9 ms·

LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

313 points by QUFB 11y ago

georgemcbay 11y ago
LinkedIn is a worthless piece of spammy shit of a website these days. I haven't bothered deleting my account but I haven't logged into it in like a year now and any mail I get from them that somehow makes it through the filters is reported as spam. I can only surmise they made this change to make it harder for (more) people to bail because they know how dreadful using their site is now and this is an easier "fix" than a Dominos-style mea culpa and positive changes.
- anish_m 11y ago
  I have the same opinion about them. worst UI. Useless emails. You have to pay them money for no reason.
- fletchowns 11y ago
  LinkedIn really is one of the worst websites I've ever used. I wish there were viable alternatives.
  - markcerqueira 11y ago
    Are you for real or just exaggerating to add some unneeded emphasis to your disdain of LinkedIn? While I don't think LinkedIn is the shining star, it's definitely not one of the worst websites I've ever used; it's actually been quite helpful for connecting with people.
    - fwn 11y ago
      I can't talk about the interface but for people who don't have an account there, this website is absolutely hostile. (think: much worse than most) I'm a calm person but I needed serious gmail filter tinkering to catch all those we-want-you-to-join-or-feel-bad emails.
      - markcerqueira 11y ago
        I think the worst thing they do is ask you to connect with your email account and then they continually spam your contacts to join LinkedIn. It's bad, but they're not the only ones doing that. Interface-wise it's not that bad, but I don't use all the features (free user) and don't spend much time on there.
      - ghostly_s 11y ago
        I'm not following... you're getting emails from LinkedIn even though you haven't signed up? You mean those 'I accidentally clicked a button without reading it and it spammed all my contacts' emails from current members? Ironically, LinkedIn is the only site I've encountered where non-members get more access than (free-tier) signed in users. I regularly open a profile in a private window via Google search because it won't show me 3rd-degree connections without paying for them, but will happily share those profiles with Googlers...
        stilldavid 11y ago
        > I'm not following... you're getting emails from LinkedIn even though you haven't signed up? You mean those 'I accidentally clicked a button without reading it and it spammed all my contacts' emails from current members? As with many others, I get these constantly: "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." with seemingly no way to disable them. You can stop them for that one person's 'invitation', but invariably someone else will start the process over again. I have a filter set up that sends all LI email to trash > Ironically, LinkedIn is the only site I've encountered where non-members get more access than (free-tier) signed in users. I can't even imagine how this is defensible. This kind of behavior doesn't give me any reason to want to make an account.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - notahacker 11y ago
      Can't speak for the original poster but I'd say, without exaggeration, that in relation to what it could be, given its inputs, LinkedIn is the worst website I've ever used. Even if you consider the number of design dark patterns used and deliberate content obfuscation to be justifiable from a business perspective, they manage to screw up things they don't have an excuse for. The jobs board has an abundance of jobs, unrivalled data to match people with them, and yet shows me very few, with very poor relevance, and big, shiny logos in lieu of a decent headline. LinkedIn Groups was the clunkiest discussion service I've ever seen (although they seem to have tightened it up a bit) which must be part of the reason why article spam vastly exceeds anyone's desire to have significant discussions in there. The UI feels cheap, tacky and glossy and my browser feels like it's choking on the infinite scroll. Even the part of the site which is well executed also happens to be the repository of the world's dullest linkbait...
  - toephu2 11y ago
    Try whitetruffle. Much less useless spam.
- iaw 11y ago
  They're fighting a symptom instead of the disease.
- dm2 11y ago
  Some sites just give off a vibe that prevents me from ever trusting them, LinkedIn is the most predominant in that category and I have never been able to put my finger on exactly why. The email proxy apps and the pay to see who viewed your profile aspects don't help. I'm not saying that it's any worse than any other sites, but LinkedIn has always felt like a shady company, like they're not on the users side. I was really hoping that the Google+ reboot would fulfill the niche market that LinkedIn dominates, but it did not.
  - yankoff 11y ago
    The "best" feature they have is automatically sending notifications to all your peers (and through email) when you change one little thing in your profile. And they show specifically what you edited. You can disable it of course in settings, but you have to know about that. I've seen enough awkward situations come out of this. How is it even possible that they think it is okay?
    - gknoy 11y ago
      I can see the rationalization: I've added React and Javascript to my LinkedIn profile, so it's probably nice to publish that to recruiters that I'm connected with, or friends who can endorse them. Of course, I really don't want to spam them while I am rewriting prose about jobs until it's done, though, so it'd have been nicer if the spamming didn't happen until I pushed some kind of "publish" button.
  - roflchoppa 11y ago
    its because they tell the user that you clicked their profile. what kind of bullshit is that, I wanna compare myself to other people without them knowing.
    - maximuscoolimus 11y ago
      Try using the Incognito Mode in Chrome. Of course, that will only give you a public view of a profile, but it seems to hide your identity nonetheless.
- dudul 11y ago
  Agreed. LinkedIn used to be great, but is not completely unusable. The website itself is awful to use, but the community is even worse. It is now just a tool for shameless recruiters to spam left and right. I spent a lot of time working on my profile, clearly explaining that I reject connection requests from strangers, that I ignore messages for open jobs which don't include a certain set of items and I still get spammed all day long. The problem is LinkedIn gets its money from recruiters who signed up for premium accounts so they cater to them.
  - nkantar 11y ago
