Now their tactics look more like desperation rather than well thought out methods to maintain growth. Its mainly the spam combined with blatent selling out to advertisers & recruiters that I have an issue with.
I also think the product is in the middle of a massive pivot from referral network to network+content destination and that transition isn't quite done yet. It will be interesting to see what the next few years hold for them.
I am just curious why they have not pushed Q&A as another engagement channel, something similar to Quora. As most people in Linkedin use real identity, the Q&A should be relatively high quality with little spam. Thinking about it, maybe Linkedin should buy Quora or Stackoverflow :)