We absolutely need a better platform for professional networking. A platform that's not filled with people who dislocate their shoulders trying to pat themselves on the back for some "inspirational" social media babble about the last time they managed to send an email.
I won't disagree about the state of LinkedIn, but doesn't the content just come with the territory? In my experience, people who "network" for networking's sake the most are exactly the type of people who self-congratulate and humble brag, so you're bound to get exactly this type of content on a platform that's entirely networking-focused.
uBlock can hide content under a common heading. If this case isn't already in one of the social media annoyance lists that can be enabled in the options, you can try making a filter using has-text:
Yes, LI 10-15 years ago was a decent site for professional networking, before it got too much like social media. Looking for work, get in touch with or keep in touch with people that you share professional interests with.
I guess it wouldn't be technically challenging to create a platform for this, the problem would be to bring the right users and as you say, moderate the content to avoid what it has become today.
Show your certificates? Amazing!
Selfie with some half-assed inspirational "leader" quote? No!
Linkedin when you actually ONLY could get introduced to a 2nd degree connection by a mutual contact introducing you both.
Before MS bought them, it was great. Now it's just a stupid Facebook clone with pathetic spam posts of people that are dying inside because they haven't found a job but oh my how much that have make them growth.
And now apparently it also has those vertical 10 second tiktoks like video "stories" or whatever they are called
I absolutely cannot understand this perspective. I open LinkedIn to add somebody to my network, contact somebody, or look for a job/hire somebody, and for those things it’s really good. I don’t make any LinkedIn content, I don’t consume any of it, I don't struggle to ignore it entirely, and I don’t miss out on anything by doing so. Where exactly does it need to improve?
It definitely is not. It probably has the most job listings for most markets, but the experience of looking for a job on LinkedIn is appalling.
They recently killed the resume builder, which makes me think that job searching/hiring is a side feature of LinkedIn.
That probably says more about the market you’re in, or you as a candidate. Every time I’ve looked for a job on LinkedIn I’ve found one almost immediately, and the recruiters I know who most reliably have something for me I all met via LinkedIn.
The only reason LinkedIn works as a job search site is because of the number of users they have. They do almost nothing to be a job search site. It's just another social network with a 'jobs' category for posts.
The number of users they have is _the_ reason they’re generally better than the competition. It’s a social networking site dedicated to finding jobs/employees for people. It has slightly better features then a lot of other job listing sites, but the main reason it’s better than the other ones (outside of certain niches), is that it has more job seekers and more job posters on it.
Other sites will typically just have less jobs posted, less users, and marginally worse features. If you can’t find a job on LinkedIn, going to a slightly worse version of the same thing probably won’t be the change you’re looking for.
By default linkedin will send you emails when "one of your contacts posted something" or "someone opened your profile"; or even "someone wrote to you, open the website so you can read what they wrote".
And basically if you don't open it for a few days it will send you some email to remind you it exists.
They decided to keep people on it a-la facebook, rather than stick to what's supposed to do
Same as you, but I cannot find a good configuration for the linkedin App to prevent it from sending me too many notifications. I get 5+ notifications per day related to "this message is trending...", "your contact posted this...", "you are invited to do that...." and buried between them, from time to time, contact invitations that are worth considering.
> To me it feels like TikTok culture infesting all types of social media.
Social media is and always has been a mirror of the real world. Today's dominant real-world culture consists of virtue signaling, vague pseudo-philosophy, toxic positivity, and a hyper-focus on group identity. You can see this every time you read the news, but you can also hear it when you just talk to random people.
The trend towards that culture started a few years before social media became a thing. I can't even imagine having a conversation with a friend anymore the way I used to in the 1990s and early 2000s. Everything I see online, I recognize from real-world interactions. Those who think social media has "corrupted" society are barking up the wrong tree.
Spoke to an old friend on the phone recently, for the first time in 10 years or so. Within a few minutes of the conversation, he had used phrases like "As a father..." and "I cannot stand by while..."
It was as if he were speaking to an audience, rather than to me. I was glad when the call ended.
Maybe that's what the platform creators tell themselves for the sake of being able to sleep at night. From my view, social media systematically brings out bad habits that people have much less trouble suppressing in face-to-face conversation. That is true even if the platform is well-intentioned, but if it isn't and deliberately prioritizes click-bait and borderline spam content to keep the ad machine churning (i.e. every SM platform today), then the "it's just human nature" excuse becomes very very thin, IMO.
>To me it feels like TikTok culture infesting all types of social media.
Yes! It's ridiculous even in real life people self-censoring words what are they expecting to happen if they say kill, suicide, penis, even apparently the word thick?
But yes TikTok-ification has crept into pretty much all social media and as I mentioned for some in real life speech.
It would need to know what you are working on and bring you into contact with people whoveork on similar things and could mentor you or add real value to your work or private project.
However, I don't think it's a consequence of the platform, but of work culture. People are like that because it works, and it works because we're deep, deep into a headlong rush toward annihilation in the name of profit.