    > The problem is LinkedIn gets its money from recruiters who signed up for premium accounts so they cater to them. I never thought about it that way, but it makes perfect sense. I deleted my account sometime last year (I think), and I deal with no shitty recruiters now.
zeeed 11y ago
They changed a process to make it slower?! o.O 3 days sounds an awful lot as if human intervention were required. What purpose would this serve?
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  "What purpose would this serve?" Lock-in is the only answer that makes any kind of rational sense. The harder you make it to get your data out of any software/website the more friction you add to people who may want to try alternatives.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  One optimistic possibility is so that if you leave your LinkedIn account logged in on a computer somewhere, another individual can't immediately export all your contacts, which could have competitive or security implications. It takes multiple days and you get notification of it happening.
  - coddingtonbear 11y ago
    I think you've hit the nail on the head, here.
    - georgemcbay 11y ago
      Extremely unlikely. I'm sticking with the non-optimistic theory. If it were really about protecting user privacy they could just have you re-enter your password to download the contacts, which is the industry standard thing to do when someone is logged in but doing something you think needs extra protection against them having accidentally left themselves logged in on a public system. 3 days is a good number for someone rage-quitting to let it slip off their radar and just lazily remain a user, not really a useful time period for security purposes.
- jlees 11y ago
  Since LinkedIn shut off their contacts APIs, folks have been looking for other ways to get at LinkedIn connections data. Export is an obvious solution - even though it requires some friction on the part of the end user, people are often willing to jump through a couple hoops if your app solves a real pain they have. By increasing the friction, people developing apps which try to make use of LinkedIn data have to try harder and inflict more friction on their users, hopefully (in LinkedIn's eyes) shutting down more of those apps for good.
lemevi 11y ago
LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing employees and if so ask them about the candidate. Governments, employers, media, LinkedIn itself and malicious types frequently use all that personal information people add on LinkedIn to cause harm. The users are what is for sale on this site. I'm not a LinkedIn user, it's not worth it.
- jcroll 11y ago
  Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are a bad thing.
  - dangerlibrary 11y ago
    As in high frequency trading, additional liquidity also equates to addition volatility. That can be good or bad, but a market needs to have enormous "stickiness" for additional liquidity to be an unalloyed benefit. Labor markets are a good example, with search costs high on both sides of the table, so maybe we grant that point. But there's relatively little evidence that recruiters actually reduce search costs, rather than shifting them around on balance sheets.
    - bduerst 11y ago
      I would argue that the job markets are incredibly sticky. With HFT, dollars are fungible and shares usually don't have a regional preference for their buyers. There also isn't a resource cost of acquiring, training, and integrating a new share into your portfolio. Recruiters typically work for for-profit businesses, that maximize returns on sales, meaning they are going to try to charge organizations slightly less than it would cost the organization to do it in house. The increased liquidity in job markets drops the amount of time it takes to match a job opening with a job seeker, which eliminates inefficiencies. You're not factoring in the income difference someone makes by being placed in the ideal job sooner.
curiousjorge 11y ago
why hasn't anybody disrupted linkedin yet? what would you like to see instead of linkedin? snapchat for business professionals?
- dudul 11y ago
  This is a good question. First, I think that LinkedIn includes too many features. Influencers, groups, pulse and stuff like that. I'm still trying to find a use for groups. Something more focused on networking would be great. Second, as I mentioned in a previous message, LinkedIn caters to recruiters because that's how they get their money, and to me it makes it insufferable. There is this running joke "Being a developer on LinkedIn is like being a woman on match.com". I believe it would be really hard to monetize a sane and clean website for professionals without turning into this spamming juggernaut.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    Ideally, the LinkedIn replacement would also be the recruiters replacement. Anything that eases communication and discoverability between companies and professionals without either getting flooded with barely-relevant matches.
- nkantar 11y ago
  I don't know that all business professionals can be catered to by the same service. I wonder if some (e.g., recruiters) have needs nearly diametrically opposed to others (e.g., developers). Or maybe it's just a matter of getting the feature set right, something that seems rather off on LinkedIn now.
  - irl_zebra 11y ago
    I think this is probably right. For example, the LinkedIn competitor OilPro is doing extremely well focusing on a specific oil and gas market segment. I think "LinkedIn for Computer Scientists" or more specific genres would do as well as OilPro.
    - 11y ago
richerlariviere 11y ago
I deleted my account 6 months ago. LinkedIn is untrustable.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 11y ago
Are there any tools out there that can create something akin to a LinkedIn profile for static hosting? Something like Jekyll?
- tarr11 11y ago
  Maybe something like h-resume? http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume
  - gknoy 11y ago
    Serendipitously, I also found something similar this weekend, but specifying one's resume in JSON rather than XML: https://jsonresume.org/ https://jsonresume.org/
    - BWStearns 11y ago
      Did that at one point. Lost the JSON file in a hard drive death though :/ The day prior to the crash I had wrote a note to put it in a git repo and then forgot. Otherwise it's a pretty nice way to manage a resume.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Part of the value that LinkedIn adds is that there is some degree of authenticity to the resumes. There are some API standards for background checks between businesses and agencies, so that could be a good place to start. You could offer authenticated profiles, where people can't lie on their resume about where they worked. Of course, LI could just implement this if you became too competitive to them.
  - chaostheory 11y ago
