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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email formats:

* A paragraph explaining social networking and another paragraph explaining LinkedIn.

* A few paragraphs on the benefits of joining LinkedIn.

* A few paragraphs explaining that a LinkedIn invitation was special because it meant that the inviter trusted and respected the invitee and wanted to stay in touch professionally.

* A tiny blurb along the lines of "I’d like to add you to LinkedIn network."

Despite my expectations that one of the explanatory messages would be best, the short, vague blurb outperformed by a huge margin.

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> getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us

So important that you resorted to every dark pattern in the book, it seems. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't know any of my tech friends who haven't had a bad experience with linkedin tricking them into spamming invites or similar.

I'm very frustrated by dark patterns, too. IIRC those came well after I left the company in 2005, and I'm disappointed they're there. I think trying to get users to spam invites is especially annoying and lame: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/953059635522502656

I'm glad you agree and weren't part of it! Apologies for suggesting you were.

Somewhat surprised Microsoft haven't done something about this since they bought LinkedIn. It surely doesn't reflect well on their brand.

Are people at Microsoft OK with working alongside people who do this scummy stuff?

Actually this is a perfect fit. Microsoft is a big user of dark patterns - many examples of how they push windows 10 telemetry and other products like browsers, Microsoft teams installations are well documented. It’s almost like a match made in heaven. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-google-and-microsoft-tric...

> A tiny blurb along the lines of "I’d like to add you to LinkedIn network."

for a long time, there were dark patterns in the account creation flow that tricked users into importing their address book and mass-emailing invitations to join linked-in. the UX made it seem like you were just sending a request to connect with someone who is already on the service.

sounds like this tiny blurb was the seed that sprouted the account creation dark patterns.

Interesting, I wonder how much of it may have been due to other reasons than just the brevity.

I wonder how much of it might also have been due to that, e.g, people generally enjoy helping other people, and so are likely to respond positively to what appears to be someone else outlining what they'd "like" for you to do.

It's hard to be sure, but my guess is the effectiveness came mostly from the brevity. Because at the time no one knew what LinkedIn or social networking were, so most users wouldn't know if the invite was spam or not, whether accepting the invite would help the other person, etc. Today there's more social pressure to accept LinkedIn/Facebook/etc invites from people you know.

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