
LinkedIn is a Virus - marban
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2013/03/linkedin-is-a-virus.html
======
jpdoctor
My version: I was on the iPad, somehow hit a link to send invites to everyone
on my "you might know" list.

Much embarassment ensued.

Surprisingly, about 75% of people who I've never met (online or IRL) accepted
the invite.

I'm not exactly sure why Linkedin is worth a damn anymore.

~~~
Bjoern
That explains why $random people I've never met send me connect invites. I
normally ignore them, but still waste time trying to figure out if its
important or not. -.-.

Can one safely ignore all these "Business" networks? Wonder what people get
out of it.

~~~
EvanKelly
I'll connect with someone in my field and location, because those are the
connections I hope to foster with LinkedIn.

One of the weirder things I've experience is people "endorsing" my skills.
Many of which are skills they've certainly never seen me use. I assume they
were doing it for some sort of reciprocal endorsement, but I don't want my
name attached to someone's skills that I know nothing about.

~~~
uptown
My mortgage broker endorsed my jQuery skills. While they are excellent - I
doubt she knows what jQuery is.

~~~
ryanmolden
Yes, I accepted a request from someone today (first time being there in quite
some time) and it immediately suggested I endorse him for a slew of skills. I
presume some people just click the button, thus I largely ignore it, I assumed
other techies did as well (I.e. Put no faith in someone's endorsements).

------
fghh45sdfhr3
All of social networking is a virus.

They all rely on viral growth, viral "features" are often pushed despite no
one liking them (see everything Facebook ever did). And most disturbingly if
they succeed in growing big enough (Facebook again) then not having one can
become a bit of problem in real life.

Of course LinkedIn is a virus. It's what works.

~~~
leethax0r
App.Net isn't like that.

~~~
yen223
Of course it is, there's a reason why they started giving out free invites.

------
qdog
Rule 1: Make sure your linkedin password is not the same as your gmail
password. I've tried to login to linkedin a couple of times in too much of a
hurry, thinking I was logging into linkedin from some request and not reading
the actual page. Luckily my passwords are different.

I'd have to say I'm not sure how someone who is tech savvy can knowingly give
a company their gmail account info and expect nothing bad to happen. I only
connect with people I know on Linkedin (and generally on g+), so I've never
wanted to let them use my gmail info. If you willingly let Linkedin scan your
gmail, I'm not sure what you would expect to happen, other than it inviting
everyone on your contacts list, just like it says it will.

I'm not exactly a fan of Linkedin, but handing out any credentials to a
website you aren't absolutely certain about seems a little naive. Also he
admits he pushed the 'connect' button, which is clearly going to connect you
to someone. I can see asking Linkedin to put a bigger warning or something,
but knowingly giving them your info and hitting connect without scrolling down
isn't the act of innocence professed here.

Post should be titled "Be careful giving information to websites".

~~~
shadesandcolour
A lot of those websites scan your address book and show you people that are
already on the site and then ask you to send emails to people who aren't. It's
reasonable to not know that 11,000 people would be on linked in. Also Linkedin
isn't exactly a website that he "wasn't sure about". Everyone knows what the
site is and does. Also your Rule 1 is kinda silly. I guess as long as I keep
the passwords to those to sites different then I should be safe?

~~~
Justsignedup
Believe it or not, I blame this entire incident on Google, not LinkedIn.

Reasons?

a) you sign in using google. That is actually a REALLY GOOD PRACTICE because
it gives you lots of benefits of oauth (I can de-authorize an account).

b) you only have the one password to remember, which is good for most people.

Why it's bad? Because when signing in, the other side can ask for details from
your account and the best you can do is say "yes" or "no" and if you
accidentally said yes, it's plowing though user preferences (something most
people can't do) at google.

What should happen instead? An intentionally slow experience.

a) user clicks the sign in with google+ or whatever.

b) user is presented with option "allow/deny access for XXXX domain to log in
with your credentials"

c) user is now presented with (all default off) options to allow sharing of
data. There is a big message up top saying "these options are not required for
you to log in with your google account. You may lose some functionality, but
will not share any extra data with the 3rd party"

Vuala. Everyone is better off.

~~~
thesteamboat
Not to detract from your point, just nitpicking for a moment. The word you're
for at the end is voilà, of French origin.