    > There are some API standards for background checks between businesses and agencies Can you list some or are you referring to LinkedIn?
    - 11y ago
kolev 11y ago
Time to abandon ship!
shiv86 11y ago
Linked in is the king of dark patterns and practices. I was foolish enough to sign up for a free 30 trial period (of course handing over credit card details with the expectation they wont just automatically charging me and seek my permission before charging). I didn’t check my cc statements for a few months and there you have it ...linked in charged me every month after the trail period ended.
- gknoy 11y ago
  Did you ever have trial magazine subscriptions? I cannot think of any subscription-based service (other than MMO subscriptions) where the implicit assumption was not, "Keep charging unless they cancel during the trial period". This behavior being so common is one of the reasons I have a nearly gut-level aversion to services that OFFER a free trial. I much prefer a free tier of service, with a clear indication of the upsell options. For services I like (like Toggl) that have a free tier of service, I am still skittish of the trials of "pro" tiers, precisely out of the fear that it might be a hassle to cancel, rather than a "we assume you're going to cancel". Everything I recall reading about setting up a subscription service suggests that the default-to-stay-subscribed method leads to more revenue (as people forget), and as customers we're accustomed to think, "well, that WAS my fault ...". In a normal subscription scenario, even, that probably is nicer to customers. However, for a __trial__, I would prefer to see an end of the paid service, rather than to start receiving bills.
- bduerst 11y ago
  I get what you're saying but your trial subscription example isn't that unusual. A better example of dark patterns is how they repeatedly try to get you to sync your email contacts by sneaking it in at random points, where you may accidentally click through it. Their website has also become a minefield of upsell links, some disguised as benign engagement (e.g. "Add a new skill") while others are much more spammy (e.g. "Follow this unrelated business which promotes through us").
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
ryandrake 11y ago
Not sure I share the experience w/LinkedIn that apparently the majority of HNers have. I get very, very few recruiter messages through LinkedIn. The ones I do get are thoughtful and do a very good job of matching skill-set, background, etc.--they have obviously read my profile and are not just fishing. This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see you have 12 years of development experience, how about this entry level position!!!" crap, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Either recruiters are getting better, or something I put in my profile has quieted down the garbage. Either way, I don't think there's much that I've put on that site that I'd feel the need to "export" so the topic of this article seems to be a non-issue. You folks don't have alternate copies of your resume and contacts somewhere?
- jlees 11y ago
  I also have found the recruiter email to have gotten a lot better recently. As an experiment (as my startup is hiring - I wanted to see what the candidate experience might be like these days), I expanded my LinkedIn profile to trigger as many recruiter-friendly tickyboxes as possible, expecting a deluge of spam. I got about five messages, all fairly well crafted and personalised to some extent. Honestly, I get more spam to my email address than InMail these days. I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender and writing a very terse summary for each job. Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. I wonder if by writing a more detailed description of my skills/experience/contributions, I somehow generate better inbound messages... Speaking to the point about "what would you export", I definitely have contacts who I am only connected through via LinkedIn; a key example being former colleagues whose personal email addresses I never got, and whose work emails I barely remember. I think it depends on the kind of network you have built there, though. The more work you've put into your LinkedIn connection pool, the more you want to export it.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    > I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender...Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. Alternate hypothesis: bad recruiters looking for software developers filter by gender... To be honest, I've had two emails from recruiters in three years, both highly targeted to specific terms in my profile, and I nearly accepted one of the jobs. Skipping those horrible spam-magnet keywords altogether is a good start.
pauljarvis 11y ago
I've never been on linkedin but i get 10-15 "requests to connect" every week - luckily i've filtered them to skip the inbox, since unsubscribing to them doesn't seem to do anything.
eonw 11y ago
actually, this feature was being exploited by spammers. a pending contact was still exportable.... so you add thousands of people, then export the list and send them email. easy way to gather targeted business email addresses that are worth money. as much as i may or may not like linkedin(i dont much), i think this little bit of info is useful when judging the reasoning behind the decision to turn it off.
- facepalm 11y ago
  If that was the reason, why not just remove exporting of pending contacts?
  - eonw 11y ago
    i am not a linkedin employee, i just know a few tricks that blackhats use. :) thus, i can not explain why they went full stupid instead of just fixing the issue.
itgoon 11y ago
Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn. Yes, it has led to actual, paying jobs. It takes some management on my part, but it's a lot easier than hunting around from site to site, or going to meetups, or any of that other stuff. Do I get spammed? Sure. That's why I have a specific email account for them. Some of the spam is quite informative. I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards. I get genuine requests, too. I take the time to respond to those just as genuinely. For all the talk of the importance of networking around here, I'm kind of surprised at the antipathy. It's very low effort, just a few minutes a week. I regard a lot of the complaints as symptomatic of the overall industry. I finally started going to meetups, and the signal-to-noise is just as bad, if not worse.
- vpeters25 11y ago
  > I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards. This would be great if it could be automated somehow: paste email to a macro job board and get links to matching posts.
  - akshat_h 11y ago
