I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is.
It has a lot of potential, but is completely ruined by the social media aspect and their attempt at making it yet another cesspool like Twitter or Instagram, all the way down to the algorithmic feed, likes and reactions.
They should step away from the nonsense and make the tool (because yes it should be seen as a tool and not a lifestyle) easier to use, not harder. Stop getting in my way trying to make me use the algorithmic feed (it forgets your choice after a few hours) or nagging me to add a profile picture (I've said no for 2 years, why are you still trying?) or certain profile details I might not want to share, or "following sources" (whatever that means, I guess it's about following bullshit hashtags so you can have even more crap in your feed). The UI is absolutely terrible and slow for no good reason and makes it painful to use.
The worst is that you might think "okay well the free version for the plebs is nasty because it tries to drum up engagement, but the premium version should be better, right?" WRONG! The premium version is just as bad but instead of wasting just your time it wastes your time and your money.
> I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is.
That's because the "product" isn't the social network. The "product" is insight and access to much of the professional workforce. Sales and HR use it extensively.
The social network aspect is likely to keep people semi-engaged with the platform and voluntarily disclosing things that Sales and HR can use as signals.
Salespeople using the platform to try to sell me their products is what makes linkedin awful to me. It's one thing to buy ads, but it's awful to spam people's inboxes with messages.
That's kind of a chicken and egg problem though, Linkedin never developed much features outside of recruiting activities so that's the revenue they have.
Linkedin has a much bigger potential than that though, just the social aspect and networking impact could be pretty significant.
The feed is really quite awful. All social media is somewhat performative by nature, but LinkedIn's feed takes it to another level. It's not just performing for peers, but also performing for current and potential future employers.
Never have so many words been written that mean so little.
I find the performative aspect to makes LinkedIn the most charming out of social media "cesspools", actually. The often vapid content and the professional personal branding exercises and optimism narratives are at least positive compared to the culture wars being fought on Facebook and Twitter.
Quora is just as much of a cesspool, except more frustrating because casual users are actually expecting to get something out of it, as opposed to people posting productivity listicles on LI.
From my experience you can opt-out of the bullshit with no ill effects, at least in the software industry. My activity is completely empty, no posts, no likes, etc and that doesn't seem to hurt me. I mostly use the tool as a rolodex to keep in touch with professional connections and be reachable by recruiters.
The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?
This tool seems to function perfectly well as a rolodex and as a recruiter contact for you (its primary function for myself and most others) but somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users.
> The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?
What a strange personification of a vast social network. Who is it that you think is up awake late at night, desperate and pathetic? What middle finger? Recruiters can reach you, LinkedIn got paid for that.
They have metrics for conversions when they push for engagement. It works well enough. Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically. It would take more work to exclude you.
Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.
I think it's an understandable position as an individual. Many people are frustrated that all these applications are somewhat forced on them by social and professional engagements in the first place. Even if they haven't been forced on you it has become tedious to have no option to say "STOP NAGGING ME I WILL NEVER PARTICIPATE".
Add to this that even basic OS functions on mobile devices are constantly trying to get you to subscribe to various services and I think it's reached a boiling point for a vocal segment of people who just want to be able to go about their UI in peace. Unfortunately some data analyst at every big company has decided it's ok to have a popup every time the user visits to remind them to engage, and sign them up for 25 different email lists they have to unsub from individually, and have notifications pop up on their phone for no reason other than to get them to open the app, just because it results in 2% more users signing up for some service and it hasn't yet cause the other 98% to rage quit.
Disclaimer: this kind of behavior has been driving me insane for several years but there's almost no mechanism to avoid these issues on the whole. Also this isn't targeted at you in particular but just to illustrate what I think is a growing resentment amongst a set of users.
Baffled by how defensive you are of a former employer. Linkedin emailed my contacts without asking. And the same has happened to me from my contacts. I would get emailed repeatedly to join. I don't support these dark patterns nor those who have worked for companies that build those dark patterns.
OP is just voicing annoyance at a nag feature, nothing personal, just a UX critique. I'm not sure why it would matter to them if the feature increases engagement for others.
> somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users
I think it's a fair question to raise when the other function seems out of place or almost inappropriate for what the tool is trying to achieve. I feel like a professional platform should be trying to maintain a higher standard instead of decaying into yet another Instagram-like cesspool.
> What middle finger?
The ~2 years of analytic data showing that I have zero interest in the "features" they're trying to force me to use despite hundreds of attempts? I also find it unlikely to believe that I am literally the only one in this situation, thus why I am raising the issue.
> Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically.
Not specifically, but surely the platform should be built in such a way to respect the user's decisions? The various nags can have a use to engage new users (that might indeed not be aware of some of the features), but after a certain point it seems counter-productive and annoying. Imagine if every SaaS tool out there would always give you the "new user" onboarding experience with help popups all over the place and call-outs for "new" features, would you enjoy it?
> Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.
I don't think it's personal because I very much doubt I am the only one annoyed by this. The platform has been designed with zero respect for their users and looks like it's intentionally trying to be as annoying as possible. Even Facebook is more subtle in their shenanigans.
I think at this point, for most people, LinkedIn just serves as a repository for formatted resumes. Connections add a bit of value, as you can see where co-workers end up in the future.
The real problem is that for anyone with decent-sounding title, the amount of inbound spam is incredibly high. Endless outsourced development companies, recruiters, and random people wanting to connect for no discernible reason. Add to that a bunch of low-quality blogging, and I can't see how anyone can really enjoy spending time on the service.
Does anyone have insight on those random connections?
I'm at the bottom of the pile in terms of job title, and I think my profile is open to everyone, so I struggle to understand why a wood worker from half way across the globe would like to connect with me.
