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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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!
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
