Everybody hates LinkedIn. Me too. There are many reasons for that, most of which I do not need to tell you about. I want to focus here one reason in particular, illustrated by the image below:
The 10 rows with blue and white buttons are crops of individual screen shots, each made after refreshing my browser. You see they are different each time? Not only the text, but also the color and the placement of the button you need to click to log in is different on each new visit.
You probably never see this, because you never refresh your browser (because you don’t have a decent password manager). I do and see this every time I log in, and I think it is evil. It is evil because of two effects of this unpredictability that are intended by LinkedIn:
- It makes the login experience as annoying possible.
- It obstructs automatic login methods.
If you’d ask Microsoft (the owner of LinkedIn) why they aim for these effects, they will probably lie to you that it is to prohibit bot-accounts or express some other security-schwalbe. Both effects have a clear objective:
- The actual reason they make login in as annoying as possible, is to make you “choose” to always stay logged in. These built-in annoyances are why people find that caring for their privacy “is such a hassle”. The hassle is by design!
- The actual reason LinkedIn obstructs automatic login, is that you can only use their official LinkedIn app on your phone.
I don’t want to dive too deep into why LinkedIn wants you to stay logged in and why they love you to install their app, but the summary is: only your data has value to them. Thus, #LinkedIn is #harvesting your #data as much as they can, offering you nothing but a shitty, laggy interface where you connect to your professional relations. If you don’t buy into this “contract”, LinkedIn does not shy away from intentionally annoying you.
At the same time, you’re locked in: you can’t leave LinkedIn without losing your valuable connections (your “social graph”). This locking in is the standard practice in #BigTech social media, and an essential ingredient of their sick business model.
But there is good news: There is a free and open social internet that is growing organically, where social platforms all speak the same language: the #Fediverse. Speaking the same language facilitates #interoperability: people can move freely from one platform to another without loosing their social graph. Since the platforms in the Fediverse are no fenced gardens, developers have no incentive to annoy and addict their users. Instead, in the FediVerse, those platforms thrive that people enjoy using!
The FediVerse is still relatively young and in full development. No actual replacement for LinkedIn is yet created, but really, is LinkedIn what yo want? If you’re interested and want to be among the pioneers, join now, sign up, join now for free, create an account by clicking on one of the buttons above.
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