LinkedIn is the worst social media I've ever seen
I'm a newcomer, I’d never used LinkedIn before until I joined three months ago. Since then, I've been banned twice and shadow-banned several times.
1) Right after I created my account, I got shadow-banned. My friends couldn’t find me, and my profile wasn’t accessible via direct link. This issue wasn’t resolved until I contacted support; they confirmed that restrictions had been placed on my account and then removed them.
2) I shouldn’t even have to mention this, but as a professional in my field, after that incident I always ended up on the very last pages of search results for keywords related to my field. People without those keywords in their resumes, or whose work isn’t at all related to the field, kept being ranked ahead of me. I can’t say I was deliberately pessimized, but that’s exactly how it appears.
3) Some time later, I decided to get Premium and paid with my own card (issued in another country, with the same name as on my profile and my passport). That’s when I received the first restriction: I was locked out of my account and couldn’t sign in until I contacted support. They made me take a photo of myself and of my passport, and after that they lifted the restrictions and apologized.
4) Everything seemed to be going along normally, yet I remained stuck on the last pages of search, being outranked by completely irrelevant profiles, until I decided to write a post about my own article on Medium. Immediately after publishing the post with a link to Medium, I received a second restriction. I was locked out of my account, couldn’t access my messages or interview invitations, and even missed a call because of this. They once again required me to submit a photo of myself along with a copy of my passport. Although they eventually restored my account, this time the process took 4–5 days, which caused me to miss an interview.
5) Now my profile is accessible via direct link, but I’ve disappeared from search. No one can find me, and hardly anyone visits my page. My post was hidden while support was "sorting out" my account, and I lost all the potential post views it would have gained because it wasn't featured in the recommendations.
All of this happened within the first three months of using LinkedIn. I’ve never seen a more appalling social media, one so full of dark patterns and outright abuse towards its users, forcing them through humiliating identity verification processes and hiding them from search.
Needless to say, I have never violated any of the platform’s rules. I don’t spam, I don’t bother people, and I don’t advertise anything. Meanwhile, my friend, whose account is over five years old—can do whatever he wants. He uses VPNs, changes his profile location several times a week, and switches his VPN location from Dubai to Europe multiple times a day without ever facing any restrictions.
And yes, I completely forgot to add: when your account gets restricted, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a premium user or not — the treatment is equally poor and the response is equally slow.
I’ve never seen a worse social media, and I’d be thrilled if a worthy competitor to LinkedIn ever emerged, I’d be one of the first to join.
BONUS: This content was originally posted on reddit, quickly became popular in the LinkedIn subreddit and was then deleted by moderator who works for M$ (which owns LinkedIn). Frankly, it feels like the whole LinkedIn subreddit is highly censored by him.
136 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadFor what it is worth, I do not. I have only had an account there for a brief period of time when I was first looking for a job after university. Then, when Microsoft bought it, I deleted my account.
When I was looking for a job afterwards, I had to go on an active look-out. I reached out to 10s of companies manually. I got ignored or immediately rejected most of the time. My success rate from me reaching out to an actual offer was about 3 %. But I guess for an average person that is to be expected.
Looking for any job is easy. Looking for a good job takes time.
Back in the olden days that hit rate would have seemed quite normal. I can remember mailing (mail not email) 20-100 letters with CVs for job applications. Each covering letter was hand signed and some were personalised for the target. Each envelope would have had something like a 30p stamp on it and running my printer was rather more expensive and slower than now.
That was the early 1990s in the UK.
[Edit: grammar]
Not that LinkedIn has great ethics around dark patterns: LinkedIn's original dark pattern growth hacks like the "find contacts" feature linked to your email that made it very easy to accidentally send connection requests to anyone you'd ever been included in an email chain with were particularly inappropriate and the "someone from x looked at your profile" stuff always strikes me as a bit creepy. But nobody shadowbans users as part of their growth funnel.
And whilst LinkedIn is actually surprisingly useless for genuine business conversation, I'm not sure the mad people recounting Things That Didn't Happen which impart Important Business Lessons for likes are any worse than that sort of person on other social networks pushing much weirder and angrier stuff these days....
In the end I got fired, so I'm actually forced back into the LinkedIn maelstrom of mediocrity but against my will, and without even the grace of my own grim resignation to spur me in to action.
It's not "social media" in the same vein as other platforms.
I’m not saying that LinkedIn is great, but the post feed is entirely optional.
Anecdotal, but it seems the mobile app resets those settings every so often so you start to get spammed with crap you don't want to read.
I eventually just blocked the linkedin app from sending any notifications and rely on the emails which I have filters on.
Does anybody here have any experience searching for jobs without a linked-in? I'd be curious to know how much an effect that would have on future job searches.
If they don't list the companies they claim to have worked at or have no connections to them its a red flag.
Prepare for a long mission!
