> Apart from the bloat, the main problem of Microsoft LinkedIn is that it does not let you export your contacts' infos, which really is a must-have feature of a contact platform.

Platform lock in is certainly intended (even though it sucks for users)

LinkedIn was originally built in Ruby, containing 60k lines of code

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2567673

Summary: https://www.pixelstech.net/article/1395463142-Why-does-Linke...

LinkedIn migrated to Node early 2010.

So they claim the change to node reduces the 60k lines of Ruby to only 2k of node. So how did they manage to add 1,998,000 more lines of node in the next 10 years and not think something was amiss?

Developers love to armchair and then you put a bunch of them together and you inevitably end up with soaking wet bloated festering codebases like LinkedIn

> So how did they manage to add 1,998,000 more lines of node in the next 10 years (...)

Does LinkedIn have the same features it had a decade ago?

Search is far more powerful. It also shifted to add an entirely new social media dimension to it.

God knows what features were made available to recruiters and marketers.

The hard part of a web app is not the stuff you see; it's the stuff you don't even know is there.

This is not entirely true. These articles are referring to the mobile services. The majority of LIs services are built in Java (with some Node, Python, Scala sprinkled in).

Here's a write up from the LI engineering blog briefly detailing a history of their architecture (up to 2015): https://engineering.linkedin.com/architecture/brief-history-...

Call me crazy but I did not think that was a surprise. I worked at big bank that had consumer-facing JS web app with 6MM lines of code, though now I am starting to think that that number is false, given the feedback in this thread.

Have you tried grabbing JSON directly from the web server responses to the browser to get your contacts?

I haven’t tried this on LI but it’s my dirty trick for exporting conference attendee lists when they’re made public on websites. YMMV.