Tag: linkedin

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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.

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Lukas Rosenstock posted a write-up of a group discussing their personal CRM routines he organised. A little over a year ago I was impressed with how Rick Klau (an old blogging connection) described his ‘homebrew CRM‘.

Lukas mentioned there were three groups in his conversation, one using specialised tools, one group using no digital tools, and one group using more general tools (“like Roam, Notion or Airtable“). I’m definitely one of the latter.

After reading Rick’s posting a year ago I parked it for a while, but when I adopted Obsidian for note taking, after a while I also started using it for some light weight CRM notes. Unlike Rick I haven’t added any process or automation, but I did start creating CRM notes so that something like it might become possible over time.

What I started with is making notes about people I encounter.

LinkedIn has one glaring hole in its functionality and that is allowing me to add something about the context of when I met someone. After using LinkedIn for 16 years I now sometimes come across a LinkedIn contact and then don’t remember how or why we connected. LinkedIn by now does show when you connected, allowing me to browse through someone’s CV to see what that person did when we connected and try to remember the context of that connection. Xing, mostly used in German speaking countries, had this from the start including a field for a few notes on when / how you met someone. That has proved valuable. [UPDATE In the comments Aad points out such a feature has been present at some point. Online search suggests it was introduced in 2013/4 with LinkedIn Contacts, and became a premium-only feature from 2017. By 2013 I had some 2k contacts, 10 years worth of interaction, where such contextual info was missing, and I use the free version, so the general point stands, even if factually not correct since 2013]

Back when I used a wiki on my laptop for notes, I also kept CRM style notes in it, especially 2004-2008. The useful bit was that I could link to a person’s page in the various notes I made about meetings, events etc. That ‘backlinking’ overview in itself was a great way of adding contextual info.

With Obsidian and the use of simple text files in markdown I have that back, and actually in a better way than in that wiki of old. Because those text files can be approached by a wide variety of software tools, not just Obsidian.
I’m not attempting to be complete in these CRM notes, I grow them the same way as I grow the other type of notes: when I encounter someone new I make note of it. Especially when I don’t know someone yet, or don’t have a strong connection to someone I make those notes. Not so much of people that I’m already connected to like colleagues. I’ve started a few new projects in the past few months, which is always a moment when you encounter a lot of new people in a new context. So those I’ve made notes for, as it helps understand a new client organisation, relevant stakeholders and context. For now backlinking in meeting and project notes is the way for adding a record of interaction.

Maybe in a year or so I can start doing more pro-active things with those notes, like Rick has built into his routines. Another element to me is potentially leaving LinkedIn behind at some point in the future, or at least be somewhat prepared when LinkedIn goes away, as all these platforms do.

Do you have some personal CRM-type routines or automation?

Handshakes and conversations is what I’m interested in, not marketing instruments. Image Handshake by Elisha Project, license CC BY SA