When I log into LinkedIn, I now receive 3 pages of spam. That spam is “every tweet by every person I’ve ever met”.
Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – important, useful information.
Support: why would you want to refuse our spam?
I asked the LinkedIn customer support folks how to disable the spam. Their response:
You can “only hide the member’s Twitter updates [if you] also [hide all] their LinkedIn updates”.
i.e. your choices are:
- Get spam
- Get nothing
Hmm. Think about the people with tens of thousands of connections on linkedin. Their linkedin home pages must be absurdly high spam-to-signal ratio.
LinkedIn’s management: Twitter? WTF is Twitter?
LinkedIn’s CTO / lead architect / whoever authorized this stupid setup apparently “forgot” that the main feature of Twitter is it *allows* you to choose the people you receive tweets from.
(or, more likely, they’ve never used Twitter – it’s just a buzzword they’d heard of from a VC)
LinkedIn removes that choice. It simply forces everything on you. No filtering. No choices. Nothing. As a user, you exist to be spammed.
As a user, you exist to consume LinkedIn’s adverts, and nothing else. The site is – it would seem – not intended to be useful.
RIP LinkedIn.com
For a business to sink to such a low level of utility, and for the management to achieve such a high level of ignorance about the market, suggests to me that LI is moving rapidly towards implosion. I don’t believe it will still be with us two years from now. And that’s rather tragic, given how valuable it used to be.