~~~
jff
Points for originality with "vuala", though. Usually it's just "viola" or
"wallah"

~~~
seanp2k2
"vuala" is actually pretty phonetic-esque without all those weird characters.

Also, I had to re-read it about 4 times before I stopped seeing "vulva" :)

------
troebr
The exact same thing happened to me with <http://viadeo.com/>, a linkedin
clone pretty popular in France.

The way it was worded hinted that I could chose from contacts who were on both
my gmail contacts and viadeo users to connect with them. Not send an add to
subscribe to viadeo to my entire contact list (who would ever want to do
that??).

It's such a horrible feeling when you realize what just happened.

It emailed my grandmother, who had no idea what that was, it emailed past
companies HR, ex-girlfriends, CEOs... This is unacceptable. I don't know how
gmail could prevent applications from doing that, but they should not even TRY
to do that in the first place.

~~~
ghshephard
ex-girlfriends, ouch. I initially thought this feature, while annoying, wasn't
that big a deal. I've changed my mind.

~~~
aetherson
LinkedIn does a real number on this one. A few weeks ago, I got a "Do you know
so-and-so" email from LinkedIn. Most of the people they suggested that I knew
were people in my general social circle, and I presume that LinkedIn was just
saying, "Person X is a connection of persons Y, Z, Alpha, and Beta, as are
you. Perhaps you know person X?"

But one was an ex-girlfriend.

Which was weird, because we hadn't dated long and had, to my knowledge, no
social overlap before, during, or since the time that we dated (we met using a
dating site). So, I thought, "How does LinkedIn know that I know her?"

And the conclusion I came to is that she had at some point recently uploaded
her address book, and deliberately not chosen me as a contact, and then
LinkedIn decided to try to nag me into initiating the contact that it knew we
probably had.

Which is, to my mind, pretty evil. She didn't choose to contact me. LinkedIn
basically used information out of her address book without her permission or
knowledge. In an admittedly very minor way, LinkedIn decided to cyber-stalk
her on my "behalf," without either of our permission.

(As it happens, we broke up amicably and no harm was done. But still, it was
kind of gross.)

------
bsg75
There is surprise when an address book with over 1000 entries is voluntarily
connected to a commercial service designed to link people together?

Surprise when closing a _browser tab_ does not stop the request from running
at LinkedIn?

Calling it a virus is disingenuous at best.

 _Edit:_ ... or a way to get page views.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
This, wait... no, sorry, not this. Joking aside; the first button is one that
deselects all contacts and they mention the numbers of connections to be
created right in the top. Here it is: <http://i.imgur.com/3qiT140.jpg>

I do hate LinkedIn but for very different reasons, like pretending is a safety
measure to not connect with strangers and then charging you for a premium
service for direct-emailing anyone you want.

~~~
notahacker
Is "Add connections" the final step?

Granted it does allow you to deselect contacts and does (discreetly) indicate
the interface is obscuring ~100 people it's defaulting sending invites to when
you go to the next step, but you can understand why Joe VP might not expect
clicking the blue button to send invitations to the mistress, disgruntled
former employee and rival contractors who are hidden away somewhere near the
bottom of the list.

------
chintan
Here is an example of another LinkedIn Virus (or may Crunchbase-linkedin
virus), that I experienced the other day and got really pissed.

1\. Go to this page: <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook>

2\. Click on the "In" Widget

3\. It says X connections work at Facebook. with "X connections" hyperlinked.
There is another link below that says "Follow Facebook"

4\. Now you'd think that clicking on "X connections" will show you the
connections.

Try it....

5\. It actually makes you follow the company.

Now, its not bad to follow Facebook but the other day I was checking out a
competitor company and realized it made me follow the company and NO WAY To
unfollow from anywhere.

So SCREW you LinkedIn Virus!!

~~~
rscale
How to unfollow a company:

1\. Go to this page:
[http://www.linkedin.com/companies?dspFllwed=&trk=hb_tab_...](http://www.linkedin.com/companies?dspFllwed=&trk=hb_tab_compy_flw)

2\. Click 'Stop following' under the company you wish to stop following.

~~~
chintan
Thanks but I still have the status that "I'm following <My Competitor>" that I
cannot remove

<http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3003>

~~~
rscale
This won't fix the past, but it's not a bad idea to go to:
<https://www.linkedin.com/settings/> and 'Turn off activity broadcasts'.

------
baddox
I really despise LinkedIn. A while back I got sick of their emails, so I
attempted to unsubscribe, which failed (I got more emails), so I attempted to
cancel my account, which also failed. When the news came out about their
encrypted passwords getting leaked (and cracked), I took another stab at
canceling my account, and that time appeared to be successful because I now
seem to be rid of them once and for all.

------
ghshephard
I'm willing to wager that the "ease" by which this "feature" is executed was
not entirely by accident (supporting the headline's premise).

