
LinkedIn has lost its vision - pm24601
http://sworddance.com/blog/2016/03/26/linkedin-has-lost-its-vision/
======
tryitnow
The problem is that LinkedIn got sucked into serving one very specific
demographic: recruiters.

It would be as if Facebook decided to focus obsessively on serving college
students. It's a good initial strategy, but eventually you have to serve
bigger markets.

If I were in charge at LinkedIn I'd focus it on becoming the number one place
for professionals to exchange information, create and manage events, and
connect with like minded colleagues.

There's a huge potential in this because most professions don't have
particularly good online social networks. Oftentimes they're old fashioned
discussion boards behind paywalls, comments sections of popular blogs and
other half-ass solutions.

Interestingly, my vision really wouldn't do much for software engineers and
developers. I think StackOverflow, meetups, and other resources already
provide this.

It boggles my mind that they didn't take this route and instead they became
the social network for the unemployed as another commenter aptly described
them.

It's a business school case study waiting to be written.

~~~
bliti
How would that make money? I mean profits not revenue.

~~~
tryitnow
Ha. Good question, I didn't think anyone thought about profits any more.

Seriously, I'm assuming the same ad driven model that has made Facebook
profitable would work for a professional network to.

I know I have personally clicked on ads that are related to my profession. I'm
far, far more tolerant (even accepting) of B2B advertising than I am of B2C.

It's tricky though. They would have to be careful not to turn it into a pure
marketing play. There would have to be safeguards against that.

The key is they would have to keep their eye on the main value proposition:

Becoming the number one way professionals connect with the idea, events, and
people who can help them do their jobs better.

~~~
bliti
And how is that different from Facebook? I'm not being a troll. Just exploring
your thoughts.

~~~
eru
In the same way Ravelry is different from Facebook.

~~~
bliti
I hadn't even heard of Ravelry. Thanks to your comment, I'll check it out. :)

~~~
eru
Thanks for going to the effort and checking it out.

For other people who don't know (and don't want to make the effort): my
argument was that special purpose social networking sites can do well. Even if
with a bit of hacking (and `apps') you could replicate most of their
functionality on Facebook.

Ravelry is for knitting and associated crafts.

------
hoodoof
Vision or not, they have exceptional engineering talent able to draw
conclusions about who my ex girlfriends are from 20 years ago and suggest I
connect with them.

Or somehow to draw conclusions about who I communicated with on an anonymous
dating site and suggest I connect with them.

I'm looking forward to the day that as I walk down the street wearing my
Augmented Reality glasses, LinkedIn transparently identifies the faces of the
passing people and suggests that I connect to each long lost deeply valued
relationship, or suggests I connect to the person walking past who has been
stalking me online after I went on one date with them and hated them. Viva
LinkedIn!

If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Linkedin is just a sum of so many dark patters...

I mean really, take Facebook. Does it suck in some ways? Yes. Does it set the
privacy defaults a bit more lenient than my own preferences? Sure.. but I use
it and I've found it trivially easy to grasp some of its privacy basics, and
set the settings according to my wishes, such that it's usable within my
privacy wishes. Further, they've at various times prompted me to look into my
privacy settings. All of this has been under enormous scrutiny and pressure,
they're no saints... but for me it's a reasonable product in my own
experience. If need be, I wouldn't feel bad about closing my FB account
because it'd mean FB just wasn't for me, rather than FB is trying to screw me
left and right and I need to get out.

Linkedin is very much unlike that, every interaction I have with it says
'close your account because you don't know what the hell Linkedin is doing',
and I've not logged on in at least half a year because I fear what kind of
alerts and notifications they'll send to my network on the basis of me
visiting a few pages there. Like when I turned off 'see who visited my
profile', so that I could turn off 'let people see I visited their profile'. A
few days later I check my best friends' linkedin because I was updating mine
and looking for inspiration, and he jokingly messages me I'm stalking him on
linkedin. I couldn't care less he saw that, he's my best friend, but what the
f, I just turned that feature off? It's just an accumulation of stuff like
that where I've completely lost my trust.

> If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great
> success!

Totally my experience. And I'm even one of those people who's pretty good at
bs options, like a tiny remark that give permission for linkedin to email your
entire gmail contact list (i.e. anyone you ever conversed with, like say a guy
from craigslist you bought a fishbowl from 7 years ago). Even then I feel like
Linkedin is just screwing me in broad daylight while I'm paying my utmost
attention.

~~~
caseyf7
Yeah, they actually sell the ability to see who visited your page even if they
have privacy turned on.