    It is a tradeoff. If you are looking for a job, or are new to the industry, linkedin is better than trying to build a professional network otherwise. After you have been in the industry for, say 15 years, and pretty much know most of the people working in your space, are highly specialized, then the recruiter emails will feel like spam. My guess is that for the first case, you aren't specific enough about yourself, so recruiters have a good chance of reaching you, based on your profile. After a certain amount of time, your profile readily doesn't distinguish your interests clearly. For example, a java developer tag at the start of one's career is quite different from a senior java developer who has understanding of internals of JVM. Recruiter may not know about the second case enough to be of much help.
- thoman23 11y ago
  > Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn. I don't get the hate either. When it comes time for your next job search, it's incredibly valuable to have a consolidated list of everyone you've ever worked with where you can see where they work now. When I was looking for some part time work while launching my (bootstrapped) startup, I reached out to about 50 people from my LinkedIn network and it worked out great for me. As for spam, I just filter and/or ignore it (yes, I get a ton of it, maybe 10+ recruiter emails a day).
rickyci 11y ago
you have to go to Connections and search a 1st connection name before seeing his/her email and contacts. You won't see that if u go straight to the person profile. What was previously a 1-click process is now more like a 3-click process. A resultant of Linkedin seeming to be incredibly agressive on monetizing?
phil_s_stein 11y ago
Linked In spammed me once when they reached some sort of milestone. The email had no remove-me-from-this-list link or way to tell Linked In that I didn't want to receive emails. I found the CEO's email address and forwarded it to him, asking him to remove me from the mailing list. He sent back a nasty email and deleted my account. I've not looked back and my life is exactly as it was, minus a few unwanted emails.
- dylanjermiah 11y ago
  Do you still have the email from Jeff?
  - caseysoftware 11y ago
    Wow, yeah. That would be an interesting one to read.
- city41 11y ago
  Please post the email. LinkedIn is scum, the more people know it, the better.
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  I should try that with the repeated "sign up" requests I get.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Please put up a copy of your letter, the semi-mythical "way to get off LinkedIn's mailing list"!
takee 11y ago
It's fairly easy to come up with a long list of shady practices that force me to not trust LinkedIn: 1. To start with, they sneaked in the request to access all your email contacts and constantly spam them in your name which can be embarrassing at times to say the least. 2. Their mobile apps do the same with your phone contacts, cleverly hiding the checkmark (in smallest font) to disallow the uploading of contacts. I have unknowingly let them look through my contacts at least two different times prompting me to never install their app again. 3. Letting others know that you viewed their profile. This is fine as long as you know about this feature but I bet that a bunch of us were taken by surprise in the early days to find out that our "online research" on someone was not private unless if you're incognito. 4. Charging you beyond the free trial period without any email or notification about it. I agree that many businesses do this but some of them like Amazon and Netflix are nice enough to allow you to disable the future payments before the trail ends. Also they tend to notify you about the payments. 5. Letting people have access to my email and other contact info even when I haven't accepted their request to connect. This may have been fixed with the recent change but may just have been one of those hidden features that led to their popularity with the recruiter world in the first place. I am sure I missed out a bunch of other things here but these are the reasons why I can never trust LinkedIn.
- suprgeek 11y ago
  - LinkedIn has employed "Dark Patterns" for a long time to scarf up your Address Book via your e-mail id. Then unless you are VERY careful you will end up spamming everyone with an invite. - They also employed a MTM attack on your mobile "Intro App" https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-in-the-middle-attack-experts/102683 https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-... - Have you noticed that the LI News feed is a high-noise collection of crap? - and on and on "Monetizing your users" is rapidly making that site useless for almost everyone.
  - colinbartlett 11y ago
    LinkedIn was the first in a long line of social networks I deleted starting 4 years ago. Not sure how anyone gets value out of enough to justify.
toephu2 11y ago
Stuff like this is why I never signed up for LinkedIn in the first place.
tubelite 11y ago
FYI: You can't export contacts from Facebook either. The API no longer supports getting the entire friends list (restricted to return only those friends who have also installed the same app). There is a "download all my facebook data" option, but that only gives you a plain "firstname lastname" list. No contact information there either.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I only use LinkedIn to find former coworkers and classmates. After that I email them directly. However I get lots of connection requests from recruiters. I always accept them. I figure that greatly dilutes whatever value linkedin might have once had because most of my connections are recruiters who wadte their time on me because I dont log in a whole lot.
Animats 11y ago
Did they remove that option even for paying users?
nileshtrivedi 11y ago
This link seems to still work for exporting CSV of contacts, including email addresses: https://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport https://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport
tdkl 11y ago
One of the main issues I had with LI personally (beside the already posted dark patterns) was the 3rd party scrapers who used the LI API to recreate their own listings with LI data. So this means if I changed the data on LI, the scrapers wouldn't update their own copies of the site. Even when I deleted my LinkedIn account I had to hunt down separate sites and go through emailing adventure to get the data removed. I want to be in whole control of my public data, that's why getting a domain and posting a blog is maybe more tedious but better at the end.
zeeed 11y ago
I requested my data when I commented first on this thread and just got the notification that it was ready. So it was 21h for me. Still way too much, but it's less than three days...

