Title needs [2013] appended, as it's from May 9, 2013.
Original HN thread:
LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#42Is LinkedIn even a social network? Everyone I know uses it as basically a resume hosting site. I don't know of anyone who uses it for actually doing anything 'social' - just career related things.
I saw a meme post today. Bunch of people liked it. It said, "LinkedIn is not Facebook. Please stop posting silly brainteasers, what you ate, and so on." Or something to that effect.
I think the HN crowd wouldn't really care for its social aspects because the HN crowd's professional online social needs are more satisfied by the likes of HN, Github, Stackoverflow, and so on. However, I see a lot of professional discussions on there for people of other career paths.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#43I had an interesting experience last year when I was working in a co-working space. I noticed that LinkedIn started suggesting to me the other people who were working in the same space. I had no verbal or virtual contact with these people, other than basic office small talk, but I never knew their name and they never knew mine. I mentioned it to them, and they all claimed they hadn't looked me up on LinkedIn, and tha…
Maybe someone had all of your email addresses (like the organizer of the coworking space) and uploaded them to LinkedIn via the contact finder.
I can't say that wasn't the case, but I believe it would have required a lot of sleuthing. I was a recent hire to the company and never added my company email address to LinkedIn. The co-working space organizer, if they even had my email address, would have had my company email and not my personal one.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#44Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in "people I know". I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless. I am not going to add him but from my point of view,…
I'm always a bit surprised that people find this sort of thing to be creepy. It's done automatically at a large scale by an algorithm - I would bet that there isn't a single human being at LinkedIn who knows that this connection was made (or is even aware of your existence [sorry]). Having said that, I completely agree that "proposing you to add people you only know remotely diminishes the usefulness of the network".…
An algorithm may be a piece of pure, abstract mathematics, but its use and implementation is still a product of human intent and societal construction.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#45The only thing I find linkedin useful for these days is to keep an eye on open positions related to my field. Besides, I dont know anyone that uses LinkedIn and actually likes it. Lets face it, its completely horrible for many reasons:
- Recruiters sending unsolicited connections requests and spam,
- Lame articles on productivity ( "5 reasons you should do X", or "5 things billionaires do when Y" bla bla.)
- Who viewed your profile feature - seriously, things like this make people not click on other people's profile.
- All kinds of statistics on profile views that don't really mean anything of value.
- Thousands of collaboration groups that are completely inactive, so basically no community whatsoever.
I honestly think that the only reason they are still in business is because nobody came up with a superior product yet, and that makes me sad.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#46It's actually a pretty ugly site. You'd think for a site that popular they'd hire better designers.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#47Other users who have imported their contact list is probably what causes them to show up on "People You May Know". I have noticed that people who I'm suggested to add are ones that I have only communicated with through email.
This is the most obvious explanation. It compares your email to the list of contacts that other people have imported. If you were on their list, you may 'know' them. Pretty simple.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#48> David Veldt is a digital marketing consultant specializing in building online businesses and growing brands. He writes on a variety of topics within SEO, PPC and analytics, as well as the occasional ode to baseball.
This is an amazing conclusion coming from a digital marketing consultant who's livelihood is based on the very principles that he's challenging. This is akin to a car salesman not realizing that many of the parts of the "American car" he's selling are probably not made in America.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a sign outside their original office (not the new ones) on Matilda which states this.
Do you mean 755 N. Mathilda Ave? It looks like LinkedIn is just moving into Experian's old office. I don't think the two companies are related.
I'll have to double check, but it looks like you're right http://goo.gl/maps/0hMLV
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
More likely they get data from their acquisition of Rapportive, which is a gmail extension that displays LinkedIn info of people next to emails from/to them.
Good guess, except neither of us were using Gmail.
Gmail can be used with non gmail domains.