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Oh boy. When has it become fashionable to quite X and announce it to the whole world? LinkedIn is just a tool - it's usefulness depends on what your current ne

• bad_user 14y ago
  I totally agree with you, but there's something here you're missing. When I joined LinkedIn, I did so because I wanted to keep in touch with people I worked with, like you know, a curated Facebook - which works well, because the people I worked with aren't necessarily interested in pictures of my baby boy or of me getting drunk this Holiday season and this goes both ways. Unfortunately LinkedIn failed and failed hard at being that kind of social network. Nowadays the only thing I receive in return for my membership is Spam from incompetent recruiters that don't even bother reading my profile, and no matter what I do I can't turn those emails off (a perk you get for paying them), which is why I simply flag all LinkedIn emails as Spam. I feel like LinkedIn missed a great opportunity here and now it's too late, their role being filled in my life by Twitter, GitHub, Google Groups and even Facebook.
  • codegeek 14y ago
    "I wanted to keep in touch with people I worked with, like you know, a curated Facebook " I have used linkedin since its early days (06-07ish) along with facebook. I learnt that "keeping in touch with ppl" is quite different b/w fb which is personal vs. linkedin which is professional. fb is more engaging where u can share pictures, stories, wall posts, fun stuff whatever. But it is extremely difficult to keep oneself engaged on linkedin just to keep in touch. Other than sharing a status update and checking linked profiles, what else can you really do on linkedin actively? Thats why, if you try and use linkedin thinking along lines of facebook, you will fail. In my opinion and experience, linkedin is more effective about keeping track of who is who in the industry specfiically in industries/domains you are interested in. Lets say you found a job listing for a company somewhere. You can actually go to linkedin and try a search "Company xxx recruiter" or "company xxx talent aquisition" etc. You can probably get a result of actual recruiters who are on linkedin for that company. You can then try and reach out to them directly (through linkedin or whatever). Btw, I did this successfully once for a job posting that I was interested in and this possting was on the company's direct careers section. Insteaed of filling out "Apply now" crap, I found a direct recruiting contact in the division through some search skills on linkedin and called the guy directly. He was happy to talk to me since I was a good fit for the role. He said that the online application portal is probably going to reject me auto (dont ask why) and hence it was a good idea to find him.
  • beghbali 14y ago
    Have you tried Coderwall for connecting professionally? you actually get relevant technical tips from people you connect with so you are technically connected and learn from each other. There is Pitchbox (trypitchbox) for replacing recruiter spam with more meaningful career opportunity stream.
  • bitcrunch 14y ago
    "which is why I simply flag all LinkedIn emails as Spam...." That's really not what the "spam" button is for, and you probably know that. You most certainly could turn those emails off - just go to email settings and click "introductions only". There's even a link at the bottom of each email to adjust your settings. Don't make it more likely that my LinkedIn messages get marked as spam through Spamhaus or gmail algorithms just because you don't want to click twice to unsubscribe or prove some kind of hate-point. (source: used to take care of an opt-in service's email spam rankings and had tons of people not use the "easy unsubscribe", and others angry they couldn't get their expected/important notifications sometimes when it got sent to a spam folder)
    • jey 14y ago
      The problem is that they keep expanding the list of emails and auto-subscribing everyone to each new one. So LinkedIn really is behaving like a bad-faith spammer. And when I click the "unsubscribe" link in the email, I don't get one-click unsubscribed, but instead it just dumps me on the "user preferences" page, then I have to hunt for the email settings and the specific box to uncheck. The thing that infuriates me the most is when they send me a "reminder" email about an invitation I've already ignored. It's like they expect me to immediately log in and immediately respond to every piece of recruiter spam and "connection request" from people I don't know. Dear LinkedIn: If I'm ignoring an "invitation", it's because I don't care about it, and I'll just click the "decline" button the next time I happen to log in. I don't want the "invitation reminder" emails, and there is no setting that I can find to unsubscribe from the "reminders".