~~~
mdlthree
I tried LinkedIn Pro as a _try free for 30 days_. This required a credit card
as it will bill you if you forget to cancel. After a week or so, I was
unimpressed and canceled. Or I thought I did. $150 later and three months of
not seeing the recurring transaction on my credit card I realized that I had
not clicked the right buttons to cancel. I felt cheated by deceptive UI
design.

~~~
xentronium
Good ole' forced continuity[1]. BTW, what OP describes is also a dark
pattern[2]. I guess they use darkpatterns.org as their handbook.

[1] <http://darkpatterns.org/library/forced_continuity/>

[2] <http://darkpatterns.org/library/friend_spam/>

------
ujjain
This happens to 13.000 people for me! I kid you not, I wish I made a
screenshot, but it said that on the browser, I also tried the "close the
browser" thing. It was not my intention at all to invite people to Linkedin,
just to invite like 30-40 people that I know well and were also using
Linkedin.

Although I never received follow-up on this. Maybe everybody rejected my
request and ignored the e-mails, or the invitations/e-mails were never sent.

I felt really bad when I saw that I just sent an invitation to 13.000
people... including ex-girlfriends, connections so long ago, I checked my
e-mail box for the next 2-3 hours, but FORTUNATELY nothing came up.

------
downandout
Social networking sites in general only grow through this type of spamming.
Facebook was one of the worst offenders in its early days - Hotmail even
blocked their invite messages for a substantial period of time. It is no
coincidence that many of the sites that use the contact-list/auto-invite
feature most aggressively have grown the fastest. Although we might find it
objectionable, apparently most users either don't object to it or don't
realize that it even happened (my guess would be that hundreds of millions of
FB/LI users fall into the latter category).

------
officemonkey
I use LinkedIn the same way I used to collect Business Cards in the pre-
Internet darkness.

The folks you contact regularly go into my address book, the rest go into my
desk drawer tied up by a big rubber band.

Outlook is the address book, LinkedIn is the rubber band.

------
drharris
This is wildly off topic, but I'm genuinely curious... What is with the
profile pictures of people looking up and to the right, with usually a
circular gradient solid color background? I see it a lot in the SV/tech
industry, and am wondering if it's a particular "startup photographer", or
some meme I don't know about. Any ideas?

~~~
unreal37
There was a study done that said that people not looking at the camera are
found to be more attractive then those who look directly into the lens. Also,
the left side of your face is more attractive than the right.[1]

[1] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/21/face-left-side-
more...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/21/face-left-side-more-
attractive_n_1443325.html)

~~~
drharris
Now this is interesting. I'm not sure if this is the reason for what I'm
talking about, but it's certainly good information to know!

------
ojiikun
I'd point a finger not at LNKD but at GOOG for not having better a better
security impl in gmail. If _anyone_ can send an email that requires just one
click in it to peruse and use your contacts list, that is a bug. Any 3rd party
should need to formally request access to resources like a contacts list, and
the user should be clearly prompted by the GOOG platform to approve/deny the
request.

~~~
downandout
It does require authorization. You have to connect your Google account to
Linked In in order for this to happen and Google has a one-click authorization
process with which to do that.

------
cargo8
YES. This totally happened to me.

Now I'm connected to every apartment manager, recruiter, and random person
I've ever emailed -__-

~~~
nirvanatikku
I'm surprised this point hasn't been made/stressed more in the comments here.

LinkedIn has essentially given recruiters another possible avenue for
connecting with people; by enabling their random, direct emails to users to
turn into leads.

I thought I was being kind in replying and saying "no thanks" only to suddenly
start getting connected with people whom with that was my only interaction.

------
BudVVeezer
Am I the only one who read that and thought "perhaps you should have paid
attention to what you were doing?" I know it sounds dickish, but seriously,
why not own up to the fact that not every user interface is tailored to you,
and that sometimes you are fallible?

~~~
matthaughey
I wish I took screenshots, but honestly my memory is I only saw six invites to
review and in tiny 10px text below the "connect now" button was a thing saying
(and also 1,132 more).

