A year or so ago I left Facebook, starting a nationwide and even global trend for others to leave it too, stating that leaving Facebook was easy and fun. Yes, I was the one who started that trend. Leaving wasn’t popular yet then. Rereading that post, I see that I never logged back in to say goodbye to my connections there.

I haven’t missed a moment there. On the contrary, it feels weird when people talk about it because it feels like a relic from another age. When I see someone else using it, I see how much it draws you in, especially with those small but impossible-to-miss message waiting signs.

Lately I’ve read a bunch of posts about LinkedIn’s creepiness. I hardly used LinkedIn and couldn’t figure out what it was for. All it got me was tons of connection requests from people I didn’t know. I kept trying to figure out what to do with them.

A few people told me they connected to people through LinkedIn, but they seemed the exception. All these random requests took time with no benefit.

I couldn’t see any benefit to LinkedIn and I did see time lost.

Since Facebook was easy and fun to leave, could LinkedIn be just as easy and fun to leave?

As I wondered what I might lose closing my account, I figured it would be. I mean, I didn’t miss Facebook enough even to remember to email people I left.

So I stopped wondering and just deleted my LinkedIn account. I’m dating this post a month after I’m writing it, so if I don’t put an EDIT saying otherwise below, it means after a month I didn’t lose anything in dropping the account.

More likely I will have gained free time and less interaction with a creepy company.

EDIT: LinkedIn has kept emailing me that people are trying to connect with my account, so it seems to be available still. I searched for how to stop that and found others had had the same problem. I had to go to LinkedIn’s site (not logging in!) to request them to stop and actually close my account. I haven’t heard back from them so I’m not sure if they honored my request.

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