The LinkedIn Birthday Ban

Good morning and happy Thursday to all 451 of you!

LinkedIn is a truly wild platform.

It’s a hybrid of people making good money using it as a sales too but also it’s a weird social feed with no clearly defined etiquette. Is it Facebook? Is it Twitter? What am I supposed to do here? Why are people just reposting their Twitter threads? Why is there a photo of a crying CEO on my feed?

As unhinged as this all is, that’s not what I want to discuss today.

If you’ve used LinkedIn and made the mistake of providing your date of birth when signing up like I did, I pity you. You probably get an influx of people you barely know sending you birthday wishes. The reason for this is that by default a button will show up in your connections notifications to wish you a happy birthday.

Innocuous enough, right?

No. The button automatically sends a canned message. This gets very annoying, very fast. So what if instead of reverting this we just made blocking these communications a ✨premium✨ feature?

It’s far-fetched, but there’s some permutation of this idea that could make people purchase LinkedIn premium.

Appreciate you taking the time to read this. If you enjoyed it, pls obliterate that subscribe button.

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