I have been thinking about ditching LinkedIn. I have enough trouble keeping up with Twitter and Facebook. I tried keeping up with Instagram for a time, but it was too much for me. I find Twitter useful, and I’ve got something of an audience there. Facebook is good for keeping up with friends and family. But LinkedIn…?
I’m not sure what the value of LinkedIn is. For one thing, it has among the worst UI/UX’s I’ve encountered. The only time I ever go to LinkedIn is to accept a request to connect with someone. Each time I go there, I feel like I’ve been transported back to the late 1990s when websites were in their experimental stage, and attempted to use every feature available in HTML, even when those features were horribly annoying. (Remember <blink>!)
More than that, however, LinkedIn just skeeves1 me out. Whenever I roll my eyes at the short bios people put in their Twitter descriptions2, I remind myself that things are a lot worse on LinkedIn.
I’ve kept LinkedIn this far because I’ve used it for professional connections. I’ve got more than 500 connections there, and I think I know about 50 of those people. I never go to LinkedIn to browse the feed there because it is the most unbrowsable feed I’ve ever encountered.
That said, for the purposes of this post, I risked sanity and opened up my LinkedIn feed. Here are some of the things that my professional network feed contains:
- A viral video on how to welcome a new person to your organization.
- Lots of photos of people’s office desks.
- Lots of sponsored ads by places like Booz Allen.
- Posts offering secrets to become a [courageous | innovative | productive | affable | etc.] [CIO | CFO | CTO | COO, etc.]
- Tons of posts telling me about people’s new roles, new jobs, new skills, or work anniversaries.
- Ironically, a post on “The End of User-Friendly Design.”
I imagine there are people who find a lot of value in LinkedIn, but I am hard-pressed to see what that value is. I am harder pressed to understand how they find that value in all of the noise.
What I really don’t like about LinkedIn is how it tells you who has been looking at your profile—and by contrast, if you look at someone’s profile, they know you’ve been looking at it. On rare instances when I want to look at someone’s profile, I’ve taken to opening up a private browsing window and browsing LinkedIn anonymously.
I have tried to keep my LinkedIn profile more or less up-to-date, but I am not sure why. I don’t use the service, and I know so few people on the service, that there seems no point in continuing with it. It is not a hard decision. I use Twitter and Facebook daily, but I actively avoid LinkedIn. It’s probably time to give it up.
Maybe.
RSS - Posts
I don’t like it anymore either these days. Used it extensively back when I was a recruiter but no longer in that field and what creeps me out is when I go there and all these people in don’t truly know have sent me messages.
Jamie, I couldn’t agree more. This post nails the LinkedIn problem on the head. I try to keep it updated just as a professional courtesy, but never go there. The value I’ve given and received through Twitter is off the scale compared to LinkedIn (zero).