The Best Thing About Retirement Will Be Deleting My LinkedIn Account


Let me count the ways I loathe LinkedIn.

No, we don't have all day.

Today, I log in to look for jobs, and here's what's on my feed:  a guy shilling for his grill company, a therapist advertising her services, a guy shilling for his carpet-cleaning company, a guy trying to get people to invest in his real estate pyramid scheme, some business organization babble bullshit, a guy shilling for his construction company, and I couldn't read any more.  What's most scary is that people I know post this crap.

Not only is the feed basically all commercials, but they're boring commercials.  LinkedIn must be the most boring of the social networks.  Admittedly, it's focused on business, but business can still be interesting.  It was more refreshing when the crazed Catholic guy would go on pro-life rants and the crazed business professor would rant about a local business, but it looks like LinkedIn threw all the interesting people out (I doubt those guys would have unfriended me or anybody).

It's partly my fault.  I don't want to post anything.  I don't even want to be on the site.  It's just sort of mandatory as a jobseeker to have a LinkedIn profile since recruiters love the site.  I've thought about just deleting my account, but I always refrain in case I need to get a job again, like now.  The job ads are awful, but occasionally a nugget pops up that isn't on the other job boards, but some days I wonder if the site is worth the effort (of course, when one is unemployed, one has plenty of time to spare, but still one doesn't want to waste time regardless).  All the listings are promoted and seem to pop up in a random order (presumably based on what the employer paid LinkedIn) however one filters, so sorting through only new ads is difficult.  Employers also like to rerun the same ad, and it's puzzling that if they haven't hired anyone for a position in a month and somehow the business continues to function, maybe they don't need to hire for it at all?  From the jobseeker perspective, they should have just hired someone who applied instead of wasting another month futzing around on LinkedIn.

I don't think LinkedIn has ever made me any money, and though I've never paid for anything on the site, so I can't really complain (it's free), I'm always tempted to just delete it every time I log in.

One of these days, I probably will delete it.  I wonder what the triggering event will be.  Some post with someone bragging about being a woman-owned business (that your dad gave to you because he started the company in 1960)?  Some ad for the same job I could do in my sleep and I applied to weeks earlier but never got a response?  Some message trying to sign me up for a multi-level marketing scam?  Some connect request that results in someone asking me to follow them instead?  Some look over my network and I wonder why I still bother to be reminded of these people?

I look forward to someday being LinkedOut.  For now, I need a job, though I wonder if one day that will even be enough to stay on this abomination.

I'd post this on LinkedIn, but I suspect it wouldn't get a lot of likes . . .

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