The people profiting from destroying every public good - peace, pollution-free air and water and soil, housing, healthcare, etc etc - own basically everything. Our politicians, our media, our military. It's been this way for a long time.
Speaking up against this isn't what most people want to hear. It's uncomfortable - and a distraction from short-term survival. There are no easy answers. It's not a message you'll ever hear amplified on corporate media, and it doesn't fit well into a soundbite or tweet.
There's an ocean of subtle and not-so-subtle messaging across every type of media telling you not to look behind the curtain. There are very real consequences for doing so in a way that gets peoples attention.
LinkedIn rewards superficiality over substance because our society does, workplace culture especially so. Professional posturing is a byproduct of a system that commodifies everything: even authenticity, even revolution.
Essentially, our 'hearts and minds' have been hacked, in every possible way.
That said, if you have any good ideas on how a different platform could change that I'd love to hear them.
Absolutely, which is saying a lot given Twitter's current state.
But most employers won't be looking you up on Instagram or Twitter, unless you're in the type of work where they need to make sure your socials are sufficiently 'clean'.
> deep into a headlong rush toward annihilation in the name of profit.
Poverty, illness and starvation are the default state of mankind and the fact that almost nobody lives in deep poverty any more is because people get up in the morning and work hard to produce value.
This is simply untrue. Most of the dire circumstances of people around the world today can be traced back to European or American imperialism and increasingly financialised economies.
> Poverty, illness and starvation are the default state of mankind
A most wretched lie. Systems of entrenched inequality and widespread poverty mostly emerged after agriculture and centralized state systems, not during early human history.
That lie serves to shift the blame for people's struggles away from oligarchs and owners and onto their victims. Do you own a company perchance? ... What do your down-stream labourers earn per hour, compared to you?
... Do you think billionaire CEOs and trust-fund nepo babies work harder than people in sweat shops? In mines? Nurses?
Poverty, illness, and starvation are not inherent states. They are outcomes of structural and economic choices.
> the fact that almost nobody lives in deep poverty any more is because people get up in the morning and work hard to produce value.
Another lie, long debunked, labelled "The Protestant Work Ethic Myth". It can be disproved with Nobel economist research [0], World Bank reports [1], or a simple graph [2], not to mention the first few pages of 'Capital'.
Historical evidence and economic research overwhelmingly show that poverty, illness, and starvation are due to structural forces and political choices, and that poverty reduction comes from systemic changes far more than from individual work ethic.
To say otherwise is to blame the victims of terrible crimes of exploitation, while absolving the perpetrators, despite mountains of evidence.
It's fine and good to work, yes. But we have green power, machines, 120 IQ AI, instant global communication... A world where everyone works 20 hours a week with no reduction in Quality of Life for 99% of us is entirely possible, right now; but the current owners of the world would rather see us all burn than move toward it.
> I’m very aware that the spoils of work sometimes get distributed unfairly.
Most company owners are, especially those that involve manufacturing in countries with low wages. What do they do about that though? Do they pay lip service, or do they pay better wages?
Do they go around blaming the poor for not working, or do they put their focus on the systems designed to extract the value of their work?
You've made your position clear, and it's based on some very false ideas about the 'default' state of humanity. I addressed these ideas but you ignored that.
> Maybe we could work less and keep the standard of living the same.
Yes, we could. No 'maybe' about it.
The reason we don't is the dedicated effort of people who like the status quo as it is, and the people they employ across politics, the military and media to keep the situation as inequitable, extractive, and exploitative as possible.
> maybe we could work the same but live in a much better standard.
We could. But again, we don't, and for the exact same reason as above.
That ad hominem got under my skin admittedly.
I’m a company owner only in the most technical sense.
I still have to earn money by going to my day job 9-5. And while some parts come from
China, I still assemble my epaper displays myself, on the desk where I work from home during the day.
So I know what it means to have to go to work. And I also know that work can be positive sum and make all sides of the transaction better off.
And again, I’ve never said that the world is FAIR or that I think it should stay unfair. I’m angry every day about how unfair it is!
I’ve just said that work is still a necessary part of this world.
The issue isn’t just LinkedIn, it happens on all social networks I’m aware of. Take your account down for vague “violations” and make it nearly impossible to speak with anyone with common sense. Franz Kafka would be proud.
LinkedIn starts to feel a little like Facebook years back. If you don't "engage" with the platform it will start throwing random posts at you.
Personally I think the shit posting started because people where not getting any reaction of Facebook anymore, after it turned into an algorithm driven ad pumping engine from hell. People want their posts read by other humans, and LinkedIn is the last place where this is actually happening. It's just that some people, especially those in marketing, online retail, management and HR absolutely suck at communication.
LinkedIn is great as a contact list and for job hunting, if you're a technical person. The same shit posting marketing people can't even sell themselves. If you have two people posting that they are looking for a job, and one it technical and the other is marketing or HR related, you'll see a clear different. The technical person can have multiple interviews lines up in hours, the marketing person will get comments like "Repost", "Someone has to know someone" or "Hire X, their great", but no one actually have a job.