And it's not like they even try to talk to you or anything, so it feels like I'm missing something.
LinkedIn the product is an expensive tool for recruiters, and the pool of people on LinkedIn they can pull from. The feed is just fluff. In that regard, before the pandemic, LinkedIn was a big success.
I was an early user of LinkedIn, got my account on 2005. I delete my account on 2010, when I started working for Google. The logic then was simple, with Google on my resume I would hardly need LinkedIn to find another job, and the noise is just too much. Now 10 years passed (I worked for Google for 6 years) and I never missed it.
I really don't find any value of LinkedIn on the employee side (for the 5 years I had a LinkedIn account, there's zero job I got through LinkedIn). I know some of my colleagues (engineering managers) use LinkedIn as a recruiting/sourcing tool, but if talents don't find value on it, it's value as a sourcing tool will decline quickly. There are already a lot of interesting new ideas/companies in the sourcing market to eat its cake.
My guess would be that it's still riding the inertial wind. After a few years, if they still can't figure something new out, it will fail badly.
Please add your photo so creepy people can check you out and potential employers can determine if you are ugly, wrong color, wrong sex, uncool, or other discrimination.
If you really believe it has that much impact get it photoshop'ed. Game the system if you think that you LinkedIn picture has an effect. Pick your preferred pronoun or what ever.
Would be pretty awkward once you started interviewing, I'd imagine. I wonder how long one could keep it up though... perhaps during COVID it'd be possible to fake your race/gender all the way through the offer letter? I'd read that Medium article.
Doesn't seem to be a problem for me. I mean maybe if I added one it will raise the levels of "engagement" on my profile by a lot more but that level is already high enough to give me a steady stream of new work so I really have nothing to gain.
I wouldn't actually mind adding a picture now (I had a reason not to add one at the beginning, but this is no longer a problem) but at this point I will refrain from doing so out of principle to not show them an increase in their analytics data and encouraging their terrible practices.
A lot of them are sales people. LinkedIn as a people business needs a lot of sales reps and account managers to be in contact with Recruiters and other people involved with selling .
It is not just big, it is mega big. WhatsApp had world dominance and their product had to deliver instant messages, including photos, videos and other features over crappy internet connections and they managed to build, manage and sustain an amazing consumer product with a handful of people, so 16k for an online job board is laughable and embarrassing. It's just a website after all.
LinkedIn keeps suggesting me my mother who passed away 4 years ago. Every week, without fail, I get an email telling me that I should totally connect with her. It’s highly annoying and no matter what I do to my email preferences, I keep getting the same damn email.
Agreed. A couple of times a year i go try and purge the stuff they send. I do want to see the job searches that I've asked for, i don't expect to see any job posting I've even glimpse at, or anything vaguely associated with it.
In all seriousness someone at Linkedin is getting paid per email sent.
I'm baffled as well, especially given how mediocre their website is (and yes I know they have more than just their website).
Usually with those type of comments someone replies explaining that we don't get it and that you MUST have 20000 people to support a website like LinkedIn
selling... what? or LinkedIn has become corporate IG and people receive money for all this "this is how I succeeded" and "I overcame my weaknesses" unsolicited content.
Selling the premium subscriptions for recruiters I assume. But I agree that the platform is becoming a typical social-media cesspool which is a shame because it could be really great if they toned down the "social media" aspect of it and focused more on recruitment, better job ads (most of it is garbage) and essentially be a corporate rolodex (right now it's a pain to use because all of the noise, and the UI is terrible and slow).
Such a poor outcome for this price. Once was involved in recruiting and the recruitment platform had some integration and subscribtion with LI. So many hopeless zero-effort applications from India... and some weird from China (or at least from profiles claiming to be from there).
Almost all enterprise software companies have more people in sales than engineering. Microsoft is one big exception but LinkedIn must have more sales than eng.
And they prefer you to be managed by a salesperson over letting you be self-serve as they tie you into a guaranteed spend with them.
I spent years trying to untangle us from their managed services, but couldn't as they batched all discounts company wide. I've never worked anywhere where departments shared budgets (even in a 3 person startup, my marketing "budget" was kept separate to other elements, alas the CEO had other issues...), but they basically enforced us to.
That meant I had to pay for pretty much all the LinkedIn usage company wide out of my budget (to receive the discounts on different products as they only applied to one invoice - huge savings on purchasing separately from different budget lines, but still large sums of cash), but internal systems meant other departments couldn't contribute their share back to us.
And once you're in the door, you're then given about 3 different contacts (your sales contact, a follow up sales contact, and then some kind of "content success" person whose only job I could tell was sharing the occasional case study).
Literally everything your company pays for is out of individual departmental budgets? You can't do internal chargebacks, shared services, or move budget around if needed? I've never worked anywhere w/ the kinda crystal ball required to make rigid dept budgets work year-round, personally.
The barriers for shifting cash around were really high, and only allowed at half ends where it had to be returned centrally and then reallocated based on business case.
Less than a certain amount and you literally couldn't move it out of a department (spend it or lose it) - you could shift it inside the department easily enough, but we as marketing and them as HR couldn't do it.
> the kinda crystal ball required to make rigid dept budgets work year-round
Apart from some mild quarterly reforecasting, you mean you've never had the joy of trying to flight out an entire year's marketing spend at the start of the year before? And then have to justify every "variance" ;)
I haven't had that joy, thankfully. But I do routinely have the joy of working with execs to reallocate spend for my products/services. The era of carefully planning out purchases 12 mos in advance is long past. Unplanned, 6-figure software expenditures are the norm now -- and companies that can make that happen without too much bureaucracy are reaping the rewards.
True, though I've spoken to a number of brands who had the same experience as well. Also the same experience of the quality of traffic being terrible for the cost as well.
