Phishing with Linkedin's Intro
Well done Jordan, this is a good example of how insincere company culture, which endorses email spam and dark design patterns, WILL backfire.In a company with great culture, this kind of project would have been caught by the various stakeholders of this project and it would not have been released.However, at Linkedin, the engineers and product managers having learned over the years that these kind of things are "fine" and can be looked over as long as the feature brings more engagement, more traffic --> more money, made this dodgy product slip through the cracks of Linkedin.I don't know how many times Linkedin has been on hackernews for email spam, when will they finally get it?I talked to the main growth hacker of Linkedin a while ago who does all the email marketing and asked him if it's not a bit dodgy what they are doing. He smirked and told me how much these strategies boost engagement at Linkedin and how much money they make.This is not something to be proud of, it's like being proud of having stolen 10 kids a lollipop today. Everybody can steal lollipops, build a drug cartel or big company with dodgy maneuvers, because then it is not about how gifted they were, it's how deceitful.That is just not impressive. However, it's insanely impressive to build a company without being dodgy, but just by making a great product that your users love.It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with dodgy maneuvers, directly translate into long-terms losses in the 10-fold numbers of the short term gains.This is not too hard to understand, is the executive team of Linkedin not intelligent enough to get that?