How to unsubscribe from Oleg Vishnepolsky

Chances are that you have seen posts from Oleg Vishnepolsky (CTO of Daily Mail) on your LinkedIn feed. He is one of top LinkedIn influencers and it is likely that some of your connections engage with his posts. You might have even enjoyed them - after all they are always positive, they educate and give free boost to job seekers and encourage HR recruiters to take unconventional paths and recognize the talent. Agreed?

The trouble - It is very likely that Oleg is not authentic and that you are part of group profile boosting and/or data collection experiment. Casual Google search for Oleg will reveal suspicious facts:

• The page about Oleg was deleted from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Oleg_Vishnepolsky because of: "Fails WP:SELFPUB (Self-promotional content) and no reliable sources (everything comes from author own LinkedIn account). Fails notability: People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject. "
• No mention of Oleg on Daily Mail management team. Another guy referenced as CTO of Daily Mail group: https://www.dmgt.com/news-and-media/news-articles/2017/dmgt-appoints-rob-chandhok-as-group-chief-technology-officer
• No personal website and no interviews/podcasts ever with Oleg. It is hard to believe that such an influential person (followed by 1.7M people) fails to have all of these

I am confident that some more advanced search would reveal inconsistent writing styles between the posts and recycled stories claimed to be personal experience.

I encourage you to also read this light-hearted and thought-provoking article about Oleg: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/5-conspiracy-theories-oleg-reasons-why-may-true-plus-one-niescieruk/. There are some really cool theories that try to explain Oleg's hyper-productivity and motives :)

The good news is that there is a way to opt out. The bad news is that it is not so straight-forward and it requires sacrifices.

First things first. If you accepted connection invite from Oleg by chance, delete this connection. LinkedIn will almost always publish posts from your direct connections on the feed.

However, this is nearly not enough. Whenever some of your direct connections engages with Oleg's posts (likes it, shares it, comments on it, likes a comment on it etc.), this is competing to appear in your feed.

Here is where things get complicated. It turns out that you can not specifically unfollow a person who is not your direct connection. Also, blocking will not help - it only prevents someone from viewing your profile. In other words, there is no "blacklist" feature that will keep Oleg from flooding your feed.

This means that you will have to make some hard choices if you are determined to get rid of Oleg - you should essentially aim to make Oleg your 3rd level connection. Go to Oleg's profile and see who your mutual connections are. Delete them. (Linkedin is very discrete about this - it will not notify deleted connection. Connection can only find out if they search for your profile and find that you are know 2nd level connection). You can also take relaxed approach and delete mutual connections only if they engage with Oleg's spam.

This should decimate prominence of Oleg's posts on your feed. However, some Oleg's posts could still find their way through - e.g. via Linkedin Water Cooler report. Think of it as a herpes - you should work on your immunity, but sometimes it might still appear. Just sigh and put your Aciclovir on (Click on three dots next to the post and select "Hide this post").