Why Can’t I Just Say No Any More?
Recently, LinkedIn made some changes in the way invitations work, adding some automated consequences for sending invitations to people you don’t know (and who don’t want invitations from people they don’t know). In so doing, they changed the options as to how you can reply to an invitation you receive. You can now:
- Accept
- Say you don’t know the person
- Decide later
- Reply to the inviter (this very important feature was just recently added a couple of months ago)
- Flag it as spam
What happened to the “Decline” button? Why can’t I just say “no”?
See, I know that clicking on the “I don’t know Joe” button will count against them - with five of those their account will be automatically suspended. We’ll leave aside the whole open networking argument for the moment. What if…
- I do know the person, but just not “well enough” for a LinkedIn connection by my standards. I don’t want to ding them for having either a slightly different connection standard or for thinking the relationship is stronger than I think it is. In this case, I think the “decide later” option actually makes pretty good sense. Maybe the relationship will grow, and “decide later” leaves that possibility open for you to accept some time in the future. You can archive the invitation so as to keep it out of your immediate view.
- I know the person, but I would never consider connecting with them because they’re incompetent, unethical or I simply don’t like them. In this case, I don’t want to decide later - I know I will never want to connect to this person. On the other hand, regardless of what I think of them, I don’t want to ding them by saying I don’t know them. I do know them - I just don’t want to connect. I think LinkedIn still needs to have a “decline” option for this scenario. Until they do, I recommend archiving the invitation - don’t punish them by saying you don’t know them.
May 26th, 2007 at 1:34 am
I recently tried to connect to two people… ormer admin from my last job and an old classmate /slash/ ROTC member. Unfortunately, both didn’t want to be bothered. My account wasn’t cancelled but I found I could no longer request connection with classmates and co-workers.
Not a major disconnect — but a sticky wicket at any rate…
May 26th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Yeah, that’s the problem with the current model. I really do appreciate what LinkedIn is trying to do with this, but I think that the limits are going to need to be tweaked and perhaps set to be in a rolling window rather than all-time. Much as some people will flag as spam a newsletter that they opted in to rather than unsubscribing, many people will hit “I don’t know ___” when they don’t immediately recognize the name, when in fact it may be someone they do know.
I don’t think the concept is flawed, just the execution.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:48 am
You’re spot on with the comment about hitting the “don’t know”. What if I rejected outright an invitation from someone in a group I’m in and I didn’t immediately recognise the name? I do like the “reply to sender” option - not before time: until now I’ve only been able to do this if they supplied their email.
July 9th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
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December 31st, 2007 at 3:54 pm
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January 23rd, 2008 at 2:11 am
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