Hacker News Reader

Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is one of the worse dark-pattern based business out there. Their whole business model is based on making connections between people, however unwanted they are.

They use any means necessary to get your contact list and abuse it to spam your contacts with dubious marketing ploys and unverifiable claims (someone looked you up! you're missing on new jobs opportunities!).

Liars.

I've resisted creating an account so far but the pressure to conform is there as you basically "don't exist" without a profile that lazy HR managers can look up.

View on HN

Reminds me of that mobile popup I always get that tells me to download their mobile app when I'm viewing Linkedin on a mobile phone and I can't move on unless I press something.

Reddit is almost unusable on mobile browsers because of this.

On a text-wrapping browser, reddit desktop mode on mobile is the best way to browse that I've found

Same with discord, excluding the almost.

You can use https://old.reddit.com .

For now.

Or https://i.reddit.com for a faster mobile view.

Every time I click a link it asks if I want to install the app or continue in the browser and the icon for browser is chrome despite me not even having chrome installed.

I'm normally a mobile web kind of guy - eBay, Facebook, Amazon etc. But Reddit is too bad, I just have to use Sync.

as a result pretty much all my mobile time that would have been spent on reddit is now spent on hn

You can turn off the app spam from the menu, at least if you have an account. Seems to work pretty well.

Recently they seem to have started alternating between 2 versions of it - one where you have to tap No and another where you have to tap Yes, so it catches you out if you're used to always using the web site. I really despise this.

Indeed using redreader help though, plus it feels faster.

> the pressure to conform is there as you basically "don't exist" without a profile that lazy HR managers can look up

I find this is an effective filter for those trying to avoid working for a red-tape-filled, default big corp. The more bureaucracy visible before getting there, the better. For those that explain it away as a bad HR does not make the company bad, if you're good enough to be picky there are good companies that also have good HR.

I got my after graduation job 1 year before graduation through LinkedIn recruiting of a very big engineering corp (100k> employee big), with way better pay than my after internship offer from an American cloud company.

The recruitment process was mostly flawless, very friendly and professional. I never felt so welcomed and on the same level as there. That actually made the tipping point for me going from only startup/midsize companies during studies to big corp. In terms of quality it was way above and beyond of the random headhunter companies offers (I get a few per week, 99% crap).

On the other hand that big corp is not publicly listed, so that might heavily influence their culture.

I feel like they are getting better after the MS acquisition, or maybe I have just dealt with most of their dark pattern dialogues and don't see them anymore

I've successfully managed to not have one to this day. Keep fighting the good fight!

Given that they have been owned by Microsoft for quite some time, how much of their current practice is learned vs inherited? If the latter, why would Microsoft allow this practice to go on?

Much of it certainly inherited, though I haven't used to in years (not because MS bought it) so can't say if it's got worse. When I used it earlier, I'd get so many spam type emails.

For a few reasons:

It takes time to go through all user stories in such a big application. Imagine rewriting all unit tests.

When you take over a big operation, you usually don't want to rock the boat more than you are already doing.

They also might have not done due diligence, underestimated what a liability this data would become, or underestimated how long it would take to rewrite it. (E.g. GDPR was only adopted a few months before the announcement of the aquisition, and didn't come into force until two years later.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com