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LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

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Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#161

Post by awj »

Caerus wrote: post #11

Facebook does the same thing and it's just as creepy. I closed my "real" account around 2011. A few months back I created a new blank account because I needed access to a couple organization's pages. The only information on that account is my name (a fairly common one) and an email address which is different from the one on my original account. It's possible they have some geographic info linking the two accounts as…

Most of that knowledge is likely due to people importing their address books. From there they can link you to other email addresses and combine the identities. Creepy yes, but relatively easy to explain.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#162

Post by reinhardt »

Lewton wrote: post #60

I don't have a linkedin account. Should I? Does it provide value I can't find elsewhere?

The value I get from it is mostly gathering intelligence about companies (e.g. size, new hires/leaves, key people in similar roles, etc), much less about actual "socializing". I very rarely initiate a connection, most of my (double digit only) contacts are by accepting invitations.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#163

Post by lukejduncan »

corin_ wrote: post #149
Aloisius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn off your visibility when browsing other people's profiles. By default, it should be anonymized anyway, unless you switched it when trying to view profile stats : https://www.linkedin.com/settings/wvmp-visibility?goback=%2E... Personally I keep mine fully on since it is a good way of passive contact (I once browsed ~1000 VCs with a headline that was somewhat provocative as an experiment and about half loo…

Premium accounts still see it, though.

LI employee here. That's actually not correct. Premium accounts do not still see anonymous viewers.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#164

Post by ry0ohki »

wtetzner wrote: post #123
blhack wrote: post #91

I finally joined linkedin about a week ago, and it just feels...scammy. It's interesting to me (or frightening) that some of the smartest people I know have the fewest endorsements. People I know doing [1] actual real work on things like "microcontrollers" have...3-4 endorsements with them, but people who I know have only maybe installed Linux, have 20 or so endorsements for "linux". There are people I know who are p…

The endorsements on LinkedIn are useless. LinkedIn suggests things like "Endorse [So and So] for [some thing]," and people just click the "endorse" button. People that know nothing about technology have endorsed me for skills I don't have.

The best part is you can make up new things to endorse them in! I've endorsed people for "Lunch" and "Alcoholism" as a joke.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#165

Post by joelmaat »

codegeek wrote: post #74
michaelochurch wrote: post #72

Y'all know that I worked for Google. On this topic, I can only say good things about the place. When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. Many of these "social" innovations that are popping up on the market place were rejected out-of-hand at Google because it holds itself to an extremely high ethical standard regarding user data, as it actually respects them. I was shocked,…

"broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam" How would you do it differently ? Genuinely interested in your opinion on this.

They should play up whatever the person does 90% of the time. For Engineers that could be demonstrated by the following profiles: GitHub, TopCoder, StackOverflow, Quora, etc. Just get right to the heart of what they do and what their skills are in a way that demonstrates those skills. That's what's missing. Everything else, and most of what is currently used, is a misguided attempt to gauge or estimate what really matters by asking about everything other than what matters.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#166

Post by Silhouette »

blhack wrote: post #91

I finally joined linkedin about a week ago, and it just feels...scammy. It's interesting to me (or frightening) that some of the smartest people I know have the fewest endorsements. People I know doing [1] actual real work on things like "microcontrollers" have...3-4 endorsements with them, but people who I know have only maybe installed Linux, have 20 or so endorsements for "linux". There are people I know who are p…

I'll keep just linking people to my github, and showing them projects I've built.

[1]: Actual real work as in: writing libraries that other people use. Contributing to the community in ways that effect the entire community.

I worry a little about the GitHub approach as well.

On the one hand, it's great that some people have effectively got portfolios now. It's verifiable evidence that they have some clue what they're doing.

On the other hand, I'm concerned about a bias developing against people who don't put loads of work on GitHub for whatever reason, which is not verifiable evidence that they don't know what they're doing. They might be world class experts who could easily demonstrate their skill and expertise in person, but that's no good if employers all start using cost-cutting auto-screening software that never shortlists such candidates for interview because they didn't share their ingenious but proprietary code/ideas with the general public.

In short, any scheme that relies on historical demonstrations, whether it's claims on a CV or code on a GitHub account, is always going to be vulnerable to false negatives.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#167

Post by rjempson »

I don't like LinkedIn for similar reasons but I somehow feel I will offend people if I drop out, and I have had some decent leads from it over the years.

The import contacts feature is particularly nefarious, it says "import" but it actually keeps checking down the track (or at least it used to work like that).

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#169

Post by rooker »

I did the "attractive women" thing (took a hit for the team, for science) and that was absolutely true. The odd thing was, the first random girl I clicked on was this girl I kinda had a crush on in college (all my "People you may know" recommendations were from college, even as I'm three years out) who happened to be Asian. Then...all of the "Also Viewed" were fairly attractive, well-groomed Asian women. Isn't that interesting? I thought at the very least it would break me out of race, but apparently they're their own class.

The other thing I'll say is perhaps this author is tapped out of "People you may know" and LinkedIn is simply guessing . Mine looks fairly reasonable, random, and not like they were digging particularly deep.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#170

Post by jen_h »

iffyuva wrote: post #146
wtetzner wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endorsements on LinkedIn are useless. LinkedIn suggests things like "Endorse [So and So] for [some thing]," and people just click the "endorse" button. People that know nothing about technology have endorsed me for skills I don't have.

That endorsements looks more or less like a poll. People with whom I have barely worked also endorsed me! Very creepy!

Same here - people that I haven't worked with but know socially have endorsed me for totally unrelated programming skills that were last used in the late 90s. LinkedIn suggests something, and people click Next-Next-Next. The whole endorsements thing is a joke.

Also not a big fan of LinkedIn's asking me to connect to the spouses of exes I haven't talked to, emailed, stalked, nor seen for 15 years and several email accounts. Massively creepy.

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