Isn’t this your favorite new LinkedIn feature?  Now when you get all of those annoying boilerplate “Hi, I’d like to join your LinkedIn network” messages, instead of wondering who the person is, or why he/she wants to connect with you, you can just click on the Ask Why button and have them explain it to you.

After all LinkedIn is supposed to be about making connections, not just building up a list of contacts for people you don’t really know, who are not part of your network, who may indeed just be ‘connecting’ with you to subsequently send you a “Thanks for connecting – now I’d like to sell you something” message.

If you have not seen the Ask Why button in your recent connection invitations, it is of course because it doesn’t exist and I just mocked up the image.  Unfortunately, LinkedIn is in danger of becoming spam-central and seems less focused on helping us all to build quality networks and more focused on increasing MAUs and traffic for traffic’s sake.

I love LinkedIn, but I feel that many others like me are getting increasingly disenfranchised by the level of noise/spam that is now polluting our personal networks. If LinkedIn doesn’t address this, then it is leaving itself open to major disruption by a professional networking solution that does in fact respect its members’ networks.

As evidenced by the recent Buyer / Seller Value Index research report (download link) suppliers and their customers have a long way to go to make better connections in their commercial engagements.  The buyers I have spoken to are particularly aggrieved by uninformed sellers trying to connect with them without first earning the right.

I know we don’t have to accept connection requests from unknown people, but LinkedIn seems to be optimizing for increased quantity of contacts rather than quality of connections. As the most commonly used professional network (for now) LinkedIn should not be encouraging that behavior.

I think it is time for us all to Ask Why.  LinkedIn can do better.

If you want to read more of my blogs please subscribe. Follow me on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn. I want you to agree or disagree with me, but most of all: I want you to bring passion to the conversation.

Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.