Ask HN: LinkedIn mysteriously banned me permanently; where to go next?

I posted earlier on HN that LinkedIn permanently banned me without knowing why. It’s a moot point with them because no person on LinkedIn seems willing (or aware) to talk to me and tell me why. All I get is the same automated response that I am banned: “We've deemed the activity in your account is in violation of the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies. Your appeal has been denied, and your account has been restricted permanently. Please see our User Agreement and Professional Community Policies for more information.”

Recruiters expect me to have a LinkedIn link on my resume or portfolio, and they expect job seekers like myself to be searchable on the platform as well. That is no longer an option for me. Besides replacing my LinkedIn URL with my home page on my resume, if that even matters, where do you think I can promote myself as a technology consultant now that I no longer exist on LinkedIn?

You engaged in no activity before ban? Just banned one day?

It's pretty scary all the horror stories one hears on HN along these lines. I wish some regulation would be imposed requiring some sort of approximation of "due process", so to speak, when this happens to people.

OP didn't say they engaged in no activity, they just didn't know why they got banned. OP probably did/said all sorts of things that would have justified it.

Anyway I've never felt it's a requirement to have a LinkedIn profile to get hired as a developer, so the post as a whole is strange to me.

> Recruiters expect me to have a LinkedIn link on my resume or portfolio

I've never seen this before.

Either way, in every city there is only a finite number of recruitment agencies each of whom will have their own internal CRM of candidates. So just go on their website, find someone who works there and ask to be put on it along with your skills etc

Also just build relationships with recruiters. It's always a smart thing to do if you're planning to have a long term consulting career.

The first idea that popped into my mind was that you could develop a distributed social network.