313 points by QUFB 11y ago

LinkedIn is a worthless piece of spammy shit of a website these days. I haven't bothered deleting my account but I haven't logged into it in like a year now and any mail I get from them that somehow makes it through the filters is reported as spam. I can only surmise they made this change to make it harder for (more) people to bail because they know how dreadful using their site is now and this is an easier "fix" than a Dominos-style mea culpa and positive changes.

anish_m 11y ago
I have the same opinion about them. worst UI. Useless emails. You have to pay them money for no reason.
fletchowns 11y ago
LinkedIn really is one of the worst websites I've ever used. I wish there were viable alternatives.
- markcerqueira 11y ago
  Are you for real or just exaggerating to add some unneeded emphasis to your disdain of LinkedIn? While I don't think LinkedIn is the shining star, it's definitely not one of the worst websites I've ever used; it's actually been quite helpful for connecting with people.
  - fwn 11y ago
    I can't talk about the interface but for people who don't have an account there, this website is absolutely hostile. (think: much worse than most) I'm a calm person but I needed serious gmail filter tinkering to catch all those we-want-you-to-join-or-feel-bad emails.
    - markcerqueira 11y ago
      I think the worst thing they do is ask you to connect with your email account and then they continually spam your contacts to join LinkedIn. It's bad, but they're not the only ones doing that. Interface-wise it's not that bad, but I don't use all the features (free user) and don't spend much time on there.
    - ghostly_s 11y ago
      I'm not following... you're getting emails from LinkedIn even though you haven't signed up? You mean those 'I accidentally clicked a button without reading it and it spammed all my contacts' emails from current members? Ironically, LinkedIn is the only site I've encountered where non-members get more access than (free-tier) signed in users. I regularly open a profile in a private window via Google search because it won't show me 3rd-degree connections without paying for them, but will happily share those profiles with Googlers...
      - stilldavid 11y ago
        > I'm not following... you're getting emails from LinkedIn even though you haven't signed up? You mean those 'I accidentally clicked a button without reading it and it spammed all my contacts' emails from current members? As with many others, I get these constantly: "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." with seemingly no way to disable them. You can stop them for that one person's 'invitation', but invariably someone else will start the process over again. I have a filter set up that sends all LI email to trash > Ironically, LinkedIn is the only site I've encountered where non-members get more access than (free-tier) signed in users. I can't even imagine how this is defensible. This kind of behavior doesn't give me any reason to want to make an account.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Can't speak for the original poster but I'd say, without exaggeration, that in relation to what it could be, given its inputs, LinkedIn is the worst website I've ever used. Even if you consider the number of design dark patterns used and deliberate content obfuscation to be justifiable from a business perspective, they manage to screw up things they don't have an excuse for. The jobs board has an abundance of jobs, unrivalled data to match people with them, and yet shows me very few, with very poor relevance, and big, shiny logos in lieu of a decent headline. LinkedIn Groups was the clunkiest discussion service I've ever seen (although they seem to have tightened it up a bit) which must be part of the reason why article spam vastly exceeds anyone's desire to have significant discussions in there. The UI feels cheap, tacky and glossy and my browser feels like it's choking on the infinite scroll. Even the part of the site which is well executed also happens to be the repository of the world's dullest linkbait...
- toephu2 11y ago
  Try whitetruffle. Much less useless spam.
iaw 11y ago
They're fighting a symptom instead of the disease.
dm2 11y ago
Some sites just give off a vibe that prevents me from ever trusting them, LinkedIn is the most predominant in that category and I have never been able to put my finger on exactly why. The email proxy apps and the pay to see who viewed your profile aspects don't help. I'm not saying that it's any worse than any other sites, but LinkedIn has always felt like a shady company, like they're not on the users side. I was really hoping that the Google+ reboot would fulfill the niche market that LinkedIn dominates, but it did not.
- yankoff 11y ago
  The "best" feature they have is automatically sending notifications to all your peers (and through email) when you change one little thing in your profile. And they show specifically what you edited. You can disable it of course in settings, but you have to know about that. I've seen enough awkward situations come out of this. How is it even possible that they think it is okay?
  - gknoy 11y ago
    I can see the rationalization: I've added React and Javascript to my LinkedIn profile, so it's probably nice to publish that to recruiters that I'm connected with, or friends who can endorse them. Of course, I really don't want to spam them while I am rewriting prose about jobs until it's done, though, so it'd have been nicer if the spamming didn't happen until I pushed some kind of "publish" button.
- roflchoppa 11y ago
  its because they tell the user that you clicked their profile. what kind of bullshit is that, I wanna compare myself to other people without them knowing.
  - maximuscoolimus 11y ago
    Try using the Incognito Mode in Chrome. Of course, that will only give you a public view of a profile, but it seems to hide your identity nonetheless.
dudul 11y ago
Agreed. LinkedIn used to be great, but is not completely unusable. The website itself is awful to use, but the community is even worse. It is now just a tool for shameless recruiters to spam left and right. I spent a lot of time working on my profile, clearly explaining that I reject connection requests from strangers, that I ignore messages for open jobs which don't include a certain set of items and I still get spammed all day long. The problem is LinkedIn gets its money from recruiters who signed up for premium accounts so they cater to them.
- nkantar 11y ago
  > The problem is LinkedIn gets its money from recruiters who signed up for premium accounts so they cater to them. I never thought about it that way, but it makes perfect sense. I deleted my account sometime last year (I think), and I deal with no shitty recruiters now.