We never 'needed' a damn feed on Linkedin in the first place
I get updates from daughters fights with cancer of people I don't know. I don't need to see this on a 'professional' network. Not sure why people post such intimate private things.
You’re being downvoted but you’re right. The feed is really just a vehicle to deliver ads. The content I see there is almost entirely garbage. I only use my profile and the ability to DM with recruiters and maybe the jobs board.
This is precisely what would have happened if Apple had gotten away with their distributed image hashing scheme. Only in that case the falsely accused would be sent immediately through the justice system and forced to spend a fortune to defend themselves on the assumption that they were hiding the evidence.
Already happened with me, my Amazon account is essentially locked. I changed my phone number and don't have access to my old number anymore and the existing number is apparently associated with some other Amazon account so they can't do anything about it. I stopped using Amazon altogether, I just request my brother to order stuff I want.
I know it's small, but want to point out another thing Amazon bait and switched (not exactly related to your comment, but I guess it needs to be shared). We ordered Amazon Kids tablets few years back (they're actually awesome and super well-priced for 3rd-world regions) and had them shipped overseas, linked to my Amazon account, etc, all working fine.
Then after some update to the "Amazon Family Parents Centre" App, they moved all parental access control off the device itself, and onto an "app" or "website". Not only that, but they blocked access to this website to anyone not in the USA region. So now, it's impossible to make any parental changes to these devices for the kids' accounts. They essentially bricked my two, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of Amazon Kids tablets, for anyone not blessed to have any means of setting an American address into your Amazon account.
The support people knew about this problem, were very helpful and did their darnedest to help me bypass this restriction within the realm of what they're allowed to do and say. But the end-result was basically: You need a US-based address, or phone number and to change your billing address to this USA region. I kindly told them to give feedback on their ticket/system/team-lead/whatever, and then gave up. Devices are useless now, and next purchase will be for something way more open or, at the very least, not subject to stupid region-locking rules that I thought we moved away from 15 years ago.
the modern consumer in a nutshell: you can effectively ban them from your platform and they will still weasel their way back through the tiniest crack in the system. That chinese counterfeit junk amazon sells is just too lucrative
What else can they do? Check out from life? Or bankrupt themselves on principle?
Honestly, fuck on-line platforms and their arbitrary bans. In meatspace, you can't be just banned from a store, or a store chain, not without a criminal record at least. Sure, user accounts are governed by vendors' ToS, and any store can ban you from their loyalty card program for any reason, but off-line, those are all incidentals not required for completing a purchase. On-line, identity, security, and optional marketing crap got bundled together into a single "account". It's a historical accident that needs to get corrected, possibly by regulatory means, to harmonize it with the general expectation that the store can't refuse you service for extra-legal reasons.
I'd get this sentiment if it was some super critical piece of living a fulfilling life, but amazon is a junk store which makes the whole situation absurd to begin with
There are only so many places you can order stuff on-line locally, to save on non-food products more expensive or downright unavailable locally. Interfacing with individual vendor and their bespoke system for each purchase gets cognitively exhausting quickly - a major reason why people prefer those large marketplaces. And then, it's not just Amazon. Adopting such policies is becoming a trend parallel to centralization. Amazon alone may not be "super critical piece of living a fulfilling life", but getting banned by it and a few more large companies (Google, in particular), and you may lose some critical things (at least critical in immediate term).
A single one, no. Two dozen different ones - I can do it, but it gets so annoying that I'll happily pay premium to buy the same things on a single site.
I don’t get why you get downvoted on this comment. Anyone buying from Amazon should realize they are buying from Temu in a trenchcoat, filling the pockets of an immoral man who treats his warehouse workers like chattel.
I have bought from amazon exactly once in four years now, because a vendor (a chinese one!) has Amazon as the only outlet where they provide warranty because they are plagued with counterfeits and bootleggers.
I find that fact for a chinese reseller so incredibly ironic. These guys are good people tho, bunch of gamers making the pinnacle of controllers for pc gaming with mouse clicker buttons and whatnot.
Shoutout to Playdigi Apex :D (no affiliation / economic insentive)
I'd like to know more. My partner and I were discussing how online bans are unjust and permanent now everywhere. Just feels weird when the Internet we grew up with basically anything went and bans were maybe hours. I get the motivation for it but also feels like the world didn't learn lessons thousands of years old as well.
It’s not that they couldn’t learn those lessons, it’s that the system makes learning those lessons a bad idea (in the short term).
It’s the same thing that happened with ‘08, etc. The market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent, so in most cases it makes (short term) sense to just be irrational with everyone else.
Its with a different partner to my main one, one of the cheapest phone providers in Australia.
I simply signed up and scanned the QR code they gave me to set up the esim. In settings I have it turned off all the time to save battery and its only turned on if its needed to sign up for services.
