LinkedIn appears to have been busy lately – and revamped the way users respond to invitations to connect.
That classic “I Don’t Know” button is gone!
The dreaded don’t know
This has been a “feature” for so long that I bet many old timers don’t even recognize that it is gone yet – I didn’t until I was looking for a screenshot for the “Twelve Days of LinkedIn” video – and noticed it had changed!
In days of yore, getting “don’t know”ed several times indicated that you were inviting people you didn’t know to connect – and very probably annoying a good number of users.
So LinkedIn put those users on a shorter leash and restricted the ways they could invite people to connect.
Happy days?
I’m not sure what might have gone into the system in place of this “feature”, or if LinkedIn doesn’t care about invitation behavior any longer.
I just can’t tell – we’ll see how it goes.
Accept, Reply, Ignore
This is advice I’ve given to readers since way back – when you get an invitation you can accept it (if you know and trust the other person), reply – as in send them a note – if you’d like to clarify anything or answer them, or just ignore the request.
Well – that’s exactly how users can react to invitations now;-)
There never was much of a reason to “don’t know” or turn down a connection request…
Change, it’s a coming…
I’ve often written about how frequently LinkedIn changes – and those changes are not slowing down.
Perhaps I’m less happy about some than others, but we’ll do our best to help you through them.
As always, leave your comments below and feel free to contact me through my “Contact Me” page.
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
Steve, the seldom dreaded “I Don’t Know” was simply modified when the changes were made last fall. Selecting the Ignore option enables two additional choices, the I Don’t Know and Report as Spam. Those choices seem pretty identical to me.
Greg,
Today when I look, the options are “Accept”, “Ignore”, and “Report Spam”.
I didn’t click through the Ignore in preparing the article above, but did just now for a connection request from somebody that I had been ignoring, and it just went away.
And I don’t dislike anyone that requested to connect enough to report them as spam just to see how that works…
So – let’s just say that LinkedIn continues to tinker with how this should work;-)
steve
Steve, agreed they are tweaking this processing. The I Don’t Know remains, at least in the version of LinkedIn that I am experiencing now. When you you choose from the three choices you identified – Accept | Ignore | Report Spam and select “Ignore” the Inbox changes to a bar that virtually disappears (gets reformatted to be easily overlooked). You then have further options to I Don’t Know or again Report As Spam. They are keeping alive the I Don’t Know option but you have to want to have at it more badly to select it.
Enough on this! There’s better stuff happening with LinkedIn like Swarm and Signal that users should be paying attention to. Carry on, Steve! ;-)