I hear you, but I do get some value from LinkedIn ( few prospects, interviews and so on ). In my little corner of the world, it has become defacto online resume. I stand by my initial reaction. I am not sure I am ready to drop it altogether.
But the thing is you need to get to the airport and there's no other way without missing your plane and forfeiting money paid for your ticket. Now what?
That's where we are with the market power of the big players. Google, facebook, apple, linkedin etc. Use the competition to linkedin in this space? You lose. The end.
The way we have always dealt with market power abuse in the past is via a combination of breaking up dominant players and regulation. The longer this wild abuse of market power goes on the more likely that this will be done in a bad way with pitchforks rather than a sensible, measured, outcome driven way carefully weighing the competing intrests to get what is best for the wider population in the medium and long term.
Also the fact this is legal at all is another case of everyone in law making, courts and enforcement having their brains fall out of their ears as soon as the words "using computers" are uttered. Do the exact same thing in any business where a computer is not used to do that thing and you are going to jail. It's break and enter. But "using a computer" so it's fine with the laws all no longer applicable.
