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Wasn’t downloading contacts from gmail standard for bootstrapping social networks? I know Facebook did that and I’m fairly certain Snapchat and Twitter did too.
by fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Wasn’t downloading contacts from gmail standard for bootstrapping social networks? I know Facebook did that and I’m fairly certain Snapchat and Twitter did too. This doesn’t excuse it, but I generally recall this as being sort of a standard onboarding process in ‘07 or so.
- byset 6y agoLinkedIn was much worse as they used dark UX patterns to trick you into letting them spam all your contacts with invitations to “connect”.
- easytiger 6y agoCorrect. Pretty much each time you logged in it tried to do it. Scummy in the extreme
- mavhc 6y agoAnd that's how they got $26 billion
- lopis 6y agoYup. They used to (or maybe still do) have 5 pages of "Do you know these people? What about these?" each time I logged in, and in one of the pages it would ask to connect to your contacts. I don't know how but they actually tricked me into do it that, and all my gmail "contacts" (read: anyone i ever sent an e-mail to) received an invite to connect to me. I received hundreds on new connections over the following days. I closed LinkedIn last year when I realized I never got anything remotely good out of it. It's a terrible place to find jobs. There is no lack of websites that do the same, but better.
- milkytron 6y agoI deleted my LinkedIn years ago because of their shady practices. Last time I went job hunting, Dice provided such a better experience.
- gurkendoktor 6y agoNot just _from_ Gmail, also to it: Google+ onboarding asked me for my email credentials when I went through it for a throwaway account.