[orillian]

Nope it's not a viral loop it's a bucket of spam. Rather warm spam, one that's been sitting in the sun far to long. But spam none the less.

Oh, and as a person no longer on LinkedIn I know this because I had to permanently place linkedin addresses in my spam filter so all my "friends" would stop sleep inviting me to linkedin. Including the ones that didn't even realize they had given linkedin my address. Oh, and a few well meaning individuals even asked linkedin to stop spamming me and others on their behalf and even though they said they would....linkedin failed to actually comply with their "clients" wishes.

And lets not get started on the crock trying to recruit on it has become. As an employer, all I wanted to do was post a position, that was all. Sigh, one can look back wistfully on the good ol' days when you could post your add in a few regional or provincial papers and expect a decent response.

[orthecreedence]

Came here to pretty much say exactly what you did. LinkedIn is a spam echo chamber, and I recently deleted my account because it's such an insane cesspool of filth. I can't count how many times I got endorsed by people I hardly knew for things they've never even heard of before. Not to mention recruiters mailing me with stupid shit like "I noticed you programmed an async library for lisp, you should come program Java for us!!" Like, wow! No thanks!

Let LinkedIn be a lesson in how NOT to grow a company. What used to be a somewhat decent social network has devolved into a cheap mockery of its former self.

[sj4nz]

I kind of get a feeling that a paid-entry social network like app.net may be the future place for finding this kind of business networking. I'm also a LinkedIn leaver, because of the spam just like everyone else.

More than a few general users I've seen usually get pretty upset when they get random LinkedIn invitations from people they don't even know, because of the address book harvesting.

[vijayaggarwal]

People tend to overvalue money and undervalue time, and that's the reason "free" services tend to beat "paid" ones in any business where per capita cost of service is low. So, while LinkedIn generates spam, it's not much vulnerable to a "paid" competitor.

[sj4nz]

This is so very true. Falls under the general guideline "If You're Not Paying for the Product--You are the Product." http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-you...

[prezjordan]

Ditto. I cannot get LinkedIn to stop listing my email address in their search results. Every time I contact support they dodge the question and tell me I "don't have a profile on their site." Of course I don't, that's the point.

The fake referrals are insane - I'm surprised no one has outed them on that yet.