zeeed 11y ago

They changed a process to make it slower?! o.O 3 days sounds an awful lot as if human intervention were required. What purpose would this serve?

georgemcbay 11y ago
"What purpose would this serve?" Lock-in is the only answer that makes any kind of rational sense. The harder you make it to get your data out of any software/website the more friction you add to people who may want to try alternatives.
JohnTHaller 11y ago
One optimistic possibility is so that if you leave your LinkedIn account logged in on a computer somewhere, another individual can't immediately export all your contacts, which could have competitive or security implications. It takes multiple days and you get notification of it happening.
- coddingtonbear 11y ago
  I think you've hit the nail on the head, here.
  - georgemcbay 11y ago
    Extremely unlikely. I'm sticking with the non-optimistic theory. If it were really about protecting user privacy they could just have you re-enter your password to download the contacts, which is the industry standard thing to do when someone is logged in but doing something you think needs extra protection against them having accidentally left themselves logged in on a public system. 3 days is a good number for someone rage-quitting to let it slip off their radar and just lazily remain a user, not really a useful time period for security purposes.
jlees 11y ago
Since LinkedIn shut off their contacts APIs, folks have been looking for other ways to get at LinkedIn connections data. Export is an obvious solution - even though it requires some friction on the part of the end user, people are often willing to jump through a couple hoops if your app solves a real pain they have. By increasing the friction, people developing apps which try to make use of LinkedIn data have to try harder and inflict more friction on their users, hopefully (in LinkedIn's eyes) shutting down more of those apps for good.

lemevi 11y ago

LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing employees and if so ask them about the candidate. Governments, employers, media, LinkedIn itself and malicious types frequently use all that personal information people add on LinkedIn to cause harm. The users are what is for sale on this site. I'm not a LinkedIn user, it's not worth it.

jcroll 11y ago
Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are a bad thing.
- dangerlibrary 11y ago
  As in high frequency trading, additional liquidity also equates to addition volatility. That can be good or bad, but a market needs to have enormous "stickiness" for additional liquidity to be an unalloyed benefit. Labor markets are a good example, with search costs high on both sides of the table, so maybe we grant that point. But there's relatively little evidence that recruiters actually reduce search costs, rather than shifting them around on balance sheets.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    I would argue that the job markets are incredibly sticky. With HFT, dollars are fungible and shares usually don't have a regional preference for their buyers. There also isn't a resource cost of acquiring, training, and integrating a new share into your portfolio. Recruiters typically work for for-profit businesses, that maximize returns on sales, meaning they are going to try to charge organizations slightly less than it would cost the organization to do it in house. The increased liquidity in job markets drops the amount of time it takes to match a job opening with a job seeker, which eliminates inefficiencies. You're not factoring in the income difference someone makes by being placed in the ideal job sooner.

curiousjorge 11y ago

why hasn't anybody disrupted linkedin yet? what would you like to see instead of linkedin? snapchat for business professionals?

dudul 11y ago
This is a good question. First, I think that LinkedIn includes too many features. Influencers, groups, pulse and stuff like that. I'm still trying to find a use for groups. Something more focused on networking would be great. Second, as I mentioned in a previous message, LinkedIn caters to recruiters because that's how they get their money, and to me it makes it insufferable. There is this running joke "Being a developer on LinkedIn is like being a woman on match.com". I believe it would be really hard to monetize a sane and clean website for professionals without turning into this spamming juggernaut.
- Zikes 11y ago
  Ideally, the LinkedIn replacement would also be the recruiters replacement. Anything that eases communication and discoverability between companies and professionals without either getting flooded with barely-relevant matches.
nkantar 11y ago
I don't know that all business professionals can be catered to by the same service. I wonder if some (e.g., recruiters) have needs nearly diametrically opposed to others (e.g., developers). Or maybe it's just a matter of getting the feature set right, something that seems rather off on LinkedIn now.
- irl_zebra 11y ago
  I think this is probably right. For example, the LinkedIn competitor OilPro is doing extremely well focusing on a specific oil and gas market segment. I think "LinkedIn for Computer Scientists" or more specific genres would do as well as OilPro.
  - 11y ago

richerlariviere 11y ago

I deleted my account 6 months ago. LinkedIn is untrustable.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Are there any tools out there that can create something akin to a LinkedIn profile for static hosting? Something like Jekyll?

tarr11 11y ago
Maybe something like h-resume? http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume
- gknoy 11y ago
  Serendipitously, I also found something similar this weekend, but specifying one's resume in JSON rather than XML: https://jsonresume.org/ https://jsonresume.org/
  - BWStearns 11y ago
    Did that at one point. Lost the JSON file in a hard drive death though :/ The day prior to the crash I had wrote a note to put it in a git repo and then forgot. Otherwise it's a pretty nice way to manage a resume.
bduerst 11y ago
Part of the value that LinkedIn adds is that there is some degree of authenticity to the resumes. There are some API standards for background checks between businesses and agencies, so that could be a good place to start. You could offer authenticated profiles, where people can't lie on their resume about where they worked. Of course, LI could just implement this if you became too competitive to them.
- chaostheory 11y ago
  > There are some API standards for background checks between businesses and agencies Can you list some or are you referring to LinkedIn?
  - 11y ago

kolev 11y ago

Time to abandon ship!

