I deleted my LinkedIn account

„People tend to intuitively sense LinkedIn’s broad-but-shallow user base problem. Everyone knows that everyone has a LinkedIn profile, but I challenge you to find three friends who use theirs actively. Now try it with Facebook. Until today I had never read the statistics I linked to above, but it just feels obvious when you read your LinkedIn mail that it isn’t being generated by eager friends trying to network. LinkedIn should not be sending annoying emails like that. The company is facing pressure because the average user is turned off from deep engagement. But the way to fix that absolutely IS NOT to spam them, which makes people even more leery, and irritated with your service.

What all of this means is that LinkedIn faces a serious challenge in a crappy environment. I don’t envy them. Overall, there is a small number of very good reasons for me to get rid of my account, which I’ve discussed above. It more or less boils down to this: I find the user experience annoying and intrusive. But the real problem with LinkedIn is not that it’s kind of annoying. There are lots of kind of annoying services that I continue to use, and will continue to use as long as they provide me with something of value. The real problem with LinkedIn is that it does nothing useful for me. Nothing. In fact, aside from generating a boatload of spam, I can’t tell how exactly LinkedIn is even supposed to impact my life. I know I’m supposed to »network« with it, but I already “network” with Facebook, and Twitter, and beer.

Maybe some people are finding hot job leads through LinkedIn and I’m just missing the party. That sounds facetious, but the truth is I am willing to believe that I’m just not getting the full value out of this tool. The problem is I am not willing to put in a substantial investment in learning how to use it (like I said, 80/20) without a decent value proposition ahead of time. I’d rather spend my time learning Javascript, or blogging. Useful career tips or leads tend to come from real friends of mine, who I tend to interact with in person or on real social media. LinkedIn seems just a touch too tone-deaf to be useful for building real career networks for me for now. The fact that they operate as a borderline spam factory would be bad for any service that I wasn’t completely sold on. The fact that it’s one struggling with bored users and a weird image makes it downright toxic. So for now, goodbye LinkedIn, maybe we’ll connect again in the future.”