Why am I here?

A few months ago, I started to question the value of being on LinkedIn.

This platform has become a cornerstone of professional networking in the modern corporate world.

But I’ve asked myself why.

Why was I sharing my personal business network with the world?

Why was I donating this IP that sells to recruiters, advertisers, and other agencies?

What is the value?

There is clearly value inia Business Social Media networking platform that connects communities of people around a central idea. There’s a perfect reasonable advertising model that comes from understanding messages that resaonte with a community.

But, for me, building up a detailed picture of an organisation’s internal structure is crossing the line- in my view. My newtork is my intellectual property.

In the age of generative AI, I am concerned about intellectual property being harvested nto language models.

So I decided to opt out of that and disconnect from every one of my LinkedIn connections.

Yep, every one of them.

Why would you do that?

I believe it is far more important to connect to people through meaningful personal interactions.

Removing myself from LinkedIn removes the associated mental pressure of a LinkedIn profile from me.

That’s all fine, but the annoying part was what happened next.

I got to the end of the donnection process and realised that I still had “unknown” connections.

These connections are supposedly deactivated accounts that I couldn’t remove unless the other person reactivated their account.

To protect my privacy from these unknown connections, I would first have to wait until the connection revealed themselves so I could disconnect from them.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Please just delete them for me.

Why Can’t You Delete Them?

So, I reached out to LinkedIn support—three times, in fact.

One proposed resolution was to delete my account and start again.

Another was to hope that one day the development team would fix the issue.

Either way, nobody took much interest.

So What?

My LinkedIn profile continues to show information, and I still have no idea who these 13 mystery connections are.