shiv86 11y ago

Linked in is the king of dark patterns and practices. I was foolish enough to sign up for a free 30 trial period (of course handing over credit card details with the expectation they wont just automatically charging me and seek my permission before charging). I didn’t check my cc statements for a few months and there you have it ...linked in charged me every month after the trail period ended.

gknoy 11y ago
Did you ever have trial magazine subscriptions? I cannot think of any subscription-based service (other than MMO subscriptions) where the implicit assumption was not, "Keep charging unless they cancel during the trial period". This behavior being so common is one of the reasons I have a nearly gut-level aversion to services that OFFER a free trial. I much prefer a free tier of service, with a clear indication of the upsell options. For services I like (like Toggl) that have a free tier of service, I am still skittish of the trials of "pro" tiers, precisely out of the fear that it might be a hassle to cancel, rather than a "we assume you're going to cancel". Everything I recall reading about setting up a subscription service suggests that the default-to-stay-subscribed method leads to more revenue (as people forget), and as customers we're accustomed to think, "well, that WAS my fault ...". In a normal subscription scenario, even, that probably is nicer to customers. However, for a __trial__, I would prefer to see an end of the paid service, rather than to start receiving bills.
bduerst 11y ago
I get what you're saying but your trial subscription example isn't that unusual. A better example of dark patterns is how they repeatedly try to get you to sync your email contacts by sneaking it in at random points, where you may accidentally click through it. Their website has also become a minefield of upsell links, some disguised as benign engagement (e.g. "Add a new skill") while others are much more spammy (e.g. "Follow this unrelated business which promotes through us").
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

ryandrake 11y ago

Not sure I share the experience w/LinkedIn that apparently the majority of HNers have. I get very, very few recruiter messages through LinkedIn. The ones I do get are thoughtful and do a very good job of matching skill-set, background, etc.--they have obviously read my profile and are not just fishing. This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see you have 12 years of development experience, how about this entry level position!!!" crap, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Either recruiters are getting better, or something I put in my profile has quieted down the garbage. Either way, I don't think there's much that I've put on that site that I'd feel the need to "export" so the topic of this article seems to be a non-issue. You folks don't have alternate copies of your resume and contacts somewhere?

jlees 11y ago
I also have found the recruiter email to have gotten a lot better recently. As an experiment (as my startup is hiring - I wanted to see what the candidate experience might be like these days), I expanded my LinkedIn profile to trigger as many recruiter-friendly tickyboxes as possible, expecting a deluge of spam. I got about five messages, all fairly well crafted and personalised to some extent. Honestly, I get more spam to my email address than InMail these days. I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender and writing a very terse summary for each job. Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. I wonder if by writing a more detailed description of my skills/experience/contributions, I somehow generate better inbound messages... Speaking to the point about "what would you export", I definitely have contacts who I am only connected through via LinkedIn; a key example being former colleagues whose personal email addresses I never got, and whose work emails I barely remember. I think it depends on the kind of network you have built there, though. The more work you've put into your LinkedIn connection pool, the more you want to export it.
- notahacker 11y ago
  > I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender...Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. Alternate hypothesis: bad recruiters looking for software developers filter by gender... To be honest, I've had two emails from recruiters in three years, both highly targeted to specific terms in my profile, and I nearly accepted one of the jobs. Skipping those horrible spam-magnet keywords altogether is a good start.

pauljarvis 11y ago

I've never been on linkedin but i get 10-15 "requests to connect" every week - luckily i've filtered them to skip the inbox, since unsubscribing to them doesn't seem to do anything.

eonw 11y ago

actually, this feature was being exploited by spammers. a pending contact was still exportable.... so you add thousands of people, then export the list and send them email. easy way to gather targeted business email addresses that are worth money. as much as i may or may not like linkedin(i dont much), i think this little bit of info is useful when judging the reasoning behind the decision to turn it off.

facepalm 11y ago
If that was the reason, why not just remove exporting of pending contacts?
- eonw 11y ago
  i am not a linkedin employee, i just know a few tricks that blackhats use. :) thus, i can not explain why they went full stupid instead of just fixing the issue.

itgoon 11y ago

Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn. Yes, it has led to actual, paying jobs. It takes some management on my part, but it's a lot easier than hunting around from site to site, or going to meetups, or any of that other stuff. Do I get spammed? Sure. That's why I have a specific email account for them. Some of the spam is quite informative. I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards. I get genuine requests, too. I take the time to respond to those just as genuinely. For all the talk of the importance of networking around here, I'm kind of surprised at the antipathy. It's very low effort, just a few minutes a week. I regard a lot of the complaints as symptomatic of the overall industry. I finally started going to meetups, and the signal-to-noise is just as bad, if not worse.

