Edit: I recommend reading this post as well to see that my negative experience with Linkedin isn't alone, I can recommend reading this reddit thread as well too :- https://www.reddit.com/r/linkedin/comments/1ld0bf2/mega_thread_linkedin_restrictions_hacked_accounts/
I, have for the past 3-4 days, been in an uphill "battle" against a company you might have, heard of, which is called Linkedin.
This is the result: 
I think I have been cooperative and I didn't deny giving them any ID but their system just doesn't support it or asks me things which I legally can't do for the most part (:
I want to show the horror story that is Linkedin and its customer support and how they asked me for my personal identification to verify I was human but I am not even sure if I was talking to a human as I had asked them to respond with (If you are a human respond 351/13
I think that its suffice to say that they were boilerplating, This whole interaction was definitely something
I think I might have unintentionally made a meme of asking 351/13 to these "deaf" customer support systems. I also think that anyone reading this might realize that I didnt ask too big of a calculation from them to verify who they were when they were asking me for to sign a public notary which I legally couldn't btw (:
There are few companies that I have started to despite more than Linkedin and the false hope that they provided. It also speaks about if Linkedin is the de-facto job place and they can have the best analytics on who to hire and who not-to for a particular job, then why are they taking customer support who clearly aren't even reading the message. I am not sure if I would ever be able to trust Linkedin if I ever create a business :)
And if I was currently on Linkedin, I could write a "Linkedin banned me unlawfully, 5 business lessons that I learn from it" (:
Although to be fair, I have learnt some business lessons... But just about the horrors within these company.
So the story essentially begins when, I had to make a Linkedin Account because somebody had asked me to make so to contact them (I have since contacted them via E-mail through an intermediary)
Anyways, So I had made a fresh new Linkedin account and I used one of my proton mail accounts to make it.
Literally the next day, I wake up and I see that Linkedin has locked me out of my account.
Now, I had thought that they might just ask me my phone number and be done with it, but oh the story has just started
They first ask me my phone number & OTP and I submit and then they ask me for persona.
I am usually, a privacy oriented person and I don't really like persona so I was a bit furious but I swallowed this frustration and decided to just follow Persona.
So for context, I am 17 year old from India, so the only really identity that I can have right now or that I have right now is Aadhaar Card (which can be considered national ID)
So I clicked on Persona's National Id to submit my aadhaar card
And...
Try again.
I tried multiple times, I finally figured out the issue is that Persona doesn't recognize Aadhar card's back side for the most part because the UI showed me a bar code whereas Aadhaar card had a qr code
Now I was getting frustrated, These companies have just offloaded all of their resources to persona and you can essentially be locked out of your account for a fault at persona's side.
Anyways, afterwards, I went into one of their ticket forms that didn't require your account to be signed up
Then I uploaded my image and explained it to them all of this as to how I am 17 and this is the only legal way that I can do but persona isn't recognizing. (Mind you that Linkedin should work for 16+ year old)
Imagine my horror when I clicked submit and realized that they don't even submit the form but rather just redirect to single page.
At first, I thought maybe it was me who took way long to type and the form expired so then I had written the things in my favourite editor and essentially tried doing it again in matter of less than a minute.
Same error.
Linkedin, genuine question, but then why did you even have this form if you were to redirect to an article which didn't help me in the first place
Now I was moving out of options, so I decided to install twitter (refuse-to-call-it-X) and message @linkedinhelp.
Now, I am not sure if it was my new account but I saw @linkedinhelp respond to many people before me and it was my constant buggering them to ask for help when they finally responded in DMS
I was then hopeful that things might change, but oh boy, I was naive
Essentially, after explaining to them that persona isn't working for me and my situation, the linkedin support team basically gave me the same article that the form had redirected to or a link which redirected BACK TO PERSONA.
I was pissed once again but then I tried to explain all my situation within their linkedin team and after a long time (their support was admittedly really slow)
They asked me for my name and mail. I provided them the following, and then they mailed me...
When you go to the link, you wouldn't believe what I found.
Yet another persona link.
I hope someone keeps a counter of how many times they do this stuff to me, at some point it gets funny.
So I once again, message them on twitter
They ONCE AGAIN, provide me a link which IS NOT helpful to me because Persona doesn't work for me.
You can also observe that each time someone new is responding to me, I am sure that they aren't reading my messages :-/ but they recommened me to mail them.
