Someone invited me to LinkedIn in 2007, I believe. I set up an account, and over the following five years, my list of connections gradually grew. One day, out of the blue, I look at my connections, and I had close to 1000!
1000 ‘friends’!
I was scratching my head, how did I know all these people? Incredulous, I browsed through the list quickly, and realized that I had never met, and not even had a real online conversation with, the majority of these people. I’ve gone blindly accepting invitations after invitations. I was wondering how did I get all these invitations, until I looked at the list of ‘friends recommendation’ sent by LinkedIn, I understood this is probably how people sent out invitation to people whom they had never met nor talked to. And looking at the way LinkedIn recommend friends and acquaintances, I seriously thought that some day, every person on LinkedIn would be connected to everyone else.
I gradually lost interest in LinkedIn. I logged in, probably three to four times a year. I still received invitations from people I don’t know, but I stopped accepting them. As to the existing connections, I was torn. Should I unfriend them, or should I leave them at that?
Suddenly unfriending someone seemed rude, so I decided to ignore them, until 2016, when I started to receive spams via LinkedIn. I logged in, and trimmed down my list of connections to around 200 or so. But I still had no new interest for the platform.
Starting in 2017, the volume of spams from LinkedIn gradually picked up. By mid 2017, I received, almost on daily basis, over two dozens emails from different people and companies I had never heard of, let alone having any business with.
Unsubscribing from any email interest did nothing at all. LinkedIn seemed to ignore any request to unsubscribe. The spams kept flooding in.
In October, I logged in to see what’s going on, and to my surprise, my home page was full of announcements from companies I did not know. I found that I had ‘followed’ close to 400 companies. I did not know how. I did not remember I had followed any company at all. I am a person who despise personality cult, so I do not follow, per the meaning of the term used in general social media.
Naively, I went on to unfollow them, one by one, as I could not figure how to unfollow in batch. Every unfollow operation took at least three clicks, it wasted quite a bit of time, as the heavy pages were loading slowly.
After having unfollowed 20 companies or so, something stroke me: why am I wasting my life doing this shit? The next question that followed, quite naturally, was what do I use LinkedIn for? In the last four years, I seldom looked at it anyway, and for the whole ten years I had been on LinkedIn, I have not done any business via that platform.
So, I was sitting there, staring at that screen, while sipping my tea. Five minutes later, the first string I typed in a search engine page was ‘how to delete LinkedIn account’. Within two minutes, I had my account zapped. For this, we had to give credit to LinkedIn’s team to make closing an account hassle-free.
The platform informed me that it would take about a month for the data to sync between the servers. In the months that followed, I saw the spams gradually subside, but they still trickled in.
Even now, it’s not totally cleared yet. Amazing. But my email account is a much quieter place.