Tag: linkedin

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LinkedIn irritatingly has introduced a new ‘pay us or we’ll purposefully cripple your experience more than before’ scheme. Another step towards the inevitable leaving behind of LinkedIn, other than perhaps for search. How long until they get to the Ecademy-point of no return (which was in 2004, enshittification is not a recent ‘innovation’)?

Events take preparation w.r.t. who you’ll meet as well as ‘after care’ one element of which is to affirm conversations and connections started at the event. Yesterday morning an event around digital ethics committees in the public sector took place, of which I was the instigator though not the organiser. I talked to many new people, taking notes of my conversations, and afterwards did what I usually do: invite those I met to connect on LinkedIn. LinkedIn for a long time has suggested to add a note because it will help the other person know better who is reaching out and why. Just as they used to stress you need to only connect to people you met. I always use that feature because it also conserves the context of a meeting for myself (although I keep those in my notes these days too). The note allows you to be human, passing the Reverse Turing test, or helpfully shows someone up as a cold sales approach. It suggested that this time too:

In the past weeks I noticed that there was a counter attached to that suggestion, ‘you have x personalised invites left’. Yesterday’s event being one where I met more than a few new people, I exceeded the limit of 5 invites for this month (The webarchive shows the limit and premium feature wasn’t mentioned at the end of January).

Paying gets you past that limit towards unlimited.
Out of curiosity I clicked the ‘renew’ button (at some point in the past I used the free trial period to be able to see and download some specific data that LinkedIn had about me, hence ‘renew’).
The following question curiously did not have ‘no interest’ as an option, ‘no’ being folded into ‘other’.

Selecting ‘other’ led to an overview of types of subscriptions, conspicuously not mentioning any prices.

Another click further revealed the lowest price point being 40 Euro’s a month.

40 Euros buys me a month of 1Gb glass fiber internet and television at home. It buys me 7 months of reduced railroad fares in the Netherlands. About a month of reading fiction daily. A year of digital services and tools I actually care about. And the removal of a newly introduced barrier in a deteriorating platform to extract value, aiming to make you pay to allow you to behave like a human being on LinkedIn. I’ll pass up on the ‘opportunity’ offered.

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Oh great, LinkedIn! Of course I want you to ‘suggest’ postings in my timeline concerning conspiracy delusions about the fires in Hawaii, a disfigured street cat ‘nevertheless’ feeding its young and thus commended for its nurturing instincts (is animal ableism a separate category in your data model?), an autoplaying video of a woman removing mobiles from her family’s hands at the dinner table in a very funny (hahaha!) way, and something about a leopard. Enshittification ftw! I unfollowed every one on my contact list two years ago just for you to have more space to play Facebook and TikTok all by yourself. And I am also very pleased you always make me set the timeline to ‘most recent’ and then put it back to ‘most relevant’ (I do wonder about LinkedIn’s definition of ‘relevant’) so I don’t miss any of your suggestions. I think I need to use a different way of going to LinkedIn to find the details of someone in my network than the default /feed LinkedIn steers you to. I’ll add the direct path to the network search page as bookmark. And continuously strengthen my personal notes-as-rolodex.

Such a great day for the Digital Services Act to come into effect for ‘VLOPS’ like LinkedIn!

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Bookmarked Glut of fake LinkedIn profiles pits HR against the bots by Brian Krebs

Brian Krebs writes about waves of fake LinkedIn profiles, that don’t yet serve a purpose that is clear from the outside. I think that the suggestion it may be to set up a network of bot accounts to later spread misinformation or propaganda makes a certain amount of sense. I think it might not be companies or potential scam victims that are the target. I can easily imagine that the timeline is the actual target. A way to spread stuff on the timeline when needed at some point. A year ago I deleted the timeline from my LinkedIn experience by unfollowing everyone. I did that after seeing the timeline deteriorate since the summer of 2020, until the point it became completely useless. A timeline that is ‘optimised’ not for you but for ‘engagement’ and outside your own control is a timeline that can be manipulated by external actors. That makes it a target. Provided you have enough fake accounts under your control.

Miller says he’s worried someone is creating a massive social network of bots for some future attack in which the automated accounts may be used to amplify false information online, or at least muddle the truthe

Brian Krebs

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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

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There’s this little thing in the LinkedIn UI that keeps tripping me up, and that I find highly irritating.

After an event I’ve participated in I usually search some of the participants on LinkedIn, to connect to them. Sometimes there’s a number of people with the same name. So I click on a name, and then to make sure that it’s the right person I sometimes click on the profile pic, to see if I recognise them from the call or meeting I just left. That enlarged profile pic is presented as a floating overlay, and it features a prominent X on the top right to close it. Great, so I click the X to close the image, returning to the profile, and then if it is the wrong person I click the browser back button to get back to search results. But clicking the back button in the browser _reopens_ the profile pic! The X in the image suggests that’s the way to close it, and I automatically do because it’s so routine, but opening the profile pic gets written to the browser history / back button. So the most effective behaviour for me would be to click the browser’s back button immediately after I’ve opened a profile pic and ignore the big X LinkedIn shows me. LinkedIn, remove the X in the image, or remove writing opening the image to the browser back button!

A video showing the UI behaviour.

(My apologies to Frank for using him as unwitting participant for demonstration purposes. No profiles were harmed in the production of this video.)

Continuing on from my recent remarks about the deterioration of LinkedIn, and my earlier thoughts on personal CRM as a non-LinkedIn, I’ve requested a download of my LinkedIn data. I wanted to take a look at what is included in it.

As I remembered from an earlier download the provided contact list contains the name, current role and date of connecting, but no links to the corresponding profiles. That renders the list of names more or less useless, if you would actually want to take your data and move on. However, going to the overview of my network on the LinkedIn site I can get my entire network shown in a single list. This overview used to be paginated, but now the network page is an endless scroll. It takes a bit of scrolling to go to the bottom of the list of a few thousand connections but then I had all my connections shown on a single page. Having saved that html file I can now strip out the links to profiles and add them to the list of connections in the data download. How I can make all that downloaded material useful as input for a personal CRM system is still an open but interesting question.