Mind you this is happening for an ACCOUNT which is ONE DAY OLD.
Linkedin just didn't like my mail being proton.me as far as I can tell and did it :-/
Then they sent me the wildest thing beyond my imagination after i had sent them a message from my side.
[This was one of the first message that I had sent to them after which they had asked me for the notary]
They wanted me to go to a public notary, sign an affadavite, upload it and that's the only way to get this ONE DAY OLD ACCOUNT because they have no ways of manual verification and are completely reliant on Persona, if Persona doesn't like the way you look in the sense that it doesn't recognize your ID, Linkedin support is hell as you can see from my experience.
I did a quick Duckduckgo search and it told me that, within India, its illegal for a minor to sign an affadavite/notary in the way that they were talking.
So does linkedin wants me to do something that I legally can't do??
at this point, I crashed out, it had been 2-3 days with 5-6 hours of my time absolutely wasted with them, actually even more as I wanted this to be resolved quickly but oh boy oh boy, even this is just the starting.
At this point, I recognized a trend.
nobody is reading my messages.
These are some of the most boilerplate responses that you can imagine and I had within the twitter dm talked to like 3-4 people each time for the most part, they really couldn't just give me one person who read the messages.
Oh no, they gave me 3-4 different people who didn't read my previous comments to them where I tried explaining the situation and just didn't help me plain simple.
It had gotten to the point of giving me immense stress till a certain point seeing my frustration towards Linkedin.
(I only used the swears as a form of emphasis on how much unhelpful they have been, If you can't see, it was 2 Am within my country when I was writing those messages, it was a different beast of a stress)
(I may or may not have written them many messages asking to just be heard or feel seen so that my account can be unlocked and there was a definitely a bit of rage inside me seeing all of this happen)
They then requested me to send them mails and I had.
And this is how we had gotten to the final message that I had shown you in the front page
at a certain point, I can understand if Linkedin wants to have secure accounts but I have never denied giving my national ID to them (Aadhaar card) and I have been cooperative with them in that as well, I also thought that the account was 1 day old and they should know a bit about that too and I had made them aware of it too and I was cooperative towards giving them my aadhaar card Id wherever they wanted too but they failed to give me a way to actually provide the aadhaar card id
And it all fell on dumb ears.
Frustrated, I typed another message after reading this, now its maybe the third or fourth day of all of this.
and then the final response from their team
I also saw many people find that they were going through a bit of their own linkedin hell online where some were even paying for me for linkedin but they had locked them out of their accounts, I can't imagine the amount of stress linkedin has given to people and especially those to whom Persona didn't recognize their IDs to.
At a certain point, I really wanted to write a blog post about it but some previous ideas had also come to my mind and I was working on them and I also wanted either to have my account back and have that as an experience or have it be rejected at the moment and then have that as an experience and writing my experience.
This is my definition of a "deaf" company. Or worse, a deaf company which hears you from one ear and passes it to the another.
Within a few months, I will finally turn 18 and then give linkedin/persona the voter ID / ID that it so desperately wants from me to have.
This was all happening when hackernews was talking about Linkedin taking 8 GB of ram and a bit of linkedin hell stories, I wanted to chime in but I was still in talks with linkedin team so I had assumed to wait for all of this to end which has happened now.
There is an complete and utter incompetence within the linkedin team in my opinion, they have something like "my way or the high way" format which can lock out people from the walled garden of linkedin. maybe this can be expected from a microslop product, but there is an irony of a job-site having some of the worst support-system, maybe even in the history of mankind.
Maybe my story is an apt example of what Linkedin has now become.
So, now in irony from my side, I said that I will tell what is the business lesson that I learnt from all of this, Lol, In all seriousness, I heard that a good customer support or bad customer support can make or break a consumer.
Companies like Microslop and linkedin definitely try to be capitalist by doing maximum profits and thus not investing enough in good support which actually cares about the product and then we have occurences like this happening which in my opinion, damages the reputation of such company forever and there might be countless of cases before me which might have happened so like this too.
These companies have network effects that they have used to effectively monopolize and then not care about the support, This though makes their product work until it doesn't. once again, it is the rigidness of linkedin and its inability to accept aadhaar cards and cooperation with its users which is the largest issue and this and many others, just doesn't paint a good picture of the platform we call Linkedin.