early behaviour made LinkedIn utterly toxic amongst the tech community in the early days. Nobody using them would be offered a job, as any applicant using LinkedIn would be demonstrating they are clueless (or worse, endorsed this behaviour).
Quite how LinkedIn managed to overcome this and have people trust them (!) I will never be able to understand.
I held off from joining LI for years after that.
I know a guy who developed for a company who over time "became" a little shady. At one point they were simple apps and this dev was working for them on contract so he put out some one time apps, his personal account was associated for a while (bad choice).
Anyway he leaves and joins another company and suddenly that company is banned from the Play Store. Took awhile to figure out that his previous employer (and some mysterious sub companies) were banned at the same time and presumably associated through this guy who again at his new employer had his personal account tied in some way.
And in fairness his new employer very much could have looked like a shadow company created by the first.
Keep that stuff separated.
Which is what sketchy spam companies do...
We're talking about a practice that is intended to avoid abuse detection. In the case of the non-sketchy parties, they're hoping to avoid false positives, but they're still doing the same thing. I'm not criticizing, I'm pointing out irony. When legitimate users have to do the same things as sketchy users, your abuse detection sucks.
Great point and I fully agree.
There is by necessity far more scrutiny on this activity.
Don't risk your main account by running ads, uploading apps, etc. Get a dedicated account for that.
Yes, sorry :( I've heard of similar things happening with Facebook.
In 2020/21 I was working from home like many people. I'd been lucky enough to get an RTX3080 for my new computer build and decided to experiment with mining ETH during downtime - it was winter and the office was cold anyway...
"Made" a few hundred bucks over the course of a couple of months and had it in Coinbase. They had a setup where you could sell for USD and deposit in a Paypal account, so I logged into mine - which I hadn't used in a few years - and deposited the funds.
Shortly after, my account was frozen for suspicious activity. I was told that there was no way to reverse this or obtain any further info or explanation. The funds were not returned to my Coinbase account.
In the end I just said screw it and chalked it up as a learning experience. I hadn't really created anything of value so I didn't feel as angry as if I'd been cheated out of actual work. Still, it pissed me off that as far as I can tell, Paypal essentially stole a few hundred dollars from me and there was nothing I could do about it.
I had figured that by using "legit" services and following along with all of their KYC/tax policies I would be safe. In retrospect I probably would've been better off cashing out via some questionable crypto exchange. Haven't messed with any of it since.
1) If you do not own the hardware your data lives on and the entire software stack to access and use your data, then you do not have control of your data and you may lose it at any time.
2) There is no such thing as computer security. If your data is on a networked computer, it should be considered semi-public.
Closed-source and for-profit companies are constantly trying to take control of your data away from you and reassure that it is safe and secure, but it is not. You must be prepared for your data stored in someone else's services to be destroyed or made public at any time. I'm sorry you learned this one the hard way :(
If it's any consolation, a LinkedIn account is not required for getting a job. I've never had one and I have a career I'm very happy with. I can't speak to getting funding or payment processor stuff, but I have a hard time believing it's a hard requirement there, either.
These are the effects of unregulated capitalism: monopoly, walled gardens, no right to appeal
The verification process failed once or twice for me, but I finally got it done, and my account was restored within 24 hours - and with no details about the actual "supicious activity" that triggered events.
Still, there was very little way to communicate with them about it; the r/LinkedIn community has a stickied post about it, with some links that do not require an active account.
It's worth noting that I'd also been flagged by Cloudflare for extra checks for a while; I also changed my browser's User Agent and it resolved that.
Or even better let a lawyer do it for you.
Because there are actual negative consequences if they don't.
EU/GDPR had the right approach -- it's necessary to create negative consequences in order to force companies to invest sufficiently in support.
We're learning our lesson and rebuilding around http://www.ottawa-rust.ca/ rather than being beholden to anybody.
Any suggestions on meetup alternatives we can harness without becoming dependent?
In the UK/EU, the GDPR gives protection against such automated decision making. i.e. You have the right (and the ability!) to appeal to a human to sort out cases like this.
More info here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
The only exception is that I know some companies use LinkedIn as essentially their job application process, but this isn't common—when I had to apply for hundreds of jobs after getting laid off at the end of 2022, I updated my LinkedIn profile but then never interacted with LinkedIn at all in the process of applying.
I half wonder if they're flagging behavior like yours as suspicious because most real humans have stopped interacting with their platform.
I know that to some LinkedIn is very important. But to me, I’ve managed completely fine. Been able to get work and have jobs without ever having a LinkedIn profile.
When I apply for a job, I provide CV, cover letter and a link to my GitHub profile.
Maybe some of the places I’ve applied to in the past have passed on me for not having a LinkedIn profile included. I wouldn’t know. No one ever said anything about it to me. But they may have filtered out my application for it. Regardless, I have been able to get work and get jobs.
