LinkedIn recently went public and was immediately criticized for being overvalued. My experience with LinkedIN has been good for its free product, poor for its premium product. In particular, they make it very difficult to cancel.
When watching This Week in Startups, they talked about this problem and thought that I could provide a little extra information on this process. On the show, they say to downgrade premium service you need to submit a question to the contact form to be issued a ticket. If this is not effective for you, see steps 2 and 3.
Here’s how:
- Attempt to contact LinkedIn through the contact form: https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask
- Contact linkedin_support@cs.linkedin.com
- Contact Angie Busch, at abusch@linkedin.com
It is unacceptable for a company to make downgrading Software As Service such a hassle.
As you may be aware, Facebook customizes the homepage feed in order to give a best guess as to what you are interested in seeing. This is done through a process of machine learning – Facebook algorithms determine what functions will cause you to spend the most amount of time on the site.
For example, Facebook began giving me an endless scroll, and without noticing I scrolled until the top of the page and the bottom of the page seemed impossibly long distances away. I closed Facebook. Now, Facebook shows me the bottom of the feed.
Using this piece of information, I am now beginning to remove myself from autoscroll entirely. Each time I notice the page has grown in length (based on change in scroll bar) I exit Facebook. My goal is to make Facebook give me what it believes is the best content for me in the first 3 to 4 posts.
Key concept: by knowing that websites are being automatically optimized to increase your time on site, users can inflate negative impact actions (site exit) when a website performs something the users doesn’t like. By over-reacting to events such as this, you can send a stronger signal about your preferences to the personalization bot.
