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LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

venturebeat.com

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Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#91

Post by thoman23 »

itgoon wrote: post #78

Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn. Yes, it has led to actual, paying jobs. It takes some management on my part, but it's a lot easier than hunting around from site to site, or going to meetups, or any of that other stuff. Do I get spammed? Sure. That's why I have a specific email account for them. Some of the spam is quite informative. I learn about openings early on, and can often find…

> Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn.

I don't get the hate either. When it comes time for your next job search, it's incredibly valuable to have a consolidated list of everyone you've ever worked with where you can see where they work now. When I was looking for some part time work while launching my (bootstrapped) startup, I reached out to about 50 people from my LinkedIn network and it worked out great for me.

As for spam, I just filter and/or ignore it (yes, I get a ton of it, maybe 10+ recruiter emails a day).

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#92

Post by georgemcbay »

coddingtonbear wrote: post #48
JohnTHaller wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One optimistic possibility is so that if you leave your LinkedIn account logged in on a computer somewhere, another individual can't immediately export all your contacts, which could have competitive or security implications. It takes multiple days and you get notification of it happening.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, here.

Extremely unlikely. I'm sticking with the non-optimistic theory.

If it were really about protecting user privacy they could just have you re-enter your password to download the contacts, which is the industry standard thing to do when someone is logged in but doing something you think needs extra protection against them having accidentally left themselves logged in on a public system.

3 days is a good number for someone rage-quitting to let it slip off their radar and just lazily remain a user, not really a useful time period for security purposes.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#93

Post by dylanjermiah »

phil_s_stein wrote: post #87

Linked In spammed me once when they reached some sort of milestone. The email had no remove-me-from-this-list link or way to tell Linked In that I didn't want to receive emails. I found the CEO's email address and forwarded it to him, asking him to remove me from the mailing list. He sent back a nasty email and deleted my account. I've not looked back and my life is exactly as it was, minus a few unwanted emails.

Do you still have the email from Jeff?

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#94

Post by takee »

It's fairly easy to come up with a long list of shady practices that force me to not trust LinkedIn:

1. To start with, they sneaked in the request to access all your email contacts and constantly spam them in your name which can be embarrassing at times to say the least.

2. Their mobile apps do the same with your phone contacts, cleverly hiding the checkmark (in smallest font) to disallow the uploading of contacts. I have unknowingly let them look through my contacts at least two different times prompting me to never install their app again.

3. Letting others know that you viewed their profile. This is fine as long as you know about this feature but I bet that a bunch of us were taken by surprise in the early days to find out that our "online research" on someone was not private unless if you're incognito.

4. Charging you beyond the free trial period without any email or notification about it. I agree that many businesses do this but some of them like Amazon and Netflix are nice enough to allow you to disable the future payments before the trail ends. Also they tend to notify you about the payments.

5. Letting people have access to my email and other contact info even when I haven't accepted their request to connect. This may have been fixed with the recent change but may just have been one of those hidden features that led to their popularity with the recruiter world in the first place.

I am sure I missed out a bunch of other things here but these are the reasons why I can never trust LinkedIn.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#95

Post by caseysoftware »

dylanjermiah wrote: post #93
phil_s_stein wrote: post #87

Linked In spammed me once when they reached some sort of milestone. The email had no remove-me-from-this-list link or way to tell Linked In that I didn't want to receive emails. I found the CEO's email address and forwarded it to him, asking him to remove me from the mailing list. He sent back a nasty email and deleted my account. I've not looked back and my life is exactly as it was, minus a few unwanted emails.

Do you still have the email from Jeff?

Wow, yeah. That would be an interesting one to read.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#96

Post by pyre »

jonathankoren wrote: post #61
lemevi wrote: post #9

LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing employees and if so ask them about t…

> The users are what is for sale on this site. Isn't that true of pretty much every advertising driven site? Full disclosure: I used to work at LI.

I haven't been on LinkedIn in a while, but are there ads on it? From my perspective LinkedIn is probably the most obnoxious social media site (in a doesn't-even-try-to-hide-it way).

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#97

Post by ryandrake »

jlees wrote: post #67
ryandrake wrote: post #33

Not sure I share the experience w/LinkedIn that apparently the majority of HNers have. I get very, very few recruiter messages through LinkedIn. The ones I do get are thoughtful and do a very good job of matching skill-set, background, etc.--they have obviously read my profile and are not just fishing. This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see you have 12 years of development experi…

I also have found the recruiter email to have gotten a lot better recently. As an experiment (as my startup is hiring - I wanted to see what the candidate experience might be like these days), I expanded my LinkedIn profile to trigger as many recruiter-friendly tickyboxes as possible, expecting a deluge of spam. I got about five messages, all fairly well crafted and personalised to some extent. Honestly, I get more s…

Title might act as a filter as well. I cycled among "Senior Software Engineer," "Product Manager," and "Engineering Project Manager", and got most of the spammy shotgun recruiters when I called myself a Senior Software Engineer.

It would be an interesting experiment to create lots of identical profiles with single variables changed to see how they each perform, but that's likely against LinkedIn's terms of service. They should add the ability to A/B test tweaks like this and let you optimize your profile for whatever level of recruiter interest you'd like.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#98

Post by suprgeek »

takee wrote: post #94

It's fairly easy to come up with a long list of shady practices that force me to not trust LinkedIn: 1. To start with, they sneaked in the request to access all your email contacts and constantly spam them in your name which can be embarrassing at times to say the least. 2. Their mobile apps do the same with your phone contacts, cleverly hiding the checkmark (in smallest font) to disallow the uploading of contacts. I…

- LinkedIn has employed "Dark Patterns" for a long time to scarf up your Address Book via your e-mail id. Then unless you are VERY careful you will end up spamming everyone with an invite.

- They also employed a MTM attack on your mobile "Intro App" https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-...

- Have you noticed that the LI News feed is a high-noise collection of crap?

- and on and on

"Monetizing your users" is rapidly making that site useless for almost everyone.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#99

Post by akshat_h »

vpeters25 wrote: post #80
itgoon wrote: post #78

Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn. Yes, it has led to actual, paying jobs. It takes some management on my part, but it's a lot easier than hunting around from site to site, or going to meetups, or any of that other stuff. Do I get spammed? Sure. That's why I have a specific email account for them. Some of the spam is quite informative. I learn about openings early on, and can often find…

> I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards. This would be great if it could be automated somehow: paste email to a macro job board and get links to matching posts.

It is a tradeoff. If you are looking for a job, or are new to the industry, linkedin is better than trying to build a professional network otherwise. After you have been in the industry for, say 15 years, and pretty much know most of the people working in your space, are highly specialized, then the recruiter emails will feel like spam. My guess is that for the first case, you aren't specific enough about yourself, so recruiters have a good chance of reaching you, based on your profile. After a certain amount of time, your profile readily doesn't distinguish your interests clearly. For example, a java developer tag at the start of one's career is quite different from a senior java developer who has understanding of internals of JVM. Recruiter may not know about the second case enough to be of much help.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#100

Post by akshat_h »

jacquesm wrote: post #35
curiousjorge wrote: post #11

why hasn't anybody disrupted linkedin yet? what would you like to see instead of linkedin? snapchat for business professionals?

Network effects.

Is Network effects a company? If so, can you give the url. Googling doesn't help much in this case. EDIT:If you were talking about social network effects, this is embarrassing.
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