All My Activity Is Gone

I have lost track of when I joined LinkedIn. Not sure where to look that up on my “all-star” profile but it was a couple of positions before I retired. I would estimate five plus years. Over that time I joined a number of groups, left some of them, wrote half a dozen articles and made hundreds of posts and comments on posts. I exchanged messages with old contacts and co-workers, congratulating them on work anniversaries and new positions. Before I retired I had a company page for my IT consulting business and links to my LinkedIn profile on my resume and a link to my LinkedIn articles on my business website. A couple of months ago something strange started happening to my account.

I don’t know about you, but when I post something on LinkedIn I am interested in what sort of response is generated, so one of the first things I do after logging in is to check “All Activity”. I then look at how many people have had their interest sparked by something I have posted, such as stories or comments on stories posted by others. Just under two months ago, when I tried to check my recent activity, all I saw was a nice graphic, suggesting I was a brand new user.

I sent a request to LinkedIn help, as displayed below. (LinkedIn help is a threaded discussion style with the oldest entry at the bottom and the newest at the top.) I was sent a link to a discussion with a helpful LinkedIn user. His suggestions — a reminder that only recent activity showed up, and that perhaps I had inadvertently started a new user login — did not apply in my case. The link eventually expired.

A few days went by and I finally tried to nudge LinkedIn help again and received a response suggesting someone was looking into my case.

I then received a message from my Support Specialist telling me that an internal research team was looking into my case. I waited not so patiently for another week before replying.

I then received the following response telling me that the internal research team was hard at work.

I then received a request for more information about the problem. It was clear that communication was not working, so I quoted from my original help request. Posts, likes and comments were gone, not the six articles that I had written for LinkedIn.

I continued using LinkedIn, commenting on and liking a few posts. None of this showed up in recent activity. I fired off another message with a screenshot attached.

At this point I realized that key phrases in the messages from my “Support Specialist” were being repeated verbatim. I began to suspect that “Priya” was really another “Siri”.

The next message I received, approximately a month after opening the case, was that activity older than sixty days would not show up — something that I already knew and one of the suggestions by my original LinkedIn discussion pal. The case was closed by LinkedIn with no real resolution. (Ironically, when I try to view my posts now, all I can see are posts from more than sixty days ago.)

So what am I to make of this? Has all my activity on LinkedIn over the years been simply a waste of mental bandwidth? Is LinkedIn, in the end, just Facebook with a suit and tie? Have I been dealing with bots all along and not realized it?

Before deleting my articles and closing my LinkedIn account for good, I thought I would share what happened to me and see if I am not alone.

Post Script, late September, 2017:

After everything seemed to return to normal again a week or so later, exactly the same thing happened again — all my recent activity disappeared. I started a new Help case and after a couple of weeks of fruitless wrangling (and many of the seeming bot-phrases repeated by my new Help case worker) I gave up and closed my LinkedIn account. I got a “we miss you” email a day later.

That’s how things ended.

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