Originally published at: "I don't have LinkedIn" website tells it like it is - Boing Boing
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There’s a difference between having a profile on LinkedIn and actively using LinkedIn or treating it like social media.
I like having easy access to my CV but otherwise don’t use/give a shit about the damn thing.
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The more annoying law school students, aka gunners, used it to brag about the BigLaw firm they got interviews/internships/offers from. They weren’t humble brags, either. Full on, Look At Me! bragging. I never understood the point.
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There was a pharmaceutical company created and then pump/dumped about twenty years ago wherein the CEO forced all the staff to get linkedin accounts, (“and on your main email accounts! none of this burner account @#$!”). To this day being annoyed by nearly daily email from linkedin (“Someone is reading your work!” “You have pending messages!” …) is all that remains of that briefly existing fine corporation @#$!
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The only time my LinkedIn account came close to being useful was when I found something personal someone had lost in a parking lot. It had their name on it and the only way I could find to contact them was through LinkedIn.
Except LinkedIn wanted me to pay to upgrade to “Premium” to be able to contact them, which I’m not going to do. Fortunately I did find an alternate way to contact them.
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I foolishly signed up for LinkedIn many years ago, when the company I worked for was looking wobbly and I figured it would help in future job searches. Shortly after the company shut down, and as former coworkers found new jobs, I suddenly got a bunch of messages from them via LinkedIn, telling me about how there were jobs at their new companies that I should apply for. I sent them questions about what their new companies were like, and got no replies, which I didn’t think much about, as I assumed it was because they were very busy at their new jobs and slow to reply, but was grateful they were thinking about me. I immediately sent out a bunch of applications and wasted a bunch of time before I realized there were, in fact, no jobs for me at those companies. It was only at that point I figured out that the messages I had received “from my former coworkers” were, in fact, automated messages from LinkedIn itself, and it deciding what jobs were relevant to me was based entirely on some bad keyword matching. I had recruiters make contact with me via LinkedIn, and they suggested jobs based on only slightly better, but still irrelevant, keyword matching. (I imagine they’re using LLMs now and everything is ten times worse.)
I still get deluged with irrelevant job offers, which I ignore, along with all the other messages from it. (Occasionally I look in the folder where such emails molder, and get amused by chirpy messages ostensibly from would-be employers, whose escalating interest and mentions of our “previous discussions” really hammer home what a total fraudulent farce the whole platform is.) I’d delete my account, just for the sake of anyone actually trying to reach me via the site, so they’d not waste their time, but I long ago forgot my login information and I’m not sure I even really could delete my account.
All of which is to say: fuck LinkedIn. They actually manage to be worse than useless for its original purpose. Anyone trying to use it as a social media platform has to be a psychopath.
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I have a LinkedIn (as a professional with a career that benefits from the kind of networking & discoverability that LinkedIn provides).
It’s such a weird kind of parallel human society. Where Facebook et. al. incentivizes you to display your cherry-picked highlights, they still have roots in our basic social life.
LinkedIn enhances something different, a more Patrick Bateman persona, a corporate drone trained and certified in the latest processes.
I’m sure Rob could state it much better.
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I have a linkedin account which I rarely. It currently has my location as Japan which is correct, but that’s only because I failed to update it for the last two countries I lived in and I am now back here.
Not really worth the effort for me.
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My LinkedIn account is mostly up to date as of 2014, though my current company likes us to promote ourselves on it, so I add likes here and there to the posts of fellow co-workers. Incidentally, through LinkedIn I had signed up a couple years ago with several survey and consulting firms, like NewtonX, and actually made some extra money taking surveys and acting as a SME during interviews with different consultants.
The last time I was doing application rounds, its value was mainly as a one-click import-my-current-CV tool. A LinkedIn page was common currency for various recruiting/application systems.
Beyond that, I’m very aggressive about routing emails directly to a folder, cleaned aggressively.
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I find LinkedIn to be very tiring, with constant notifications and its inherent promotion of a perpetual self-branding hustle culture.
Though I did save my all time favorite LinkedIn notification. I know this was a coincidence, but still …
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Speaking of LinkedIn, from the WaPo a few days ago:
Last week, the professional network added a new data privacy setting that caught many by surprise. By default, it granted itself permission to use information shared on the service to train its artificial intelligence. Unless you toggle this new setting to off, LinkedIn considers everything fair game — your posts, articles, even your videos.
To opt out, log into your LinkedIn account, tap or click on your headshot, and open the settings. Then, select “Data privacy,” and turn off the option under “Data for generative AI improvement.”
Flipping that switch will prevent the company from feeding your data to its AI, with a key caveat: The results aren’t retroactive. LinkedIn says it has already begun training its AI models with user content, and that there’s no way to undo it.
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Remember when you could at least say about social networks that "they may be utter fucking sleazeballs but they’re not Microsoft?
Good times.
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Because we are an MS Outlook house in work and something something they also, almost uniquely, won’t respect anti spam law and I still get the odd email from LinkedIn despite taking every opportunity to tell them to fuck right off for a long time.
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I very deliberately don’t have a LinkedIn account because my life goals include working only at places that would never require something like that. I want to work at places that get it and ideally make the world a better place rather than encouraging soul sucking corporate bullshit. I’m willing to sacrifice a lot to maintain that standard. I only hope the world evolves to make workplaces like that more commonplace rather than even more scarce.
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“Hello, I’d like to add you to my professional network on Linkedin” is the new “Christ, what an asshole”
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