Ask HN: To LinkedIn am I just collateral damage of a barely functioning system

The only exception is that I know some companies use LinkedIn as essentially their job application process, but this isn't common—when I had to apply for hundreds of jobs after getting laid off at the end of 2022, I updated my LinkedIn profile but then never interacted with LinkedIn at all in the process of applying.

I half wonder if they're flagging behavior like yours as suspicious because most real humans have stopped interacting with their platform.

* Go through LinkedIn Business support (https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/contact-us) instead of the consumer support chat

* Try the EU data rectification form (https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/TS-DRF)

* It sounds like other sites are showing captchas too, which might be a broader issue. I would try a different browser, clean your cookies etc., and potentially go to a coffee shop or VPN into a clean IP (not a commodity VPN provider). X and LinkedIn (or whoever LinkedIn uses for identity verification, and potentially Cloudflare) may have flagged your IP.

  1. captive audience due to early network effect - and no significant alternatives

  2. innovation halted years ago

  3. juice the profits: steady state OK growth forces deep cost cutting. The customer experience suffers first

1) If you do not own the hardware your data lives on and the entire software stack to access and use your data, then you do not have control of your data and you may lose it at any time.

2) There is no such thing as computer security. If your data is on a networked computer, it should be considered semi-public.

Closed-source and for-profit companies are constantly trying to take control of your data away from you and reassure that it is safe and secure, but it is not. You must be prepared for your data stored in someone else's services to be destroyed or made public at any time. I'm sorry you learned this one the hard way :(

If it's any consolation, a LinkedIn account is not required for getting a job. I've never had one and I have a career I'm very happy with. I can't speak to getting funding or payment processor stuff, but I have a hard time believing it's a hard requirement there, either.

The final nail in the coffin for Linked in must surely be LLMs, since at least my picture of LinkedIn is that it's filled with people who post barely sentient text about how they are excited about random uninteresting things.

Several years ago I removed nearly all content from my LinkedIn profile and set it to private. Lo and behold my career has been doing just fine. The rate at which recruiters are reaching out to me hasn't changed one bit. I've also interviewed and gotten offers.

I've always resisted normalizing having any kind of social media account. Whenever there was something going on that "required" a Facebook account, I simply wouldn't participate, and I'd let whoever needs to hear it know that I'm not participating because I don't use Facebook. Whenever I'm at a conference and people ask me for my LinkedIn info, I simply reply that I'm not on LinkedIn, and if they want to get in touch with me they can try sending me an email. Sometimes they stare at me like I just walked out of a space ship, which is fine. If you can't grok that I'm not on LinkedIn, I probably don't have any interest in whoever you are or whatever you're selling.

There's a possibility that there might be a "network effect" going on, where activities in other contexts are being used to score the LinkedIn context. I have no idea what might be going on in other venues, but they may affect/be affected by the LinkedIn stuff.

I recently completely abandoned my Faecesbook account, because they flagged the third post I made as spam. The posts weren't spam. I was sharing new releases of my apps with my friends, but the bot saw App Store Link, and automatically assumed "spam."

I'm not going to keep trying, and I'm not going to appeal, because that may actually affect my accounts in other venues, that I care about. The only reason that I kept the FB account, was to provide Service to a group. They no longer need me, and I really couldn't care any less about FB, so ... asta la vista, baby.

> MySpace is a favela. You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug.

> You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!

> You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum. It's a squelette.

— Bruce Sterling, Reeboot 11 Keynote[0]

0. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech...

The verification process failed once or twice for me, but I finally got it done, and my account was restored within 24 hours - and with no details about the actual "supicious activity" that triggered events.

Still, there was very little way to communicate with them about it; the r/LinkedIn community has a stickied post about it, with some links that do not require an active account.

It's worth noting that I'd also been flagged by Cloudflare for extra checks for a while; I also changed my browser's User Agent and it resolved that.

Or even better let a lawyer do it for you.

Well, it shouldn't be. You shouldn't tie your livelihood to a single unpaid account.

However, it's been years and this trend doesn't reverse and only gets worse.

We're learning our lesson and rebuilding around http://www.ottawa-rust.ca/ rather than being beholden to anybody.

Any suggestions on meetup alternatives we can harness without becoming dependent?

Try to make a pseudoanonymous account nowadays without phone number for 2FA or "security". You get banned on so many places. And even if you play ball they arbitrarily cut you off since some principal component analysis put you outside some parameter range.

>At times, I wonder if I'm just getting a response from robots or whether the support team just does not care about what I am going through right now.

I think they just pass or fail support tickets randomly due to pressure to close tickets.

The root of the issue in my case is probably caused by my camera's low quality pictures from a lack of AI post processing since I use Graphene OS. It sucks that you can no longer easily contact a human when you're really stuck.

Yes, sorry :( I've heard of similar things happening with Facebook.

Also, my feed is full of posts that are just past deadline. Guess I realize just how weird this platform is.

F*ck LinkedIn. You don't need it to get a job. I'm living proof. My profile has barely anything on it now.

They're amongst many companies who hate to provide minimal service to their "product." (Google, I'm looking at you.)

As for your ID issues, I had similar trouble when I lost my common sense and agreed to take a selfie while applying for an apartment in a new area. Several attempts to land thru perfect photo of my ID that they said wasn't verifiable (not sure why, folks, since my ID photo was nearly a decade old) and I gave up.

I would never do the same for a social media profile, so i recommend fighting back. Protect your privacy, ng friend, it's the last remaining bit of leverage you have.

In the UK/EU, the GDPR gives protection against such automated decision making. i.e. You have the right (and the ability!) to appeal to a human to sort out cases like this.

More info here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

These are the effects of unregulated capitalism: monopoly, walled gardens, no right to appeal