The first problem on LinkedIn is that many people have to be on it to earn a living or show their team spirit for work. If we could all find employment and network without LinkedIn better than with it, 90% of us would.
So when someone is hitting on someone using LinkedIn, that person is the societal equivalent of the jerk who hits on a waitress at her job. She has no choice but to be nice to you and tolerate your “smooth” lines because she’s a prisoner. She can’t leave easily and the jerk might be an important customer of the business. Even if the jerk is being coy about it (likely for the purposes of plausible deniability later), it’s incredibly awkward and disrespectful to the waitress.
This is no different than a female client flirting with a male financial advisor putting him in the awkward position as well.
Both are jerks. And while these are common stereotypical situations, there exist with the roles reversed too. Ask any male bartender. It’s awful and a real impediment to security in their relationship when every other night, some lady implies she’s available to him.
The second and bigger problem with LinkedIn are all the idiots who think it’s an extension of their social media. They pontificate on political events, give condescending lessons on life, share way too much about their personal life (nobody cares about your daily wins), and use #hashtags so #frequently that is #impossible to #read their #posts, not that they worth reading anyway.
It seems no matter what you do to purge yourself of these fools in your “professional network”, you’ve always got a few saps that end up liking their posts and so that Instagram-like garbage shows up anyway. You have to constantly tell LinkedIn you’re not interested, or just keep your network to a low high-quality number of people that are too busy working to play with their phones.
When I get a connection request, even if it looks like a promising industry connection, I check their activity history. If they’re on LinkedIn liking and posting things every week, then it’s a no go. You’d better be worth a cool $100 million for me to make an exception.
My feed is my feed. I follow companies to keep track of my industry. If you are cluttering that up with your sappy posts, even if I agree with you, you’re gone.
Unless you’re my boss, in which case, my hatred runs deep. I can’t even unfollow you because you are the kind of LinkedIn Loser who checks for mismatches on connections verses followers. So yes, much deep hatred.