vpeters25 11y ago
> I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards. This would be great if it could be automated somehow: paste email to a macro job board and get links to matching posts.
- akshat_h 11y ago
  It is a tradeoff. If you are looking for a job, or are new to the industry, linkedin is better than trying to build a professional network otherwise. After you have been in the industry for, say 15 years, and pretty much know most of the people working in your space, are highly specialized, then the recruiter emails will feel like spam. My guess is that for the first case, you aren't specific enough about yourself, so recruiters have a good chance of reaching you, based on your profile. After a certain amount of time, your profile readily doesn't distinguish your interests clearly. For example, a java developer tag at the start of one's career is quite different from a senior java developer who has understanding of internals of JVM. Recruiter may not know about the second case enough to be of much help.
thoman23 11y ago
> Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn. I don't get the hate either. When it comes time for your next job search, it's incredibly valuable to have a consolidated list of everyone you've ever worked with where you can see where they work now. When I was looking for some part time work while launching my (bootstrapped) startup, I reached out to about 50 people from my LinkedIn network and it worked out great for me. As for spam, I just filter and/or ignore it (yes, I get a ton of it, maybe 10+ recruiter emails a day).

rickyci 11y ago

you have to go to Connections and search a 1st connection name before seeing his/her email and contacts. You won't see that if u go straight to the person profile. What was previously a 1-click process is now more like a 3-click process. A resultant of Linkedin seeming to be incredibly agressive on monetizing?

phil_s_stein 11y ago

Linked In spammed me once when they reached some sort of milestone. The email had no remove-me-from-this-list link or way to tell Linked In that I didn't want to receive emails. I found the CEO's email address and forwarded it to him, asking him to remove me from the mailing list. He sent back a nasty email and deleted my account. I've not looked back and my life is exactly as it was, minus a few unwanted emails.

dylanjermiah 11y ago
Do you still have the email from Jeff?
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  Wow, yeah. That would be an interesting one to read.
city41 11y ago
Please post the email. LinkedIn is scum, the more people know it, the better.
J_Darnley 11y ago
I should try that with the repeated "sign up" requests I get.
davidgerard 11y ago
Please put up a copy of your letter, the semi-mythical "way to get off LinkedIn's mailing list"!

takee 11y ago

It's fairly easy to come up with a long list of shady practices that force me to not trust LinkedIn: 1. To start with, they sneaked in the request to access all your email contacts and constantly spam them in your name which can be embarrassing at times to say the least. 2. Their mobile apps do the same with your phone contacts, cleverly hiding the checkmark (in smallest font) to disallow the uploading of contacts. I have unknowingly let them look through my contacts at least two different times prompting me to never install their app again. 3. Letting others know that you viewed their profile. This is fine as long as you know about this feature but I bet that a bunch of us were taken by surprise in the early days to find out that our "online research" on someone was not private unless if you're incognito. 4. Charging you beyond the free trial period without any email or notification about it. I agree that many businesses do this but some of them like Amazon and Netflix are nice enough to allow you to disable the future payments before the trail ends. Also they tend to notify you about the payments. 5. Letting people have access to my email and other contact info even when I haven't accepted their request to connect. This may have been fixed with the recent change but may just have been one of those hidden features that led to their popularity with the recruiter world in the first place. I am sure I missed out a bunch of other things here but these are the reasons why I can never trust LinkedIn.

suprgeek 11y ago
- LinkedIn has employed "Dark Patterns" for a long time to scarf up your Address Book via your e-mail id. Then unless you are VERY careful you will end up spamming everyone with an invite. - They also employed a MTM attack on your mobile "Intro App" https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-in-the-middle-attack-experts/102683 https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-... - Have you noticed that the LI News feed is a high-noise collection of crap? - and on and on "Monetizing your users" is rapidly making that site useless for almost everyone.
- colinbartlett 11y ago
  LinkedIn was the first in a long line of social networks I deleted starting 4 years ago. Not sure how anyone gets value out of enough to justify.

toephu2 11y ago

Stuff like this is why I never signed up for LinkedIn in the first place.

tubelite 11y ago

FYI: You can't export contacts from Facebook either. The API no longer supports getting the entire friends list (restricted to return only those friends who have also installed the same app). There is a "download all my facebook data" option, but that only gives you a plain "firstname lastname" list. No contact information there either.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

I only use LinkedIn to find former coworkers and classmates. After that I email them directly. However I get lots of connection requests from recruiters. I always accept them. I figure that greatly dilutes whatever value linkedin might have once had because most of my connections are recruiters who wadte their time on me because I dont log in a whole lot.

Animats 11y ago

Did they remove that option even for paying users?

nileshtrivedi 11y ago

This link seems to still work for exporting CSV of contacts, including email addresses: https://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport https://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport

tdkl 11y ago

One of the main issues I had with LI personally (beside the already posted dark patterns) was the 3rd party scrapers who used the LI API to recreate their own listings with LI data. So this means if I changed the data on LI, the scrapers wouldn't update their own copies of the site. Even when I deleted my LinkedIn account I had to hunt down separate sites and go through emailing adventure to get the data removed. I want to be in whole control of my public data, that's why getting a domain and posting a blog is maybe more tedious but better at the end.

zeeed 11y ago

I requested my data when I commented first on this thread and just got the notification that it was ready. So it was 21h for me. Still way too much, but it's less than three days...