I just tried to cancel and they grabbed another month “as per the TOS you agreed to”.
Sadly I didn’t see these comments before subscribing to send one email. 
Fuck you LinkedIn. Get ready for the chargebacks.
I have yet to see much benefit from LinkedIn either. I begrudgingly joined about a year ago, then dutifully added my info / contacts (as you did). It does seem like a nice way (initially) to organize your “network” and remember folks you worked with that you can no longer remember. But I have yet to experience a single meaningful benefit that transcends simply keeping track of contacts manually. The “discussions” and “social” stuff they kicked off generally only features marketing / self-promotional updates from folks.
Don’t feel the desire to opt-out. But your findings from three years ago seem to be largely true today.
No, I can’t point to any practical benefit from LinkedIn, but I think the idea is a good one.
The whole idea of LinkedIn is that it can let you know of contacts that you may not know about. Of course I wouldn’t want to cold call a distant LinkedIn contact I’d never met. It’s good to know if someone I know well has a contact that I’d like an introduction to. As someone who has reviewed more resumes than any human should have to do, I know the value of a recommendation to both the applicant and the hiring manager. I’ve held five programming positions in the past nine years, and four of them came from recommendations from friends or former co-workers. Most of them were kind of random occurrences. LinkedIn seems to be an attempt to allow us to be a little more intentional about friend of a friend recommendations.
Plus, it’s an easy way for me to keep up with where my friends are working.
I use LinkedIn minimally, I only visit when:
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One of my friends discover LinkedIn and sends me link request. When this happens, I read it as “When I change my contact info, find the update at LinkedIn.”
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when I need latest contact info of a friend I want to contact.
Also, if you leave your profile pretty much blank like I do, you won’t receive link request spams.
Li-what?
I agree with you Jeff - if someone wants to contact me, they can e-mail me or, better yet, pick up the phone. I ignore every invitation to every social networking site, because all that they do is add yet another layer of indirection to human communication. If a “friend” is too lazy to actually contact me and strike up a conversation, why exactly should I feel compelled to fill out a form for him/her? I deal with enough bureaucracy from the government and phone company, thankyouverymuch.
I think that even ordinary (non-geek) people are becoming less willing and less able to communicate like functioning human beings. People use the text messaging on their cell phones instead of dialing the number. And they use MSN/AIM at home instead of picking up the phone there. Now e-mail is somehow becoming too personal and people would rather exchange offline messages using a clever pseudonym at a silly forum or web site.
I say, to hell with it. If this is what passes for a friend/associate these days, I’m not interested. And I’d rather make one phone call to one friend and meet them downtown for the afternoon than spend the entire day at home sending impersonal messages back and forth to people who I presumably lost touch with for a good reason. Or people who I don’t even know.
Have gotten lots of benefits from LinkedIn. Both through actually using the system to connect to people or organizations and to evaulate people applying for jobs; and by using the visibility it gives you into your friend’s network to figure out the best person to ask for an introduction or recommendation outside LinkedIn (without having to spam everyone you know).
Think it’s incredibly valuable for anyone who needs to find a job, make contacts at a particular organization, or who does hiring.
If you don’t do any of those things, you’re right it’s probably not worth your time. But if you do have those needs and don’t see the value, you’re probably not leveraging the service effectively.
It’s been useful for to get in touch with old friends where I previously only had an out-of-date mobile number or email. I’ve also used the service to manually search for people I’d lost touch with.
But, I have to agree - the service hasn’t helped me at all professionally.
Back when I first encountered LinkedIn, I found it was pretty useless to me. Now, while I’m conducting a job search, I’ve discovered how to make it useful… not as a primary contact point or job-finding mechanism, but as a supplement to the other things I do. So… how exactly am I using it?
Here are my Top 10 rules:
1- LinkedIn is for my professional life only. I consciously avoid links between ANY sites that cross over between professional and personal. That plus judicious use of privacy settings everywhere… well, it doesn’t completely separate the two, but it helps.
2- My only LinkedIn contacts are people that I know and respect, and that I believe respect and value my skills.
3- I categorize my contacts carefully: colleagues, partners, etc. Those who are just “friends” are few, and only accepted into my network as a courtesy; they are not actively sought out.
4- I use the contact system as it was meant to be used. That means asking for invitations, not sending requests to people I don’t know. Other professionals respect this and respond positively to introductions. (If folks are very slow to provide introductions, I’ll use the telephone to prompt them. This almost always works – because of #2 and #3, I have or can easily get access to phone numbers.)
5- My LinkedIn profile is basically my resume. The public URL is printed on my personal business card.
6- I use “box.com” to provide links on my profile page where interested parties can download a PDF copy of my real resume, and important documents I’ve written and published elsewhere.
7a- I actively ask for recommendations from key people in my career history who will give me strong, well-written references. I gently advise if there are grammatical errors or misspellings, and I make sure the recommendation isn’t “damning with faint praise.” I only display references that will advance my career.
7b- When interviewers or recruiters ask for references early on, I point them to my LinkedIn recommendations. This almost always suffices. This lets me protect my managerial references from being bothered; I provide a means to speak with them only when someone is nearly ready to make an offer.
[BTW, yes, you can do #5-7 by having your own standalone website. Not sure if that is a better approach or not.]
8- I link all my other job search accounts or profiles back to my LinkedIn profile, and to each other, as far as is possible.
9- I actively search for internal contacts at places I think I’d like to work, and ask for introductions. I can find out what it’s really like to work there; I can make new professional contacts; often I can get an internal referral directly to the hiring manager. (For internal referrals, I encourage complete honesty: “I’ve only recently met the guy online and really don’t know him, but you might want to take a look and maybe interview him.” I am often surprised at how this small thing still propels my resume towards the front of the list.)
10- I don’t join every group I can. I do join the groups for my professional affiliations (such as IEEE and ACM). I am also judicious about which group memberships I allow to be publicly visible on my profile: only those which ought to appear on a resume.
[Of course, besides all this, I also use LinkedIn to keep track of people’s contact information when it changes, but others have already discussed how they do that.]
I just had my fill of LinkedIn. Maybe it helps some folks, but not me.
The article indicates they create profiles without people’s permission or solicitation. My recent experience is, they do the same with duplicate profiles. I already had a profile, and they created a duplicate somehow without my consent. Someone shot me in invite using one of those unknown duplicate profiles. That invite appeared in my email. I clicked the link, and it took me to a page with an error message indicating that my email was not associated with the account. I am not able to find my duplicate profiles so I can delete them. They probably don’t even have my first or last name on them.
On the page where the error is displayed, they also have an option for me to send them my email password so they can rummage through my email account. Lovely.
CS is no help. They just tell me what I already know from the FAQ’s; i.e., I may have duplicates. I tell them I have no duplicates, but they don’t address the real problem, which is I shouldn’t be getting these invites that don’t work.
End of 2018 and they are still around.
Does this mean that they improved their service (giving more user benefit) or that users are ok with providing information without direct benefit?
Or that people are just a lazy bunch 