Since a year or so the deterioration of the LinkedIn timeline has been very visible to me. Next to an increasing number of people sharing things as if LinkedIn is Facebook, the timeline is not under the control of the user, and presents algorithmically determined items. Sometimes that results in seeing things days or weeks after they were posted when I would have liked to see them the day they were posted, but instead got the rants of someone else. The only way one can shape the LinkedIn timeline is by removing people from it. So I did, and removed all people from it. I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have no LinkedIn timeline, and use it as it was in the past, as a digitised contact list. Of course that brings my LinkedIn experience back to the place where it was when Jyri Engestrom predicted its demise if it didn’t introduce an object of sociality in April 2005. I’ve been using LinkedIn since June 2003 (user nr. 8730), and the barebones ‘digital rolodex’ actually serves me well, to see the background of someone I meet, and to allow others to see the same about me. From now on I can skip the timeline that LinkedIn serves me as a default, and engage with people in my network, and the things they share on my own terms and initiative, seeking them out when I want. Next to keeping my own notes.
To get to an empty timeline I had to unfollow everyone I’m connected to. Which is not a simple thing to do, as LinkedIn provides no easy option to unfollow large amounts of people, and requires you to unfollow everyone one by one. Of course there are work arounds and that is what I used, with a snippet of code in my browser console.
LinkedIn can be nice and quiet, with everyone unfollowed
@ton oh, Ton, how will we form business synergies now?
Social media-free rolodex. zylstra.org/blog/2021/09/e…
Ton Zijlstra mentioned this article on zylstra.org.
Ton Zijlstra mentioned this article on zylstra.org.
Hi, Ton,
I received your pingback to your blog post shared above around LinkedIn and I can share plenty of the sentiment you have described above. In fact, if I were to write about all of the things I find horrifying and excruciating about LinkedIn, it would never end! However, this quote of yours: ‘the timeline is not under the control of the user, and presents algorithmically determined items’ is one of the main reasons as to why I have followed a similar path as I have described in this blog post http://www.elsua.net/2022/06/17/how-to-stop-linkedins-toxic-algorithmic-manipulation/
Being ‘served’ content by an obscured, opaque and rather obnoxious algorithm that doesn’t have a clue about what my interests and wants are, and with which I can’t do anything to improve it, is a no-go for me. I tried hard to make it work for me for about 4 years, but I just had enough with the non-sense, so I will be following a similar approach to yours. I have started to do a massive unfollow and once I reach 0 it will be down to a rolodex function with the odd reaction here and there. But, fresh, new content? No, thanks! That’s going into my blog, as I decided to stop feeding another walled garden I have never been able to control and move back to what we should have never left in the first place. The Open Social Web!
Blog on!