~~~
sokoloff
So create a second profile... (I get that you might naturally expect/want that
you could use your main profile with some special bit set, but given that the
workaround is so trivial, the pragmatist in me has trouble working up a lot of
anger over it.)

~~~
eru
It's more the violation of trust (also trust in reliability and
predictability) that annoys people.

------
ChuckMcM
Actually the 'monetization' of LinkedIn against non-recruiter members has
really dampened my enthusiasm for the company. So many things that I used to
be able to do as a member for free have been cut off. I got a chance to talk
to someone about that and their off the record comment was that two things had
happened, first recruiters were using their own profiles to do research rather
than using the tools that LinkedIn tried to sell them, and two when they
restricted access they found their "meat" members started paying for the
service of knowing things like "who looked at my profile." Win win! sort of.

The interesting thing was this trick, a recruiter creates a fake profile that
has the same characteristics of a candidate they are trying to place. They
wait for the LinkedIn AI scripts to send their fake profile a list of
companies that are looking for people like that fake profile (and thus their
actual client) and then they are spamming those companies HR/Jobs/other emails
to try to get their candidate in front of the company So much easier than
trying to lie your way into figuring out who was hiring and for what.

~~~
hardlianotion
It seems crazy, but pretty damning evidence of that gong on discussed here

[http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=17...](http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=179303)

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is pretty funny. Clearly you could search for every profile that had a
picture from a stock photo on it and turn up a bunch of fakes.

------
overgard
The thing for me personally, is after some of their past behavior I just don't
trust them enough to use the site regularly. I'm thinking specifically of
their extremely aggressive and manipulative attempts to gain access to your
email contacts and spam people you know. While I'm not specifically worried
about that one specific thing, the fact that they were willing to do something
like that makes me think they're willing to do other things I'd disagree with.
When it's your professional reputation and contacts at stake it just feels a
little bit too risky to use it regularly.

That said, it really is a useful tool for keeping track of where people have
gone and what they're presently up to, I just can't imagine ever using it
regularly when I don't entirely trust them.

------
melvinmt
LinkedIn is great: everyone you want to connect with is not active on the
platform and everyone you don't want to connect with is _very_ active.

------
haddr
Linkedin has become a creepy social network, with those hundreds of
headhunters trying to build their database and mostly spamming you with worse
and worse offers, with those creepy notifications that "somebody has visited
your profile", looking more like average dating site more than something
professional.

Yes, it seems that LinkedIn is lacking a vision on how to make looking for a
job a better experience.

------
msandford
Linked in employees probably _can 't_ update their profile without attracting
unwanted attention from managers who will hound them about "why are you
leaving?!?!" and hence, you know everything you need to.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Does that happen at LinkedIn, or are you just assuming? It sounds a little
weird, actually. Why would a manager get agitated about one of his/her people
actually updating their skills on their very own site?

I'd be suspicious if someone was _not_ updating their profile at least once or
twice a year.

Though, in practice, I would just avoid managerial stalking of my employees.
So what if someone's keeping their profile up to date? So what if they're
checking out the market regularly. We all do it. You'd be a fool not to.

~~~
msandford
I'm totally speculating. I don't know.

> Why would a manager get agitated about one of his/her people actually
> updating their skills on their very own site?

Dysfunction is prevalent everywhere in the world. LinkedIn isn't somehow
magically exempt because they own the product.

------
brianmcconnell
They should probably rebrand as SpammedIn. The only people I hear from there
are recruiters, and not very good ones as they don't even seem to bother to
read my profile. I occasionally find its useful for tracking down people I
want to get in touch with, though I can usually find their email pretty easily
via other means. It's sad, because it could have been a really useful tool for
networking and exchanging information.

------
tyrelb
As an employer, I posted a job ad a couple weeks ago, paid a few hundred
dollars, and got 2 non-qualified applicants. Many of my 'connections'
(friends) saw the posting and clicked the job posting...and LinkedIn reported
these ads views (making me think my posting was more popular than it actually
was). Needless to say, it was a learning experience and I'll be sticking to
Indeed. I'd short LNKD...

------
T-A
> Earlier in 2016, LinkedIn lost its bloom. A year ago LNKD was at $269, today
> it is at $110. What happened?

This:
[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1459032194553&chddm=23851&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:LNKD&cmptdms=0&q=NYSE:MWW&ntsp=0&ei=fRD3VrHLNYjEUaWUo8AO)

Not very informative to plot a price chart in isolation, without any kind of
comparison to the sector or broader stock market...