For what it's worth, a designer that works on this feature tweeted an apology
and said they should add a warning, as it was way more common than intended.

------
42tree
Another Linkedin Virus feature:

the default setting on group discussion is that whenever someone replies to a
discussion, all the people who replied before get email notifications.

At one time, I thought Linkedin is nothing but a huge email spam machine.

------
jurassic
I've been eyeing the gmail import tool with suspicion, and I'm glad I didn't
give in to my curiosity. I'd be mortified if all the contacts in my address
book got an email blast from a 3rd party website.

------
codeulike
I've always hated LinkedIn but recently it seems to actually have people
talking to each other in forum-style threads, which actually makes it a bit
more useful.

------
Yhippa
This happened to me when I did something similar on Gowalla several years ago
and I had a very similar experience. It was nice getting the random
correspondence from someone I hadn't heard from in years but I was way more
embarrassed than anything else.

------
Mc_Big_G
I hope "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity." applies here, but I just can't get the picture of the management
over a LinkedIn laughing their asses off because this is exactly how they
designed it.

~~~
rhizome
Hanlon aside, I interviewed there in, oh October or so, and my sense of the
general trajectory of LinkedIn in light of that experience is that they may
have a terminal case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

------
triplesec
I hated Linkedin since it started 10-ishyears ago because it managed to get to
my private email because a friend invited me. Now I know how that happened.

People use it for jobs and so I'm loathe to delete it entirely, but I still
loathe it.

------
Bjorkbat
Huh. Inconvenient I'm sure, but this actually sounds rather fun.

There are people I haven't talked to in a while. Maybe I should invite them to
LinkedIn.

Well, that, or I could just send them an e-mail, but that doesn't sound nearly
as interesting.

------
cmancini
This same thing happened to me. Thought it was a "see if these people are on
LinkedIn". Instead it emailed them. Somewhat mortifying, but fortunately I
tested with a limited subset of my address book.

------
pcx66
I hate that LinkedIn tricks you into endorsing others and accepting
endorsements. It was embarrassing to get endorsed for my expertise on Excel
from people I barely knew.

------
ErikRogneby
This a a case where the double confirmation would be a good design decision.
"Are you sure?" "Click yes to invite 1000 people to connect."

------
Peroni
I wonder how many of the 1,138 accepted the request?

~~~
matthaughey
Last I checked, about 400-500 had accepted. I put the blame squarely on me for
not reading carefully, but also on LinkedIn for not warning me, but Google as
well. Turns out Google has a group in your contacts for everyone you've ever
emailed and it's at something like 6,000 for me, so I guess about 1/5th of
those were on LinkedIn, who got invites.

Some of the invites went to people I'd banned from my sites for spamming, an
old accountant I haven't talked to in ten years, and PR flacks I had arguments
with over sending me press releases I didn't want. My LinkedIn account used to
be a pretty well-curated list of people I'd actually interacted with in person
before and done some business with, and now it's just a random hodge-podge of
a bunch of internet strangers I crossed paths with at some point.

~~~
eterm
Supposedly LinkedIn has a karma system where you will be punished for anyone
not accepting your requests.

You may end up banned from making future requests, although that might come as
a relief and it sounds like LinkedIn might be BSing there given that combine
that with support for mailing >1k people at once.

------
xradionut
There's only three types of folks that contact me on LinkedIn: bots,
recruiters and prostitutes.

Correction, that's only two types...

------
mlopes
Happened to me a few months ago, didn't delete my linked in account, but
pretty much stopped using it.

------
corwinstephen
Did the exact same thing over a year ago. I can't believe they haven't changed
that workflow yet.

------
namenotrequired
I did the exact same thing. Awkward.

------
waltz
glad i'm not the only one

------
Buzaga
I've got a feeling that just about everything in LinkedIn interface is made to
be intentionally broken or deceptive, I think there's a lot of "discourage
through bad ui", for example, here's a past tweet of mine, I've actually had
to GOOGLE to find out how leave a group:

"<http://t.co/RTAOpvTo> 10 minutes to find how to leave a group on linkedin
and need to follow step by step... discouraging through bad ux?"

------
drivebyacct2
How did this happen without giving them your password or using the same one?

------
vvghh
So is Capitalism.

------
haven
LinkedIn is a Scala shop. So if LinkedIn is a virus, I think that's a first
for the Scala language. "Scala, good for viruses too!" :O

