I closed and deleted my LinkedIn account today. Why?

  1. In the five (six? seven? more? I’ve actually lost track) years I’ve had my account, I’ve never once used it to make a professional reference or connection. Not. Once.
  2. I had people on my contacts list I’d never heard of. Somehow. I suspect what happened is that the one time I gave LinkedIn access to my Gmail contacts, it spammed everyone I’d ever sent an email to or received one from — regardless of how legitimate said email was. Not awesome.
  3. LinkedIn’s social currency is dubious, at best. Instead of ‘Likes’ or ‘Follows,’ LinkedIn trades in endorsements. This is all very well and good — until you start receiving endorsements from people for skills that you’ve never employed for those people. This begs the question, ‘How the heck do they know what I can do?’ This has the effect of flooding the market with so much currency as to effectively render it valueless.
  4. LinkedIn has clearly never read my profile, and their job matching algorithms obviously need tweaking. Like, so much tweaking they may as well throw out the existing algorithms and develop some new ones from scratch, because the job postings they recommend to me don’t even come close to matching either my interests or my existing skillset. It’s about as good as Netflix’s algorithm for matching movie recommendations to me based on past viewing history, which is to say, not at all.

I remember when LinkedIn first launched and I joined their services, thinking it could be an interesting experiment for professional networking. Somewhere along the line, though, they missed their mark, and I’m all too happy to cut them loose.

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