      • jonnytran 14y ago
        I don't know if it's still like this, but I actually went through a ton of trouble trying to unsubscribe from LinkedIn emails. I dug through all the preferences and unchecked all the email notification boxes, but the LinkedIn emails kept coming. After googling I found that I wasn't alone in having this problem, as if it were some kind of bug or something. At this point, I gave up and started marking all LinkedIn emails as spam. This all happened a while ago, so they may have fixed it by now. But quite frankly, I don't care. I would delete my account, but many legitimate companies I've interviewed with specifically ask for my LinkedIn profile to keep in touch. It's kind of annoying. I've been using careers.stackoverflow.com as an alternative for an online resume, but it's unexpected to potential employers.
• VLM 14y ago
  The tool analogy breaks down in that most people don't can't won't own or use tools, and the popularity curve shows that although people with a basement full do exist, they're kind of rare and most people only use a couple. A better analogy for social networking is watching a drama TV show. I don't at all, which is supposedly really weird. But of those who do, they follow a bell curve where most people only follow a couple TV shows. So they've gotta periodically swear one off cold turkey. Like these posts you claim to dislike. Its much more like swearing off watching Survivor, than like giving up on the hammer.
• deleted 14y ago
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• azakai 14y ago
  > Would it sound absurd for someone to announce that they quit hammers tomorrow? If hammers were a very recent invention that had become a cornerstone of the modern workplace, then yes, it would be interesting to read a well-argued post about why someone was "quitting hammers."
• fusiongyro 14y ago
  Your argument would carry more weight if your analogy were better. But the fact is that social networks are what Dijkstra would have called a "radical novelty": "The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit.... It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name 'common sense', our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. This is the situation that is characteristic for the 'radical' novelty." (EWD 1036) Hammers don't care if we use them or don't. There isn't one big Hammer.com that produces all of them. Hammers are not constantly acquiring new features. Hammers aren't useful or not on the basis of how many other people use them. Hammers do not even have significant overlap with other tools. Hammer.com doesn't need to convince anyone to try hammers. Companies that make hammers want you to buy their brand, but they don't bother with trying to convince people they need them. Look at all the differences from social networks. Unlike a hammer, if nobody else is using LinkedIn, it's not useful to you anymore either. If everybody quits using LinkedIn but you, LinkedIn won't have any revenue, even though you're not paying to use the service. If everybody quit using hammers for stupid reasons, there wouldn't be anything stopping you from using them; in fact, any hammers you already own would continue to work. LinkedIn could just vanish despite your protests. LinkedIn is pretty unlike a hammer, so I don't find your argument holds all that much water. It's a social network, so it's of interest and on-topic here when people decide to leave. It's interesting, because many people here are building their own startups and many of them are social networks. They survive or die on being used. If there were great insights in this article about how to retain users, it would be especially interesting, but knowing that there is a general malaise about this one is still information, and the article is still well-written and I still feel I got my nickel's worth from it.
  • TY 14y ago
    LinkedIn and hammers have one thing in common: they are tools to get something else done, they are not the end game. In that they are similar, in everything else they are not. This commonality (both being tools) is crucial to the reason that I chose hammers and not apple pies, "Dance Dance Revolution" games, Iron Man animated series or the Federal Reserve as examples for my analogy. These would not hold any kind of substance at all (liquid or otherwise). Each tool has its own place and time. If there's a recession and Cap finds himself unemployed, then LinkedIn will be much more valuable to him despite the minor inconveniences that it might cause (i.e. spam). In fact these inconveniences might become a welcome and even desired feature of the product. My point is that renouncing tool X when you can't find a use case for it has become a fashion of sorts that irks me. Please note, that I don't deny anyone the right to follow this movement, but I also reserve the right to be annoyed by it and share my emotional state and receive validation that such state is shared by a large number of other people, at least according to the upvotes on my post.
• wpietri 14y ago
  Maybe if you read them more thoughtfully, you'll get more out of them? Hammers are individual tools. LinkedIn is purely social. Most people only used it because other people were using it. If people are quitting it, then it might be good to announce that as well. Certainly that's the only significant way to pressure LinkedIn into improving things. Of course, this being the internet, people do talk about which hammers they use: http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/1659 http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/1659
• martinp 14y ago
  The problem is that there is a ridiculously large, and ever-increasing number of tools available. So determining which ones provide you value and which ones you can do without has become a skill in itself. This especially applies to our field where new websites, services, platforms, frameworks and even programming languages appear pretty much every single day.