

LinkedIn is Evil - smock

I just spent the last half hour trying to downgrade my account from business to personal, after discovering a recurring charge which I hadn't realized was going to be recurring.  There are plenty of buttons and obvious links for how I can upgrade my account - but not a single one for downgrading.  I considered canceling, but now that I'm in the system it will be awkward to leave.  Basically they have me boxed in.<p>From their FAQ, it appears that the only way to downgrade is to E-MAIL THEM!  Even though I find this unacceptable, I went ahead and composed an e-mail using their link - only to get a 'Page Load Error' upon submission.<p>Has anyone else had a similar experience with LinkedIn, or am I just missing something obvious?
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sam
The same thing is happening for me. I just noticed that they are billing me
$20/month and I'm also getting an error when I try to send them a message via
their form. Not being able to downgrade in a simple way is Evil. It reminds me
of AOL in the bad old days.

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Harkins
You're missing that you should just start contesting the charges. You made a
good faith effort to downgrade. Chargebacks sound like the only way to get
their attention.

~~~
Kaizyn
You know, a person can always CALL on a 'telephone' and speak to someone from
LinkedIn in person. After dealing with a short wait period, you will get to
talk to someone who will help you, thus avoiding the nastiness in court.

~~~
mlinsey
I'm not sure if you really meant this as a reply/rebuttal to the grandparent,
but contesting a charge with your credit card company rarely ever results in
"nastiness in court". In fact, that's pretty much the one virtue of credit
cards over other forms of payment - it's easy for you to contest things and
then your credit card company will usually just take care of it for you.

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brk
Odd, I've gone from free-paid-free-paid-free a few times now by following
whatever the process was at the time.

One thing I suggest for any sites like this is to get one of those
"disposable" credit card numbers with a configurable time/balance limit. Login
to your online card balance viewer portal and there is usually an option for
this. Eliminates a lot of "please please cancel my account" debates...

~~~
deepster
Any recommendations on 'disposable' credit cards?

~~~
georgecmu
Citibank provides a web service that dynamically generates a credit card
number linked to your account, which is only valid for a month. This service
comes free with their credit cards AFAIK.

~~~
kingnothing
Bank of America offers this as well. They give you the option of specifying a
one time limit, monthly limit, and expiration dates for the number.

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rplevy
LinkedIn seems to be an all-around stubborn and inconvenient site. I had the
same experience, but in my case it was in deleting my account. The deletion
process was unnecessarily difficult, so I deleted all my contacts (I think the
account ultimately did get deleted though). The reason I wanted to delete my
account in the first place had to do with the fact that it was overly
restrictive in managing, showing, deleting my own content. The last straw was
that I had posted a question in the public Q/A section and there was no way to
delete the question permanently when I did not want it to be shown.

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apu
I've had problems with their email notifications. Despite repeated requests to
be removed from all emails, I still keep getting some. I've written to them
about this as well, with no response.

In general they appear to not really pay attention to user requests.

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bfioca
Maybe downgrading is considered an edge case.

~~~
j2d2
Agreed. Considering a company evil is a bit much...

~~~
wmeredith
Considering a company benevolent is a bit much, I think.

~~~
j2d2
By not considering a company evil, I haven't said anyone is benevolent. I have
a hard time believing nefarious acts are afoot here. I'd prefer not to see
paranoia on HN.

~~~
staticshock
this isn't paranoia, it's a discussion of bad design

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adityakothadiya
Yes, I had similar experience while closing my account on LinkedIn. I had to
email them, to which they replied with asking reasons. But why should I bother
giving them reasons about why I want to close.

They really made sure that I don't have any option to close the account in
one-click (ok, 2 clicks max. for confirmation!)

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bayareaguy
Sounds like a good YC business: a service that will take care of the hassle of
canceling you from other services.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Could call it CancelMe -- For $5 you could cancel any one of a dozen major
evil fee spammers.

I like it. Somebody contact me (info in profile) if they would like to explore
this further.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _For $5 you could cancel any one of a dozen major evil fee spammers_

And for $50 you could cancel the CancelMe service itself :)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Only after going through a dozen menus, calling a Voice System, and copying a
special code from your e-mail into a small text box one character at a time :
)

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ampradhan
Oh man...this sounds similar to turbo tax online...when I filed my taxes for
last year, at the end of the process I upgraded to the next level which was of
course more expensive. Then the upgrade did not really help with the return
and I decided to downgrade back to the standard personal level...but..oh
no...I could not downgrade at all..WTF...and their site says once you upgrade
you cannot downgrade...that's a boat load of whatever...but I would never
imagine LinkedIn doing something similar...the error is probably temporary..

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Bluem00
I had almost exactly the same experience, through the error message when I
submitted my comment to their "customer service" people. The message still
went through and they did cancel my unintentional "subscription". My error
occured because the system somehow decided that I wanted to create an account
at the same time as I submitted my message, but an account with my email
address already exists (for obvious reasons).

Hope your email goes through as well.

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tptacek
I really like LinkedIn. It's been useful to my business a bunch of times. But
I've never been tempted to pay for it. What prompted you to upgrade your
account?

~~~
sam
I signed up in order to send a message to someone outside of my network.

~~~
tptacek
Oh. I've always wondered if that works. Did it? Did they respond?

I get a lot of mileage out of the brokered introduction feature.

~~~
sam
Nope.

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maurycy
[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/186-linkedin-just-wont-
le...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/186-linkedin-just-wont-let-me-go)

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misterbwong
I don't know if this one is different from the link you used, but it seemed to
submit for my test email. I chose Premium Accounts > Cancel-Downgrade as the
categories.

[http://linkedin.custhelp.com/cgi-
bin/linkedin.cfg/php/enduse...](http://linkedin.custhelp.com/cgi-
bin/linkedin.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php)

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Mystalic
I've downgraded from them. Yes, they only do it by email, but they did it like
they said.

They need to fix it though.

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bluelu
Xing isn't any better.

When you register, you get all the features. After a month, when you don't
upgrade your account, you only see who was on your profile (picture) but can't
click on them. You can't even send messages to your friends anymore. You can't
search for people, etc...

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neilk
Any idle News.YC'ers in Mountain View? Perhaps a personal visit...

[http://maps.google.com/?q=2029+Stierlin+ct,+Mountain+View,+C...](http://maps.google.com/?q=2029+Stierlin+ct,+Mountain+View,+California+94043)

~~~
timcederman
They're just down the road from me, I'll go say hi :)

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babul
Although many people use LinkedIN, I don't as there are many things in thier
T&C I am not happy with regarding the sharing of my personal information and
those in my network.

~~~
tptacek
It's basically my resume; I'm OK with people circulating it. =)

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t0pj
Is that opportunity I hear knocking at the market's door?

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danhalen
Yes, I had to write them too. I spent a bunch of time discovering that. It's
piss poor customer service. I'm over it.

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adnam
How's that down arrow coming along?