~~~
tshtf
Here you go:

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1459033180269&chddm=98141&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:FB;INDEXSP:.INX&cmptdms=0;0&q=NYSE:LNKD&ntsp=1&ei=UxT3VrHSCcX-
igKvjo7YBg)

~~~
T-A
If you think LinkedIn is in the same sector as Facebook, maybe. I find the
comparison with Monster far more telling.

~~~
Balgair
What did I miss about these well correlated drops? What happened to both
companies to cause these losses? I am genuinely curious as I don't really
follow these 2 companies.

~~~
T-A
The year started with a surge in recession fears. In a recession, employers
reduce hiring, so it makes sense that companies offering professional
recruitment services would be particularly affected.

------
ddon
Haven't updated my LinkedIn profile for a long time, and I get friended all
the time by strangers and I don't even know if it makes any sense, but I just
accept them... How do you use LinkedIn? Please share your ways...

~~~
hueving
I endorse friends for skills they don't have to screw with them.

~~~
sb8244
All of my coworkers have endorsed me for Wordpress for this same reason (to
mess with me and potentially get Wordpress recruiter spam)

------
loudandskittish
Lost its vision? LinkedIn has felt useless for years. It's that "social
network" that clogs up my inbox no matter how many times I changed the
notification settings and nothing more to me.

The worst part is, those e-mails are useless. I keep getting ones informing me
that there are five jobs changes in my network. I'm actually curious about who
has gone where and click the link and it takes me to...well, I don't even know
what I'm looking at.

Afters years of working as a freelance writer and not doing too well lately, I
took a stab at getting one of those "real" jobs which required references. I
decided to look at my LinkedIn profile for the first time in ages to see who
might be able to help.

I click "My Network" and get this pop-over that takes up the whole screen
asking me to "grow my network" and effectively hiding the information I came
for in the first place. How is this supposed to be useful?

~~~
justinclift
Completely agreed. Shady practises (eg: email spam), plus dark patterns (eg
presenting people who _might_ be a connection as having actually sent a
"Connection Request") have made it fundamentally a not-to-be-trusted website.

My LinkedIn profile now _literally_ tells recruiters to Fuck Off. And still
they come.

The only value it has for me, is presenting (generally) valid contact details
(eg: email address) for the people I already know and whom I may have fallen
out of contact with. That's not huge value though, and several times I've been
seriously tempted to just remove my profile forever.

------
alkonaut
The part about the past vs the future is so true; why not ask me for a few
keywords describing what I'd like to do, or not like to do?

I'd be very happy to provide that and it would be a gold mine for their paying
customer, the recruiter.

Now I get tons of recruitment spam for things I wouldn't dream of doing, and
the things I'd like to do but haven't yet done aren't visible anywhere.

So many missed opportunities in this product it's amazing.

~~~
a3n
Why not write that in your summary yourself, rather than wait for LinkedIn to
figure it out? It's not a finely searchable field, but at least it's there.

~~~
alkonaut
True, but as a feature that recruiters actually use, and that would change the
entire mindset of recruiters to seach for people who want to do X, rather than
people who already did X) I think it would be a valuable feature.

------
duncanawoods
I haven't touched linked-in in quite a while but an idea that I would enjoy:
bring all the value of the meat-world conference online.

Across each major industry vertical, it could organise say a quarterly event
featuring webcasts and q&a from industry legends, moderated discussions,
workshops plus all the networking and promotional activities. Bit like a MOOC
but focussed on professionals not students.

It would make the networking aspect of linked-in meaningful. It shouldn't be
passive rolodex, linked-in should get off their ass and actually work to help
us create real new connections with people we interact with in the events and
activities they host.

------
otoolep
>LinkedIn’s own employees don’t see the value of updating their own LinkedIn
profile!