I travel quite a bit and in most countries I'm required to show my passport to get a sim card. However, in several countries I've bought at least 4 or 5 sim cards by now (non tourist sims I mean) so there doesn't seem to be a limit on how many numbers you can have, they just want each number to be linked to a real person.
Of course it may be different in some countries, but it's worth checking to be sure.
Nope, Apple's system was based on a list of KNOWN CSAM hashes, not some AI algorithm.
Also it mathematically required multiple local hits before anything would've been sent to Apple.
And even at that point an actual human would've checked the image(s) (reduced quality versions) before any action is taken.
So even if you would've managed to trigger the system multiple times on someone's phone with hash collisions that actually are pictures of kittens, the most you've done is slightly inconvenience a low-paid image checker in a cheap call center.
The NYT published a very well-reported case (two cases, actually) of Google doing this more than two years ago. This is not a hypothetical -- this is already happening.
A possibility of loosing access to a 20 years old Google account is quite disturbing. I know it's possible to setup a sync of Google drive to a local NAS, I wonder if the same can be done with Gmail archives.
Then there's a problem of loosing access to all linked accounts on other services. What can be done about those, switching them to Proton mail.preemptively? Life without SSO is annoying.
When my account was closed by an ISP, Thunderbird (unexpectedly for me) mirrored the lack of access to the IMAP folders and deleted all my local mail. Fortunately this was a temporary issue that I was able to recover from.
In short, don't rely on TB to retain IMAP data, (like Dropbox) it is not a backup and IME will sync data losses, deleting local data if it is no longer accessible on the server.
>When my account was closed by an ISP, Thunderbird (unexpectedly for me) mirrored the lack of access to the IMAP folders and deleted all my local mail. Fortunately this was a temporary issue that I was able to recover from.
This is absolutely ridiculous of Thunderbird.
That said:
1. As you said, like Dropbox, it's a local mirror, not a backup. Someone gaining access to your email and mass-deleting everything would delete your local copy too. A an actual backup of Thunderbird mail files would accomplish a backup.
2. Did your ISP somehow allow Thunderbird to log into the mailbox and gave it empty content? Or did they delete content before killing IMAP sessions? If so, it's outright malicious. Otherwise, Thunderbird shouldn't have deleted anything.
3. Having an always-on desktop box with a mail client that gets all email once a week is a lazy way to decrease the chances of being affected by something like that. Having a script that copies mailbox data into another folder (named according to date) is, well, an actual backup.
I've always wondered about this. What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. Would you be able to make a new account? If not, that seems like a pretty big deal. Same concern with your email, or any of the other big services that we usually depend on. If I just suddenly lost my gmail, I would probably lose access to external accounts and other important data, which could be crippling.
This happens regularly (perhaps not frequently) to people with their Gmail account. Google's AI says no, and there are very few people reporting successfully navigating the system to get their account back. This is one of the anti-google arguments, the other main one being they kill big projects all the time.
You are right though, it can be crippling, and this thinking part of your personal (and business) risk profile. Ideally your email is at least tied to a domain name you separately own. That way, if your Google/MSFT/Apple/whatever account gets blocked, you can switch over the email to another provider and still get access.
* edit to add: I don't know if this is more a Google thing than other companies, I was just heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and have researched these issues specifically with Google, leading to me ensuring I'm not as reliant on them as I used to be. I figure now I have about a full days worth of hassle if all my google stuff gets blocked, but otherwise I'm recoverable.
I lost access to a Google account almost a decade ago; trying to get it back was one massive Kafka trap. Every few years I go back and try navigating the Kafka trap again hoping against hope for better results. But I’m still locked out.
It’s particularly frustrating because IMAP is setup for it into another google account, so I can still send and receive email from the address but I’m fully locked out of the service.
Some precious files were in that account from childhood.
The official Google support channel: Social outrage in online communities. If you cannot generate it, you are not worthy enough of eing treated fairly, worm!
I once had a functional bug where a MFA recovery email would receive the token, but the system would flag any further steps as ‘suspicious activity’. I also had an active gmail session via thunderbird, so I could easily have proven my claims legitimacy if required. Alas, there is no concept of support at google.
I lost access to a YouTube account, which had my gaming videos, when they went all in on Google Plus. Somehow they messed it up and I couldn't get through the recovery process. I remember I was forced to change my password and then I could no longer log in. After that I decided I would never make a new YouTube channel again.
I feel no reason short of a mandate from a judge is so good to allow Google (edit: or any other tech company, really) to completely lock someone out of their personal data. Give them a takeout link and send them on their way, at least.
>I feel no reason short of a mandate from a judge is so good to allow Google (edit: or any other tech company, really) to completely lock someone out of their personal data.
Yes. It's a travesty. And those who work at those tech companies should be ashamed to be associated with such behavior.
That said, if your data isn't hosted (even if just as a backup) on your hardware, it isn't your data.
