LinkedIn Review - Very Interesting !!
I have become increasingly frustrated with LinkedIn especially the difference between the mobile feed and PC feeds - almost different universes. So I went looking for reviews - see the article below from Gavin Pitchford which sets out most of my frustrations. Microsoft has some work to do when it finally buys LinkedIn by the end of 2016 for US$26.2 Billion - good luck !!
Dear LinkedIn: You’re starting to suck! The 12 things you need to fix, and soon! (updated, May 25) Jan 19, 2016
- 58,802 views
- 4,497 Likes
Dear Jeff, (LinkedIn CEO)
LinkedIn used to be pretty good. But recently, you’re failing. There’s all kinds of fake profiles and hackers – I get endless invites from them, and if I mistakenly accept one, they send me endless spam.
I know this annoys a lot of us – because an article I published on Linked In on this subject so far has over 65,000 views, 750+ universally positive comments, 3100+ likes and has been shared about 1,700 times! Even though you did your best to hide it and it could only be found by clicking on someone’s share / like – not listed in Pulse like all the other far less popular articles. (Did I mention you're starting to suck? Hiding / ignoring user criticism is the first sign of a business that is destined to fail).
And this article - despite being hidden - has also attracted over 57,000 views, 4,500 likes, over 1,400 shares - and over 800 comments - with over 99% of those endorsing the article and just as annoyed as I am.
Many of those comments were from people who were pissed off you had ignored their many emails. And I agree. Your customer service responses are slow to non-existent, and when I do get a response, half the time the person who wrote it has clearly failed to comprehend my request, even though I used simple words.
Your mobile app has bugs. You completely messed up the group functions in the new release. The "endorse" feature never stops jumping in front of my view – but is completely both baseless and useless (with apologies to the actual people who endorsed me who do actually know I’m good because we have actually engaged – as opposed to the dozens who have never once spoken to me but still saw fit to endorse me for something I don’t actually do)
And it looks like all you care about is the money – not your loyal customer base.
To put it in perspective, I'm not new to LI. I have been using your product for over 10 years – and was one of your first 750,000 users. So I have a little history. Plus I’ve been paying you $20 / month or more since 2005. Do you care?
Let’s look at these individually.
1.The hackers, fakes and frauds. They are rampant. They put all of us at risk. And you do nothing. Numerous of your most viewed profiles are fraudulent / fake profiles, usually pretending to be pretty women, with revealing / semi-revealing pictures of themselves. Less viewed but equally fake profiles are ubiquitous. Some so obviously so, anyone who actually read them would see them as fake. (unfortunately some of your users, especially the "LIONs", are indiscriminate, and so the fakes proliferate. Often the pictures the hackers use appear all over the internet. How do you not have any kind of basic screening to prevent this? Can you not even identify that the IP address from which they access LinkedIn is in a country half a world away from the country in which they claim to reside? The pic and the home IP address are two easy tests to eliminate numerous frauds – but you deploy neither. Why? Because it will slow growth?
And when I report to you that the person is a fraud, shouldn’t you take them down and keep them down? One I reported to you a while back, Ashley, with 500+ contacts and virtually no job history is still up. Using Google image search, “her” picture appears all over the internet – at least 624 times, under numerous different headings, but all essentially the same theme. One representative heading: Cute Girl With Nice Cleavage | My Emo Teen. Many of her “endorsers” are equally fake profiles. Is this why I joined LinkedIn?
2.The fake invites: We all get these – often 10+ a day – from the aforementioned fraudulent profiles. Even if you can’t be bothered to try and eliminate the frauds, it would be so easy for you to prevent new users from inviting anyone unless they knew the email addresses of the invitee until they got to 50 or 100 connections. You have made it so easy to initiate an invite: they are almost all issued by a single click with no extra effort – but in the “old” days there was always an option to customize the invitation – and to respond back to the initiator by clicking ”Don’t accept yet – respond to …” which allowed us to ask “How do I know you exactly”?
Of course, I realize that might slow your user growth and decrease that important Monthly Active User metric upon which your valuation is based, but to remain valuable to us real people, LinkedIn needs to revert back to being a professional networking tool, not a haven for hackers, spies and frauds to gather and chase the real people.
Update: Since this article was published, Linked In has responded to several of the criticisms, and this is one they have partially fixed. Users again have the ability to respond without accepting, although the manner in which they do is painful. But if you look for it, it's there. "Ashley" has moved from Burlington Ontario, to Calgary Alberta and is now in L.A. California - but her profile is still online...
