LinkedIn Removes Restricted And Hibernated Profiles From Members’ Follower Counts And Connections

LinkedIn wants the world to know that it’s no longer going to allow hibernated and restricted profiles from being a part of users’ follower counts and connections.

The leading professional networking platform says that many people are going to see a decline in their follower count by this week’s end. And the reason why happens to be just this.

The news was first shared by a selective member who goes by the name of Sachin Shah. He says that users’ stats would undergo a mega change and the company also acknowledged the same after releasing a public statement on the matter.

LinkedIn says that this decision is designed to better support members of the app as well as contributors by enhancing engagement and getting more insights. They plan to do this by restricting and hibernating various accounts that won’t be a part of the app in its total follower count as well as the figure for connections that are normally listed on the profile of a member.

Moving on, users would routinely update all the connections of members and their followers to make this change. Moreover, they’re referring to this as the safest and most authentic experience that arises with transparency. It also reflects a more realistic view of who is a part of a member’s audience.

So many Hibernated accounts are those that entail members of the app that ended up deactivating their account for a while, instead of actually shutting it down.

We can understand where the company is coming from with this new update and we do feel it was a change that was a long time coming. Things should have been like this forever but when you’ve got other arch-rival apps including Twitter and Facebook including restricted profiles across stats, it’s not a whole lot different from the way other apps consider stats in this regard.

LinkedIn also notes that when restricted and hibernated accounts start getting active, they would be returned in the count for followers and connections of members that they were once a part of. But similarly, it also unveiled how those members reaching the connection limit figure of 30,000, account being unrestricted does not mean they’ll be readded to the list until they end up removing active connections from their list to make room for others.
The news is being dubbed as something very logical and it comes at a great time when the platform also bids farewell to the staggering 59 million users from China while closing all operations in that part of the world.

We know that the total figure of members on the app is all set to drastically fall by millions after this change so it makes sense as to why LinkedIn has opted to go ahead with this change for measuring a user’s audience.

With that being said, it’s not at all clear if the company would remove such accounts from its own member count or not. As it is, experts call that misleading, and with a staggering 930 million member count already, it’s going to take a hard hit.


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