If someone else is hosting your data then it doesn't belong to you, unless you have a strong copyright claim, and the money to pay lawyers to litigate such a claim.
> This happens regularly (perhaps not frequently) to people with their Gmail account.
this should be regulated. For example, electricity/utility companies cannot just abruptly close your account, without giving massive notice in advance, and justified reason (such as non-payment).
The internet has become utilities, and it's not just the pipe, but the monopoly applications on it such as email, etc. Being deplatformed unjustly has as bad an effect as being disconnected from the grid and utilities. This means the gov't needs to make sure this can only happen under regulated ways, and not at the whims of the company.
Well, thankfully, you cannot be deplatformed from e-mail, since it's a protocol, not platform.
Both Google Mail and Microsoft Outlook could keep your e-mails from being delivered to people who still have an e-mail with them (and vice-versa, but if it got that bad,would you still be willing to keep in touch with the people, and do business with the companies willing to put up with that ?
I had my YouTube account banned because I changed the channel name into something that trigged their AI. Maybe it was that I’ve never uploaded a video or written a comment? Who knows. Anyway I was fully expecting to have lost my account (and my playlists) forever based on the bad reputation Google has, but when I clicked the “do you disagree with this” appeal thing it took very little time to have my account restored.
This is very anecdotal, and Google’s automated process is probably as horrible as it’s generally made out to be. It was just so surprising to me that it wasn’t, that I thought I would share it.
All I know is that when I took that word out it let me create the account. This was somewhere around the same time as your account creation. It might be more complicated than that, but I'm not about to try and reverse-engineer it.
The problem is the rules aren't specified, if you fall afoul of a rule you do not get told which rule it is, and the rules are AI-based decisions that are hard to even understand. If the process was transparent, it would be a lot easier to deal with.
Comment moderation is also a shitshow, my comments routinely get silently deleted (or worse: shadowbanned).
And the most ridiculous in this, is how they get deleted/banned a LOT more if you use YouTube's own syntax for time-links ! (Maybe the automatic moderation system thinks these are external links or something?!?)
> This happens regularly (perhaps not frequently) to people with their Gmail account. Google's AI says no, and there are very few people reporting successfully navigating the system to get their account back.
Yep, happened to me too. I have a gmail account from back when gmail was still in private beta. I know the correct password. I have access to the recovery email. I can't log in.
NEVER depend on Google for anything critical. If you're unlucky you'll get completely screwed over, and you won't be able to do anything about it.
> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work
I agree with your larger point esp. Gmail - would be quite crippling - but I haven't had LinkedIn for years now, and it hasn't negatively impacted my job or searches. If anything, it helped me be more proactive when I was looking instead of feeling like I was praying to the abyss.
There was a second in ~2020 where LinkedIn was starting to feel like finding work in the Myspace days - people were expressing themselves in more personal ways on their profiles (I guess because of the lockdown) and remote work was just kicking off. It had this glow that reminded me a lot of the early 2000s work scene online.
Soon enough, as LI caught onto the trend those quirky profiles and posts were replaced with branded influencers and "viral posts". The platform quickly became as influencer-focused as Instagram or Twitter, which feels inappropriate for a job site. But it's not a job site they say, it's a career platform... or professional network... or something (of which a huge aspect is uploading your resume and applying to jobs). Anyway, the way the LinkedIn influencer sphere covered layoffs was like an E! television show - they loved it.
Turns out LinkedIn is not an "essential social media" shall we say. It's not the career accessory that my GitHub and a Macbook are, it could have been, but they chose their path.
My linkedin account got taken over a couple months ago. The attacker changed the phone number and immediately added 2FA, but they didn’t control my email. During account recovery LinkedIn suspended the account and asks for ID verification, through a 3p vendor who do government id verification. That passed and LinkedIn said I could login and reset, but it still stayed suspended and asked for id again. My guess is they drowned in complexity in their own recovery flow and I hit an edge case or something.
It's pretty bad. I filled out a job application the other day (for Bunq) and they said "gmail preferred". So much for using my own domain!
I applied for an accelerator and they refused to let you proceed without using a Google account.
I was banned from selling on Amazon 14 years ago because someone who had lived in my apartment before me was shady. I'm still banned and they give no recourse.
This happens all the time, usually the service provider blocks the account, denies any error and refuses to reopen it, citing its terms of use (which provide for unmotivated account closure).
The idea is that losing a user costs infinitely less than legal fees, so when in doubt they pull the plug. I had direct confirmation from a gafam employee
There are many stories of paediatricians, healthcare professionals or parents wrongfully accused of paedophilia. They never got their accounts back.
I advised an association to buy a domain name and a paid email service and not to rely on Gmail. They didn't listen to me, and two years later Google cut off the account for sending spam or some other similar reason. They lost all contact emails with their suppliers, their accounting, invoices, etc. ...
Don't expect anything from the customer service of a free service. You are the product, not the customer. They will throw you out like rotten fruit at the slightest problem.
