Do. Not. Use. The. Linkedin. API.
Before you start questioning my rather arrogant and bold statement, how about this. You instantly give this article 100 claps, and beg for my approval of your thanks in the comments — the information I am about to tell you is that valuable:
Linkedin is shit for developers. In every way.
Not just the API, but scraping it too.
The API
As a keen young developer looking to build something cool with the Linkedin API, you might be strolling along all happy, when all of a sudden, you hit the API like a brick fucking wall. The API is shit. They give you nothing. No permissions. No docs. No coherence. Even after applying for MDP, you get next to no permissions.
Stack overflow posts that are just a year or two old may say that you can get r_fullprofile permission, to get users’ full profiles, by applying for MDP. It is not documented anywhere officially, so you go for it, making fake app after fake app because they keep getting rejected (for no apparent reason — they don’t give you one at all!). Finally you get all hyped that you got accepted into MDP, but to your detriment, you have nothing. Then you see some other SO posts that say you need to apply to some other partnership program. Then you see on Linkedin’s docs that r_fullprofile is no longer offered as a permission any more, even tho they keep the official r_fullprofile docs up to date. No luck. r_basicprofile, which is what you get from MDP, gives you bascially nothing. Profile pic, name. Great. Thanks.
You eventually realise the API is a pile of satan provided wank. You look for other means of production to seize, only to be disappointed furthure.
Scraping
This is where you start to find pre built scrapers that claim to still work in 2020 or whatever godforsaken year you may be living in. Well, bad news, fellas. Linkedin employ some kind of ninja team that are constantly trying to get around the API limitations by scraping, and they employ another ninja team to stop the first ninja team from succeeding. What this means for you and me is that our lives are fucked.
I once was a man convinced that if I could go on a website in my browser, then it must be scrape-able. Linkedin has made me wiser. They have thought of every nook and cranny in existence. From rate limiting the number of actions an account can perform, to blacklisting IPs, to yadda yadda yadda idgaf at htis point im so demotivated just google some stack overflow shit u’ll see the misery ppl have gone through.
I WASTED 1 WEEK OF MY LIFE. DO NOT DO THE SAME. DO NOT USE LINKEDIN FOR YOUR APP. I HAVE WARNED YOU. WHY HAVEN’T YOU THANKED ME.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Linkedin is shit.
What’s more confusing is Microsoft own Linkedin. Microsoft also own github, which now has lovely unlimited private repos. So why give us private repos, and not r_fullprofile?
Fucking shit.
Goodbye.
