Some people are going to find this to be very obnoxious. Some people are going to be fine with it conditional on how it's done. If you are okay pissing off group A and suffering those consequences to find group B then go for it. If you aren't then don't. Pretty simple.
Why does every public projection of an opinion need to be accompanied by some absolutist division of all of humanity into Team Right and Team Wrong.
When an attractive woman that I don't know sends me a link request on LinkedIn it's kind of obvious that she's trying to sell me something. It's been everything from companionship to printer supplies to headhunting, but it's no different than any other platform. I know the article is about women being approached by men, but it happens the other way around as well.
Yeah women do this as well, leveraging their looks, and the HN commenters referring to incels and predators are missing this quote from the article:
'House says overtures on the app are often a two-way street. "I have a lot of female clients who reach out to men to date on LinkedIn," she added. "They think a guy is really hot and maybe they can get a job or maybe a date."'
The first problem on LinkedIn is that many people have to be on it to earn a living or show their team spirit for work. If we could all find employment and network without LinkedIn better than with it, 90% of us would.
So when someone is hitting on someone using LinkedIn, that person is the societal equivalent of the jerk who hits on a waitress at her job. She has no choice but to be nice to you and tolerate your “smooth” lines because she’s a prisoner. She can’t leave easily and the jerk might be an important customer of the business. Even if the jerk is being coy about it (likely for the purposes of plausible deniability later), it’s incredibly awkward and disrespectful to the waitress.
This is no different than a female client flirting with a male financial advisor putting him in the awkward position as well.
Both are jerks. And while these are common stereotypical situations, there exist with the roles reversed too. Ask any male bartender. It’s awful and a real impediment to security in their relationship when every other night, some lady implies she’s available to him.
The second and bigger problem with LinkedIn are all the idiots who think it’s an extension of their social media. They pontificate on political events, give condescending lessons on life, share way too much about their personal life (nobody cares about your daily wins), and use #hashtags so #frequently that is #impossible to #read their #posts, not that they worth reading anyway.
It seems no matter what you do to purge yourself of these fools in your “professional network”, you’ve always got a few saps that end up liking their posts and so that Instagram-like garbage shows up anyway. You have to constantly tell LinkedIn you’re not interested, or just keep your network to a low high-quality number of people that are too busy working to play with their phones.
When I get a connection request, even if it looks like a promising industry connection, I check their activity history. If they’re on LinkedIn liking and posting things every week, then it’s a no go. You’d better be worth a cool $100 million for me to make an exception.
My feed is my feed. I follow companies to keep track of my industry. If you are cluttering that up with your sappy posts, even if I agree with you, you’re gone.
Unless you’re my boss, in which case, my hatred runs deep. I can’t even unfollow you because you are the kind of LinkedIn Loser who checks for mismatches on connections verses followers. So yes, much deep hatred.
There is the problem of predatory approaches to women in social networks of course.
But I feel most women automatically take any messages from men declaring their affection, be it genuine or not, in a pretty negative way by default.
I get it's a protective natural reaction, but it can be harmful. If you're a woman, and you take this too seriously and in a negative way, suddenly you start thinking all men are mindless jerks. I've seen it. It's all about the choice of words.
If I were a woman, and a stranger sent me an email out of the blue, but was educated and chose his words well, I wouldn't care at all. In fact I would seek him out so that we get to know each other better.
If not I would simply ignore it. Of course this can be hard if you get bombarded with hundreds of messages, and emails and stuff.
But I would try not to be dismissive and view it in a negative way by default. People live in a defensive state always, and that is really harmful.
This is kind of ignorant of the fact that the defensive state is a reaction to harmful behavior. You're placing the burden of 'dealing with it' on the passive participant, when it belongs to the active party. If you can't stand the 'harm' of a negative reaction to picking a girl up on LinkedIn, then don't do it. They, unfortunately, don't get the option to avoid it before it happens.
Secondly, as a LinkedIn user, there is a reasonable expectation that communication in the platform will be professional. The platform's value proposition is grounded in this expectation as a sort of social contract. Sometimes people are ok with others defying said social contract, but you should assume they won't be.
picking up a girl on linkedin only works if you approach in a professional way anyway. The chances for a coffee meeting is 100x higher if you suggest discussing some mutual professional interests (fake it if you must) then just saying '' do you want to go on a date with me''. Then if you like each other you will notice the sparks flying. If not you now have networked professionaly. win win
I don't think it's about the choice of words, but the choice of context. This is a professional networking website, so focus on that.
People expose their LinkedIn profiles for a specific purpose, and that's networking. It's not an invitation for cold calls.
Hijacking a community like this poisons the well for everyone else. When it becomes prevalent enough, women put their guard up, or avoid that community altogether.
It might be that most women are already in monogamous relationships or are uninterested in romantic relationships. Unsolicited requests for things that the receiver isn't interested in should be considered negative. Was it not implicit that by signing up for LinkedIn that they weren't there for romantic interests?
Why does every public projection of an opinion need to be accompanied by some absolutist division of all of humanity into Team Right and Team Wrong.