When Did LinkedIn Start to Suck?
It's hard to believe I've been a LinkedIn member since 2006. That's just over 3 years from its official launch on May 5th of 2003. Happy Cinco de Mayo. And it's been a very happy place for me to host my career moves and wants, hunt for jobs, have jobs hunt me, gain new skills, make connections and keep them with business and personal friends. Social media for business, learning, sharing. I love it. Loved it.
Until now. I've been silent for I don't know how many months, and now, today, I've accepted a new realization: my LinkedIn messenger is worthless to me for business. It's a sad day actually. I'm not happy writing this, but I feel the need to express what I've seen written prior and perhaps better. But take a look below. Tell me if this doesn't look familiar, on a "good" day of LinkedIn messenger.
Today's messages in my inbox are here to the left.
On a good day, half of them are ads or requests for me to buy consulting services that, as a sole-proprietor, I can't use and don't want [in the orange box]. The other half here are my messages with happy birthday wishes to people with whom I'm connected. Sometimes, I exchange messages live with people I know. It feels like a rare treat.
I blocked names and faces in bold pink but the first half of my visible messages are solicitations for business services that I absolutely don't want, nor did I request them. All I did was accept a connection request from someone. Boom. Messaging wars. Even follow-up messages saying things like, "OK. I'm about to give up, but just one more time Christopher... you sure you don't have time today??". Would you want your partner, gf/bf, wife, friend, manager, or police officer who pulled you over to talk with you in this way? Not in almost any situation. That's not a trail to happiness. It's a stressor.
Most of the connection requests I receive are from business development people, hocking their wares and trolling the deep waters of LinkedIn with a gill net. I find gill nets atrocious to wildlife, leading to wanton destruction of seals, dolphins, turtles, sea-birds, and countless unwanted fish that just die and are thrown back to sea or become chum.
I feel like chum. I'm not chum, but I'm beginning to feel like a chump.
This is a request to all solicitors out there. Spend more money on your ad campaigns. Stop buying cheap broad search campaigns that use general demographics and keywords like "analytics", or "self-employed", or "data science" to ask me if I want an investment counselor for my corporation, or that I'd be better off with their lead-generation software and services because I'm the perfect fit. Guess what? I'm not. For one, if you send me a super not targeted long-winded message, I'm not reading it. I don't read long notes in text or email from anyone. My mother sends me long articles that are very pertinent and kindly sourced from her brain to my inbox, and I still don't read them. That's my Mom. I love her. Not reading something from an unloved mass-email generator human or AI agent either. We're done there.
So I'm complaining. And I'd love to hear your complaints. My next move, after ranting here, is to find a way to remove myself from lists and to dive deeper into security and messaging settings to remove as much unwanted communication as much as possible. I haven't spent that time yet. That was reserved in the past to filter out Facebook spam and update my privacy settings on social media. Now it seems I need to dive into that pool on LinkedIn.
When I was at MySpace I ran a group of way more brilliant engineers than myself who designed and maintained administrative software that helped users filter unwanted content and attention. We also spent literally millions of dollars per year in image and content review, remove, and in some cases, to alert appropriate authorities of any malicious content that was posted. Accounts were put into a silent monitor state by our software and the police, FBI, Secret Service all had back-door access to "flagged" accounts who had broken the law with their posted content. We even found missing children through our first in industry Amber-Alerts. That was then. MySpace is mothballed and its guts have been removed and lost to the ages. Technology and investment were planned and executed and available. We're all better for the learning there, and the people have moved on to other companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IAC, to analytics consultancies, and their own companies where they've taken this philosophy of user-centered information and messaging with them. Myself included.
I more than appreciate... I support the right and need for LinkedIn, and the new owner, Microsoft, to sell advertising on its platform and to make it available for individual deal solicitation. I'm conflating advertising here with messaging because it's been conflated for me already by receiving ads, and now targeted individual solicitations that normally number 1/2 to 3/4 of my inbox.
I'm seeking advice, and something to assuage my growing antipathy about using LinkedIn messenger, and LinkedIn at all anymore. It's been a great run. But there are other job services out there. I'd like to be able to talk with other human beings I know or want to know and to not be continually on the receiving end of a sales pitch. Let's end the failed art of this deal, and move on.