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Ask HN: To LinkedIn am I just collateral damage of a barely functioning system
I have been on linked in for almost as long as I have been in tech. My current account has been in use since at least 2017.
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.
- sad555 2y agoWhat happened to you is the exact reason why I keep all Linkedin contacts on my local excel spreadsheet. Sure, if Linkedin decides to get rid of me will feel bad at first, but I won't feel powerless.
- qbqetell 2y agoI have always been agnostic of closed platforms. But for whatever reason, LinkedIn never came to my mind as a platform to also hedge against. LinkedIn just never crossed my mind in that respect. But right now, it has happened, and its too late.
- anonu 2y agoLinkedIn is the eBay of social networks. 1. captive audience due to early network effect - and no significant alternatives 2. innovation halted years ago 3. juice the profits: steady state OK growth forces deep cost cutting. The customer experience suffers first
- qbqetell 2y agoI am really sad to see it play out like this, because I always liked the founder. That's probably the reason why I never saw a problem like this coming.
- blululu 2y agoThey did the most spam-forward and deceptive growth-hack campaign of all the social networks that I have been forced to join. Straight up lying to everyone’s contacts: “person with hiring authority asked you to join today”, “Person you know professionally is waiting for your response to join”, “why are you keeping person with power over your professional life waiting?”. It was one of the largest misinformation campaigns ever created to bootstrap this obnoxious social network for grandstanding about work accomplishments. They hijacked everyone’s contact lists to spam their colleagues with emails that blatantly misrepresented things, with vague professional setbacks implied for not complying. Screw the jerk who presided over this deception. *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.