I never liked LinkedIn. I had closed it once before, but I had a client at one point who wanted me to have it up (to show his clients my resume as a writer/translator? I forget), so I put it back up. Now it’s gone again.
LinkedIn has always been opaque to me. When I go to Facebook, I can see where I can go and what I can do. Same thing with Twitter, Instagram, all that crap. You take a glance at them and they are fairly self-explanatory.
In contrast, I never got the first clue as to what to do on LinkedIn. There are forums… somewhere? I have found articles via Google that people posted on the site, but there is no feed when you go there suggesting what to read or anything. It has always seemed 100% inert to me.
I never found my network there to be any use at all. Rather, it was mostly bunch of cheesy self-promoters that I had met at some networking event that I had long forgotten (both the event and the cheesy self-promoters). Of course, I had friends, etc., on there as well that I value, but we never interacted there at all.
So… I don’t get it. An uninviting site that doesn’t provide any visual clues about how to do shit on it and a useless network. Now, I may be some kind of social media fool missing a goldmine of something-or-other, but I would say that such foolishness has applied only to LinkedIn. Maybe I just have a blind spot as to its brilliance.
I agree. I had set up an account with them mostly because I was sick of seeing ‘log in to see this profile’ when I was googling people. It should be noted that I’m not in an industry that uses linkedin, so it’s really not aimed at me. However, I felt like it was essentially just a bunch of business cards and resumes. That seemed fine, it wasn’t for me, but it seemed fine. Like you, I know people communicated on there somewhere, but I never paid anywhere near enough attention to figure out how to use it as a social media site. I ended up shutting down my account, mostly because of the mountains of junk mail it generated.
I feel like I’m stuck between generations here. As a Facebook and former Myspace user. I’m too old to use tiktok or instagram and too young (well, probably not) to use linkedin.
Congrats. For a very long time there was no way to get LinkedIn to truly forget about you. They’d follow you to the ends of the earth with “someone clicked on your profile!” emails. I gave up and changed my email for unrelated reasons and they finally left me alone. Somewhere out there is a LI profile I made 10 or 15 years ago and abandoned, still sucking in other people.
LinkedIn is the Corporate Ladder for non-corporates. It is indeed a haphazard pile of business cards at a seminar. Some people find those useful, most never do but have to go to them anyway. There’s a section of people on this dumb planet who really believe motivational speakers and who will buy into get-rich-quick schemes, and they’re the same kind of people who talk big on places like LinkedIn, but it’s all pseudo-sparkle, no substance.
No shit. I was popping in to ask "how in the name of Cthulhu’s breath did you manage to close a LinkedIn account? All I was ever able to do was remove every bit of identifying information and change the account name to ‘Nobody Home’. And still I get PMs saying “Hey, ‘Nobody Home’, seven people want to connect with you and be your buddy and pal and get you to endorse their pyramid schemes, click here for details”
You can have the annoying emails auto-dumped into a folder you never check. Takes less time than complaining about it here.
You also don’t need a real personal account to see others’ accounts; just make an empty one attached to a hotmail account.
I mostly use LI as a tool to help me remember people’s names. I’ll often remember enough to allow me to search my contacts. Sure, my email program has their contact info stored, but I can barely remember my own name, let alone some rando I met at a workshop six years ago who I want to ask about something. I check it maybe every other month.
I honestly have not idea why I bother keeping an account there except to put satisfy any prospective new customers curious enough to look for my social network presence. I suppose it lends support to what my resume says about my experience.
Otherwise it’s just another thing I have to do once a month as far as deleting messages I’ve ignored and have no intention of responding to.
All of the above. I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s never understood the point or usefulness of it. I joined years ago because it was sort-of expected at the time, but rarely log in. It seems the only point of it is, in the words of a friend, to “collect people.” I logged-in one time by request to give a glowing work review to a former co-worker who was looking for a job. Don’t know if it did him any good but I was glad to help. And for the longest time I kept receiving emails asking “Do you know Joe Schmo?” These were quite annoying because “Joe” was someone I’d worked with a dozen years ago whom I particularly loathed and despised! Perhaps I’ll just drop it, as some of you seem to have done.
Me too. I know how to contact my friends and associates without Linkedin. I have never used it for anything. In fact, it was years before I discovered the “home” page is actually a news feed of some sort. But it’s never interesting.
I never joined; but have over the years had a number of bouts of repeated emails from LinkedIn telling me that somebody wanted me to join so I could connect with them that way. There might be half a dozen or more emails about each such person.
Some of them, I had only a vague idea, if any idea, who they were. Others I routinely communicated with just fine without going through LinkedIn.
I checked directly with a couple of people when it first started happening. LinkedIn was apparently grabbing everybody’s address book – in at least some cases without their knowledge – and spamming everybody in their address book with these emails. That in itself guaranteed that I didn’t want anything to do with them.
On the contrary, I actually like LinkedIn for a few specific purposes, mainly that of keeping track of contact info for business acquaintances.
There’s a lot of people I meet at work who aren’t “friends” of mine, but who are instead work acquaintances (including coworkers and former coworkers) that I like to keep track of for networking, references, etc. I don’t have (nor do I want) their personal contact info, so if they change companies, I may lose contact with them entirely.
FWIW, I have made a point of always declining permission for LinkedIn to access my email contacts. I have no desire to spam everyone I know.
I’m another linkedin user. I just landed a new client from there two weeks ago or at least the new client checked out my profile on Linkedin. It helps a ton from my consulting company. I post links to my podcast which helps increase my listeners and I generally have 20 or so people check me out and my credentials on there each month.
I also use it to reach out to people occasionally. Back at the start of the pandemic I reached out so several people I went to grad school with who I haven’t talked to in over 5 years to get them to help me find packaging for hand sanitizer. I also use it to collect supplier contacts and start the bidding process. A friend of mine just told me about a Linkedin contact reaching out to ask about interest on a million dollar purchase so a lot of business gets done there.
ETA: I don’t use it to read other posts or generally hang out there. I’m probably only on for 10 minutes per week.
There are recruiters who use LinkedIn to scout new employees, and they do have job advertisements which are legitimate. I wouldn’t say it’s completely useless, but not everyone is going to get the same mileage out of it. I personally haven’t found anything on LinkedIn but haven’t really tried that hard either.