For The Love of LinkedIn
For The Love of LinkedIn
First up … I like using LinkedIn. But it’s not perfect, and there are quite a few things that perhaps need to be improved:
- For the Web version, I think it’s rather slow and bloated.
- The navigation often tries to “trick me” into clicking on things.
- It just doesn’t quite help in consenting to things. There’s often a LARGE BUTTON that tries to do things I don’t want, and a very small icon for the thing I want to do.
- The editor really needs to be improved, as it often is buggy. I’ve often got to switch between browsers to get an article formatted in an acceptable, and it still doesn’t look good. I appreciate that LinkedIn has had problems with security in the past, and perhaps try to limit the effects of code injection, but their editors need to trust a bit more HTML code.
- Article creator. It’s extremely difficult to find previously written articles (apart from using Google to find them).
In this article, I’ll outline a few little quirks in LinkedIn.
Consent to my contacts
Overall, I think LinkedIn needs to help the user more in consenting to things, especially in the layout of the consent elements of their push notices to mobile devices. The following is a message I continually receive on my phone. This screen basically asks for LinkedIn to go and have a dive into my contacts list, and find out who I am in contact with:
Just take a minute to look at this screen. There is a LARGE BUTTON for continue, just where you look, and then there’s a little cross at the top. You don’t have any more navigation, and you are kinda stuck now, wanting to get rid of the message. Also, rather than have two buttons which say, “Consent to contacts”, and “Do not consent to contacts”, it has a large button which says “CONTINUE”, which is obviously leading the user to consent by default. You must click on the cross at the top of the screen in order to leave this page.
I clicked CONTINUE once — by mistake — and people in my family asked me why I was connected to them on LinkedIn — as isn’t the kind of platform you want to use in order to keep your Mum up-to-date on how things are going.
I appreciate that the message does say that I can turn off “Sync Contacts”, but it really should have been off by default, and there should be a link on the message which takes me there, and where I just toggle it off.
The Invisible Man
In 10 March 2017, for a few days, I became an invisible man:
It all started on a Saturday when I received a message of:
and where all of my articles just disappeared from the Internet, and no-one could contact me on LinkedIn. There was no way of even logging into my account and backing up my articles.
I even tried to load the Google cache versions of my posts (as I need to access these for a forthcoming presentation), but these just redirected to a generic holding page on the LinkedIn site. It was a strange feeling, where all the articles that I had written, and which I often used in order to recover information from the past, had just disappeared. It really made me feel that I had no ownership of the content I’d created — and indeed this is the case.
So had I upset a government official on my viewpoints on cryptography? Was it a nation-state plot on my viewpoints on banning tunnels? Without any communication on the reason, I could only imagine what had caused the restriction.
So after three days of sending many emails to LinkedIn I received a message:
and I felt much better. The rights of academics to critical appraise things on the Internet is still alive and well, and it was all just an error.
As far as I can tell LinkedIn doesn’t like you to be too active, and if too many people click on your profile, it can cause a lock-out. This is because, I think, that LinkedIn thinks you have been spamming, even if you are not a spammer. So, if lots of people find your article interesting, it can cause too much activity, and there can be a lock-out on the account.
If this is the case, they really should tell you the reason why the restriction has been applied.