Life as a LinkedIn group manager isn’t much fun, given the limited control you have over your group. Now LinkedIn’s rolled out a new discussion format that makes things even worse, not to mention confuses the difference between “discussions” and “news” items. Apparently, LinkedIn has serious Digg envy. Let the spam commence.
How Things Were
Previously, LinkedIn Groups had a “discussion” area, where anyone in the group could start discussions on topics with other members. In addition, there was a separate “news” area where anyone could submit news items to share. These have now been merged — and without any heads-up that I see being given to the poor suffering LinkedIn group administrators out there.
Now, I oversee our Search Engine Land group. For about a year now, I’ve had some very strict rules in place, with the primary one being that discussions shouldn’t include links, because way too many people were starting “discussions” that were merely product pitches, attempts to get traffic to blog posts or outright spam. I also had rules that no one was supposed to submit news stories. Again, this was to fight spam submissions that added little value to the group.
Rules & Premoderation Wishes
For those who care, you can read more about these rules as they are posted in our LinkedIn Group, here and here. To ensure people saw them, I had them flagged with big “READ FIRST” headlines and tagged to be at the top of the default discussion mode. I had to do this because LinkedIn has failed to give LinkedIn group admins the ability to moderate discussions and news items submitted.
Today, I still don’t have moderation controls. To make matters worse, I can’t even feature the rules in the way that I used to. You really, really suck, LinkedIn.
Policing LinkedIn: Old School
Let me step a bit back and share what I sent LinkedIn last November, documenting what a joyful experience I had to deal with working with their terrible group system on a daily basis. My routine, as I explained to them (feel free to skip all this, if you don’t want some back history on LinkedIn problems):
Visit the Search Engine Land group in the morning.
Hit discussions and sort by most recent, so that I can see what new discussions have been started.Look for spam or people who simply start a “discussion” that’s really a link drop.Copy and paste the person who started the discussion’s name, since I can’t remove and block them from the discussion itself (FEATURE REQUEST). Delete the discussion.
Go to manage. Search for the person. Hope I can find them. Sometimes people join, post, then quit so you can’t remove and block. Well, why not preapprove? Because that’s a pain. Let me locate ANYONE in LinkedIn and proactively block (FEATURE REQUEST). Also, when I’m dealing with some names, looking them up can be hard since I have to figure out where exactly the last name begins. You get lots of people who also have “names” that are generic descriptions of what they do.
Remove and block that person, when found. Be VERY CAREFUL not to accidently hit the Change Role link that’s right above the remove and block button (at least it doesn’t say Promote To Manager” any more. Rinse and repeat this for each person who has abused the discussions feature.
Go to News. Curse again that I can’t restrict news to just come from my own feeds or whatever feeds I want to enable (FEATURE REQUEST). Instead, in order to keep people on the Search Engine Land Group updated with news from Search Engine Land, I also have to let anyone submit. Wish at least I could premoderate.
Sort by Latest News, to see if there’s any really junky submissions. Open each article to review it, which loads with that really annoying LinkedIn frame. Then open the comments for each story, in case I need the person’s name in order to remove and block them. I also leave the news tab open, so that I can delete the stories.
Curse that for the past five days now, LinkedIn has stopped pulling in our own news feed. Wonder if the support message I sent on Friday will get answered. Decide that I will just turn off the News portion and then curse that you have to have both Discussion & News together, not separately (FEATURE REQUEST).
Later in the day, a summary email will go out to all members of my group. Often, despite the fact that I’ve killed offtopic discussion and news spam, it will still be there, because it was automatically prepared at some point. Wish that I could get a preview before it went out, or I could manually trigger a send if I want (FEATURE REQUEST).
In the news area, I just want to have news from my own site or a collection of sites to go out.
In the discussion area, I want to be able to have only approved discussions go live.
These don’t seem that hard to implement. At the very least, I wish I could toggle what I want, news, discussions and/or jobs. Jobs is options, but to have news, you have to have discussions (and vice versa).
Since that time, LinkedIn made only one improvement, the ability to easily click on someone’s profile and select the “Remove, Block & Delete All Contributions” button. That wiped them out, along with all the spam they submitted.
That button is still around, but locating it is harder. More important, trying to ferret out the spam and unauthorized submissions in now an incredible nightmare.
The New Horror Show
Here’s what I see in my group right now:
Previously, what I chose to feature as a discussion was right at the top of the page. Now, my “Manager’s Choice” gets shoved into the lower right corner (marked A in the screenshot above). In place of my choices, LinkedIn decides on its own which are “popular” topics and shoves them up high.
