Why LinkedIn’s “Catch Up” Feature Sucks and How to Disable It

Adding insult to injury: it’s not a new feature

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

LinkedIn has long been lauded for it’s incessant notifications that serve little to no value. If you’re someone who has used it over the last few years, you no doubt can relate to some, if not all, of them.

I bet you know the famous “someone viewed your profile” notification.

How does that help? It doesn’t. But it does offer a small hit of dopamine — the same way other social media notifications do.

But this “new” feature? Has to be the most blatantly misleading so far.

If you can think of an even more misleading feature please let me know in the comments.

Catch Up

The “new” feature I am referring to is the Catch Up feature. Basically, LinkedIn added another tab to your My Network page.

See below.

This is the same tab that used to be reserved for one of the most important features of this app: connections.

If you got a notification that appeared under your My Network tab, it actually meant something. This is because it meant that, very likely, someone wanted to connect with you.

While these notifications are nice to have, my issue is that they are grouped in with significantly more important notifications — notifications that were almost exclusively reserved for when your network grew.

When I see the notification under My Network, I get a stronger hit of dopamine (I have been trained to see this notification as one of great importance) and am met, instead, with disappointment.

Which really sucks because seeing somebody’s birthday or work anniversary or new job shouldn’t be disappointing.

So now I am triggered to think that my network is growing (the main purpose of the app)…