Dan Schlosser is a software engineer who writes on Medium about LinkedIn's dark patterns, design, and building a Google Photos-style image grid.
HN links it for the LinkedIn dark patterns post. Commenters cite it as a reason they avoid LinkedIn, and one notes the manipulative tactics are widely known.
Many people are literally tricked into uploading their contacts. Example with screenshots.[1] The UI/UX practice is called "dark patterns".
On a monthly basis, I get LinkedIn "invites" from friends who simply didn't understand LinkedIn's hostile and deceptive user interface. They think they're just importing their contacts to conveniently++ find existing profiles but in reality, they're unwittingly giving permission to LinkenIn to spam their address book to recruit new members.
You may be good at defensive web surfing to keep your contacts private but most others are not.
Btw, there was a previous discussion from Feb 2014 about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276032
[1]https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462#.8nv6mhadv
++ (understandably because they don't want to manually retype each contact name into Linkedin. Ain't nobody got time for that.)
Ever since the scraping lawsuits [0] I realized linked-in has adopted the "I take all your data, you take none of mine" idea to another level.
Also the site doesn't even work well and is one of the main examples of "dark patterns" on the web [1].
Literally one of the worst companies and websites out there. Stallman has a summary of the additional reasons [2].
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/eff-court-accessing-publicly-available-information-internet-not-crime
[1] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462
[2] https://www.stallman.org/linkedin.html
See LinkedIn Dark Patterns [0]. It explains how LinkedIn tricks one into sharing contacts.
There we have it, finally signed up and signed in to
LinkedIn. The next part of the new user experience is filling
out your profile. Depending on how you count, LinkedIn tries to
import the user’s address book three to eight times. It
shouldn’t be this hard to sign up for a product without giving
away any unnecessary information.
Related HN discussion [1].
[0] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11063178
It could be because of their usage of dark UI design. I'm not sure if they still do it because I haven't been on there in a long time.
https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462
It was also mentioned in this presentation as having confusing UI.
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/oo-ux
To be fair, LI uses dark patterns with the same gusto that a wolf has for a lamb ranch. I thought they were widely known for their scummy tactics.
https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462
Other commenters mentioned it could have been constructed in the reverse direction.
But, they did have some dark patterns you might have missed: https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462