Would you consider a tool that tracks your activity locally so you don't get banned useful?
I've been going through hell for the last month. I was banned from LinkedIn for excessive activity.
For 24 hours
For 48 hours
For 72 hours
For 168 hours - currently waiting until Tuesday, 10 PM CET.
The only useful advice I've received from support is to be less active.
So I'll have to limit my activity.
At the moment, this whole situation motivates me to work on a partial solution – some kind of activity tracker, where data wouldn't leave your devices but would give you an overview of how much activity quota you have available.
What features would you like?
Has anyone had a problem with these restrictions for LinkedIn or other networks, too?
[I am doing my own research.]
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Real Favicon Generator
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@ph_bernard I think it was because of many comments.
Happycapy
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@bartvandekooij quo is new to me. I was also thinking whether X has similar restrictions.
@bartvandekooij @busmark_w_nika Nika, X has restrictions but they’re extremely high. It’s very hard to exceed them.
Something like: 500 DMs, 2,400 tweets + comments, 400 follows per day. It’s really, really difficult to go over those limits.
@byalexai These are new limitations on X. Back in the days, we could follow, unfollow, DM 1000 times per day. Then spammers arrived and the platform changed everything. :D
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@bartvandekooij @byalexai Did you test them Alex? :D
Hey Nika,
I've worked with seven social media companies, big and small, and every platform has explicit or implicit restrictions on actions like following, unfollowing, or sending DMs.
For example,
Product Hunt used to cap follows at around 50 per hour on the mobile app.
On LinkedIn, stick to safe limits, say, 100 invites per week max, though some push further (but you don't know the exact threshold).
I got banned on LinkedIn 7 years ago, right after going viral with 100k views in 2018 as one of the platform's early big hits. Although they brought me back, I haven't posted since.
Sorry this happened to you. Hope you get your account back soon. Let me know if I can help with anything.
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@rohanrecommends Hey Rohan, from where do you know those quotas? Are they publicly available, or did ChatGPT give this data?
@busmark_w_nika Hey Nika, ChatGPT lies a lot with outdated information or picking someone's opinion from the internet. It's just limited by its training data from the past and can't access real-time updates if its not available prominently on the internet.
At its core, it's repackaging internet content into chat form, with no proprietary intelligence. That's why it still thinks Product Hunt has a "Coming Soon" page, even though we've removed it.
On the quotas, I got the details straight from LinkedIn and through my own experimentation. I'll drop the links below for you to check.
Example,
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a553226
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a551012
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a551295
The limits on connection invites are unique to each account based on their account age, activity, premium status, total connections, acceptance rate, past outstanding invites and more.
If you were rate limited for commenting, try checking how many comments you were making every day.
Hope this helps! :)
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@rohanrecommends Thank you for your resources. Now, with all the information provided, you totally changed the logic of my tool :D I need to consider these things as well, but first, I need to come up with a basic functioning prototype since I am trying to code it on my own (and I am a newbie).
@busmark_w_nika Glad I could influence the development with this little knowledge share. Looking forward to what you're building. I am cheering for you as always. :)
This idea’s actually pretty useful! I’m new to PH and got restricted for a bit too. I’ve been curious why, but never got a clear answer.
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@linda_vagt Do you mean, that you were restricted from PH or LinkedIn?
Hey @busmark_w_nika
Love this idea, sounds really useful.
I’d love a real-time activity counter with early warnings before hitting limits.
And tracking for sent messages (like DMs on LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook…) would be super useful too (messaging limits are often the easiest to hit).
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@amraniyasser I am not so sure whether messages can be tracked to such an extent, but I will try to come up with something :D Because it is also a difference when someone is a warm contact vs a cold contact.
Really interesting idea! A few features I’d love in an activity tracker like this:
Real-time activity overview – see how close you are to hitting platform limits.
Customizable alerts – get notified before you risk a temporary ban.
Historical trends – track daily/weekly activity to spot patterns.
Privacy-first design – all data stays on the device, no cloud uploads.
Action breakdown – messages, connections, posts, likes, etc., separately.
Predictive guidance – suggest optimal activity pacing to avoid restrictions.
Curious to see how you balance simplicity with these insights sounds like a tool many of us would use!
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@emmanuel_afolabi No worries, I will not be paying for an additional service to store someone's data :D I am not that generous, lol.
been there. LinkedIn's rate limits are brutal and completely undocumented which makes it worse.
a local tracker is a smart angle. the privacy-first approach matters here because nobody wants to hand over their LinkedIn session data to a third party
feature-wise I'd want: daily/weekly action counts by type (connection requests, messages, profile views, searches), a simple red/yellow/green status for each, and maybe a cooldown timer when you're approaching the threshold. bonus if it can learn your personal limits over time since LinkedIn seems to enforce different thresholds per account age and activity history.
the tricky part is figuring out what counts. LinkedIn doesn't publish their limits so you'd need to crowdsource the thresholds from beta users and build the model from real ban data. that's also your moat though
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@curtis_swick there should be something like recommended rates, everything is different for accounts, but I think that there can be a rule of thumb for the border. For example no more than 35 comments per day.
The local first angle is probably the strongest part here. Most people would not want this kind of tracking tied of some external dashboard.
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@reid_anderson4 yep, but the thing is that as soon as there will not be any data stored, and they will reset counters, no backup. They will start without the data from the blank screen.
Curious whether the bigger prob is total activity, or just doing too many similar actions in a short time.
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@sadie_charlotte1 I think it is a mixture, because you can make an overall huge activity, but also repeated patterns are detected too.
Would you build this just for LinkedIn first, or make it flexible enough to work across other platforms too?
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@valerie_june LinkedIn first and then expand to other platforms when it makes sense. But as others mentioned, e.g. twitter has bigger limits.