> I'm baffled by that number given how bad the product is.

That's because the "product" isn't the social network. The "product" is insight and access to much of the professional workforce. Sales and HR use it extensively.

The social network aspect is likely to keep people semi-engaged with the platform and voluntarily disclosing things that Sales and HR can use as signals.

Salespeople using the platform to try to sell me their products is what makes linkedin awful to me. It's one thing to buy ads, but it's awful to spam people's inboxes with messages.

Indeed, "talent solutions" and "marketing solutions" are Linkedin's biggest revenue drivers. Subscriptions come after that.

That's kind of a chicken and egg problem though, Linkedin never developed much features outside of recruiting activities so that's the revenue they have.

Linkedin has a much bigger potential than that though, just the social aspect and networking impact could be pretty significant.

The feed is really quite awful. All social media is somewhat performative by nature, but LinkedIn's feed takes it to another level. It's not just performing for peers, but also performing for current and potential future employers.

Never have so many words been written that mean so little.

I find the performative aspect to makes LinkedIn the most charming out of social media "cesspools", actually. The often vapid content and the professional personal branding exercises and optimism narratives are at least positive compared to the culture wars being fought on Facebook and Twitter.

Quora is just as much of a cesspool, except more frustrating because casual users are actually expecting to get something out of it, as opposed to people posting productivity listicles on LI.

From my experience you can opt-out of the bullshit with no ill effects, at least in the software industry. My activity is completely empty, no posts, no likes, etc and that doesn't seem to hurt me. I mostly use the tool as a rolodex to keep in touch with professional connections and be reachable by recruiters.

The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?

Posts like this baffle me.

This tool seems to function perfectly well as a rolodex and as a recruiter contact for you (its primary function for myself and most others) but somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users.

> The problem of course is that the platform doesn't seem to understand that and desperately tries to encourage me to participate which seems pathetic at this point. They have 2 years worth of analytics that essentially show them a big middle finger, why keep trying?

What a strange personification of a vast social network. Who is it that you think is up awake late at night, desperate and pathetic? What middle finger? Recruiters can reach you, LinkedIn got paid for that.

They have metrics for conversions when they push for engagement. It works well enough. Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically. It would take more work to exclude you.

Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.

I think it's an understandable position as an individual. Many people are frustrated that all these applications are somewhat forced on them by social and professional engagements in the first place. Even if they haven't been forced on you it has become tedious to have no option to say "STOP NAGGING ME I WILL NEVER PARTICIPATE".

Add to this that even basic OS functions on mobile devices are constantly trying to get you to subscribe to various services and I think it's reached a boiling point for a vocal segment of people who just want to be able to go about their UI in peace. Unfortunately some data analyst at every big company has decided it's ok to have a popup every time the user visits to remind them to engage, and sign them up for 25 different email lists they have to unsub from individually, and have notifications pop up on their phone for no reason other than to get them to open the app, just because it results in 2% more users signing up for some service and it hasn't yet cause the other 98% to rage quit.

Disclaimer: this kind of behavior has been driving me insane for several years but there's almost no mechanism to avoid these issues on the whole. Also this isn't targeted at you in particular but just to illustrate what I think is a growing resentment amongst a set of users.

Baffled by how defensive you are of a former employer. Linkedin emailed my contacts without asking. And the same has happened to me from my contacts. I would get emailed repeatedly to join. I don't support these dark patterns nor those who have worked for companies that build those dark patterns.

Ohhhh I'm with you 100%. There's plenty of shady bs that LinkedIn has done and this wasn't a blanket endorsement at all.

But I do think the parent's personification of the platform misguided.

OP is just voicing annoyance at a nag feature, nothing personal, just a UX critique. I'm not sure why it would matter to them if the feature increases engagement for others.

> somehow it's problematic for to have other functions for other users

I think it's a fair question to raise when the other function seems out of place or almost inappropriate for what the tool is trying to achieve. I feel like a professional platform should be trying to maintain a higher standard instead of decaying into yet another Instagram-like cesspool.

