Thank you! Thank you for saying it out loud !
At the start, LinkedIn was great and you could really connect you to a vibrant community of former colleagues and weak relationships. I actually got fruitful introductions and evn job offers from those days.
Then, they wanted to become a social network. Because, you know, advertising... It started way before Microsoft.
We started to see "LION" (LinkedIn Open Network), it became a goal for some to have as many connections as possible. So, tons of connections, but no more answers to messages. No more introductions. Useless connections. LinkedIn encouraged that by allowing connection requests without knowing the email of the person. That's when spam started.
Then, messages became mostly irrelevant, simple commercial requests of people who did not give a sh*t who you were. I personally cut off all LinkedIn notifications from that day on. I guess a lot of people never read their messages anymore either, so it became impossible to get an introduction. What's a community worth when people cannot communicate with each other?
Then came the "let's be Facebook" idiotic strategy. People would post and repost other people's content, pure fantasies with no link to reality. 25-year-olds became management or strategy gurus. No more skills, only pretention. Add AI to that and you've got the most useless feed ever.
To add insult to injury, the mobile app has got the worst UX you can find, full of counter-patterns, buggy, slow, you name it.
And yet, they manage to charge $11000/year to headhunters. Or to sales reps. Or to advertisers.
We need a LinkedIn competitor.