Goodbye Linkedin

I recently made the decision to delete my LinkedIn account. After having the account for years, I have not found any value in it. It has became more a nuisance than anything - and it is easier to just delete the whole thing than let it sit, accruing messages and notifications.

I joined initially as part of a college class. The service was described as a social network for professionals, a place where you were expected to have a good profile and resume if you wanted to get a good job after school, with plenty of detail and none of the fluff that circulates other social networks - a place where career-oriented people of all levels could build their connections to others and develop working relationships.

After several years on the network, I never gained employment or networked with people I didn’t know elsewhere. I haven’t found any amazing opportunities. I haven’t found any great people to work with or been recruited by my dream organization…

Instead, it has become a place of numerous spam offers, where most of my “connections” are just trying to sell me on something. It’s not all bad, but LinkedIn is built for Fortune 500 recruiters and people seeking employment in those corporations. I had a hard time finding any benefit for a myself as a small business owner.

And so, I deleted it!

I am happy to have one less social media account and app to take up my attention. I don’t have to check it… ever again. I’m also not the only one who feels this way - especially about LinkedIn. Even back in 2014 people were starting to have some problems, mostly tied to the kind of “forced” nature of the network. It’s too stuffy, too saturated with sales pitches and automated recruitment tools. The messages mean almost nothing, connections are no longer genuine (if they ever were), and it feels a lot more like a trading room floor than a “network” of people looking to prosper together.

Take those bad tastes and combine them with ever-increasing features - recommendations to write, skills to verify, links to add, groups to join, posts, messages, and on and on - and you end up with a whole lot of hassle with virtually no return. On top of that, there’s a TON of plain old garbage on there, and I’m not the only one complaining.

Even compared to some of the others, it’s clunky and problematic, and has a habit of being more convoluted than it needs to be (read just a few of the reasons here). But even outside all of the UI complaints, spam, and unwanted connection requests, it all comes down to my first point. If it’s not offering any real benefit, why continue to waste time on it?

Do you still use LinkedIn? What benefits do you get from having an account? Is there a better option out there?