Ok. So if you’re locked out of linkedin, now all you need to do is change the hundreds of thousands of other LinkedIn users to change their mindset instead of pleading with LinkedIn themselves to restore your access.
Yep, it would be a huge mess. This is what lead me to switch to Fastmail. If it's _essential_, it's probably worth paying for to ensure you have real support.
It just so happens that Fastmail is also puts out an excellent product.
Fastmail is excellent, but for business purpose… they lack Google Docs, Meet, Drive, Chrome (so you have to create a Google account anyway if you want to save your Chrome bookmarks) and being the major SSO provider on the market.
Separation of concerns is a positive, in my book - I don't want my personal email to be mixed up in my file storage and document creation. I guess I'm old school like that.
> What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account?
I think most people would be... just fine? Personally I'm from a culture that is very distrusting of those big platforms anyways, so people are even less likely to rely on them. If my mom lost access to her google account she would be fine, my dad wouldn't notice (he has been using his own e-mail domain forever), neither would my brother (since he makes a new google account with every phone anyways, having forgotten his previous password), and I wouldn't be bothered much either. I've also been doing fine professionally for 15 years and don't even have a LinkedIn account.
It's a similar picture for everyone around me. Some Facebook account or whatever may have seemed important when we were 16, but by and large people grow out of that vain phase, or even grow out of using the likes of Facebook at all. Nowadays whatever can deliver a message will do. There's a dozen ways to each anyone.
If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better.
>If losing access to any one account is a big deal for you, that's more than a major technological literacy failure - it's a basic life planning failure. Do not overly rely on a single thing controlled by people you cannot trust. Even my grandmother would know better.
uhhuh. While it's a good idea to have backup plans and to exercise independence, people usually aren't accustomed to losing substantial parts of their livelihood for no reason and having no recourse. There's no reason to form a backup plan for a scenario that shouldn't occur. We depend on services all the time whose providers we can't control. That's modern life. What would a backup plan look like here for the average person? Do you think your average tech savvy person has taken those steps?
The intention with this post isn't to defend unpreparedness. But there is a point to be made that cutting somebody off, through some technical loophole, shouldn't be a thing. And companies know that. Every so often they get called out in public by somebody with a lot of traction and they correct the problem. So it's only a problem if it gains enough visibility. That's the system.
Backup plan? You are missing the point. If you need a backup you already messed up. The only entities that should need backups of anything but treasured photos are businesses.
If you don't bank on the assumption that you will always have access to some random mail account and instead treat it like a discardable glove, you don't need a backup plan.
Lost access to your mail account and forgot your PW to to some random other account? Whatever. Make a new account, tell your friends. Happens all the time.
HN will very happily brigade for little guys, too. Every few months there's a new "Stripe closed our account" thread that picks up a lot of steam.
Every once in a while it gets Stripe's attention and they fix it. Most of the time the torches burn for a few hours until someone researches the author and figures out they were building a gambling platform or something else explicitly against Stripe's ToS and the thread quietly dies out as people realize OP was just exploiting HN's visceral reactions.
That's not HN helping. That's because some Stripe employees actively browse HN, especially those threads pertaining to their company, looking to help.
Though some Googlers browse HN, I've never seen where they could actually help someone here - the company is too large and dispersed. Those Googlers are here for leasure, not business.
I agree it's not HN helping—I think those threads are one of the most toxic parts of this forum. As I said, most of the time HN gets out the pitchforks in support of someone who knows full well why they were banned.
Usually you're just straight-up screwed unless you know someone who works at the respective company (or know someone who knows someone).
Even worse, some Terms of Service forbid you from ever signing up again if you're banned, meaning you're perpetually at risk of another ban if you sign up to the service again.
> What happens if one of the big tech companies makes a mistake and closes your account? LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work. Would you be able to make a new account? If not, that seems like a pretty big deal.
You are screwed, and it is a big deal.
However, until some ambulance chaser manages to corral the affected people into a class action lawsuit and win, there will be no change.
> Same concern with your email
This one is straightforward--have your own domain. Download everything such that you can change provider if they stomp you.
What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off? What if AWS or some cloud provider kills your self-hosted VPS? What if your ISP or mobile phone provider does it?
So many fragile layers to our indispensable digital lives; we all walk on eggshells. I'm paranoid about backups and redundancy, but I'd be devastated by a single lockout.
> What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off
Compared with your chances with getting back google account (unless you know someone inside and still not guarantee it will work) you have many actions that you can take. Talk to your registrar support and try to work things out and even ask for transfer. If they don't respond or don't help you then you can complain with ICAAN and even take them to court.
> What if your domain registrar is the one to cut you off?
Then you're fucked. What do you want me to say?
That having been said, domain registrars seem to be FAR less likely to do an automated AI rugpull than hosted services from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
If you use your country's ccTLD you also have recourses against your registrar (if you live in a nice enough country and assuming you just broke some ToS and not committed a crime).
