Reply to Ton Zijlstra 'The Enshittification of LinkedIn As DSA Takes Effect'

Same old, same old

I never post my updates on there, that’s what this site and my Mastodon feed are for. If I really thought there was any value in it I would post links ‘over there’ to selected posts ‘over here’.

When it first started, the idea of tracking your own professional network, and seeing “who knew whom” was something of a winner, but the inevitable swamping in “social” features, adverts, algorithmically-driven content and posts written by marketing people has made it pretty much useless, a source of irritating noise.

One of the less-than-lovely features is that every time you connect to someone, it automatically follows them in your feed, whereas I want to be selective in whose posts I follow.

I’m following the two main tips from Ton’s post:

• bookmark the network page as my main entry point into the platform
• unfollow all my connections

Unfollowing connections

Potentially this means my feed is just the algo-babble, but then I plan not to read my feed.

Unfortunately the scripts suggested by Ton from How to mass unfollow connections on LinkedIn in 2022 no longer work in September 2023 as the HTML of the following and followers page has changed.

With a bit of hacking around I managed to get something of what I needed from this:

(() => {
  let count = 0;
  function getAllButtons() {
    return document.querySelectorAll('[aria-label*="stop following"]');
  }
  async function unfollowAll() {
    const buttons = getAllButtons();

    for (let button of buttons) {
        count = count + 1;
        console.log(`Unfollow #${count}`);
        window.scrollTo(0, button.offsetTop - 260);
        button.click();
        await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 100));
    }
  }
  async function run() {
    await unfollowAll();
    window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);
    await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 1000));
    const buttons = getAllButtons();
    if (buttons.length) run();
  }
  run();
})();

While running the script it does pop up random “are you sure” dialogues which still need a manual click, but for some reason not for every “click”.

The hardest challenge

Does this mean that I want social networks to work much like they did in 2005? Mostly yes.

The biggest challenge? Finding a way to explain the reasons for this to colleagues who still see any form of social network as yet one more one-way marketing medium.

Oh well…