Seasoned accounts are a positive heuristic in many domains, not just LinkedIn. For example, I some times use web.archive.org to check a company's domain to see how far back they've been on the web. Even here on HN, young accounts (green text) are more likely to be griefing, trolling, or spreading misinformation at a higher rate than someone who has been here for years.

Yep. This is how the 3 major credit bureaus is the United States to verify your identity. Your residence history and your presences on the distributed Internet is the HARDES to fake.

Instead you need: - five years of address history - a recent utility bill or a council tax bill that has your full address - maybe a bank statement - passport or driving license

It just so happens that Experian, etc. have all of that, and even background checking agencies will depend on it.

(Except maybe the sorts of idiots who write job descriptions requiring 10+years of experience with some tech that's only 2 years old, and the recruiters who blindly publish those job openings. "Mandatory requirements: 10+ years experience using ChatGPT. 5+ years experience deploying MCP servers.")

so.. most of them?

Anyway the problem is not a hiring person expecting it, it's systems written with not enough thought that will expect it for them, and flag the people as untrustworthy who do not match expectations.

Only if you don’t plan ahead. I can’t remember which book/movie/show it was from, but there was a character who spent decades building identities by registering for credit cards, signing up for services, signing leases, posting to social media, etc so that they could sell them in the future. Seems like it would be trivial to automate this for digital only things.

There are probably more ways this can fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_corporation

When I was 18 with little to no credit trying to do things. Financial institutions would often hit me with security questions like this.

But, I was incredibly confused because many of the questions had no valid answer. Somehow these institutions got the idea that I was my stepmother or something and started asking me about address and vehicles she owned before I ever knew her.

Though if step mom shares your name (not unlikely if OP is a girl with a common name) it isn't a surprise that they will mix you up.

I've found for the most part account age/usage is not considered at all in major online service providers.

I've straight up been told by Google, Ebay and Amazon that they do not care about account age/legitimacy/seasoning/usage at all and it is not even considered in various cases I've had with these companies.

They simply don't care about customers at all. They are only looking at various legal repercussions balanced against what makes them the most money and that is their real metric.

Ebay: Had a <30day old account make a dispute against me that I did not deliver a product that was over $200 when my account was in good standing for many years with zero disputes. Ebay told me to f-off, ebay rep said my account standing was not a consideration for judgement in the case.

Google: Corporate account in good standing for 8+ years, mid five figure monthly spending. One day locked the account for 32 days with no explanation or contact. At day 30 or so a CS rep in India told me they don't consider spending or account age in their mystery account lockout process.

Amazon: Do I even need to...

I'm considering going back to school to write a "Google Fi 2016-2023: A Case Study in Enshittification" thesis but I'm not sure what academic discipline it fits under.

(I'll say it again for those in the back, if you're looking for ideas, there's arbitrage in service.)

So, just hire one of those "account aging" services?

Because if you expect people to go there keeping everything up to date, posting new stuff, tracking interactions for 3 years and only after that they can hope to get any gain from the account... That's not reasonable.

What?

You only need to create an account once.

Update it when you're searching for a new job.

You don't need to log in or post regularly. Few people do that.

I worry about Kafkaesque black-mirror trust/reputation issues in the coming decades.

A breach like Equifax should have cost their shareholders 100% of their shares, if not triggering prosecutions.

We are not doing any of this because we are being led by elderly narcissists who loathe us and rely on corporate power, in both parties, and that fact was felt at a gut level, and enabled fascism to seep right in to the leadership vacuum.

I dimly remember some sci-fi book, the kind where everything was Very Crypto-Quantum, and a character was reminiscing about how human spacefaring civilization kinda-collapsed, since the prior regime had been providing irreplaceable functions of authoritative (1) Identity and (2) Timekeeping.

Anyway, yes, basic identity management is an essential state function nowadays, regardless of whether one thinks it should be federal or state within the US.

That said, I would prefer a tech-ecology where we strongly avoid "true identity" except when it is strictly necessary. For example, the average webforum's legitimate needs are more like "not a bot" and "over 18" and "is invested in this account and doesn't consider it a throwaway."

The terrifying thing about this is that phones are almost trivially SIM cloned, surveilled, and impersonated, when they're not just owned with malware.

From an attacker standpoint, if an attacker gains access to any email address with @example.com, they could pretend to be the CEO of example.com even if they compromised the lowest level employee.

Apple / Google developer program uses Dun&Bradstreet to verify company and developer identities. That's another way. But LinkedIn doesn't have that feature (yet).

Bad idea.

I never had my work e-mail address on LinkedIn, but then I made the mistake of doing this, and LinkedIn sold my work e-mail address to several dozen companies that are still spamming me a year later.

DFE "deleted everything"

The F is for Fucking.

DFE: Delete Fucking Everything.

The gag is that the newbie asking the question will wonder why the F wasn't included in the expansion, and rapidly figure it out. Or they ask, and you make fun of them for it. The joke is either kinda cerebral or really juvenile... and the tension between the two is part of the joke.

  Th y w r   ele ing ev ryt  ng ve y sl wly.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mykola-yanchii-430883368_hiri...

Anyway I think we can add OP's experience to the many reasons why being asked to do work/tasks/projects for interviews is bad.

On linkedin company pics, look for extra fingers.

Persona seems to rely solely on NFC with a national passport/ID, so simply stolen documents would work for a certain duration ...

Someone apparently deleted the profile.

Nowadays just to be sure, I verify nearly every person's LinkedIn profile's creation date. If the profile has been created less than a few years ago, then most likely our interaction will be over.

On another note, what's unreal about the pseudonym? It's a Ukrainian transliteration of Николай Янчий (Nikolay Yanchiy). Here's a real person with this name: https://life.ru/p/1490942

This is covered in this help article, especially the bullet points at the end[0].

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a568195/

You can browse anonymously for free.

To see all the folks who've visited your profile, you need to pay.

It's a red flag to be a new entrant on a platform.

FTR Wikipedia/Stak Overflow have also encountered this problem (with no real solution in sight) and new market entrants (new products) struggle with traction because they're "new" and untested, which is why marketing is such a big thing, and one of the biggest upfront costs for companies entering a market