[KiwiCoder]

I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.

Of course I'm speaking only from personal experience, but as both candidate and hiring manager LinkedIn holds next to no value for me. I see it as a commons that has been largely ruined by recruiting agents who are incentivised by their employers to maximise candidate throughput at everyone else's expense.

There is some residual value in LinkedIn groups, where peers can network for mutual benefit, but these pools of genuine interaction inevitably attract recruiting agents - if indeed they aren't already present as groups admins, happily lurking while candidates posture and parade.

But I'm not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.

[mundo]

"Contact info storage service for ex-colleagues I wasn't chummy enough to add on a real social network" pretty much sums it up for me.

[mathattack]

I think there's a big gap between current and former colleagues I want to keep professional contact with, and folks I want to show photos of my kids.

[jklinger410]

>I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.

I think almost the exact opposite. Linkedin is still missing many features that could turn it into a bit of a game changer for business.

Maybe as a recruiting tool it's currently trash. I can get behind that. But if Microsoft manages to bring in a fresh set of users with some new features it could expand into something actually useful instead of a marketing hellhole.

[shortstuffsushi]

Not to say it won't happen, but which fresh set of users would Microsoft bring? Who do you know that isn't on LinkedIn (registered, if not actively using)? And of those people, what features do you think would make them want to start using LinkedIn?

[jklinger410]

1. Mash Linkedin and Skype and create a Slack/Facebook For Business Competitor.

2. Integrate that with Office 360 for Business.

3. Create a much more appealing Resume/CV that either integrates well with hiring tools or competes directly with them (monster, indeed, so-on) by creating your own backend for recruiting.

4. Make it very simple to migrate your MS Live/Outlook/Skype profile to a Linkedin profile (or do it automatically ala Google+).

This makes advertisers happy. This makes any corp using Office 360 immediately integrate to Linkedin. This makes Linkedin much more appealing to candidates and recruiters. This could bring people over from competitor services. This actually makes the entire MS Office suite more appealing.

[kohanz]

Isn't (3) what they've been trying to accomplish for years? I believe what you see now in LinkedIn is their best effort at tackling that problem (and I'm not impressed).

[jklinger410]

Yeah, it is. I guess it's a bit of an assumption of mine that MS would be able to do a better job of it than Linkedin.

[rhizome]

Has their "resume" representation even changed in 5 years? I doubt they're seeing it as a problem to be tackled. Everything I know about the company says that the left hand doesn't care what the right hand is doing, and they have a lot of hands.

[baddox]

I don't have a LinkedIn account, and I would probably reopen one if I heard that they stopped their incessant spam emails. I'm surprised that they haven't been sued to MySpace and back for those email policies, which almost certainly are illegal in the United States. (This based on my experience, which ended 2 or 3 years ago when, after months of failed attempts, I managed to close my account.)

[wst_]

Can't you just disable it? I got emails only when someone is sending me a message or invites me.

[ohyoutravel]

iirc when you sign up, they sua sponte take all your contacts from [fb, Google, your phone, etc] and message all of them saying you have invited them to join LinkedIn. This is the scummy behavior I assume the poster is talking about.

[eli]

Not for years, they lost a lawsuit over that practice.

[ryandrake]

Given all the data they have, it SHOULD be the job site to end all job sites.

[mathattack]

My 2 cents... It's an underutilized resource. They have career data for the highest value people in the world. Yet their technology and interface are woefully dated. The mobile search is awful, and it should be a tool that everyone uses before every meeting. The "You may know X" ability to find new contacts goes down dramatically. It would be beaten by a heuristic that just checks people who work at your current or prior company in the same city.

I do think there's room for a turnaround.

[ryandrake]

The thing that most turns me off from LinkedIn is that it leaks your browsing information to the users you are browsing, through their "who viewed my profile" feature. If I want to just brush up on a contact's background before a meeting without announcing to him that I'm stalking him, I need to log out and re-browse. Major pain in the butt.

[bfstein]

You can turn that off.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141009022529-27827108-how-t...

[rhizome]

That they create a blog post for that rather than easily discovered UI elements (hover?!), says a lot about LinkedIn as a company.

[ghaff]

It's pretty easy to discover--under privacy in your profile. But, yes, the fact that a number of these types of settings are opt-out rather than opt-in is a pretty dark pattern.

[ryandrake]

Wow, never realized that! This is something that you should have to opt-in to, not opt-out.

[komali2]

Interesting, I am a recruiter turned software engineer and have the exact opposite feeling. When I was a recruiter it was a fantastic way to find niche candidates and just maintain a casual discussion with my best candidates in general, as well as publish relevant news to my connections.

As I was undergoing the transformation to engineer, it was a fantastic platform for me to reach out to people in my new industry and city, people who had gone down my path before, mentors, and etc. Then when it was time for job search, LinkedIn and Angel.co had the highest quality postings. Also, on LinkedIn when looking at a job posting I could see if someone from my bootcamp or university worked there, as a link right under the job posting.

[up_and_up]

> I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.

Hence why I closed my account a year ago. As an engineer it provides me with nothing but recruiter spam.

[estefan]

I closed mine when it was apparent recruiters were illiterate and couldn't read "Contracts only".

[notmything]

Yet for me it's provided every single job I've ever had except my first straight out of University.

[user5994461]

It's good to me. I've changed jobs because of linkedin message before.

I also use it to keep track and keep in touch with previous coworkers.

[tvanantwerp]

> I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.

One of my coworkers talked me into playing this game. We look for the most professionally pointless endorsements our contacts have and add to them. So maybe someone ends up 3 endorsements for Econometrics and 18 for Microsoft Powerpoint.

[josephb]

I have several PowerPoint endorsements :)

[ChuckMcM]

I figure the next step for LinkedIn is in union organizing. It seems pretty clear that is a possible next step for the software industry.