Huh? It's a company of 8,000+ people, and a random screenshot of 4 profiles
leads you to this conclusion? In any company of thousands you're going find at
least some people that don't find utility in the product that company is
creating. Surely that's obvious? You'd need to actually perform a proper
statistical study to know for sure.

~~~
pm24601
OP here.

Some points here:

1\. I don't have access to all that data do that sort of analysis. If you have
that access, run the analysis and get back to me. I was writing an opinion
piece, not an academic paper.

2\. The people in question are all managers and above. A good demographic of
LinkedIn's sweet spot.

3\. These people in question, I met personally. And each one of them expressed
some variant of not seeing a _personal_ need to update their own profile.

4\. Most of my personal friends understand that they are supposed to get
"something" from their LinkedIn profile - they just don't know what that
"something" is.

5\. LinkedIn has potential that it is wasting.

------
lifeisstillgood
So, as an intellectual exercise, what would I want from a "perfect" LinkedIn:

\- well I gotta trust it, so all of the below I cannot see LinkedIn actually
doing but \- become a contact manager. When did I last call / mail this
person. \- become a graphical network tool - show me my personal business
network \- and remind me who I have not called despite really wanting to

\- What about? Did I promise anything? Did they? Keep reminding me of my todos

~~~
joshuapinter
Hey Paul, we're actually working on an app that does a lot of the things you
mentioned.

I shot you a quick email with a private beta invite in case you want to give
it a go.

Thanks for the validation. :)

Josh

~~~
pm24601
OP here. I would be interested in this as well.

------
blisterpeanuts
LinkedIn is great for someone like my wife, who avoids Facebook as a time
sink, and calls LinkedIn a "Facebook for grownups". It's been a useful way for
her to connect with people without the cruft of looking at kitten pictures and
what someone ate for breakfast.

I log in maybe twice a month, and that's sufficient for me. I hope it works
for LinkedIn as well, because I'd like them to stay in business, but I'm happy
with my level of involvement which I suspect is similar to that of many others
who are also overcommitted on other networks like Facebook, Plus, Twitter,
etc.

I do find myself spending more time there (i.e. staying logged on for a longer
period) because of the blogging/article stream, much of which involves issues
I'm interested in -- employment, technology, the markets, future trends.
Truly, it is a Facebook for grownups, at least for me and my friends.

~~~
Pxtl
I'd rather just a big filter on Facebook and some added resume features for
that. Let me create a professional profile and add professional friends to it.
Add a searchable resume system and we're good.

------
dawhizkid
What do all those 9k employees do?

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fweespee_ch
Tbh, LinkedIn only has value if you are looking for a job. The majority of its
features are nearly worthless to the general population of users.

This being the case I think there is an opportunity for a lean site with a
narrow vertical [e.g. software devs which are heavily recruited by internal
recruiters] to dislodge LinkedIn. Of course they'd have to solely sell your
resume to recruiters. All the other revenue streams and related issues would
have to be dropped.

~~~
dastbe
There's a couple sites specifically catering to the software dev for hire
vertical, like Hired.

Though I think software devs have a unique view of Linkedin, in that we have
many other avenues for professional networking AND we are heavily recruited at
all levels of experience. When the only real way to network is via mutual
acquaintances (as opposed to open source projects, chat rooms, etc.) and you
aren't getting spammed with every "game changing startup" Linkedin can give
you real value.

~~~
fweespee_ch
> There's a couple sites specifically catering to the software dev for hire
> vertical, like Hired.

Yeah but honestly they are all companies I'd personally avoid and haven't been
happy with.

> Though I think software devs have a unique view of Linkedin, in that we have
> many other avenues for professional networking AND we are heavily recruited
> at all levels of experience. When the only real way to network is via mutual
> acquaintances (as opposed to open source projects, chat rooms, etc.) and you
> aren't getting spammed with every "game changing startup" Linkedin can give
> you real value.

Yes but what value do you get out of it besides access to a network for a job
search?

------
ArtKleiner
March 28, 2016 at 2:13 am As the editor-in-chief of a management magazine
(Strategy+Business, www.strategy-business.com), I have a different perspective
on this.

The potential value of LinkedIn is as a vehicle for showing up professionally.
Within a company, and often outside, people realize their aspirations by
demonstrating what they can do distinctively.

That goes beyond having a personal brand: it involves having relationship
equity, reputational equity, and competence – all of which accrue, over time,
just as powerfully as interest-earning capital. LinkedIn is a vehicle for
accelerating this, which is why it has value as a platform for publishing
articles etc.

It's also why the spam issue is serious - to the extent it interferes with
that platform.

