Comment by janice1999
8 days ago
Allowing you to sign up and then immediately locking or shadow banning your account is a dark pattern to force you to provide a mobile phone number or other identification (for extra advertising targeting of course).
8 days ago
Allowing you to sign up and then immediately locking or shadow banning your account is a dark pattern to force you to provide a mobile phone number or other identification (for extra advertising targeting of course).
Nah. Shadowbanned users normally don't even realise they're shadow-banned; it's not a growth hacking strategy, and the point of ID is to validate details already provided for advertiser filtering. It doesn't even push the "verification" feature particularly hard. OP is unlucky enough to have IDs that span a couple of countries so probably triggers some half-baked algorithm aiming at weeding out fake profiles (LinkedIn loves AI slop, but it's in the business of selling expensive ways of messaging people, so it doesn't want too many fake profiles).
Not that LinkedIn has great ethics around dark patterns: LinkedIn's original dark pattern growth hacks like the "find contacts" feature linked to your email that made it very easy to accidentally send connection requests to anyone you'd ever been included in an email chain with were particularly inappropriate and the "someone from x looked at your profile" stuff always strikes me as a bit creepy. But nobody shadowbans users as part of their growth funnel.
And whilst LinkedIn is actually surprisingly useless for genuine business conversation, I'm not sure the mad people recounting Things That Didn't Happen which impart Important Business Lessons for likes are any worse than that sort of person on other social networks pushing much weirder and angrier stuff these days....