We lost access to one of our phones numbers recently - moving it from Three (UK) to Smarty (a trading name of Three). No access for 3 weeks over which time I spent hours-and-hours contacting them.
So many things tied to our phone number, including banking authorisation (work, charities, and home), online account auth (2fa), contact from school, contact with family, ... it was an absolute nightmare. The single worst customer support experience of my life AFAIR.
In the UK there are two Ombudsman for such services but one says they won't help until 8 weeks after you report a problem to the company involved (and the other somehow says they won't help at all).
It's really given me resolve to, instead of simplifying and signing the family up to the same services, distributing suppliers to avoid us all being stuck without service at the same time.
My Instagram account was banned. I was never an active user, and I'm not sure I actually had a single post, so I have no idea why they found it necessary to disable my account. I tried the ID verification process but got nowhere.
I had no problem creating a new account. All of the accounts are linked together with my Facebook account, so it's not like they weren't aware. I didn't care until Threads came along, and now my preferred handle is unavailable.
> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work.
It is kind of expected to have a profile you can link companies to, but I didn’t know people were actually active and engaging in discussions on the platform. I only sign in every few years to update something, but are you all actively exchanging with others on LinkedIn as a way to find jobs? I thought it was accepted since >10 years the whole platform is corporate noise.
It is corporate noise. But I think it's a great way to find, and talk to, people with similar professional backgrounds. Or to stay in touch with people that you've worked with.
My Amazon account was recently limited to digital goods.
Supposedly it was caused by too many returns. I've checked and I have 2 orders returned during 15 years of purchases.
There was a way to raise concern, but the email was ignored.
I recently (like, yesterday) got permanently banned from Reddit for "report abuse", for some random semi-nonsense comment I reported a month ago on a meme subreddit. Regardless of how justified that is or isn't -- I only have one side of the story to share of course, and I think I just got caught in some labor-saving measures for their underpaid+overworked admin staff -- it's a great reminder of these corporations' power over us.
A lifetime ban from a forum is certainly not as practically bad as the nightmare scenario of losing GMail, but still not great. I used Reddit to discuss technology, philosophy, and politics, and was quite active over the last year especially, using the platform's various science subs to share+refine the ideas I'm developing for my upcoming book with experts. Obviously there's a professional element there, but it was also a big outlet for me, keeping me motivated to share my work when I was feeling like scrapping it all due to anxiety and/or pessimism. Getting 50 upvotes on your detailed critique of some tenured professor's work feels better than you might imagine! I even had 45 "followers", though I never quite learned what that feature was or why it existed -- still, it was a nice ego boost at time when I needed that desperately.
Now that I'm banned for life, I'm basically just planning on giving up that part of my personality for now. Perhaps publishing my book will earn me some friends/critics willing to discuss such things with me, or perhaps I can make some when I start a PhD someday, but until then, Reddit's the only show in town; I've realized that Reddit is to scientific discussion what LinkedIn is to professional networking.
Like LinkedIn there are alternatives, but also like LinkedIn, the alternatives lack network effects and features. Lemmy is absurdly small+monolithic by comparison (/r/philosophy alone is 395x bigger than the entire 'Lemmyverse' put together, and much more diverse), HackerNews is highly focused and intentionally underdeveloped ("You're posting too fast!" + no markdown or communities), Twitter is somehow a Nazi thing now, and LessWrong is... well, it's its own beast. I could try Bluesky or Threads, but A) I've been a forum diehard since finding giantitp.com in middle school, and B) that feels a little like asking to be hurt again, lol. Would love any recommendations from passerby, though!
...sorry, had to get that off my chest, I guess. 12+ years of comments disappearing due to a random incident was more of an emotional blow than I expected, to be perfectly honest. TL;DR: Never, ever report any comments on Reddit. Ever. It's an under-appreciated risk.
If it helps, Reddit outside of the niche or rare well-moderated subs is detestable; a wasteland of bots and ads and partisan nonsense.
Even on the science subs, no one cares about your older comments or the age of your account, except to pull things out of it to try and doxx you or invalidate your opinions.
You can make another account on a VPN and still get the same upvotes, still reach the same eyeballs, get the same feedback and motivation boost. 'Followers' don't matter, real relationships do.
It might even be good to have a fresh account in some unexpected ways. Or not - because fuck that place. Like you said, you'll always be at the mercy of admins who have made it very clear how they feel about users.
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah I've sorta taken it for granted that I'm going to comply with their "no ban evasion" rule, but I guess I should give it some thought if I find the urge some day. Given that my old account was publicly linked to my real name (and I'd like to do the same for any new one), that could get a little tricky... But that's obviously a self-imposed hurdle.
What are they gonna do, site-wide ban you again? If so, VPN a third account with your real name. A fourth, a fifth. It costs them a lot to ban you for dumb reasons, and costs you nothing to make new accounts.
I'd suggest creating an email newsletter for people to join if they like your posts. It's the only way to have a reliable audience, because every large platform these days is suspect.