ThatsThePoint.jpg
https://www.linkedin.com/
My situation to avoid posting the same thing in multiple places: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050578
To me it's really weird they're taking such elaborate measures to ban legitimate paying users when the site is completely infested with AI/bot spam anyway. They seem out of their depth. Oh, and as an extra screw you, they're still billing me, because of course they are.
But specifically, what had occurred was that I noticed I had nearly fallen for an LLM-bot clone or takeover account from my contacts in my DM directing me to this “great recruiting firm” that looked to be just an identity docs siphoning scheme.
That caused me to notice a bunch of new 1st-degree connections I hadn’t added, all of which were profiles purporting to be Chinese AI researchers. No clue if they were real people and I didn’t spend time to investigate before doing exactly what you describe - change of password and enable 2FA, with the added step of trying to report the suspicious circumstances to the obvious security@ etc email addresses… ALL attempts of which bounced with messages telling me to use the LinkedIn platform to report security issues, as those email addresses are not monitored. (lol)
Of course, when I reluctantly tried to capitulate and report the matter using the links from the bounce messages, I found I could not, since my account was suddenly suspended for “suspicious activity”, and the kicker was that in order to unsuspend it, they wanted me to upload scans of my government ID! Yes, they wanted me to do the suspicious sort of activity I was wanting to report was happening on their platform in order to use the very platform I suspected someone had already pilfered my identity through. I waited a week or so, too disgusted and angry and ready to write them off until, well.. oh yeah, a job. my contacts. sigh
Of course, that’s also another example of the insecure patterns companies force on their users and employees while at the very same time giving them training to not do exactly those things, and exhibiting all the red flags they point out the employee needs to be aware of as indicators of phishing, etc.
I was with a company that outsourced their security policy training and compliance to a company that sent “URGENT” emails from phish looking custom domains incorporating our company’s name, and all the other red flags that told me not to do the things it asked. (so I didn’t, and instead reported each one to our internal security team. It was funny until it wasn’t.)
Hey… Nice. There’s that therapeutic rage-typing I never got around to, and this comment almost brings my comment back on topic. I feel a little better anyway. Thanks all!
I wrote a ~50 LOC browser extension that always redirects away from the feed to your profile. Works great, sideload and forget.
https://github.com/classvsoftware/nofeeds
Sideloading eliminates this risk completely.
If I can be bothered replying, I tell them it's open source, they can just use the code for free. Eventually if I push them on it, they tell me they just want to acquire the users, and don't care about the extension. I wonder just how many extensions are compromised this way, it's a mess.
I'm not sure how this has become the go-to method for every site that needs person verification, and it's kinda terrifying because you just know they keep all of it stored somewhere forever with half assed security and the whole DB will get leaked sooner or later like it always is, leading to so much identity theft it's not even funny. The only camera that should ever get to see anyone's passport is the border police scanner.
And I'm sure they say they delete all of it after verification, and then probably laugh about it afterwards if anyone believes that bullshit.
That most financial regulations targeting bad actors end up constraining or disempowering regular people is a feature, not a bug. This is a really good thread: There is no freedom without the freedom to transact.
https://nitter.net/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083#m
I am not familiar with their internals but am assuming they deal with spam/scams and you are an unfortunate casualty.
You want them to censor more people?
"Agree?"
That said, it's not completely valueless. I keep it around to see what old coworkers are up to these days(career wise). I've also gotten a job from a recruiter who found me there. I'm guessing one or both of those are the only reasons anyone keeps it around. The content is pretty bad.
I'm in ER, my father has just died.
This is what it thought me about B2B sales.
Read more
EPolanski is one of the best b2b sales people in the universe!
#goodtogreat
— /s of course :)
Perhaps it could be better, but a lot of people would pay a lot for a single good job offer. And you accepted it.
I will say though the social aspects in specific are completely value-free, IMHO. It's just business-Facebook. I've never read nor made a single post on LinkedIn, and can't envision a time I would, and every post I've seen elsewhere screenshotted seems fucking unhinged.
So like, these features: professional networking, private messaging, as an archive of your work history: sure. Those work and are good. Everything else where it tries desperately to be a social network nobody asked for: garbage. Bin it. Could probably cut the operating cost of the website by 96% if you did, too, with the added benefit of not needing to send me dozens of fucking emails begging for engagement.
I agree, LinkedIn is full of people performing their career as social media and posting selfies. But there is also useful information from orgs and people who moved off Twitter and shifted their weight to LinkedIn.
Twitter was a unifying platform (maybe that was just accumulated through time) and the shakeup has benefited LinkedIn.
you know, like that famous quote: some people are more equal than others.
or something like that anyway, I cannot be arsed to check for the exact one, because it's pathetic shit, not important.
iirc it is from either of these two books by George Orwell: animal farm or 1984.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Most social media doesn’t tie directly to your work and profession. They all suck, but LinkedIn has a way uniquely painful way of hurting people.
Though there seems to be a steady stream of people who have a sick day then post photos on IG of what they were actually doing.
I genuinely might prefer reading AI-generated crap, because then I feel better about humanity.