Even further up, LinkedIn shoves an invitation for people to “Like” new “Discussions” (marked B in the screenshot above). The problem is, these aren’t discussions. These are predominantly articles that have flowed into our group from Search Engine Land’s news feed. And soon, they’re also going to be any links that anyone in the group decides to share, despite that being against our group guidelines and despite experience showing that we’ll be flooded with spam.
In particular, take a close look at the new “Start A Discussion” section:
See the “attach a link” section? That’s a big, huge fat invitation for people to start spamming us with links. It also fundamentally changes one of the unique features that LinkedIn offered over Facebook. It was more “discussion” oriented, more designed especially for business professionals to ask question of each other and get help. Worse, it’s difficult to tell when you’re going to click on a “discussion” and get sent out of LinkedIn to a news article or stay within LinkedIn where an actual discussion is taking place.
I can’t even police my group rules. Without asking me, LinkedIn just made these changes to merge news and discussions, explicitly encouraging members to share links without bothering to ask the group administrator (that’s me) if I wanted this. I can’t turn off the functionality, either. My only choice is to completely kill the new combined “Discussions” section entirely.
I don’t really want to do that, because that’s what made our group compelling — members could talk to each other and do so in a largely spam-free environment.
Policing for spam is also harder, because all the feed content gets mixed in with new submissions / discussions or whatever LinkedIn is calling them now. After finally locating the “new discussions” link that was previously easy to find:
I have to scan through all the news feed “discussions” from us to spot things that members have submitted:
Then I have to look at each submission to decide if it they violate our group guidelines — not that some of these people submitting can even find our guidelines now.
Basically, LinkedIn has shoved Digg down my throat. I don’t need that — Search Engine Land’s sister site Sphinn is already expressly designed for people to share internet marketing news stories, complete with a moderation team that fights spam.
What I asked for (such as in this LinkedIn product forum) was premoderation. What I heard back was:
Pre-moderation is definitely one of the additional moderation tools in the near-term pipeline (among which is the digest-quality-scrub option discussed in another thread in this forum)
More than a half-year later, I still don’t have it — but I do see LinkedIn found time to make my life, and probably those for many other group moderators, a hell of a lot harder.
So, here’s a request to LinkedIn. Give moderators back the “classic” look if they want it. If you can’t, then the very next thing I want to see from LinkedIn is the ability for group managers to premoderate what goes out in our groups. Because they are OUR groups, in the end. For me, if I can’t control spam, if I can’t ensure a good signal for my group, I’ll just shut it the hell down.
Are you a list admin who’s unhappy with the changes? Chime in on the discussion thread I created in the LinkedIn Groups Product Forum.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I got one for ya… try creating a group and then assigning ownership to a member of the group. You can’t do it. Facebook has this same problem. Maybe I don’t want ownership of a group for the rest of my (account) life….
Update on that! They actually implemented a clean way to re-assign ownership, demote yourself or leave. Goodbye Fluffy Kittens group.. err.. I mean.. steak eating manly man group… yea..
Hi Danny, thanks for the feedback. I just joined the LinkedIn product team and will make sure you’re feedback gets to the right people.
Thanks,
Micah
Principal Designer LinkedIn
Danny, I couldn’t agree with you more! I also manage a group and I find this new interface to be incredibly counter-intuitive and difficult to read and to use. The old system was so much better. I would really rather see LinkedIn address the multitude of functionality issues instead of creating a new look and feel that reduces out ability to be productive.
LinkedIn has been steadily going downhill ever since they decided to become a twiter/facebook site. I used to be an active user. Now I rarely interface w/ the site directly. It is so awkward, unwieldy and plain unprofessional that this is unfortunately just another failed step of many failed steps. I see the end of LinkedIn as soon as a competitor takes them on.
I really hope that Linkedin can reconsider their decision and revert to the old interface.
Hi Danny, I am on that Linked in group and received your group email today and appreciate what you have to say here. We are seeing this so much across the social web now and it’s important for sites like Linked In to remember what makes them special. Change can be good, but not when everyone is changing to match each other. I shared your link on my business page on Facebook as well. Thanks for this.
Right on Danny! LinkedIn’s decision makers need to be reminded that an organization will remian bigger than the sum of its parts only when each part is allowed to function optimally. Linkedin needs to take in the wisdom of your comments and not get in the way of the flow of information and relationship building. It is a system of many continual connections that all add up to a vibrant community. How does that saying go???…a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest……
I do hope that Linkedin will reconsider and change back to the old interface. Kristine may very well be right about LinkedIn’s future.
Danny,
Thanks, I couldn’t agree more. This is just the latest move in a downward spiral. It’s time for LinkedIn to decided if the want to best professional networking site or the worst social networking site. They can’t be both.