As discussed above, yes you can try to get around their IP blocks using a VPN — I’m guessing they have some basic ML models watching new account creation from banned IPs. It just seems… idk, pitiful? Embarrassing?
Also the subs I was creating are now locked forever behind a banned account, which is more funny than anything
5 AM. On my treadmill. Sipping on my favorite plant-based, gut-friendly health drink.
As I kickstart my day, I'm reminded how a healthy, thriving "ecosystem" is essential – both for me and the little people in my organization. Just like gut bacteria keep everything in balance, it's the insignificant little people and their micro-moments of trust, support, and empowerment that help our team thrive.
In People Operations, it's not just about strategy – it's about ensuring that every single person (yes, even the smallest gear in the machine!) feels valued, appreciated, and happy. When their needs are met, the whole system runs smoother.
Grateful for every, single, one of you who makes this place what it is. The work you do, no matter how big or small, keeps us all moving forward!!
> I have primary account (linked in my profile about) to my real name and thought it would be cool to have my open source project as account name on LinkedIn. And if I recall, I've seen similar approaches from others.
This is not how you're supposed to use LinkedIn. Your Open Source project is an organisation, not an account. I highly suspect the ToS says you can't have more than one account.
Not sure I'm totally understanding here, but it sounds like LinkedIn turned on (probably AI-based) porn scanning on messages, there was a false positive, and the guy wasn't able to escalate to support. Is there an implication that it was blocked for political reasons?
It’s not porn, it’s mixed use technology. The persons decentralized LORA radio messaging platform, is another persons disaster resilience platform, is another persons hobby project, is another persons anti censorship tool, is another persons improvised frontline communications tool, is another persons counter-terrorism ai ban hammer trigger.
WOW that's the reason? I didn't catch that, that's both hilarious and disheartening. Dijkstra is rolling in his grave... I suppose we'll have to move from "nodes and edges" to, idk, "dots and lines", kinda like TikTok has created "unalive"?
Can't wait to see what the almighty AI thinks about the Tits problem![1]
Or the Tits group[2] (I swear, I'm not a member!).
Very tempted to include Tits Alternative[3] as one of my interests on LinkedIn, but I'm afraid the result will be too predictable.
Side note: The two groups that don't satisfy the Tits Alternative are very dear to my heart. Writing software to do computation in Thompson's Group and its generalizations[4] was my introduction to geometric group theory. And I ended up with Grigorchuk as my graduate advisor after learning about the Grigorchuk group.
Actually, why wouldn't people working in porn and porn adjacent industries send porn related content to each other in DMs, totally in a professional context ?
What on earth makes you think people working in porn and porn adjacent industries behave "in a professional context" on LinkedIn, when nobody else seems to?
Given how many people are on LinkedIn, would you doubt that women on the platform sometimes get sexually harassed in DMs, e.g. by people sending them porn?
Unless it’s a burner or malicious account, I can hardly imagine someone being that courageous to sign death warrant to their career if woman decides to call them out and it goes viral.
So what's the implication here? Is Microsoft/LI unhappy about Ukraine content? Mesh content? Mesh in Ukraine? Or did the TOS bot have a false positive?
How is the Signal thing related? There seems to be an indication that getting banned on LinkedIn will prevent you from signing up to Signal. I don't think it was intended to be read as such but language is really weird:
> But tried to install Signal couple of days later from App store. And you guess the rest.
No, no I did not guess that getting banned on LinkedIn would prevent you from signing in to Signal.
I can see Microsoft using some system across their sites, which would affect your Github account, if you're blocked or banned on LinkedIn. It would be a pretty excessive, but I can imagine such a system. As to how Signal is involved I have no idea.
Welcome to a brave new world of digital fascism and mass surveillance.
Why does every message have to be scanned with AI? Since when WeChat behaviour has become an example for the Western social media?
You don't scan all user private messages with AI, you give your users a report button which they can press if they don't like a message. Only then you can take any other measures. That's is.
How is Microsoft going to train their new AI models without using all your chats as part of the training data though? If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.. And LinkedIn is "free" as in beer.
Rather free as super salted bretzel and drinks are available to buy, tightly tied to the only store still running in the global town: we may never have to subscribe for a paid account, but LinkedIn clearly is pushing for many features only available if we pay.
As wage slaves, of course we are products right from the start. So on that side at least it conceptually aligns that we are LinkedIn products.
> Why does every message have to be scanned with AI?
To answer this question honestly - I would assume that the service owners don't want to get pulled in front of a congressional inquiry about why their service isn't doing anything to prevent the distribution of child abuse material.
I agree with you but please don't throw the term fascism left and right to refer to things you disagree with. The word's meaning is already twisted and diluted to the point of uselessness.
I grew up in a communist regime and can assure you tyranical censorship is not exclusive to fascism nor its sole defining part.
I had an error stopping me from commenting anything for months, decide to message support, they say "idk bro some more info?" and the error went away. I kinda suspect they knew the info already
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