I have deleted my LinkedIn account of 16 years. I hadn’t even touched it in several years and I’m not sure I’ve ever really gotten much value out of it. I had been considering leaving for a while, and a new terms of service pushed me over the edge, not because of anything in it (I didn’t even read it) but because the cost of reading it seemed higher than the continued value from keeping the service.
I downloaded my data before closing. It took almost exactly 24 hours for the full 36kb zip file to be generated. Not a ton in there, but perhaps it may be nice to have, especially my list of connections.
There were some connections on there that I no longer have in real life or through other platforms, but it has been years since I’ve even talked to any of them through LinkedIn. Most communications I’ve gotten in the past decade have been from recruiters, and even that has pretty much died away. If I want to contact them, I have the list and can find other means. And if they want to contact me, it’s not hard to find my email address.
Perhaps if I were more into job hopping or otherwise needing a job, I would’ve found the service more useful. But I haven’t moved jobs in fifteen years and have no plans of doing so anytime soon. If I do need to change jobs, I think I will be able to find something before my savings runs out.