The problem articulated here stems from a confusion between public and
professional identities. They’re not the same thing. They involve different
kinds of equity. A public identity requires having a reputation and presence.
We need to be able to publish, critique, and show up. LinkedIn is a platform.

A professional identity requires relationships and connection. For managing
relationships, we need to be able to prune and prioritize people. Avoiding
spam is critical. LinkedIn is a connection point. I too use it to find people
and try to contact them.

For both purposes, we need aspirational guidance, damage control (dealing with
rumors etc.), and the ability to have one place where people can always find
us. To the extent LinkedIn offers these transparently, it can monetize them.

It hasn’t, in my view, lost its vision. It’s grappling with the fact that its
vision is complicated. And the tools are not always clear. The user interface
gets in the way. Is that a trust issue - or just a user experience issue?

Thanks for posting this . I appreciated this essay and the comments. Reply

------
fredfoobar42
LinkedIn had... a vision? Since when?

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shurcooL
This resonates with me. I've already been planning to delete my LinkedIn
account soon. Just having it and maintaining it has more cost than it provides
me value. I'm just doing a few preparation steps before I do it (basically, a
transition plan, like exporting all the valuable to me information from there
into something I'm happier to maintain).

------
yalogin
LinkedIn never had a vision. They never thought big.

They should have aligned themselves with the worker bees, instead they are now
synonymous with recruiters. They should have bought stackoverflow and github.
I don't k is why the fuck they did not do that. Look at Facebook, it bought
Instagram and whatsapp and kept itself relevant. LinkedIn failed in that
aspect.

------
TheRealDunkirk
Most of us, here, understand that the site has been only marginally useful for
quite some time. Well, the company I'm contracted to just did a reorg a couple
weeks ago, following an major headcount reduction last fall. In a STUNNING
display of Dilertonian megacorp management, we were told, in a meeting, that
we shouldn't be unhappy with where we were put in the new organization,
because they used our LinkedIn profiles to sort it out. So, if you don't like
where you wound up, they said, you should have been keeping your your LinkedIn
profile up to date. I really should just delete the whole thing. It's done
absolutely nothing for me, after all these years. And, while I wasn't affected
by these moves, I see that it keeping it can, actually, work against me,
professionally.

------
robbiemitchell
A symptom of the lack of focus -- or giving up -- on the idea that people
should have a reason to keep profiles up to date: acquiring Lynda.

The shift to content was already underway with Pulse et al., but purchasing
Lynda indicated that LinkedIn needed to deduce interests and skills from
viewing content, rather than get first-hand information from profiles.

In terms of resumes being more complete than LinkedIn, resumes let you do one
thing you can't do with a public profile: scope your experience -- which is
necessarily simplified to be on one page -- according to the role you're
applying for.

------
msoad
I found a solution to recruiter spam in LinkedIn. Instead of killing my
account I just deleted all the details (positions and education) from my
profile. Now I connect to ex-colleges without getting a lot of spam.

------
maxxxxx
I think that's the path of many companies. They have something good going but
they are so overvalued that they have to grow at a much faster rate than their
current market allows and so have find other ways to make money. Which in turn
then often destroys their once good first product. I bet that will happen to
Facebook and Google too. They better come up with something new to keep their
growth going but it's really hard to find a market of the necessary size.

------
bandrami
I've been on LinkedIn for about 10 years now. I still have no idea what it's
for, or what I'm supposed to do on it. I don't even know if there's a way for
me to pay to get different stuff than they show me. It clearly has an audience
(every project manager I've had seems to love it), but that audience is
equally clearly not me.

------
engi_nerd
I don't keep my profile up to date because I don't see the value anymore. I
did, once upon a time, keep it very up-to-date, but the only people who ever
contacted me were headhunters for positions I had zero relevant experience for
and would never be interested in.

------
Pxtl
Honestly, I wish Facebook or Plus would create a "Professional" portal with a
distinct friend list and profile page and searchable resumes so we could be
done with this digital albatross.

------
apahwa
a big issue for them (as the article says) is incomplete profiles or profiles
that aren't as filled out as the person's resume. i believe that is because a
lot of, if not most, people embellish their resume to make what they did sound
better than it actually was. you can't do that on a public profile since
people will know you are bullshitting.

------
Animats
I haven't paid much attention to LinkedIn in years, but it used to be all
"consultants".

LinkedIn has a market cap of $14 billion. Which is just wrong for a company
that's been around for years and is still losing money.