Micah,
I urge you to do something to stop the rot before it is too late. I need another social network site like I need another hole in my bum.
I agree with Danny and all of the comments here which describe these changes to LinkedIn Groups as yet another misstep in a pattern of poorly thought out decisions which are fail to make good on LinkedIn’s potential, and even damage the basic value of the site which makes it unique in the social networking space.
If the “renovated” LinkedIn Groups don’t add new options for moderators very soon – at the very least the ability to revert to the old format or to turn off “submissions” and control items are auto-posted by feed, etc. – they will quickly slide into unmanageable, spammy noise.
It seems to me that this is a pivotal moment, and I for one am on the verge of opting out of most of the LinkedIn Group discussions I’ve been subscribed to.
Danny, couldn’t agree more!!!! Even shared this URL on my linkedin status update. I’m appalled at what Linkedin has done with this. And I am line by line in agreement with you and those are my thoughts exactly. I just wrote to linkedin as well explaining my frustrations as well as others. Linkedin doesn’t seem to understand it’s the groups that really grow their website and the half ass ability for the managers to control the content to make sure it was a worthwhile group to be in.
There is one point you didn’t address which I think is down right ridiculous. The fact that you can only change your linkedin group details a total of something like 4 times for the life of the group. Isn’t that beyond stupid. I mean, I want to give the group’s logo a fresher look, so I upload a new logo, and BAM that counts as one change, 3 left for the life of the group. Opps! I just realized a typo, I wrote “A very interacive group with members from all walks….” I go to edit to fix the misspelled work, click save, BAM that’s two changes, 2 left. I think you have all gotten my point. There are just way too many ridiculously stupid restrictions in place that make no sense and just hinder what linkedin can become. They seriously need to fire all of their upper management decision makers and get some people with business sense in there. I love linkedin, the concept and the space it fills in the internet world. Stay true to your roots and god damnit, listen to your dedicated users!
But yeah, merging news and discussions, that was just plain dumb. I had to delete all my news feeds just so I could see the actual discussions. And hey, I use to have like 8 pages of discussions that I could browse through. Where the hell are they now? Did anyone else notice all their old discussions have just completely disappeared?
Thank you for this post! (If nothing else, I feel validated)
I have been in constant contact with Amy (or is is “Amy”) who works in Customer Support at LinkedIn, trying to explain to her (them) what a horrid mistake they have made with the changes to Groups.
After many exchanges (and kudos to them that they do email back), today Amy/”Amy” wrote to me saying “I know sometimes changes can be hard to adjust to and sometimes features are different than they were” — and that was the precise moment in time I knew the value of LinkedIn to serious business people was over.
I am the president of a start-up that is growing exponentially and I always credit LinkedIn for being absolutely key to our growth. Because social media is essentially so non-scalable, the LinkedIn groups are key: The three groups I created and manage, which have thousands of members, have allowed us to develop conversations with precisely our target market and therefore grow the Conversion Optimization space not just for us but for the whole industry.
The changes, frankly, suck. They make LinkedIn be more like Facebook but, as one of my kids put it a while back to a friend, “LinkedIn is like Facebook for grownups.”
Not anymore.
It seems that LinkedIn made all these changes without proper consideration of how they will affect their users. I’m sure if they had done proper market research and consulted their users they could’ve come up with something that would have made your life easier rather than harder.
>>>Because they are OUR groups
Wrong. They’re LinkedIn’s groups. Although we managers built the groups, they do not belong to us. A tenuous way to spend time, isn’t it? … building something that belongs to someone else.
-Tom, a LinkedIn group owner
@Tom, LinkedIn can only succeed if we, members, take an active role. Otherwise, they do not exist (I am thinking about the other 2 or 3 business networks i keep getting invited to join but don’t, for example). So in that sense, it belongs to us.
@Mike, clearly, they have done no research with Group managers. I belong to a “SuperUsers” managers group, and that is the consensus. Beyond that, in our company (www.widerfunnel.com) we run Conversion Optimization tests to improve our clients’ conversion rates and I can assure you many of the website changes would have failed in a statistically valid experiment.
No, Tom — they are our groups, not LinkedIn’s. We effectively leave for free space on LinkedIn’s platform — and there are risks with that. But we have the power to close our groups at any time. If they really belonged to LinkedIn, we couldn’t do that.
LinkedIn used to be the “professional’s” social network and now it’s worse than facebook. I have been a user for a few years, and was quite active at one time, but no more. Now I rarely log-in, let alone post anything. I find the changes as much unprofessional as just plain annoying. My solution is I simply don’t bother – I don’t have the time to sort through it all. They seriously need to rethink the logic to these changes.