> What middle finger?

The ~2 years of analytic data showing that I have zero interest in the "features" they're trying to force me to use despite hundreds of attempts? I also find it unlikely to believe that I am literally the only one in this situation, thus why I am raising the issue.

> Nobody's out there 'trying' expending extra energy to engage you specifically.

Not specifically, but surely the platform should be built in such a way to respect the user's decisions? The various nags can have a use to engage new users (that might indeed not be aware of some of the features), but after a certain point it seems counter-productive and annoying. Imagine if every SaaS tool out there would always give you the "new user" onboarding experience with help popups all over the place and call-outs for "new" features, would you enjoy it?

> Disclaimer: Former LinkedIn employee baffled at how personal you seem to think all this is.

I don't think it's personal because I very much doubt I am the only one annoyed by this. The platform has been designed with zero respect for their users and looks like it's intentionally trying to be as annoying as possible. Even Facebook is more subtle in their shenanigans.

I think at this point, for most people, LinkedIn just serves as a repository for formatted resumes. Connections add a bit of value, as you can see where co-workers end up in the future.

The real problem is that for anyone with decent-sounding title, the amount of inbound spam is incredibly high. Endless outsourced development companies, recruiters, and random people wanting to connect for no discernible reason. Add to that a bunch of low-quality blogging, and I can't see how anyone can really enjoy spending time on the service.

Does anyone have insight on those random connections?

I'm at the bottom of the pile in terms of job title, and I think my profile is open to everyone, so I struggle to understand why a wood worker from half way across the globe would like to connect with me.

And it's not like they even try to talk to you or anything, so it feels like I'm missing something.

LinkedIn the product is an expensive tool for recruiters, and the pool of people on LinkedIn they can pull from. The feed is just fluff. In that regard, before the pandemic, LinkedIn was a big success.

I was an early user of LinkedIn, got my account on 2005. I delete my account on 2010, when I started working for Google. The logic then was simple, with Google on my resume I would hardly need LinkedIn to find another job, and the noise is just too much. Now 10 years passed (I worked for Google for 6 years) and I never missed it.

I really don't find any value of LinkedIn on the employee side (for the 5 years I had a LinkedIn account, there's zero job I got through LinkedIn). I know some of my colleagues (engineering managers) use LinkedIn as a recruiting/sourcing tool, but if talents don't find value on it, it's value as a sourcing tool will decline quickly. There are already a lot of interesting new ideas/companies in the sourcing market to eat its cake.

My guess would be that it's still riding the inertial wind. After a few years, if they still can't figure something new out, it will fail badly.

I can see that being the cause.

Please add your photo so creepy people can check you out and potential employers can determine if you are ugly, wrong color, wrong sex, uncool, or other discrimination.

If you really believe it has that much impact get it photoshop'ed. Game the system if you think that you LinkedIn picture has an effect. Pick your preferred pronoun or what ever.

Would be pretty awkward once you started interviewing, I'd imagine. I wonder how long one could keep it up though... perhaps during COVID it'd be possible to fake your race/gender all the way through the offer letter? I'd read that Medium article.

Oh, is it better to have an entirely text-based service like a phone book? Surely that will help with retention.

Is it alright not to have a profile picture on LinledIn? I've searched around and only found advice telling me to put one.

Doesn't seem to be a problem for me. I mean maybe if I added one it will raise the levels of "engagement" on my profile by a lot more but that level is already high enough to give me a steady stream of new work so I really have nothing to gain.

I wouldn't actually mind adding a picture now (I had a reason not to add one at the beginning, but this is no longer a problem) but at this point I will refrain from doing so out of principle to not show them an increase in their analytics data and encouraging their terrible practices.

LinkedIn itself. I have not used any of their other products so can't comment on them, though I wouldn't be surprised if they are just as terrible.