That said, I've also never been directly asked for such a profile, if it was a field in a form I don't remember it being mandatory and I don't even remember when I made my LI account, or when I actually started to input more than my name...
If asked, I honestly said that I didn't want to associate myself with a site that made such heavy use of dark patterns and felt so very, very sketchy to use, and everyone respected that answer (at least to my face).
(I did have to create a LinkedIn account once, for the sake of a previous employer who wanted their small company to not look like it was just the founders who worked there, but I made it using the company email address and never updated it after creation, so I don't really count that as ME using LinkedIn, more my employer through me.)
The purpose of LinkedIn for most people is to keep their business contacts and to look for jobs. Of course some use it to appear to be a “thought leader”.
Do you think just because you don’t use LinkedIn to apply for jobs no one does?
This is like the old Slashdot meme “I haven’t owned a TV in over a decade. Do people still watch TV”?
I think that because I don't it's not essential (if it were essential I wouldn't be able to avoid it), and I think that treating a social media platform as an essential part of your livelihood is unhealthy for reasons like this.
I'm not excusing LinkedIn from culpability here, just offering hope that there is life after LinkedIn.
I’ve had 8 jobs since I’ve had a LinkedIn profile in 2012. Three have come from reaching out to companies on LinkedIn and 2 from companies reaching out to me. I
The root of the issue in my case is probably caused by my camera's low quality pictures from a lack of AI post processing since I use Graphene OS. It sucks that you can no longer easily contact a human when you're really stuck.
But you logged in, into social media.
However, it's been years and this trend doesn't reverse and only gets worse.
Well, it shouldn't be. You shouldn't tie your livelihood to a single unpaid account.
Lots of things "shouldn't" be, but are, thanks to the tech industry.
Unfortunately, your response amounts to little more than, "Simply go back in time and do things differently!" In other words, you're not helping him.
Or a single paid account. Being a paying customer in these situations buys you nothing.
* Go through LinkedIn Business support (https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/contact-us) instead of the consumer support chat
* Try the EU data rectification form (https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/TS-DRF)
* It sounds like other sites are showing captchas too, which might be a broader issue. I would try a different browser, clean your cookies etc., and potentially go to a coffee shop or VPN into a clean IP (not a commodity VPN provider). X and LinkedIn (or whoever LinkedIn uses for identity verification, and potentially Cloudflare) may have flagged your IP.
There's a possibility that there might be a "network effect" going on, where activities in other contexts are being used to score the LinkedIn context. I have no idea what might be going on in other venues, but they may affect/be affected by the LinkedIn stuff.
I recently completely abandoned my Faecesbook account, because they flagged the third post I made as spam. The posts weren't spam. I was sharing new releases of my apps with my friends, but the bot saw App Store Link, and automatically assumed "spam."
I'm not going to keep trying, and I'm not going to appeal, because that may actually affect my accounts in other venues, that I care about. The only reason that I kept the FB account, was to provide Service to a group. They no longer need me, and I really couldn't care any less about FB, so ... asta la vista, baby.
Also, my feed is full of posts that are just past deadline. Guess I realize just how weird this platform is.
F*ck LinkedIn. You don't need it to get a job. I'm living proof. My profile has barely anything on it now.
They're amongst many companies who hate to provide minimal service to their "product." (Google, I'm looking at you.)
As for your ID issues, I had similar trouble when I lost my common sense and agreed to take a selfie while applying for an apartment in a new area. Several attempts to land thru perfect photo of my ID that they said wasn't verifiable (not sure why, folks, since my ID photo was nearly a decade old) and I gave up.
I would never do the same for a social media profile, so i recommend fighting back. Protect your privacy, ng friend, it's the last remaining bit of leverage you have.
I work remotely and have since 2020, the only way that anyone from BigTech of my current company would have reached out to me was via LinkedIn.
I’m sure if I were still in Atlanta I could get a run of the mill enterprise CRUD job based on my local network.
The final nail in the coffin for Linked in must surely be LLMs, since at least my picture of LinkedIn is that it's filled with people who post barely sentient text about how they are excited about random uninteresting things.
John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has a very popular website and he said a couple of weeks ago that his traffic still hasn’t recovered from when Google shut down Reader.
In other words, even if you do have a website, no one will organically go to it instead of using one of the “aggregators”
> MySpace is a favela. You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug.
> You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!
> You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum. It's a squelette.
— Bruce Sterling, Reeboot 11 Keynote[0]
0. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech...
Try to make a pseudoanonymous account nowadays without phone number for 2FA or "security". You get banned on so many places. And even if you play ball they arbitrarily cut you off since some principal component analysis put you outside some parameter range.
>At times, I wonder if I'm just getting a response from robots or whether the support team just does not care about what I am going through right now.
I think they just pass or fail support tickets randomly due to pressure to close tickets.