But I agree with you that it's a terrible, and it's why I deleted my profile. I didn't even know how creepy/skeevy their business model is then, but what I did see was that their product is just BAD in so many ways, yet they survive only because they hold an unassailably dominant market position.
If you hold a monopoly position, then please, please at least make your product great. I'm looking at you, too, Craigslist. For example.
However... Craigslist for all its fault is driven by an egalitarian vision. The ideology which prevents Craigslist from improving their UI and providing an API (or supporting scraping) is the same ideology which prevents them from taking massive investment, becoming beholden to investors, monetizing at any cost, and selling out the users in the process.
It's very easy to sit here and split that hair and so, "but no, I want them to just improve the UI, but also not sell out." It's very easy to create a laundry list of the way we wish others would behave, but it's also childish and unrealistic to expect the world to conform to our ideals, especially when we are distant and ignorant of the actual choices in front of the stakeholders.
Given the nature of what is going on in the Valley right now—eg. Twitter considered a failure because they only have 1/5th the userbase of Facebook, and nary a drop of ink spilled on its contribution to global conversation, all because we need to see how many dollars this thing can actually generate before we decide on whether its successful despite whatever world-changing qualities it may have—I think Craigslist is a wonderful company that more should take as an example.
I have been seriously frustrated by the dominance of Craigslist re apt-hunting, but it's quite fair to note that, while I may object to their choices, it is obviously not greed that (primarily) motivates them/him. So it's definitely not right for me to group them with LinkedIn.
I really don't understand what value regular users are getting (let alone people paying for Premium). Part of me believes people will realize this and delete accounts en masse, but then I remember how status obsessed everyone is and I have my doubts. LinkedIn is sort of like Zynga for career status, so I suspect there is a lot of user psychology they can manipulate.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/6-5-million-linkedin-passwo...
They have also been sued for stealing users' e-mail address books and spamming all their contacts with invites:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/23/linkedin-sued...
$10 is very little consolation for hundreds of people you know now thinking that you are, ehrm, not smart, for giving your address book to LinkedIn, or worse, thinking you're a spammer because each of your contacts got three annoying e-mails "from you" with no opt-out button.
If they had to pay even one dollar to each person they spammed, they'd probably be bankrupt.