3.You leave our contacts open and visible to our other contacts as the default setting. This allows the hackers, spies and frauds to see all of our other contacts – valuable information for them they can also use to target our contacts next – leveraging the fact that I foolishly accepted the invite from Ashley with the nice cleavage to persuade my contacts that Ashley is real. You need to reverse this immediately! (Note - this setting can (and should) be changed by the users in Settings - this article is complaining that the DEFAULT setting is set to share - which benefits hackers.
4. Your mobile app has bugs: I know there are others bugs but this one irks me. Half the time I try to “like” or comment on a post, it won’t – but instead sends me back to the top of the post. That’s not even an option! (although maybe it should be). How do your developers release this without stress testing! (Update: This has since been improved, but now there are new bugs.)
5. SPAM! People I don’t know are sending me spam using In-mail. Why do you allow this? How do I opt out?
6. SPAM! People to whom I was stupid enough to connect are sending me what is obviously mass spam. Why do you allow that either? I pay a premium to use your product. I get you may want to subject free-riders to some spam, but I pay you now over $350 / year – I shouldn’t have to endure that!
7. Changes to Groups which mess up the Group Manager: No longer can I see my groups in the order I set up. No longer can I tell if there are pending requests to join my groups. I now need to search individually for each group, and then click Manage. What used to take 3 seconds now takes 4 minutes. Not surprisingly, new membership requests which used to run 6-10 a month in 2 of my groups have just about halted completely since you instituted the “upgraded” Groups option. Comments have dried up. The previously useful Group function is no longer relevant.
8. The "endorse" function is always on my page. Make it stop. It’s useless. If you’re going to keep it, at least get more details as to how / why someone is deserving of an endorsement. Right now it’s only reliable use is to help identify the fakes. When a profile has under 20 endorsements, and they’re from different countries than the individual in the profile, and all from all the same people, it becomes easier to identify the fraudster. Unintended consequence...
9. Stop sending me the same request to add data to my profile. It's not there... because I don't have any jobs / education / languages that I haven't already listed! After 10 years, if it isn’t there, I’m not going to add it now! Let me turn that message off!!
10. Let me once again see my profile EXACTLY as others see it.
11. Stop trying to get me to share my email list with you. I did it once by mistake, and it was a huge embarrassment. When I connect with someone for the first time, and click on them, I want to see their profile - not end up in a screen where I once again get asked to give you a list of people you can carpet bomb with spam - and worse - do so in my name!!!
12. Last and certainly far from least: “customer service”. Your responses are cryptic to non-existent. Virtually 100% of them are standard stock replies which your team clicks, seemingly at random, and that seldom relate to the issue in any meaningful fashion.
There’s lots more ideas for improvement. I’m sure many of your other users have their own ideas. But these are important – especially the ones around our security. When you allow these hackers and spies to continue unchecked, you send a pretty clear signal that legitimate users are not your priority. Only some false metric you think measures growth. Eventually that will catch up with you…
Yours in faint hope…
Gavin
DEAR LINKED IN USER / READER - Please SHARE this article by clicking on the LI LinkedIn logo at the bottom of the post. It's the only way Linked In will take any notice.
The author, Gavin Pitchford is the CEO / founder of Delta Management Group, a 24 year old search firm based in Toronto. Canada. Delta leads Canada in working with “green professionals” engaged in sustainability or CSR careers, as well as clean tech companies, and is one of two leading search firms in Canada in serving the networking / telecom vendor industry. Pitchford is also the founder of the Canada's Clean50 Awards (www.clean50.com). He can be reached at gpitchford ~at~ deltamanagement com. Follow on Twitter: @GavinPitchford and @Clean50. He is a real person, and LinkedIn user ~750,000 (of now 360,000,000 real and fake profiles) and has been active daily on LinkedIn since 2005, although with increasing frustration.
To view a related article on 14 ways to spot fraudulent linked in profiles: For the full article see https://bit.ly/1UtSiZm. (50K views, 2400 likes and 1600+ shares) The “Readers Digest” version contains only a brief summary of the 14 steps you can take to identify a fraudulent profile and can be seen here: https://bit.ly/1Prxu0G . More importantly, an article describing the value of the data the spies get when you connect, see “Is this Woman a Chinese Hacker?” at https://bit.ly/1Oi59wf
LinkedIn will surely bury this article (as they did the ones above). To help bring some change to LinkedIn, ideally please share it (click the LinkedIn button below left) or Like it – and help spread the word.