They did the most spam-forward and deceptive growth-hack campaign of all the social networks that I have been forced to join. Straight up lying to everyone’s contacts: “person with hiring authority asked you to join today”, “Person you know professionally is waiting for your response to join”, “why are you keeping person with power over your professional life waiting?”. It was one of the largest misinformation campaigns ever created to bootstrap this obnoxious social network for grandstanding about work accomplishments. They hijacked everyone’s contact lists to spam their colleagues with emails that blatantly misrepresented things, with vague professional setbacks implied for not complying. Screw the jerk who presided over this deception.

*Edit, just looked back on these and it really was outright deception. They would spam messages by your contacts written in the first person "I would like to connect", "I'd like to add you to my professional network." signed by them. Impersonating people for profit is definitely on the wire fraud spectrum. Screw that guy.

This.

This early behaviour made LinkedIn utterly toxic amongst the tech community in the early days. Nobody using them would be offered a job, as any applicant using LinkedIn would be demonstrating they are clueless (or worse, endorsed this behaviour).

Quite how LinkedIn managed to overcome this and have people trust them (!) I will never be able to understand.

It was so bad that it turned off many people (even outside of tech) from joining social media sites altogether.

I held off from joining LI for years after that.