Goodbye LinkedIn subscription, after 13 years

I signed up for LinkedIn nearly 13 years ago on April 19, 2004 as one of the first 500,000 members. I am sadly departing the platform as it has become less good.

Back in 2004 LinkedIn was competing with services like Plaxo and I was selling stuff at Microsoft. During those early days social networks were small and slow, but I remember the amusement of a corporate directive to stop using these dodgy online services to link with business acquaintances made on company time due to some alleged privacy issue. The delayed action irony of Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn.

In 2012 I spent some time working with LinkedIn which was a super-interesting West-coast scaleup hypergrowth cultural experience. I also found out that I share my Cinco de Mayo birthday with LinkedIn, and since then I have been a full-stack commercial consumer of, and advocate for LinkedIn.

Premium subscription, recruiting ads, marketing ads plus always helping my teams to craft wonderful profiles so they can be more successful professionals. Not just to hoover up the employer halo effect of good looking profiles, then use them in competitive pitches to demonstrate the stellar quality of teams I put together 🙂

Anyway, for many years LinkedIn has been my #1 morning boot-up information stream to keep up to date with my network, and useful thought leadership articles. LinkedIn Pulse, Influencers and such have all been valuable elaborations based on the original principle of “members first” when LinkedIn was building the network. Super sticky with lots of reasons to spend time on the platform.

The member network building job must be done as it seems like along with the dumbed down chunky Duplo® interface update, we now have saturation bombing of corporate sponsored crap in the feed. I no longer see what my network is sharing or much interesting content, so have stopped visiting. I use services like Feedly RSS and Quora instead.

My #1 issue with the new LinkedIn (internal codename Neptune) interface are the super-sized anabolic steroid fed feed images. They dominate any valuable text that actually educates, informs and entertains. It’s like a Pinterest of stock marketing images. If there was a premium “show thumbnails only” I’d probably keep paying to be able to read the good stuff, and just ignore the sponsored noise.

The only interesting thing left is to look up people, but that’s a quick in and out transactional stalk. So for the first time in around 7 years I won’t be renewing my premium subscription. Take my premium cash or monetize my dead-beat eyeballs, but both together at low quality ?

I really do hope LinkedIn can course correct this one as I miss the good old days, but until then, it’s London calling: goodnight and good luck.